Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media [1 ed.] 9780252096273, 9780252038389

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Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Keepers of the Flame

Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Keepers of the Flame NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Travis Vogan

University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vogan, Travis Keepers of the flame : NFL Films and the rise of sports media / Travis Vogan. pages cm isbn 978-0-252-03838-9 (hardcover) — isbn 978-0-252-07991-7 (paperback) — isbn 978-0-252-09627-3 (e-book) 1. NFL Films—History. 2. National Football League. 3. Football—Social aspects—United States. 4. Television broadcasting of sports—United States—History. 5. Mass media and sports—United States—History. I. Title. gv742.3.v63  2014 796.332’6406—dc23  2013035329

Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii

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Introduction: NFL Films and Pro Football  1

1 Creating and Sustaining America’s Game  35



2 More Movies than News  58



3 The NFL’s Smithsonian  79



4 The Shakespeares of Sports Films  99



5 Keeping the Flame in the Broadcast Era  127



6 Cable, NFL Media, and NFL Films’ Dinosaur Television  150

Conclusion: The Persistence and Obsolescence of NFL Films  175 Notes  189 Bibliography  217 Index  233

Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

Over the years I have had the pleasure and good fortune to be in the company of mentors, colleagues, sources, friends, and family who provided the stimulation, inspiration, and support necessary to complete this modest work and the sundry tasks that accompanied its development. First of all, I had the unique privilege of getting to know Steve Sabol while this project was in its beginning stages. Almost on a lark, I called NFL Films to see if I might interview one of its producers to learn more about the organization’s poorly recorded history. I didn’t expect much. Perhaps they would refer me to someone in PR or e-mail me a fact sheet with a couple of tidbits I had not yet seen. I was on the phone with Steve Sabol—the company’s president and a celebrity I had grown up watching on TV—within forty-eight hours. As I learned shortly thereafter, he gave audience to anyone with an interest in the company he spent his life building—from Sports Illustrated staffers working on a feature to graduate students writing term papers. Most media professionals I’ve encountered since Steve are quite guarded—and understandably so. They worry researchers might distort their comments, do a hatchet job, or, worst of all, give away company secrets. These concerns did not seem to trouble Sabol. In fact, he was so excited that I was planning to write about his company that he gave me an open invitation to visit NFL Films whenever I wanted. This is all to say that Steve (he corrected me every time I tried to call him “Mr. Sabol”) was as generous and gregarious in real life as he was on camera. I am at times

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Acknowledgments

critical of him and NFL Films in this book. However, I want to be absolutely clear that Sabol’s unyielding—and completely unnecessary—generosity made this study possible. I hope this book can play some small part in explaining his crucial significance to the history of American sports media and popular culture more generally. Beyond Steve Sabol, I was able to interview and get to know many current and former NFL Films producers, archivists, and administrators including Inez Aimee, Greg Cosell, Kathy Davis, Dave Douglas, Dave Franza, Jonathan Hock, James McCormick, John Murphy, Dave Plaut, Bob Ryan, Steve “Doc” Seidman, Colleen Smith-Grubb, Jeremy Swarbrick, Phil Tuckett, Jon Weiss, Chris Willis, and Neil Zender. Colleen, Chris, and Steve deserve special mention for their time, patience, and kindness. Outside of NFL Films, Jon Kendle at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Archive provided helpful assistance during the two research trips I made to Canton. Thanks are also due to Maury Levy and Kevin McLoughlin for allowing me to reproduce their excellent photographs in this book. I have heard many a horror story from fellow academics struggling to get their first book into production. Thanks to the good folks at University of Illinois Press, I only have positive experiences to report. Danny Nasset and Tad Ringo shepherded this work through production with a combination of encouragement, honesty, and friendliness. I am grateful to have such terrific support and to be a part of University of Illinois Press’s tradition of scholarship on sport and media. The project started at Indiana University and benefited from the direct and indirect guidance of Greg Waller, Paul Gutjahr, Josh Malitsky, Paul Pedersen, Ted Striphas, Kathy Teige, and Robert Terrill. Greg—my former advisor who has become a fittingly Lombardian figure in my academic universe—was particularly generous in providing mentorship and rigorous feedback throughout and beyond this project’s first phase. Josh also provided—and continues to provide—trusty advice and friendship that far exceeded his responsibilities as a committee member. Vicky Johnson and Michael Oriard offered astute feedback that helped me to improve this manuscript considerably. It’s humbling to have scholars whom I hold in such high regard to be involved in this book’s evolution. Others who helped along the way include Chris Anderson, Glen Elder, John Gennari, Andrea Gogröf, Dave Jenemann, Kathleen Lundeen, and Dan Nathan. The School of Journalism & Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa have proven to be encouraging, inspiring, and fun environments to call my academic home. I have benefited from

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the mentorship, collegiality, and friendliness of Julie Andsager, Susan Birrell, Kajsa Dalrymple, Nik Dickerson, Dave Dowling, Frank Durham, Gigi Durham, Brian Ekdale, Laura Kastens, Tom Oates, Tina Parratt, David Perlmutter, Judy Polumbaum, Horace Porter, Becky Scott, Melissa Tully, and Deborah Whaley. Thanks also to Elona Lucas, Bindu Malieckal, and Keith Williams for helping to make my brief stint at St. Anselm College an enjoyable one. Mark Benedetti, Steph Ceraso, Patricia Connolly, Jeremiah Donovan, Seth Friedman, Mack Hagood, Lori Hall-Araujo, Eric Harvey, Jennifer Jones, Andrea Kelley, Matt Laferty, James Paasche, Justin Rawlins, and Zeynep Yasar have proven that academia is a solid place to make lasting friends. Andrew Byers, Brandonius Currie, Rachael Currie, Josef Krebs, Jacobo LaRiviere, Los Chinuts, Fr. Daniel S. Pringle, and Travis Gutiérrez Senger provide a constant source of conversation and engagement. Finally, Caitlin Owens and Oates The Cat are the best. Last, I’m lucky to have such a great family. Thanks to Doug Kendall, Mardell Kendall, Joe Kendall, Melysa Mott, and, most of all, Carol Vogan and Thad Vogan. While I’ve been truly privileged to have excellent mentors, colleagues, and friends, I have been ever luckier to be surrounded by an awesome family—and I didn’t even get to choose them! An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in The Moving Image, and an earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in Popular Communication. Thanks to the University of Minnesota Press and Taylor & Francis for rights to reuse phrases and ideas published in these earlier pieces.

ix

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Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Keepers of the Flame

Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Introduction NFL Films and Pro Football NFL Films [is] perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America. —Austin Murphy, Sports Illustrated 1 An NFL Films production isn’t just seen, it’s felt.

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—Cory Laslocky, NFL Films Spokesperson2

While baseball is traditionally recognized as America’s favorite pastime, the National Football League (NFL) has stood as the United States’ most popular and lucrative sports organization since the late 1960s.3 NFL football’s immense cultural and economic power is not simply a product of the games it provides for millions of live and mediated spectators, but also its cultural meanings. Scholars of sport have argued that pro football serves mythic functions in American culture.4 More than merely a game, the sport embodies and articulates characteristics, beliefs, attitudes, and values unique to American history, identity, and everyday life. These mythic qualities, of course, are not essential to football. Rather, they are crafted through its representation— from brief newspaper game reports to the macho cacophony of sports talk radio. Consider Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi’s five NFL championships and overall winning percentage, and it is clear that he was one of the most successful coaches in football, and even sport, history. But wins alone

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Introduction

do not explain his status as an American icon that signifies leadership, work ethic, tradition, and virtue. Lombardi achieved this significance through his depiction. Indeed, he is still the subject of a steady stream of commemorations that includes biographies, documentaries, a postage stamp, and even a Broadway drama. The National Football League realized early on that football’s meaning is pliable. Throughout its history, the NFL has developed various strategies to manufacture an image that sets the gridiron game apart from other sports and that distinguishes itself from other sports organizations. Perhaps the league’s most important branding and marketing effort was its 1964 establishment of NFL Films, a subsidiary film production company that creates celebratory made-for-television documentaries about the league. NFL Films’ productions, which are featured on various segments and programs that run throughout the entire year, transformed the league’s players and coaches into “legends of autumn” who partake in “cruel rites of manhood” on the “one-hundred-yard universe” of professional football. In doing so, these films changed how football, and sport in general, is represented and imagined while establishing a foundation from which the contemporary sports media landscape—an almost unavoidable facet of popular culture—developed. In 2008, sports journalist and ESPN football analyst Sal Paolantonio published How Football Explains America, a short volume that considers why “we [Americans] dedicate our Sunday afternoons to the poetically violent rituals of the National Football League.”5 His book examines pro football’s relationship to democracy, territorial expansion, militarism, patriarchy, entertainment culture, and other elements he considers representative of American identity. Paolantonio uses various iconic moments from the league’s history to describe its mythic status. To make the case for football’s relationship to masculinity, he references an instance when New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor, famous for his unbridled and relentless play, attempts to motivate his teammates on the sidelines by screaming, “Let’s go out there like a bunch of crazed dogs and have some fun!” To prove the same point, he recalls a moment when Chicago Bears linebacker Mike Singletary goads and intimidates the opposing team’s offense by maniacally yelling: “Hey, baby! I’m gonna be here all day, baby! I like this kind of party!” Paolantonio cites both cases to claim that NFL players are larger-than-life warriors who revel in the game’s violent intensity and engage in single-minded missions to vanquish whatever adversaries stand in their way. Along slightly different lines, Paolantonio uses a touchdown pass from San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana to receiver Dwight Clark in the wan-

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Introduction

ing minutes of the 1982 National Football Conference championship game—a play now known simply as “The Catch”—to describe football’s aesthetic potential. The play seemed doomed when it began. Montana’s pass protection had been overwhelmed by the Dallas Cowboys’ defense, and he was forced to search for an open receiver while fleeing toward the sideline. Just before the oncoming defenders slammed Montana into the ground, the off-balance quarterback hurled a high pass toward the back of the end zone, which initially appeared to be heading out of play. Clark, however, made a leaping grab, landing just in bounds to score and secure the lead. San Francisco wound up winning the game and then prevailing in the Super Bowl—the first of four championships it would win in the course of the following decade. “The Catch” is now one of the most famous plays in sports history, and footage of it is repeatedly shown in advertisements and promotions to demonstrate pro football’s excitement, unpredictability, and beauty. The iconic moments Paolantonio describes have more in common than their apparent illustration of how football explains America. They were shot, edited, and are distributed by NFL Films. These instances that have come to embody the National Football League’s history, football’s significance in America, and even what it means to be American, were carefully designed to display the NFL in its best light. The meaning Paolantonio assigns to the moments he mentions is largely a result of NFL Films’ distinct aesthetic practices. The intensity Taylor and Singletary seem to radiate is displayed principally by the subsidiary’s use of ground-level cameras and the sound it gathered with wireless microphones— conventions the company popularized. These techniques allow viewers to see players’ straining faces and to hear the emotional tenor of their voices, elements of the game that, prior to NFL Films, were imperceptible to those watching on television or even in the stadium. Similarly, Clark’s catch is almost exclusively displayed through NFL Films’ footage of it, which was shot in slow motion by a 16mm camera placed at ground level in the back of the end zone. From the perspective of NFL Films’ camera, it appears Montana has no receivers available and that the pass he throws is sure to sail out of bounds. The camera keeps the ball tight in the frame as it floats toward the end zone. Just before it flies beyond the field of play, Clark leaps into the shot—seeming to come out of nowhere—to make the fingertip catch. The slow motion builds suspense for how the play will resolve, and the shot’s framing makes Clark’s emergence and catch seem almost miraculous. While it is undoubtedly a great play, NFL Films’ conventions make it seem astonishing—transforming Dwight Clark’s

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NFL Films transformed Dwight Clark’s 1982 touchdown catch into “The Catch.”

