RIP Steve Sabol

Dreams. We all to live the dream. We strive to hold dream jobs. Who actually gets to live a dream? Who actually gets to see their desires and ambitions and their subconscious play out in front of them?

I can think of one man who lived out his dream, and we just lost him- Steve Sabol.

Steve Sabol was the co-founder of NFL films. NFL Films is the reason why The National Football League stopped being a sport and became a national obsession.

Steve and his dad Ed Sabol created NFL films because they just wanted to document their favorite sport. So the Sabol boys filmed the big games. The real magic started on a -16 degree day in January in Wisconsin. Two football teams simply played a game on a frozen field.

Or at least, that's what the game would have been to lesser filmmakers. They turned it into a historical event.


Lambeau Field in Green Bay became a hallowed shrine: the mythical Frozen Tundra, as bleak and barren as the icy fields of Jotunheim. I can't watch the footage of that game without grabbing a blanket. Hell, I can't hear the phrase Ice Bowl without sneering and thinking Bart Starr is a warrior. An actual warrior; in reality, he's a man who played football in the 60s. That's what Steve Sabol did.

As the 60s progressed, the NFL gave the rights to its old broadcasts to the Sabols, as a posterity measure. But what it became was a guarantee that no game would go unforgotten or un-embellished. 

When Steve took over in the 70s, he had the brilliant idea to implement slow motion when filming games. Moments occurring in seconds of real time were minutes of glory when Steve got his hands on them:



 In the 90s, the NFL wanted to improve its appeal on TV, so it took a page from NFL Films and added slow motion replays to telecasts. This was the first step in making the NFL America's favorite TV show. It's the only sport I know that is more fun to watch on TV than it is live. And Steve opened the flood gates, and his vision for how the sport should look became the norm.

I would spend my summers as a boy watching Steve's work, dreaming of becoming an NFL player. If you've ever met me, I have neither the mentality nor the fast-twitch muscle to be a professional athlete. But, Steve made these people my heroes. And not just role model heroes, my warriors from epic poetry. The way Steve and the NFL Films crew captured these men captured not only my imagination, but their greatest moments.
Moments of joy:

Determination:

And the six thousand different emotions present in this still of Kellen Winslow:

I bet Greek children remembered Odysseus the way I remembered Joe Montana.


As an adult I think back and realize that Joe Montana was probably nothing more than another imbecilic jock that went to Notre Dame. But I just can think these thoughts, as true as they are. I could barely even type them just now; I dare I badmouth Montana, he threw the pass that became THE CATCH. And I know there was one man who made me believe the myths about these men, who made me a fan.

And I loved and respected Steve because that's all he was, a fan. He was a huge football fan that got to watch football all day. Need proof?


Steve wrote a hugely nerdy poem about the Oakland Raiders. If you know anything about the Oakland Raiders, they're the most sociopathic meatheads in a sport composed of sociopathic meatheads. He wrote a poem about them.
And then matched it to his footage of the Raiders.

And the Raiders adopted it as their team poem. Yes, Steve got the football team into poetry. By just being a nerd.

I was moved to hear that Steve Sabol died this week. But NFL Films will live on. The moments on film will live on. The struggles, the emotions, the myths, they live on. The men he made gods will live on. The sport will live on, and the love of the sport will live on. So in a way, he never leaves us. Rest in Peace Sabol.