touchdown catch into The Catch. Paolantonio’s discussion of these iconic instances conflates the NFL’s past with the history NFL Films has created for it. Like all representations of football, NFL Films’ dramatized productions give the sport meaning and shape how it is imagined. However, unlike newspaper game reports or television broadcasts, the company’s works are intended—and in fact obliged—to create a positive, salable image for the league. Steve Sabol, former NFL Films president and the driving force behind its distinctive style, described the subsidiary as a group of “historians, storytellers, [and] mythmakers.”6 It both documents the NFL’s history and positions it as a heroic institution characterized by awe-inspiring moments and epic battles. In doing so, it transforms pro football into a spectacle that exceeds its position as a sports organization and becomes a corporate site of cultural production. The company’s widely circulated documentaries have created some of the NFL’s most memorable instances and, by extension, some of the most beloved and frequently evoked moments in the history of American sport. NFL Films turned the frigid 1967 NFL championship game into what is now known as “The Ice Bowl,” and it captured the plays that fans and sportswriters have since dubbed “The Immaculate Reception,” “The Drive,” and “The Miracle at the Meadowlands.” It christened the Dallas Cowboys “America’s Team,” made Vince Lombardi into a symbol of stern patriarchy, molded Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas into a working-class hero, and fashioned New York Jets quarterback “Broadway” Joe Namath into a countercultural rebel. As former NFL coach and sportscaster John Madden once claimed, “If you’re not in NFL Films, you’re not a part of NFL history.”7 Through its productions and other operations, NFL Films strives to control how the National

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Introduction

Football League is consumed and remembered. Since its development, the company has attached a consistent set of themes to the league and depicted it through a distinct combination of conventions. Pro football, as NFL Films depicts it, is an intense, violent, beautiful, and sometimes humorous sport where heroic men band together to overcome adversity and reach a common goal. It is an institution that expresses what it means to be American and embodies teamwork, manliness, perseverance, courage, discipline, sacrifice, and leadership—sporting characteristics that, in part because of NFL Films’ pervasiveness, are now clichés. NFL Films cultivates and maintains this image regardless of the personalities or historical circumstances its documentaries showcase. As Paolantonio’s references and Madden’s statement indicate, NFL Films’ hyperbolic representations are so widespread that they are often treated as the league’s actual past, rather than as a carefully crafted and commercially motivated version of it. Even Paolantonio’s offhand description of NFL games as “poetically violent” owes a debt to the now well-worn way that NFL Films combines slow motion violence, symphonic scores, and baritone narration to convey what Steve Sabol called pro football’s “ballet and brutality.”8 Beyond simply praising the league, NFL Films strives to create moving experiences. Steve Sabol claimed that the company’s documentaries work “to give the viewer goose pimples.”9 It represents powerful hits as cringe-inducing moments of violence, winning touchdowns as uplifting feats of triumph, and players’ rare blunders as uproarious gaffes. In doing so, the subsidiary presents the NFL as an organization—the organization—that furnishes these unique cinematic thrills. Although sports media are at the center of American and global popular culture, they have attracted only scant scholarly attention.10 NFL Films, one of the world’s most recognizable and influential sports media institutions, has yet to receive in-depth academic consideration, and studies of sport have only mentioned it briefly.11 This book offers the first institutional and cultural history of NFL Films. It traces the organization’s establishment and development from a small independent film production company into the marketing machine that Sports Illustrated named “perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America.” It also considers the company and its practices in relation to the cultural, historical, institutional, industrial, economic, and technological contexts that shape them. NFL Films illuminates the National Football League’s growth and meaning since the 1960s; the aesthetic techniques that characterize popular representations of sport; the cultural value and uses of sports media; the expansion of sports television beyond live broadcasts of games; and the emergence of cable TV and Internet sports media.

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More broadly, this study uses the league-owned production company as a lens through which to investigate the NFL’s transformation into a national obsession now known as “America’s Game” and to explain sports media’s concomitant development into a ubiquitous facet of American popular culture.

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Igniting the Flame

NFL Films’ oft-repeated creation myth, which is frequently mentioned in commentary on the company and the publicity it generates, mythologizes the organization in a manner that reflects its rose-tinted depictions of the league. The story begins with Ed Sabol—an outsized personality who wore loud suits and boasted the fittingly conspicuous nickname Big Ed. Sabol had long maintained a fascination with the connections between sport and drama. He excelled as both a swimmer and an actor at New Jersey’s Blair Academy and at The Ohio State University. While in prep school, Sabol set an interscholastic world record in the one-hundred-meter freestyle. At Ohio State, his four-hundred-yard relay team won the 1937 Big Ten and AAU championships. He enjoyed similar prominence on Ohio State’s dramatic stage, where he once served as president of the university’s dramatic society, the “Scarlet Mark.” While both drama and sport involved performing, the theatrical stage was more welcoming to Sabol’s exhibitionism. He left school in 1937 and moved to New York City to pursue acting full time. “I went to Broadway to try to get on stage,” he noted. “I never attended any [formal] dramatic school, but I always enjoyed appearing in front of groups of people and trying to be funny.”12 He was cast in a production of Oscar Hammerstein’s college-themed musical Where Do We Go From Here?, which was cancelled after merely ten performances, and he briefly served as part of the opening act for the Ritz Brothers vaudeville comedy troupe. After achieving only minimal success on the professional stage, Sabol moved to Miami, where he met his wife Audrey. In 1941 the young couple settled in Philadelphia, where Ed took a job as a salesman for his father-in-law’s overcoat business, the Jacob Siegel Coat Company. The lucrative position, which he temporarily left to serve in World War II under General George S. Patton, allowed him to start and comfortably support a family of four. By most standards, Sabol was a success. Though the handsome, charismatic, and fast-talking Big Ed was an excellent salesperson, he loathed his job—an experience he likened to “going to the dentist every day.”13 One of his favorite hobbies during his unfulfilling working life was making home movies and amateur films with an 8mm

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Introduction

windup Bell & Howell camera he and his wife received as a wedding present. “I shot everything that moved,” Sabol claimed in a 2004 interview, “I have more movies of my wife getting into and out of an automobile than you can believe.”14 As his son Steve asserts in the 2011 NFL Films documentary Ed Sabol: The King of Football Films, a production made to celebrate Sabol’s long-awaited election into the Pro Football Hall of Fame: “I didn’t know my father had a head. It seemed like all we ever saw was that camera sitting on his shoulders.”15 Sabol’s preferred filmmaking subject was Steve’s football games. He took his hobby seriously, building a rickety twenty-five-foot tower on the sideline of Steve’s home field at suburban Philadelphia’s Haverford School to gain a clearer perspective while filming.16 Steve’s coaches would use Ed’s film to study their team’s performance and other area schools even learned of his talents and requested his services. In 1957, shortly after Ed turned forty, his father-in-law sold the overcoat business, leaving the Sabols with a sizable chunk of money. Rather than investing the financial windfall, as his father-in-law might have liked, Sabol decided to pursue his interests—with gusto. He earned his pilot’s license, purchased a Cessna single-engine airplane, and started filming with even greater frequency—often making films of the places where he would fly. While vacationing in the Bahamas Sabol shot footage from his plane, operating his Bell & Howell with one hand and manning the aircraft with the other. He then edited together a film of the footage entitled Bahamas Bound and sold it to the Bahamas Development Board. Sabol also fashioned a time-lapse film of a Howard Johnson hotel being erected near his home and convinced the company to purchase it for use as a promotional tool. He may have been finished with the overcoat business, but he was still quite a salesman. Sabol eventually decided to pursue filmmaking full time. In 1962, he founded Blair Motion Pictures, an independent film production company named after his daughter, who was named after the Blair Academy he attended as a youngster. His first attempted film, a documentary about whalers off the Atlantic coast titled To Catch a Whale, was a creative and financial disaster. Sabol never actually saw a whale during the month he spent filming at sea, suffered from seasickness throughout the shoot, and lost two cameras to water damage.17 As a result, he decided to pursue topics closer to his interests and limited experience. While researching potential subjects, Sabol learned that the filming rights for the National Football League’s 1962 championship game were being auctioned and that Tel-Ra Productions, a small company that served as the league’s primary filmmaker since the late 1940s, purchased the previous year’s

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Ed and Steve Sabol pose with a football long before the development of NFL Films. Courtesy of NFL Films.

rights for $1500 (because of their retrospective status, films of NFL games were, and are still, much less popular and profitable than live television broadcasts). In order to ensure he would win the rights, Sabol doubled the amount of the previous year’s winning bid.18 Though Blair Motion Pictures’ bid was by far the largest, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was wary of this unknown company. After all, the only sports filmmaking experience Sabol listed on his resume was

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Introduction

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documenting his son’s high school games—a qualification that did not exactly instill Rozelle with confidence. But Sabol offset his inexperience with charm, ambition, and salesmanship. After quaffing a few martinis with Sabol over lunch at Manhattan’s Restaurant 21 and listening to his pitch, wherein the determined filmmaker promised to use eight cameras and to document the game in the dramatic style of a Hollywood movie rather than the straightforward structure that sports newsreels and Tel-Ra’s productions adopted, Rozelle consented to sell Blair Motion Pictures the rights. The commissioner really had nothing to lose. At the time, game films composed an almost inconsequential facet of the league’s marketing operations and had no effect on its financial health. If Sabol did not deliver, the league would simply shelve his film and no one would likely notice the difference. After securing the rights, Sabol hired Dan Endy—who previously worked for Tel-Ra—as co-director and gathered several other camera operators and editors. His most significant hire, however, was his son Steve, who would later emerge as NFL Films’ creative leader. Like his father, Steve had a passion for the drama of sport, was given to exaggeration, and possessed an uncanny understanding of marketing and public relations. While enrolled at Colorado College, Steve studied Art History and played fullback on the football team. An average football player who spent most of his time on the bench, Steve began a grassroots campaign to set himself apart from his competition—an effort that anticipated the mythmaking he would develop with NFL Films. He reinvented himself as a mysterious football prodigy from the fictional town of Possum Trot, Mississippi—“Sudden Death Sabol, the Fearless Tot from Possum Trot”—and began a facetious campaign for “Sudden Death” to win the Heisman Trophy, the highest honor a college football player can earn. He took out newspaper ads in the local paper from

The title card from Blair Motion Pictures’ first production, To Catch a Whale

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Ed and Steve Sabol prepare to film an NFL game. Courtesy of NFL Films.

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Introduction

the “Possum Trot” Chamber of Commerce wishing his persona luck on the field and created postcards, brochures, T-shirts, buttons, and pencils celebrating “Sudden Death Sabol” as “The Prince of Pigskin Pageantry now at the Pinnacle of his Power” and as “one of the most mysterious, awesome living beings of all times.”19 Sabol’s campaign made his name recognizable enough for area sportswriters, who did not realize they were being duped, to honor him as an All Rocky Mountain Conference player. His efforts were so audacious that Sports Illustrated caught wind of them and published an article on his playful grandstanding. As he told the magazine, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s not being noticed.”20 Though he shared his father’s flamboyance, Steve Sabol fancied himself an artist and even eccentric—qualities he claimed to have inherited mainly from his mother, who served as the head of Philadelphia’s Art Alliance when he was a child. The Barnumesque young filmmaker flaunted his apparent eccentricity in a 1972 Philadelphia Magazine profile by showing off the electric chair he had in his living room (and boasting that he was the only person in the United States with an actual electric chair on display in his home), his collection of stuffed owls, and the sign he displayed outside of his bungalow, which read “The Institute of Abstract Speculation and Sneak Attacks.”21 The filmmaking aesthetic he wound up establishing is nearly as flashy and indulgent as his home decor. As the story goes, when preparing to film the 1962 NFL championship game, Big Ed called Steve—who was far more committed to playing football and self-publicizing than to his studies—and said, “I can tell by your grades that all you’ve been doing is playing football and going to the movies, which makes you uniquely qualified for this job.”22 Steve worked for the company from that point until his death in 2012.23 The Sabols’ primary goal during Blair Motion Pictures’ first years was to represent football in a way that it had not previously been showcased on film or television—as an intense and thrilling experience. Ed Sabol wanted to portray football the way Hollywood depicts fiction—with dramatic flair.24 Steve sought to complement his father’s approach by displaying the game as he had experienced it during his playing days, “with the eyes bulging, the snot spraying, the sweat flying, the passion, and the sound.”25 The Sabols began to form this method with Pro Football’s Longest Day, Blair Motion Pictures’ twenty-eightminute highlight film of the 1962 NFL championship between the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants. The film very directly sought to treat football the way Hollywood portrays fiction by borrowing its title from Daryl F. Zanuck’s popular war film The

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Introduction

Steve Sabol lounges in the electric chair at his bachelor pad. Courtesy of Maury Levy.

Longest Day (1962), which was released just months before the documentary began production. Pro Football’s Longest Day frames the championship as a geopolitically inflected battle of wills between small-town Green Bay, Wisconsin, and cosmopolitan New York City. Its opening sequence introduces spectators to Green Bay through images of the town’s lakeside factories bil-

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Introduction

lowing exhaust on a characteristically cold and quiet day. The voice of narrator Chris Schenkel, a well-known television and radio sportscaster at the time, emerges to link these working-class images to the imminent championship game. “This is Green Bay, Wisconsin. It is tucked away in the upper-regions of Lake Michigan. In many ways, it’s just another lake town. But Green Bay is famous the country over for one thing—football, as played by the Packers.” After Schenkel introduces the town, the film shifts to Packers quarterback, Bart Starr, dressed in boots, blue jeans, and a stocking cap while standing outside of Green Bay’s empty stadium. The stadium, shown directly after the film surveys several factories, is presented as yet another workplace in this industrial town. Starr reinforces his working-class appearance with a humble self-introduction: “I remember something Coach Vince Lombardi told us when we first came to Green Bay. He said, ‘Fellas, there are planes, trains, and buses leaving here all the time. And if you don’t produce for me, you’re going to find yourself on one of them.’ Being Packers, we’ve never forgotten that.” The film then cuts to Lombardi, also standing outside of the stadium. In a self-sure and paternalistic tone characteristic of the coach’s demanding persona, Lombardi praises Green Bay’s support for the team and pledges the Packers’ loyalty to the town: “The men who wanted to stay, they’re still here. And let me tell you this, Green Bay is a great town for football.” Starr, a docile representative of the Packers and Green Bay, strives to complete his duties satisfactorily as Lombardi carefully monitors and disciplines his performance. Starr and Lombardi’s placement outside of their workplace reinforces their position as members of Green Bay’s regular population. Schenkel closes his introduction by emphasizing Green Bay’s relatively small size for a city that supports an NFL franchise: “Green Bay, Wisconsin, whose heart is warm for the Packers. From pro-football’s earliest heritage, this is the last of the town teams. Sixty-three thousand people live here, and all of them are for the Packers.” After introducing Green Bay, the film cuts to an aerial panoramic shot of Manhattan’s skyline—filmed from Sabol’s Cessna. “This is New York City, population 8,700,000,” Schenkel announces. “The great city of the western world. And the home of a football dynasty, the New York Giants.” The film then shifts to a shot of Yankee Stadium’s interior as Giants’ running back Frank Gifford confidently strides into view wearing a wool overcoat, slacks, and leather gloves. “When you’re with the Giants, you learn that football is a game of percentages,” Gifford calmly states. “You have to pick out the other team’s weaknesses, exploit their mistakes, and then you win ballgames.” Gifford provides a refined and thoughtful counter to Starr and Lombardi’s

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Introduction

disciplined straightforwardness. He is a handsome, articulate, and sophisticated representative of urban America who does not immediately report to a coach and who privileges calculated strategy over the hard-work ethos that Starr invokes and Lombardi enforces. By establishing this dramatic foundation, the film positions Green Bay as its protagonist—the small-town organization that unites, battles against, and eventually defeats its urban opponent. The game that follows is filtered through this familiar narrative—a class-infused struggle between the town and the city. After constructing this introductory framework, the film presents a series of highlights that trace the contest’s most important moments. It further dramatizes the game footage by emphasizing the subzero weather in which the teams played and championing their capacity to endure such harsh conditions. Close-ups of players huddling around fire pits on the sidelines and cuts to fans bundled up in the stands accentuate the extreme circumstances that warrant the title “pro football’s longest day.” Beyond its Hollywood-inspired narrative arc and use of multiple ground-level cameras, the production actually bears little resemblance to the work that eventually came to characterize NFL Films. It is a straightforward highlight film that mostly mimics the newsreel-style productions Tel-Ra fashioned. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Pro Football’s Longest Day is the story of its production. Still very much a novice filmmaker, Ed Sabol did not think to winterize his cameras. Two of them froze, one of his camera operators suffered frostbite, and the walkie-talkie system he had planned to use to communicate with his crew failed. Much of the film was lost to the cold and wound up piled in laundry baskets outside of the Giants’ locker room. As a consequence of these unexpected catastrophes, Sabol took sick from nerves and spent most of the game on the toilet with diarrhea. However, and thanks to his ambitious decision to use eight cameras, there was enough salvageable material to create a twenty-eight-minute highlight film. The documentary premiered to a small audience at Toots Shor’s Restaurant in Manhattan. Disaster almost struck again when a waiter accidentally knocked the projector over. The quick-thinking and media-savvy Pete Rozelle held an impromptu press conference to keep viewers—most of which were invited league officials, reporters, and potential sponsors—occupied while Sabol and his staff cleaned cocktail sauce off of the film and rethreaded the projector. Despite the trouble at the premiere, and regardless of the production’s formal similarities to the newsreels that preceded it, response to the documentary was overwhelmingly positive. Rozelle even hailed it as the best football film he had ever seen.26

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Old Gold Cigarettes purchased the production for $20,000 shortly after its premiere.27 The sponsor then sent Big Ed and Giants receiver Del Shofner on a service club tour of American Legions, Elks Clubs, and other community meeting places, where they sometimes projected the film onto a bedsheet when venues did not have proper screens. Sabol would introduce the production and discuss the process of making it while Shofner would recount his experience playing in the game and then sign autographs. Based on the limited success of Pro Football’s Longest Day and the consequent trust he garnered from Rozelle, Sabol bid on and won the rights to film the NFL’s two subsequent championships, producing Deadline to Glory (1963) and Anatomy of a Championship (1964). Like Pro Football’s Longest Day, both films were organized around familiar dramatic narratives, recapped the games chronologically, used a college marching band–style soundtrack, and featured sportscasters as narrators. While Deadline to Glory and Anatomy of a Championship were more widely distributed than Pro Football’s Longest Day, they were still limited mostly to private screenings around the country, most of which took place either in the Philadelphia area or the regions from which the competing teams hailed. Though Blair Motion Pictures’ first three films were by no means blockbusters, demand for exhibition increased each year. Ed Sabol realized that these productions’ escalating popularity would eventually attract the attention of larger film production companies with the capital to drive the price of filming rights beyond Blair’s limited economic reach. The rights to film these games were already rising dramatically in price every year: the 1963 contract cost $10,000 and the rights for the 1964 championship doubled to $20,000. Sabol thus asked the league to purchase Blair Motion Pictures, claiming that incorporating the company would give the NFL valuable control over its products and their content. As he reportedly told Rozelle when making his pitch: “Nobody can come in and take those films and turn them into porno or something. It’s not censorship, but you can keep an eye on it so every Tom, Dick, and Harry can’t take those football films and turn them into something that shouldn’t be.”28 Sabol’s proposal tapped into Rozelle’s well-established preoccupation with shaping, controlling, and marketing the league’s image. Upon the commissioner’s urging, the league purchased Blair Motion Pictures for $280,000—a $20,000 investment from each of the league’s fourteen teams.29 NFL Films would document all of the league’s games and produce yearly highlight films for each team and for the annual championship. Not all of the owners, however, were thrilled about the NFL’s new venture. The Baltimore Colts’ penny-pinching Carroll Rosenbloom reportedly pulled Sabol aside after the league moved to purchase

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Introduction

Blair Motion Pictures and warned, “Good luck on your new endeavor, but if you ever come back and ask for money, we’ll close you down in a second.”30 After transforming Blair into NFL Films, the league retained Ed Sabol as the company’s president. Ed handled NFL Films’ business affairs; John Hentz, who previously worked at Tel-Ra, oversaw production; and Steve Sabol, who took over as company president in 1987, developed its aesthetic approach. While Hentz ran the company’s behind-the-scenes activities until his death in 1980, the quotable and media-savvy Sabols served as the company’s public figureheads and worked nearly as hard to distinguish NFL Films among sports media—and themselves among media executives and filmmakers—as they did to cast the league in a positive light. Since its incorporation, NFL Films has documented every NFL game and filmed thousands of interviews with players, coaches, and others involved with the league. It generates around one thousand miles of film each year from which it annually creates nearly four thousand hours of programming. In addition to appearing in the organization’s productions, all of this material is deposited in the NFL Films archive, the world’s largest sports film archive and the starting point from which most of the company’s films are fashioned.31 NFL Films houses all phases of the production process at its 200,000-square-foot Mount Laurel, New Jersey, headquarters—from processing film to sound mixing.32 As a consequence of its production operations’ containment at a single facility and its relatively consistent aesthetic approach, NFL Films is often compared to 1930s Hollywood studios and is sometimes even referred to as the “last great Hollywood studio” and “Hollywood on the Delaware [River].”33 Like Pro Football’s Longest Day, NFL Films’ earliest productions were initially exhibited at disparate sites ranging from Elks lodges to Boy Scout meetings. Rozelle believed these works would best benefit the league by increasing its presence on television. By the mid-1960s TV had established itself as the primary way major American sports were experienced, and the sale of broadcast rights had become one of the National Football League’s principal revenue streams. Although sports television was growing in popularity during the 1960s, the league was only present on the medium during live broadcasts of its games, short recaps of them on the nightly news, and a few scattered highlight programs. Most of this programming had a regional focus and would be available only to those who lived near an NFL franchise. Immediately after its incorporation, NFL Films began producing segments for network football broadcasts as well as the nationally syndicated weekly review and magazine programs NFL Game of the Week (1965–1986, 2003–2009) and

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This is the NFL (which has existed in several forms since 1965 and eventually splintered into several highlight and magazine series that include Inside the NFL and, most notably, NFL Films Presents). It also made the summertime show NFL Action from 1967 to 1976. These programs educated viewers about the league and its players, contextualized recent games, and created anticipation for upcoming contests or, in the case of NFL Action, the impending season. After establishing itself on broadcast TV during the 1960s, NFL Films became even more visible by furnishing highlights for ABC’s Monday Night Football, providing footage for a recurring segment on The Tonight Show, and eventually producing an array of original programming for the cable channels ESPN, HBO, and Showtime. NFL Films Presents—as it evolved from This is the NFL—now stands as television’s longest running sports program, and Inside the NFL, another descendent of This is the NFL that NFL Films began making for HBO in 1977, is cable TV’s longest running series in general. Aside from broadening the league’s geographic reach, these productions established a presence for the NFL on television throughout the entire week and beyond the season. In addition to the programs it creates, NFL Films developed the sports home video genre and has released hundreds of videos on its own and in cooperation with sponsors like Sports Illustrated, which used the productions to attract and retain subscribers throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. It also provides the NFL’s network partners (the television networks with contracts to broadcast the league’s games) and other clients with footage for use in their productions. Indeed, a significant percentage of the non-live NFL footage that now appears on TV and the Internet can be traced to an NFL Films camera. More recently, NFL Films has become a primary content provider for the NFL Network—a league-owned twenty-four-hour cable channel launched in 2003 that focuses entirely on the National Football League—as well as NFL.com and NFL Mobile. Chicago Bears owner and coach George Halas, a leader in the NFL from its birth in 1920, initially found NFL Films to be an unnecessary nuisance. He worried that the company’s camera crews were sent by the league to spy on his organization, and he sternly warned them to keep their distance. But after viewing the reverential way it depicted the NFL, Halas recognized the company’s promotional and historical value to the league he helped to launch. He dubbed the subsidiary “Keepers of the Flame” for the NFL—a designation NFL Films has adopted as its motto. In an emotional letter he sent the Sabols, Halas wrote that because of NFL Films “the history of football would

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forever be preserved on film and not by the written word a la baseball.”34 Halas, however, had a very specific idea of what constitutes acceptable historiography when it came to his league and precisely how the NFL’s flame should be kept. In addition to constructing a tradition that emphasizes the league’s positive qualities, the flame NFL Films maintains avoids shedding light on its problems. The company’s films do not probe the NFL’s drug scandals, labor strife, injuries, or the legal troubles its players and coaches sometimes face off the field—elements that other media outlets spend countless hours exposing, dissecting, and sensationalizing. While these issues are undoubtedly part of the National Football League, they are minimized and usually avoided within the “official” history NFL Films concocts. NFL Films only produces an estimated one-half of one percent of the league’s total revenue.35 “The clubs make more from hot dogs and parking than they do from us,” joked Ed Sabol in a 1977 interview.36 Unlike many of his quips, this is not an overstatement. NFL Films, however, is not designed to produce financial profits. Rather, it enhances the league’s ticket sales, television contracts, and ability to move branded merchandise by creating and publicizing a favorable identity for the NFL that shapes the value of the myriad products that now bear its name. Regardless of its relatively small revenues, NFL Director of Broadcasting Val Pinchbeck maintained that NFL Films “may have done more to promote professional football than anything other than the games themselves.”37

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Documenting, Dramatizing, and Humanizing the NFL

Because spectators already know how featured games resolved when viewing an NFL Films production, the company is obligated to provide something different from game summaries. Its documentaries fashion retrospective reinterpretations that bring viewers closer to and dramatize events. Company spokesperson Cory Laslocky distinguishes NFL Films productions from other sports media by claiming they are felt rather than simply seen. Furthermore, commentators often describe NFL Films’ distinction through appealing to its productions’ capacity to create stirring viewing experiences. In reference to NFL Films’ editing practices and use of on-field sound, a 1972 Washington Post report claimed, “When the ooofffs, smacks and hard hits are used as the soundtrack for one of [Steve] Sabol’s almost abstract montages of the violence of football war, you sit there looking, cringing and covering up your own body.

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These are movies that can make you scrunch up your toes and press your knees together for protection.”38 The helmets, facemasks, and bulky pads that football requires make it difficult for spectators to see and identify with NFL players. NFL Films developed a set of conventions designed to bring viewers “inside the helmet.” These signature practices came to fruition in They Call It Pro Football (1966), which Steve Sabol proudly called the “Citizen Kane of football films” because of its aesthetic innovation within the context of sports media and its formation of the company’s filmmaking style.39 NFL Films’ first and most basic stylistic innovation was increasing the number of cameras used to represent the league’s games. In contrast to the one or two cameras that television broadcasts employed prior to the early 1960s, NFL Films typically used at least two for regular season contests and up to twenty for the NFL Championship, which was known as the AFL-NFL World Championship from 1967 to 1968 and then renamed the Super Bowl in 1969 (a retitling that retroactively dubbed the 1967 and 1968 championships Super Bowls I and II).40 The cameras occupy three basic positions that the company refers to as the “tree,” “mole,” and “weasel.” Similar to conventional representations of football up to the point when NFL Films developed, the tree sits stationary high in the stands at midfield to offer a broad perspective of the game and to ensure every play is documented. The mole is on the sidelines to get intimate shots of the on-field action. Last, weasels roam the sidelines and stands to capture candid elements beyond the field, such as fans’ reactions, players bantering on the sidelines, vendors shilling programs, and coaches throwing their headsets to the ground after a disappointing play. In fact, NFL Films claims its weasels precipitated the popular phenomenon of players saying “Hi, mom” when filmed on the sidelines. More broadly, these roving cameras established greater awareness that in-stadium activities were being recorded and put on display, which contributed to the array of performances that now pervade NFL games on and beyond the field—from touchdown celebrations to the sometimes outlandish costumes fans wear.41 Because they use handheld film cameras, moles and weasels have greater mobility than cumbersome TV cameras. Furthermore, since the tree is sure to capture each play, moles and weasels are free—and encouraged, in fact—to take risks while filming, sometimes isolating an individual they believe might be on the verge of a big play. If they miss a significant moment because they were focusing on a different facet of the game, they can be assured that the top camera caught it. In order to ensure his camera operators captured as much

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Introduction

potentially useful material as possible, Ed Sabol advised them to “let the film run like water” despite the cost of film stock—an expense that climbs dramatically when cameras film at the faster speeds required to document events in slow motion. Big Ed justified these costs by asserting, “You remember the quality long after you’ve forgotten the price.”42 The combination of NFL Films’ use of multiple mobile cameras and Sabol’s willingness to let his cinematographers shoot copious amounts of film enabled the company’s crews to get uniquely dramatic shots from unconventional vantage points. NFL Films, for example, was the first media outlet to keep cameras trained on quarterbacks after they passed the ball, showing the brutal hits they routinely absorb and their reactions to the plays they set in motion. These types of shots—which are now commonplace in sports television replays and highlights—were possible because of the company’s use of several cameras and its cinematographers’ ability to privilege generating alluring footage over simply following the ball. The added cameras enable NFL Films to create more intimate viewing experiences. For instance, NFL Films’ sideline and roving camera operators often film from low angles to stress players’ size and heroism. To a similar end, the company uses close-ups shot with telephoto and wide-angle lenses to highlight the game’s seldom seen subtleties—such as players’ mud-caked hands, grimacing faces, and rippling muscles—in ways that voyeuristically, and even erotically, convey professional football’s pain and emotion by situating the male body as an object of pleasure, desire, and consumption.43 NFL Films also often has one or more cameras present at every game—usually occupying the position of the mole or weasel—that record footage exclusively in slow motion. The company’s most famous shots are from the ground level, in slow motion, and isolating a particular player, part of a player, or object. For example, NFL Films documented the play now known as “The Immaculate Reception”—arguably the most fabled play in NFL history—in which Pittsburgh Steelers’ running back Franco Harris caught a deflected pass and ran it for a game-winning touchdown in the final moments of a 1972 divisional playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. Although the game seemed all but over, NFL Films cinematographer Ernie Ernst was still filming—letting the film run like water, as it were—in hopes of extracting one more usable shot from the contest’s final seconds. Shooting in slow motion from the end zone toward which Pittsburgh was advancing, Ernst elected to isolate Harris. Keeping Harris in the frame throughout the play, he captured the instant when the running back lunged to snatch the ball just before it touched the ground.44 Ernst’s is the only shot to document Harris’s catch from this perspective, and it is used nearly every time the play is displayed either by

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NFL Films’ close-up shots of players’ mangled hands became one of the signature ways the company showcased pro football’s power and intensity.

an NFL Films program or a different media outlet that purchases the rights to use NFL Films’ footage. Several locations around Pittsburgh even display statues of the play—at the moment when Harris caught the ball—that reproduce the perspective of Ernst’s camera. Beyond noteworthy individual plays, NFL Films’ cinematography is best known for its slow motion close-up shots of a football spiraling through the air—a convention the company calls “tight on the spiral.” The shots themselves require remarkable foresight and dexterity. The camera operator must keep the football in the frame and adjust focus as it soars swiftly through the air, a feat Steve Sabol likened to “trying to juggle while surfing.”45 NFL Films now sometimes uses the phrase “tight on the spiral” to describe the mixture of drama and intimacy that characterizes the company’s aesthetic practices as a whole. Building from the increased perspectives the varying cameras offer, the detail slow motion and telephoto lenses convey, and the access its status as a leagueowned organ furnishes, NFL Films was the first sports media outlet to microphone players and coaches during league games.46 As in the moments featuring the sounds of Lawrence Taylor and Mike Singletary yelling at their teammates and opponents, wireless microphones showcase the league’s emotional and physical power.47 They capture the grunts and groans of players struggling for position, pads crunching during a tackle, and coaches’ incensed reactions to referees’ calls. NFL Films frequently uses this audio material as sound effects for its other footage. Wireless microphones also allow NFL Films access to

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NFL Films’ wireless microphones captured Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram quibbling with officials in Super Bowl IV.

candid and funny moments that humanize and add complexity to the figures it often positions as one-dimensional heroes. Its sound footage of Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram feverishly calling plays and haggling with officials during Super Bowl IV does not depict him as the ultra-confident tactician we might expect a championship coach to be—presumptions that NFL Films’ hagiographies of coaches like Lombardi, Tom Landry, and Don Shula helped to establish—but a fast-talking, wisecracking, somewhat insecure, and, above all, relatively normal person. On the other hand, NFL Films’ audio footage of feared Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus cursing at opponents and snarling as he pursues them only enhances his violent, herculean image. NFL Films productions use montage editing to punctuate the qualities they attach to the league. Yoshio Kishi, a freelancer whom Ed Sabol hired to work on They Call It Pro Football, developed an editing style that represented games through weaving together their most exceptional moments. This technique combines plays’ most exciting parts rather than showing them in their entirety and arranging them chronologically, like the newsreels that preceded NFL Films. Highlight films, the company’s most popular and influential genre, rely most heavily on montage editing. An NFL Films highlight might insert a great catch between an interception and a powerful tackle that index completely different times and places. These productions document events, but privilege the process of conveying their intensity over detailing precisely how they transpired. The scripts written for football films and newsreels prior to NFL Films’ development were verbose and rife with lighthearted wordplay. Steve Sabol often recited the line “Milt Plum [Detroit Lions quarterback] pegs a peach of a pass to become the apple of coach George Wilson’s eye” to describe—and mock—the style of narration that characterized these sports films. In fact, many of NFL Films’ earliest productions used this same style of narration. Sabol even

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sheepishly admitted to using the Milt Plum line several times while he was still conceiving NFL Films’ aesthetic. However, he eventually came to believe this garrulous style could not adequately express football’s heroism, gracefulness, and violence. As he noted, “In film, particularly documentary film, words are like medicine—an overdose can kill you.”48 He developed a deliberate, pithy approach influenced in equal measures by Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, and Grantland Rice. Linemen, as they are described in They Call It Pro Football, do not simply block opponents, but put to use “the hands of combat, the hands of pros.” Similarly, the league’s linebackers are not powerful tacklers, but the “search and destroy men of pro football” who display “the face of the tiger” and engage in the “activity of the tiger.” Sabol would sometimes even write in verse, as he did for the 1974 season review film The Championship Chase, which features a melodic, rhyming script he designed to function like a Greek chorus. Along with a montage of the notoriously rugged Oakland Raiders, for example, the film includes Sabol’s poem “The Autumn Wind,” which likens the wind to “a raider / pillaging just for fun” that will “knock you round and upside down / and laugh when he’s conquered and won.” John Facenda’s baritone, authoritative voice and Sam Spence’s rousing orchestral scores—perhaps the two most identifiable and frequently evoked characteristics of NFL Films’ signature style—animated Sabol’s writing. Sportscasters like Jack Whitaker, Chris Schenkel, and even a young Dick Enberg narrated the company’s earliest productions. They did so in much the same manner that they would call games for television or radio—economically and enthusiastically. Sportscasters in the 1960s—much like today— were judged partly on their ability to inform listeners and viewers without overwhelming the featured content. The Sabols, however, wanted a voice that would command attention. Facenda, who narrated scores of NFL Films’ productions until his death in 1984, was a Philadelphia television news anchor football fans now affectionately refer to as the “Voice of God.” Steve Sabol often said that Facenda’s imposing delivery “could make a coin toss sound like Armageddon” and Ed Sabol once bragged that Facenda could “make a laundry list sound like the Constitution of the United States.”49 NFL Films hired Facenda because his voice was “arresting;” it did not merely describe events but aided the company’s efforts to move spectators. 50 The company has maintained this voice even after Facenda’s death by mainly using narrators who possess a comparable resonance, most notably Philadelphia Phillies play-by-play announcer Harry Kalas (who died in 2009). It also periodically uses Hollywood actors as narrators to broaden productions’ appeal. During NFL Films’ first decades, Academy Award winner Burt Lancaster narrated Big

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Narrator John Facenda, otherwise known as “The Voice of God,” in the recording booth.

Game America (1969) and Burl Ives, another Oscar recipient, lent his voice to Three Cheers for the Redskins (1972). The company hired Mel Blank—the voice of many popular Looney Tunes characters—to add comic appeal to The Son of Football Follies (1976) and Super Duper Football Follies (1989). More recently, the popular actors Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, Gary Busey, James Coburn, Laurence Fishburne, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Brad Pitt, Paul Rudd, Roy Scheider, Tom Selleck, Martin Sheen, Donald Sutherland, Bruce Willis, and others have narrated various NFL Films productions. To temper its intense narration and enhance it productions’ authenticity, the subsidiary also often includes snippets of play-by-play culled from radio and television broadcasts. Before NFL Films, most sports film soundtracks featured marching band music inspired by John Philip Sousa’s peppy compositions. This music, Big Ed thought, “didn’t fit the tempo of the modern game.”51 It certainly did not complement Facenda’s booming voice or Steve Sabol’s weighty prose. NFL Films thus hired Munich-based American expatriate Sam Spence to compose original scores, recorded with a sixty-five-piece orchestra, to emphasize the beauty and violence of America’s Game.52 Spence’s pieces, which span several genres and are inspired by the popular film compositions of Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Miklos Rozsa, placed the sport into a cinematic register. Steve Sabol wanted powerful, melody-heavy songs that possess what he described as a familiar, “hummable” quality. One of NFL Films’ most famous compositions, for example, is an adaptation of the folk melody “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?” Another, entitled “The Magnificent Eleven,” is a takeoff on Elmer Bernstein’s theme song to John Sturges’s Hollywood western The Magnificent Seven (1970). The composition process was unorthodox in its simplicity: Sabol would phone Spence in Munich and literally hum him a few bars. Spence would then transform Sabol’s templates into full-bodied orches-

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Introduction

trations that often combined booming bass drums and driving timpani with French horns, oboes, and flutes. As with its longstanding use of Facenda’s voice, NFL Films’ composers continue to build from the initial framework Spence and Sabol established during the 1960s. Finally, NFL Films’ style is composed of the company’s traditional use of 16mm color film rather than video—the medium through which the majority of televised sports media was shot during the 1960s and is still shot today, albeit in high-definition. The company is now, in fact, Eastman Kodak’s biggest client (although a growing percentage of its productions incorporate video). The Sabols maintain that film provides a sense of emotional depth and texture that is impossible to achieve on video. As Steve Sabol claims, “Film is about romance, magic and history. Videotape is about sitcoms and news.”53 Sabol’s statement also taps into common attitudes that situate the film medium as having greater artistic merit than television. NFL Films’ use of film, then, aids its efforts both to dramatize the league’s history and to distinguish its productions from typical sports TV. When shown in 16mm slow motion from various angles, narrated by Facenda, and backed by one of Spence’s driving scores, a garden-variety touchdown becomes a heroic achievement of epic proportion. NFL Films’ signature conventions imbue any recorded instance—be it a routine play or a game-winning field goal—with excitement and a sense of historical importance. Further, and most importantly, the conventions NFL Films developed and continues to use cast the qualities these films display as characteristic of—and essential to—the National Football League. They depict the NFL’s games as sensational spectacles marked by bone-crunching violence, sublime moments of grace, uplifting triumphs, and tear-jerking defeats. NFL Films has often—and understandably—been criticized for treating football with too much reverence. Steve Sabol defended the company’s practices by maintaining that “football is the toy department of life. If we get a little pompous or pretentious or silly or overanalytical,” he claimed, “well, the fate of the universe is not at stake.”54 In fact, NFL Films balances its epic earnestness with a steady stream of lighthearted and humorous productions. “The game is great, but we don’t take everything so seriously,” Sabol contended. “We’re the balloon and the pin. We blow it up and we can puncture it.”55 The result is a mythology that both lionizes and humanizes—often simultaneously. NFL Films’ traditional productions—from short segments to full-length documentaries—fall into five primary, and often intersecting, genres: highlights, epic histories, biographies, follies, and chalkboard programs.56 Highlights, a genre that precipitated the constant stream of highlight programs that

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Introduction

now permeate television and online media, represent events by weaving their most outstanding moments into celebratory narratives. In addition to the team and Super Bowl highlight films it produces every year—which range from twenty minutes to over an hour in length—most of NFL Films’ weekly review television programs, such as Game of the Week and Inside the NFL, are composed mainly of highlights, and many of its other programs contain short highlight sequences. Epic histories offer examinations of the league’s entire past (The History of Pro Football [1983], 75 Seasons [1994]), particular eras in the league’s history (The Fabulous Fifties [1987], Era of Excellence: The 1980’s [1989]), individual teams (Chicago Bears: The Complete History [2005]), or facets of the league’s history (Super Sunday: A History of the Super Bowl [1987], The Leaders: Breaking Racial Barriers in the NFL [2007]). Like the epic histories, NFL Films’ biographies commemorate the careers of individual players (Dick Butkus [1985], Unitas [1999]), coaches (Lombardi [1967], The Jimmy Johnson Story [1994]), and others connected to or associated with the league (What’s He Really Like— Howard Cosell [1973]). Many NFL Films television programs also feature player profiles, a shorter subgenre of the biography, and human-interest programs of varying lengths on the league’s more quotidian aspects, the cultural meaning of football in general, and issues related to the sport. Pro Football—Pottstown, PA (1971), for instance, examines a minor league football team’s season in a vérité style inspired by the documentaries Albert and David Maysles created during the 1960s and 1970s. Follies films, also known as “bloopers,” offer a comic counterpoint to the sincerity that marks NFL Films’ other genres. Unlike the company’s typical productions, follies showcase the league’s least heroic and most human moments—botched passes, missed tackles, and players tripping over their own feet. Similar to highlight films, they often weave together the NFL’s most spectacular blunders and combine them with lighter music and either wry or overtly silly narration. Although the image-conscious NFL was initially hesitant to support the creation of productions that call attention to players’ and coaches’ foibles, it changed its mind after a test screening Steve Sabol conducted for several Philadelphia Eagles players received rave reviews. The film he wound up creating, Football Follies (1968), still stands as NFL Films’ highest-selling production. Furthermore, the film and the various other productions it spawned set the stage for hundreds of sports blooper productions and even popular television programs like America’s Funniest Home Videos. Despite their comic subject matter, follies augment NFL Films’ celebration of the league by posi-

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Introduction

tioning the moments they feature as aberrations from the precision that usually characterizes the NFL. To be sure, follies’ comic appeal hinges on the heroic mythology NFL Films constructed. Finally, chalkboard programs explain and analyze the game’s intricacies and unpack the details that mark certain plays and scenarios. For example, the studio program NFL Matchup (1993–present), which airs on the cable channel ESPN, uses coaching videotape recorded from a single stationary camera—the same material NFL coaches use to prepare for games—to dissect and evaluate teams’ performances. In addition to these primary genres, NFL Films has developed an array of subgenres and offbeat productions that defy easy categorization. For instance “big hit” films like Crunch Course (1985) and Merchants of Menace (1989)—which have all but disappeared as a consequence of the controversies surrounding concussions in football—are highlight films that consist only of powerful blocks, tackles, and collisions. “Wired” productions like The Hidden NFL (1992), Turftalk (1995), and the TV series Sound FX (2009–present) consist of highlight sequences that edit together the best sound footage NFL Films captured. On the quirkier end of NFL Films’ catalogue, Autumn Ritual (1986) uses interviews with personalities ranging from musician Phil Collins to political commentator G. Gordon Liddy to explore football’s cultural significance; Strange but True Football Stories (1987), hosted by horror film icon Vincent Price, presents some of the league’s most bizarre moments in a spooky style; and NFL Rocks (1992), produced during the height of the music video’s popularity on American television, pairs NFL Films footage with complementary rock ’n’ roll songs.57 To keep up with trends in sports media—many of which its programming triggered—and to satisfy clients’ shifting priorities, NFL Films has recently ventured into the popular genre of reality television with Hard Knocks (2001– present), a program it co-produces with HBO subsidiary HBO Sports that documents an NFL team’s preseason training camp.58 Like Hard Knocks, many of NFL Films’ productions now balance its traditional conventions with an effort to incorporate the themes and aesthetic practices that mark mainstream sports media. Others exhibit none of the company’s signature conventions. NFL Matchup, for instance, shares more formal similarities with an ESPN studio program than a traditional NFL Films production. Beyond these primary conventions and genres, NFL Films pioneered the use of graphics to explain plays and strategy; developed the reverse-angle replay; and was the first media outlet to pair sports footage with popular music—all of which are now standard in contemporary sports media.59 As of 2013, the company has

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Introduction

garnered 109 Emmy Awards for its innovation and aesthetic quality—thirty-five of which went to Steve Sabol.60 Consequently, NFL Films proudly markets itself as “the most honored filmmaker in sports.” While undoubtedly stylish, inventive, and influential, NFL Films’ productions should not be divorced from the institutional purpose that ultimately informs their representations: to create and disseminate an image that enhances the National Football League’s cultural, historical, and economic value.

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NFL Films in Context

NFL Films’ productions are the company’s most popular and identifiable element. Commentary on the organization focuses primarily on these films. However, a range of cultural, historical, institutional, economic, industrial, and technological factors informs their distinctive and selective representation of the league. The chapters that follow consider how these circumstances have shaped NFL Films, and, on the other hand, how the subsidiary illuminates and impacts these contexts. In doing so, they explain NFL Films’ history while using the company to investigate pro football, sports media, and their intimate relationship in America since the 1960s. In the late 1950s, the National Football League was less popular than both professional baseball and college football. It was a regionally oriented sports organization with a thuggish reputation that received little media coverage beyond areas near its franchises. Building upon his predecessors’ efforts to transform pro football into a national phenomenon, Pete Rozelle reorganized the NFL’s economic structure; spearheaded aggressive public relations and marketing campaigns; and negotiated television contracts that enhanced its exposure. Chapter 1 outlines how NFL Films grew out of and expanded upon the league’s diversified efforts to create, circulate, and manage a broadly appealing brand. In particular, it considers how NFL Films’ early productions marketed the NFL as a reflection of American identity—a strategy the company has maintained ever since. The subsidiary consistently depicts the NFL as an embodiment of the same set of values—attributes it casts as emblematic of America—regardless of the sometimes politically charged differences that mark the league. Chapter 1 explains how NFL Films’ celebration of pro football as America’s Game—both during and since its early years—builds and maintains a stable, salable image that incorporates divergent subject matter into the corporate mythology it promotes. NFL Films productions simultaneously document and dramatize the National Football League. Although they index the league’s past, these documenta-

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Introduction

ries privilege perpetuating the history NFL Films builds over clearly—or even faithfully—reporting on how events unfold. Chapter 2 builds upon chapter 1 to consider how these movies sustain the institutional identity NFL Films constructs while negotiating clients’ demands; potentially polarizing subject matter; and changing social, discursive, and institutional circumstances. It focuses on the highlight, NFL Films’ most popular and influential genre, which recounts events by arranging their most exceptional moments into thrilling narratives. The highlight, I suggest, embodies NFL Films’ prioritization of manufacturing a positive image for the league over accurately describing its past. NFL Films’ mammoth archive—the starting point from which many of its productions are created—contains film from every game since NFL Films’ incorporation, along with other material the company has acquired. In fact, NFL Films often refers to its archive as the “NFL’s Smithsonian” and “football’s wine cellar.” Beyond housing many of the league’s most cherished moments, the archive organizes contents to support the mythology NFL Films creates. It classifies and arranges material according to NFL Films’ trademark conventions and even its potential to excite viewers. The archive is also the starting point from which NFL Films sells footage to outside clients for use in their productions. Chapter 3 expands on the first two to demonstrate how the subsidiary’s peculiar archive facilitates its productions’ creation, circulation, and protection of the league’s image. As part of its attempts to build a brand that distinguishes the National Football League, NFL Films separates its work from other sports media— particularly television. The key way NFL Films asserts this distinction is by claiming to be a site that produces exceptionally artful content—a status sports TV, and the medium in general, does not traditionally enjoy. The company emphasizes its productions’ status as films rather than television, places its programming in dialogue with consecrated aesthetic traditions, casts its creative staff as artists, publicizes the critical acclaim and awards it receives, and asserts that its documentaries are “art for art’s sake” rather than corporate marketing. Chapter 4 examines how NFL Films engages artistic traditions and discourses to distinguish itself within the sports media landscape and, by extension, to differentiate the league from competing sports organizations. In doing so, it investigates how the image NFL Films creates, both for itself and for the National Football League, is not only constituted by its productions, but also the cultural value of film and television, the discourses NFL Films generates, and the discourses surrounding the company. Regardless of the distance NFL Films continually asserts between its productions and sports television, chapter 5 suggests it deliberately built upon

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Introduction

a tradition of dramatic sports TV that emerged during the early 1960s, most notably the “up close and personal” production practices Roone Arledge developed for ABC Sports. Moreover, it examines how NFL Films’ syndicated programs prior to cable TV’s emergence complemented live telecasts of NFL games—from run-of-the-mill Sunday broadcasts to exceptional TV events like the Super Bowl and ABC’s Monday Night Football. In addition to charting how NFL Films’ television programming during the broadcast era augmented and publicized live NFL game telecasts, chapter 5 explains how this content gave the league a presence on television throughout the entire week and year that created a framework from which sports TV expanded into a twenty-four-hour phenomenon along with the arrival of cable. Early cable television outlets—particularly ESPN, the first twenty-fourhour all sports cable channel—frequently used NFL Films’ highly dramatized content to fill their programming schedules and to build a valuable association with the NFL. While cable sports television provided a treasured new venue for NFL Films productions, these outlets also started to mimic the company’s distinctive conventions. Moreover, and more importantly, they churned out content almost immediately after sporting events ended and covered sport far less reverentially than NFL Films. These shifts diminished NFL Films’ prominence within sports television and constrained the company to alter its production practices in order to maintain a presence on the medium. The National Football League’s 2003 launch of the NFL Network and NFL Films’ 2004 designation as part of NFL Media—a subsidiary that includes the Network, NFL.com, and NFL Mobile—intensified these changes. While the NFL Network programs a great deal of NFL Films material and markets itself as the company’s proud “home,” it has forced the subsidiary to scale back its signature conventions in order to privilege the production of content that resembles ESPN’s more popular news-driven programming. Similarly, although NFL Films produces exclusive content for NFL.com, this material does not typically adopt the company’s classic aesthetic. Chapter 6 examines NFL Films’ redefined role within the contemporary sports media landscape and league it helped to create. It considers how the company precipitated the industrial and institutional conditions that now evidence less interest in its traditional aesthetic. While NFL Films’ signature conventions have become less prominent in sports media and less important to the league, they continue to circulate through productions various clients commission the company to make, references to and parodies of them, and the ways consumers put them to use. My conclusion briefly considers how the mythology NFL Films built and the conventions that traditionally communicated it persist in popular culture despite

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Introduction

the contemporary sports media landscape and the NFL’s decreased reliance on them. It also examines how the National Football League’s marketing continues to celebrate NFL Films’ recognizable and relatively prestigious brand as the organization provides less support for the distinctive practices that signal it. Keepers of the Flame primarily examines NFL Films’ circulating and archived productions, the discourses it generates, and the discourses surrounding the company. Because there is so little scholarly work on the company, I principally use commentary published in the popular, sports, and trade press; internal documents deposited at the Pro Football Hall of Fame archive; observations of NFL Films headquarters I made during two research visits; and interviews with several of the company’s former and current staff. The interviews, observations, and archived productions provide a wealth of information that has not been addressed in commentary on NFL Films. They also demonstrate how insufficient an approach to examining NFL Films, its relationship to the NFL, and its place within the history of sport and sports media would be if it used only extant sources and productions available on video and television. Much of the commentary published on NFL Films derives from interviews with Ed and Steve Sabol. Beyond using this material as evidence to understand the company and its history, I employ it to consider how the subsidiary imagines, represents, and sells itself. As professional mythmakers, the Sabols continually demonstrated a penchant for exaggeration to amplify their company’s stature and influence. Some of the Sabols’ assertions have turned out to be entirely fabricated. In fact, most of the commentary on the company simply recirculates these tall tales, which NFL Films’ staff jokingly refers to as “Sabols’ fables.” Rather than leading my quest to understand NFL Films’ history astray, these instances of self-promotion—both fictional and truthful—instructively illuminate how NFL Films distinguishes itself and the league. After all, the company’s primary obligation is to create, nurture, and publicize a positive and exciting image—not simply to reproduce reality. While this book builds an accurate history of NFL Films, part of that history concerns the company’s sometimes embellished selfmythologizing and the marketing purposes it serves. The institutional image NFL Films constructs is ripe for criticism. Its productions routinely glamorize football’s warlike elements, equate masculine violence to heroism, and use the gridiron game to promote nationalist and American exceptionalist attitudes. For example, The Young, The Old, and The Bold (1969)—a production made during the height of the Vietnam War that outlines the quarterback position—describes successful passing as “saturation bombing with touchdowns coming in clusters.” Along different, but similarly problematic, lines, a frequently circulated snippet of Buffalo Bills coach Lou

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Saban wired for sound on the sidelines captures him admonishing a player by disgustedly screaming: “My daughter could do better!” These are but two of many instances of political incorrectness—and even irresponsibility—that mark the subsidiary’s work. While I periodically mention these practices’ implications, I do not offer a full-scale critique of the company’s representational politics. Rather, I consider the broader process through which NFL Films has consistently, indeed unwaveringly, attached certain qualities—both troubling and innocuous—to the league; how these characteristics are now often considered essential to the NFL; and the cultural, historical, and commercial ends they serve. I thus locate NFL Films’ often problematic practices as outgrowths of the broader institutional and economic factors that shape its operations. I hope, however, that Keepers of the Flame will provide useful context others might use to critique NFL Films’ productions in greater detail than this project’s scope allows.

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Historians, Storytellers, Mythmakers

When I called the Pro Football Hall of Fame to schedule a 2010 research visit, I was briefly put on hold while the receptionist connected me to one of its archivists. Immediately after I consented to hold, John Facenda’s rumbling voice emerged. Backed by an equally familiar Sam Spence score, Facenda uttered the opening lines to NFL Films’ highlight of the 1967 Ice Bowl, which the company made into one of the league’s most enduring myths by dramatizing the frigid Green Bay weather. “In the ice-bucket chill of a Wisconsin winter, the two best teams in the National Football League met in a cruel rite of manhood.” According to the archivist with whom I spoke moments later—who may have been surprised to discover that I was as interested in the audio material the Hall of Fame uses to entertain holding callers as I was in scheduling my visit—the institution has employed NFL Films material in this way for quite some time. Though banal, this moment suggests the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a site devoted to preserving and showcasing the National Football League’s history, communicates its identity and mission through NFL Films’ representations. Moreover, it illustrates a key point about NFL Films’ place in American popular culture. While the company creates a dramatized and commercially driven version of the National Football League’s past, this mythology is often treated as the league’s actual history. Indeed, the tradition NFL Films builds somehow legitimizes the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s position as a site that organizes, preserves, and protects the NFL’s heritage.

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Introduction

The National Football League was only mildly popular before NFL Films’ development. It is now difficult to avoid. The Super Bowl is routinely the country’s most watched annual television event, stories about the league and its players pepper both mainstream and sports media throughout the entire year, and the NFL’s shield logo is emblazoned on everything from children’s clothes to air fresheners. NFL Films expanded the league’s presence in media culture and built a distinct way of imagining it. “Even more than the live telecasts of the games themselves,” asserts the New York Times’ Ben Yagoda, “the work of NFL Films has shaped America’s sense of what professional football is about.”61 As Steve Sabol claimed, “People tell me all the time, ‘You know, my memory of the Ice Bowl, The Catch, and The Drive comes from you guys. I wasn’t at the game; I didn’t even see it when it happened on TV. I remember them because of your films.’”62 NFL Films constructs the league’s history through familiar stories of heroes and underdogs filled with riveting moments—spine-chilling hits, beautiful touchdown runs, graceful catches—that it intensifies through the use of ground-level slow motion, on-field sound, montage-editing, baritone narration, and symphonic scores. “Facts are fleeting,” Sabol noted, “feelings are forever. So when you can’t recall how many yards a player gained or who scored which touchdown, you never forget how it made you feel.”63 According to sports TV executive Don Ohlmeyer, “NFL Films started looking at football through a different pair of glasses and the [television] networks very quickly tried to get the same pair.”64 “NFL Films became so distinctive,” notes sports historian Michael MacCambridge, “that the entire enterprise seemed inevitable, the only way to shoot a modern football game.”65 Moreover, while the company set out to give football a Hollywood-inspired treatment, Hollywood representations of football and sport now commonly mimic NFL Films. In fact, popular sports films that include Brian’s Song (1971), Semi-Tough (1977), Black Sunday (1977), Rudy (1993), Jerry Maguire (1996), Friday Night Lights (2004), and Invincible (2006) have hired NFL Films to produce their football sequences. “When I got ready to direct Friday Night Lights,” noted filmmaker Peter Berg in a 2012 interview with the NFL Network, “my creative team and I sat down and we studied NFL Films and used NFL Films’ style, strategy, and technique.” Rudy director David Anspaugh even admits that he employed the subsidiary to make his production seem more “authentic.”66 Keepers of the Flame uses NFL Films to illuminate pro football’s rise to prominence in American popular media culture and to demonstrate the significant role media have played in shaping and circulating its significance. The NFL’s metamorphosis into the United States’ most valuable and visible

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sports organization began around the same time that it incorporated NFL Films. While it is debatable whether or not, as Sports Illustrated suggests, NFL Films is the most effective propaganda organ in corporate America, it certainly created a powerful, lasting, and influential image for the league. This book examines how NFL Films has worked to distinguish the NFL among professional sports organizations and popular entertainments by transforming it into an institution that furnishes breathtaking, cringe-inducing, sometimes sidesplitting, and always branded experiences. In doing so, it tells a larger story about sport and sports media’s intertwined growth, meanings, and uses since the 1960s.

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Creating and Sustaining America’s Game Every Sunday from September through December, before their TV sets and in stadiums from coast to coast, some 40 million Americans are enraptured by a modern-day spectacle that even the Romans would enjoy. The game is professional football, now established as the spectator sport of the ’60s. —Time Magazine, 19621 The NFL is so outsized in its scope, so imperial in its ambitions, so important to its fans, that it’s . . . like a society unto itself.

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—Peter Keating, ESPN The Magazine, 20062

Although it is now hard to believe, the National Football League was not always the corporate sport behemoth that ESPN The Magazine’s Peter Keating describes as a “society unto itself” and that Christian Century resignedly deemed “America’s newest indigenous religion.”3 Autumn Sundays were not always overrun with Americans donning their favorite teams’ jerseys and piling into sports bars to watch multiple simultaneous telecasts of league games, often with laptops and mobile devices in tow to monitor their fantasy football scores. The Super Bowl was not always the world’s most popular annual media event,

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and more Americans did not always watch football games than attend Sunday church services. Somewhere along the line pro football transformed from an American sport into America’s Game—a spectacle that constitutes the nation that so insatiably consumes it. NFL football’s meteoric rise had a great deal of assistance from the league’s media and publicity operations. Fueled by a combination of sport and media’s increasingly profitable symbiosis and Pete Rozelle’s image-consciousness, the NFL enhanced its marketing efforts during the 1960s and began to diversify aggressively, creating branded products that reached out to audiences beyond the white, middle-class men who composed its typical fan base. Football historian Michael Oriard claims the league’s increased reliance on media and publicity during this time ushered the organization into its “modern” era.4 These institutional and historical shifts provide context that explains NFL Films’ development, relationship to the league, and practices. NFL Films, as Ed Sabol boasted with characteristic brio, “created the way the game should be perceived by the public.”5 The National Football League entered the 1960s as America’s third most popular sport; it ended the decade as America’s Game. NFL Films built upon the league’s established and expansive promotional activities to construct, advertise, and preserve this distinction. Many of NFL Films’ early productions explicitly argue for pro football’s unique centrality to and popularity in 1960s American culture. For example, They Call It Pro Football provides an introduction to the NFL, the men who play and coach it, and the vibrant culture surrounding it. The production begins by setting the 1960s NFL apart from the league’s past. It opens with a whimsical score paired with black-and-white newsreel footage from the NFL’s early history that Facenda places into a loose historical context by emphasizing pro football’s relative obscurity when the league emerged. “It was a game that a handful of spectators came to see,” Facenda explains. “A tug-of-war. Twenty-two nameless men grappling in the mud. They called it ‘pro football.’” The grainy and indistinct newsreel images display the game from the perspective of a stationary camera far from the field. As such, the sport appears sluggish, unorganized, and tedious. There are no cuts to the crowd, no sounds of pads crunching or coaches hollering, and no close-ups on the players. Moreover, the light and fanciful soundtrack—a stark contrast to Spence’s thundering scores—suggests this version of pro football lacked the seriousness and power that, because of NFL Films, is now so intimately associated with the league. After establishing this historical framework, a colorful montage of 1960s pregame pageantry replaces the drab footage of the game’s past. Fans pour into a massive stadium as marching bands, vendors, scantily clad young women twirl-

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Creating and Sustaining America’s Game

ing batons, and mascots revel in the frenetic, excessive spectacle. The throngs of supporters and vibrant pregame merriment suggest professional football had become a sensation enjoyed by far more than the mere “handful” of fans that previously followed it. NFL games constitute wildly popular, carnivalesque breaks from everyday life that a diversity of Americans zealously adore. To punctuate the celebratory atmosphere that pro football games furnish, the introductory sequence ends with oscillating images of multicolored balloons and a group of doves being released into the air before a game. A rousing orchestral climax accompanies the montage as the film’s title emerges and Facenda proclaims: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun. Sixty minutes of close-in action from kickoff to touchdown. This is pro football; the sport of our time.” Aside from expanding the league’s presence on television beyond Sunday broadcasts of its games and the season as a whole, NFL Films constructed a unique, durable, and broadly appealing brand for the NFL during a time when the organization was still struggling to establish a lucrative identity. Its productions attached a distinct set of qualities to the NFL—violence, heroism, discipline, leadership, masculine toughness, beauty, excitement, and the intersections among them. NFL Films used those characteristics to argue for professional football’s status as an embodiment of American identity and, in doing so, to position the National Football League as more consequential than competing institutions and entertainments—not merely a sports organization, but an avowal of the nation’s defining features and aspirations. While NFL Films’ early productions make the argument for the league’s status as “the sport of our time” during the 1960s, the company—even in more recent productions that do not feature its traditional conventions—has persisted in attaching the same features to the NFL since its development. NFL Films incorporates the sometimes politically charged points of difference that mark the league and situates it as an institution that is unaffected by historical or social change. Regardless of the shifts that occur within or beyond the NFL, the mythology NFL Films constructs and sustains depicts it as an illustration of the same quintessentially American attributes. The Modern NFL

Although the NFL of the 1960s was characterized in part by an increased reliance on media and publicity, the league has worked doggedly to cultivate and promote its image since its 1920 formation in the showroom of Ralph Hay’s Canton, Ohio, Hupmobile auto dealership.6 During its early history, the NFL was both less popular than professional baseball and college football and lacked

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their respectability. Pro football players were reputed as surly toughs who could not find gainful employment elsewhere after college. Furthermore, the NFL was economically unstable. Franchises from small and mid-sized towns would routinely emerge only to fold shortly afterward, such as the Duluth Eskimos (1923–1927), Hammond Pros (1920–1926), Oorang Indians (LaRue, Ohio, 1922– 1923), Racine Legion (1922–1924), and Tonawanda (New York) Kardex (1921).7 NFL president Joe F. Carr, who served as the league’s chief executive from 1921 to 1939, took several measures to strengthen the NFL’s financial viability and to improve its image. Using Major League Baseball as his model, Carr moved teams—save Green Bay—to America’s largest cities. This shift brought franchises greater economic stability and fostered the league’s continued growth. Following the lead of Major League Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the vigilant administrator who famously expelled eight members of the Chicago White Sox for conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series, Carr also strove to position the league as virtuous and carefully regulated by distancing it from gambling. He vowed that any league member caught betting on games would receive a lifetime ban.8 To publicize this wholesome image, Carr developed Champions of the Gridiron (1938), the league’s first promotional film. Sponsored by General Mills, the one-hour production was distributed nationally and exhibited—often free of charge—at movie houses, schools, and clubs. In the straightforward style of an educational film, Champions of the Gridiron explains professional football and celebrates it as an honorable and safe game suitable for “every member of the family.” It opens with a spoken introduction by Carr, seated in his Columbus, Ohio, office. “The object of this picture,” he explains, “is to demonstrate to the people of America that clean, competitive athletics, combined with the proper nourishing food and good habits will develop healthy, rugged bodies and clean active minds.” The production, which Navy coach Swede Larson praised as the finest football film he had ever seen, fashioned a noble identity for the still inchoate NFL and, just as importantly, delivered that image to a national audience.9 Based on Champions of the Gridiron’s success, General Mills sponsored a new and very similar edition of the film in 1939.10 Two of the most significant implementations made during Carr’s tenure— the liberalization of forward pass rules in 1933 and the 1936 institution of a reverse-order college draft—were designed to make the professional game livelier than its far more popular collegiate counterpart. Before 1933, forward passes could only be made from five yards behind the line of scrimmage. The rule change—which college football did not adopt until 1945—permitted passes to be thrown from any location behind the line, an allowance that created greater

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Creating and Sustaining America’s Game

potential for exciting plays. Prior to the college draft’s development, entering players could sign a contract with whichever team offered them the largest salary. Consequently, the league’s wealthiest clubs were consistently able to hire the best incoming players. This economic disparity transferred into predictably lopsided games. To insert more excitement into these often unsurprising contests, the league instituted a draft where picks were assigned in the reverse order of the previous year’s league standings—a model the NFL, because of its collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association, is still able to follow despite its clear violation of antitrust regulations.11 This implementation only allowed entering players to sign a contract with the team that selected them. The draft enhanced individual franchises’ financial health and situated the league as uniquely competitive. George Halas even cited it as the “primary reason” the NFL eventually transformed into the United States’ most successful sports organization.12 Philadelphia Eagles owner De Benneville “Bert” Bell, a former University of Pennsylvania quarterback who played for the Haverford School that Steve Sabol would attend decades later, initially proposed the reverse-order draft. In fact, Bell, who was elected NFL commissioner in 1946 and ran the league out of a combination of a small office in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and his nearby home until his death in 1959, initiated many of the shifts upon which Pete Rozelle expanded during the 1960s.13 Despite the enhanced level of competition the draft fostered, the league was in frequent financial trouble during Bell’s tenure as commissioner. To boost games’ marketability, Bell scheduled weekly contests between teams perceived to have comparable talent. He would reportedly sit for days at his kitchen table before each season, methodically laboring to create the most engaging schedule possible—a program wherein no contest’s outcome could be predicted with certainty.14 As he would frequently say, “On any given Sunday, any given team in our league can beat any other team.”15 Bell’s efforts to enhance the league’s entertainment value also bled onto the field of play when he implemented sudden-death overtime periods for playoff games in 1946 and legalized the unlimited free substitution of players in 1950.16 Sudden-death overtime, an additional period added to the game if regulation play ends in a tie, made certain that playoff games would not end in a draw and ensured that any game won during overtime would finish in dramatic fashion.17 Free substitution created a livelier pace and afforded teams a greater degree of strategic potential by allowing for specialty players to enter the game at any time. To complement the enhanced competition that the draft, scheduling, and rule changes created, Bell continued Carr’s efforts to bring the league greater

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respectability. Much like today, popular discourses during the 1940s and 1950s often critiqued the NFL as brutally dangerous and even potentially fatal. Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham penned a 1954 Sports Illustrated article that claimed football had become “too vicious” and, along more sensationalistic lines, a 1955 Life Magazine exposé entitled “Savagery on Sunday” charged that professional football was riddled with dirty play.18 In response to these discourses, Bell repeatedly assured the public of the game’s safety and integrity. He even forbade players from adopting nicknames with violent connotations.19 As Bell told sportswriter Jack Orr, “We cannot have dirty stuff in football. We are trying to sell the game to women and children.”20 To serve similar PR goals, Bell expanded on Carr’s attempts to divorce the league from gambling—particularly after a failed attempt to fix the 1946 NFL Championship between the New York Giants and Chicago Bears.21 He reserved the power to bar anyone from NFL stadiums whom he or team owners suspected had gambling ties. He also formed an investigative department led by former FBI agent Austin Gunsel, who organized a network of agents in each NFL city to monitor activities that might harm the league’s still very fragile image.22 The nascent medium of television offered a different set of problems and opportunities. Like most sports organizations during this time, the NFL was initially hesitant to embrace television for fear that it would decrease ticket sales. Despite his and the franchise owners’ reluctance, Bell realized that TV offered an unprecedented opportunity to increase the league’s exposure and to separate it from other sports. In 1948 ABC began to broadcast NFL games. These early telecasts were typically presented in a “Game of the Week” format that featured only one contest each Sunday afternoon. Throughout the next several years, other networks, including NBC, CBS, and the short-lived DuMont Television Network, showcased NFL games. Most of these telecasts were regional. As a result, those who lived in areas without a nearby NFL team would likely not see any games.23 During this time NFL teams were responsible for negotiating their own television contracts. Some clubs, including the Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers, even formed independent regional networks in cooperation with sponsors.24 These contracts resulted in vastly different profits across the league depending on franchises’ popularity and the size of their home markets. While telecasts significantly boosted the league’s exposure, the disproportionate revenues gained from teams’ contracts made it nearly impossible for smallmarket organizations like the Green Bay Packers to compete economically with the New York Giants or Chicago Bears.

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Even though TV broadcasts increased the league’s exposure and profits, Bell sought to maintain live games’ status as the NFL’s primary product and to sustain attendance at those events. In 1956 he imposed blackouts of telecasts within a seventy-five mile radius of all home games.25 As Bell declared regarding his rationale behind mandating blackouts: “I don’t believe there is any honesty in selling a person a ticket and then, after you’ve taken his dollars, deciding to put the game on television, where he could’ve seen it for nothing.”26 While Bell, given his responsibilities as the league’s top executive, was likely far more interested in maintaining ticket sales than ensuring fairness to those who purchase tickets, his statement evidences an effort to position the league as a fair-minded postwar American corporation. Beyond ensuring television broadcasts would not decrease gate receipts, Bell instituted rule changes to enhance the NFL’s conduciveness to the profitable medium. In 1957, and at the behest of the increasingly influential TV networks, Bell ruled that all visiting teams would wear white-based jerseys and that home squads would wear darker colors so viewers—who were seeing games in blackand-white—could more easily tell teams apart.27 Along these lines, in 1958 Bell instituted a “television time-out” rule, which safeguarded advertisers’ investments in football telecasts by guaranteeing periodic breaks where commercials could be inserted. Bell also maintained a keen sensitivity to the importance of how media outlets frame and discuss National Football League games. He pressured both the league and the networks to make certain that broadcasts displayed the NFL favorably. In a 1956 memo to the league concerning telecasts, Bell ordered that “everyone must do all in his power to present to all the public the greatest games in football combined with the greatest sportsmanship.”28 Furthermore, he believed that both radio and television broadcasters—because they generated revenues from advertisers that paid specifically to have their messages delivered during pro football games—were obligated to represent the league uncritically. The commissioner reserved the right to suspend or even terminate broadcasters if they did not depict the league in accordance with his expectations. In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer Bell steadfastly argued that he was not practicing censorship, but merely ensuring that broadcasters fulfilled what he believed was their professional obligation to promote the NFL. Broadcasters, Bell claimed, “are being paid by their sponsors through the league—or even by the league through their sponsors—and that makes them salesmen for football. You never heard of a salesman saying that his product was no good, did you? Well, we don’t want any of our broadcasters implying that about football.”29

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The 1958 championship game between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts at Yankee Stadium—the first NFL championship decided in suddendeath overtime that is now commonly referred to as “the greatest game ever played”—solidified the league’s popularity and further cemented the increasingly intimate union between pro football and television. Johnny Unitas led the Colts on an eighty-six-yard drive that culminated with a seven-yard touchdown run by fullback Alan Ameche during the first overtime period’s waning moments. More significant than the game’s dramatic finish was that it was nationally televised.30 The match, which took place just blocks away from Madison Avenue, simultaneously advertised professional football as a sport with mass appeal and evidenced TV’s potential to deliver it to a nationwide audience. Moreover, the game’s location in Yankee Stadium, America’s most storied baseball landmark popularly known as the “house that [Babe] Ruth built,” symbolically gestured toward professional football’s imminent rise as the country’s new favorite sports spectacle. Despite the structural changes Bell implemented, his media savvy, and the success of the 1958 championship, the NFL was still financially insecure when he died. Pete Rozelle unified the teams’ economic interests and amplified the media and public relations operations Bell and Carr initiated. As sportscaster Jack Whitaker put it, “Bert Bell laid the foundation and Pete Rozelle built a skyscraper.”31 Most biographies of popular sports figures begin with their early athletic exploits. Narrations of Rozelle’s life and career focus on his uncanny ability to promote and sell. Rozelle was the first NFL commissioner who had not previously played or coached football.32 Instead, he was a businessperson trained in public relations and advertising. He began his career with the NFL in 1952 as a PR specialist for the Los Angeles Rams—a team that had to be particularly mindful of its image because of the many entertainment options available to consumers in southern California. In 1957, and after briefly leaving the Rams to work for the firm tasked with marketing the 1956 Summer Olympic Games, Rozelle was hired as the team’s general manager—a post he held until his 1959 election as commissioner. Immediately after being named the Rams’ general manager, Rozelle made several changes to distinguish and promote the franchise. Most notably, he partnered with Roy Rogers Enterprises to manufacture and sell Rams bobblehead dolls and other miscellaneous items—a small but successful venture that demonstrated the team’s potential to create a relationship with consumers that spanned beyond football games. The bobblehead doll, according to Sports Illustrated’s Neil Steinberg, was the first time a sports team logo was applied to a

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product outside of baseball caps and pennants.33 Based on these items’ popularity, Rozelle opened a Rams store in Los Angeles to provide a permanent outpost for team memorabilia. Rozelle’s marketing experiments with the Rams motivated the entire league to team with Roy Rogers Enterprises in 1959 and create a national licensing program—NFL Enterprises. The first NFL memorabilia sold nationally was a set of glassware carrying team logos, which the Standard Oil Company bought to give away with fill-ups at its gas stations. Within a year of NFL Enterprises’ partnership with Roy Rogers various manufacturers were producing three hundred different NFL-branded products.34 These items circulated the league’s image independently of NFL-sanctioned events and broadcasts. The NFL became present seven days a week through the glasses that filled Americans’ cupboards and the bobblehead dolls that decorated their bedrooms and offices. These ephemera established a foundation for the current ubiquity of sports memorabilia and apparel. Moreover, they adapted the NFL brand to fit the presumed interests of demographics the league traditionally struggled to attract, most notably women and children. Though Rozelle enjoyed profound success while working for the Rams, the thirty-three-year-old marketing wunderkind was not initially considered as a candidate for NFL commissioner after Bell’s passing. However, when the league’s owners met to find a replacement they could not reach a collective decision. After twenty-two unsuccessful ballots, Rozelle’s name cropped up. Unlike the other candidates—most of whom had extensive histories in the league—Rozelle had not been around the NFL long enough to burn many bridges with its old guard. He was selected as a compromise on the owners’ twenty-third ballot. Most histories of the NFL and discussions of Rozelle’s importance to its expansion—which affectionately refer to him as the ingenious and prescient “Boy Czar”—locate him as a savant who used his uncanny understanding of media and publicity to single-handedly transform the league into a national sensation.35 “For the National Football League to have become what it has become,” wrote former New York Giants General Manager Ernic Accorsi, “one event was indispensible: Pete Rozelle had to be the commissioner. There is no way, no possible way, all of this could have ever happened without him.”36 While Rozelle was certainly instrumental, the NFL’s transition to its “modern” phase was partly an outgrowth of its established history of image-consciousness—a tradition that can be traced to the league’s creative, though unsuccessful, 1920 decision to install the sports star Jim Thorpe as its first president (whom Carr replaced after only seven months). Further, this transformation occurred during

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the historical moment when television had established itself as a fixture in most American homes. By the time Rozelle was elected commissioner, approximately 86 percent of American households had at least one television set—in contrast to the 9 percent with TVs in 1950.37 A combination of historical, cultural, and technological shifts aided Rozelle’s profound impact on the league. The young commissioner, however, understood these transformations’ promotional and economic potential far better than most of his contemporaries. Under Rozelle’s leadership, the league shifted to an entertainment-centered institution. In fact, he modeled his task after Walt Disney’s diversification of his company from one that produced cartoons into a media empire that created television programming, memorabilia, and a theme park.38 When sportswriter Roger Kahn asked Rozelle whether the NFL was “show business,” Rozelle replied, “Sure. But we prefer the word entertainment. . . . Our league provides action entertainment, nothing less and nothing more.”39 Rozelle’s Disney-inspired aspirations of expanding the league and maximizing its amusement paid off quickly and considerably. By just 1962 the NFL had so dramatically increased in popularity and cultural reach that Time Magazine dubbed pro football “the spectator sport of the 1960s.”40 The following year Sports Illustrated named Rozelle “Sportsman of the Year” for expanding the NFL and safeguarding its integrity—an honor that had never before and has not since been awarded to a nonathlete or coach.41 In 1999 The Sporting News recognized Rozelle’s importance to enhancing professional football’s popularity, and the influence his efforts had on sport in general, by designating him the “Most Powerful Sports Person of the Century.” 42 One of the first, and what is generally considered to be the most important, changes Rozelle initiated as commissioner was reorganizing the league’s economic structure to a revenue-sharing model. NFL historian David Harris situates this economic reorganization as a broader institutional and philosophical shift that he refers to as “League Think” and cites as the “central ideology of the Rozelle era.”43 “League Think” gave the league’s teams a unity of purpose and assumed that acting in concert with the NFL’s interests would ultimately serve the best interests of individual teams—even those that were well off before the league restructured. The league’s individual teams still compete against each other, but are more directly engaged in a broader battle between the NFL and other entertainment organizations. As Rozelle claimed in a 1982 New York Times article, “While the NFL’s teams are clearly competitors on the field, they are co-producers and co-sellers in producing and marketing. In this regard, they are not competitors; rather, they are partners acting together in a common enterprise.”44

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Building from the NFL’s corporate reorganization, Rozelle negotiated a league-wide national television contract. His efforts to sign the contract were initially blocked by a federal judge on the grounds that it violated antitrust regulations. Undaunted by this initial ruling, Rozelle persuaded Congress to pass the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, which granted professional sports leagues exemption from the antitrust laws that previously prohibited collective television contracts. Just months after President John F. Kennedy—a devoted football enthusiast—signed the Sports Broadcasting Act, the NFL agreed to a two-year, $9.3 million contract with CBS.45 The one contingency to this agreement was a continuation of television blackouts within seventy-five miles of where games took place. The blackout rules relaxed in 1973 when the league decided to allow local telecasts if events sold out within seventy-two hours of kickoff. In addition to expanding the NFL’s visibility through national television contracts, Rozelle refined the league’s efforts to create national appeal. First, he moved the NFL’s headquarters to Rockefeller Center in Manhattan’s business district. This relocation to a high-profile business center was as much a marketing-driven decision as a practicality. From a business perspective, it made good sense to move the league’s offices closer to the New York City–based advertising agencies and television networks with which the NFL was beginning to work so closely. Symbolically, moving the league’s headquarters from sleepy Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, to a New York City skyscraper placed the league into association with the country’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations. To create a communications infrastructure that would tend to and monitor the league’s image, Rozelle established the NFL’s first public relations department. As he noted in a 1974 interview with the Los Angeles Times, “We subscribe to about 85 newspapers, including at least two in every franchise area. . . . We’ll accumulate stuff on players’ eating habits, players’ wives, fan clubs, promotions, almost anything you can think of. We’ve got a file on every active player.”46 The files primarily aided the league in preparing press releases. However, they also allowed the NFL to keep track of the discourses circulating about it and to respond as needed. Additionally, and similar to his predecessor’s borderlineOrwellian tactics, Rozelle hired the former Los Angeles Police Department’s intelligence chief to establish contacts in each NFL city to report on and investigate rumors regarding league players and other employees.47 Rozelle evidenced the seriousness with which he took maintaining the league’s positive image in 1963 when he suspended indefinitely Green Bay Packers halfback Paul Hornung—the former Notre Dame star known as “The Golden Boy”—and Detroit Lions lineman Alex Karras for gambling on NFL games (both were reinstated and returned to the league the following season).

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As Rozelle stated in reference to the suspension: “It was a tough decision . . . but the integrity of the sport was at stake. We had to show we weren’t covering anything up.”48 A comparable situation arose in 1969 when Rozelle threatened to fine and suspend high-profile and notoriously fast-living New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath unless he sold his stake in Bachelors III—a New York City restaurant and night club frequented by gamblers with alleged mob ties. Though Namath briefly retired to protest Rozelle’s threat, the two eventually reached a compromise, and Namath returned to the field, but only after separating himself from Bachelors III.49 Rozelle expanded the league’s public presence with his 1963 establishment of NFL Properties, an in-house department that handled licensing, merchandising, publishing, and community outreach. Creating this subsidiary gave the NFL greater control over the items that carried its brand. Although it developed and sold a variety of products, NFL Properties’ primary goal—much like NFL Films—was not to generate revenue, but to shape the league’s image and broaden its circulation. For example, in 1969 the league published The First Fifty Years: A Celebration of the National Football League in its Fiftieth Season, a coffee-table book that commemorates the league’s anniversary. Similar to They Call It Pro Football, The First Fifty Years argues for football’s centrality to American culture and its unique capacity to unite diverse groups. The book even dedicates itself to “the American spirit, which has invented this most courageous, complex and creative game to reflect and to challenge itself.”50 A section of the volume titled “A Game For Our Time” explains the vital cultural role pro football played in 1960s America: A game of varied but elemental excitement, pro football rose to dominance in the 1960s, at a time when the United States experienced a social-political crisis unparalleled in its history. Crowded into increasingly unmanageable cities, governed by a seemingly unreachable bureaucracy, given an unwanted war in Asia and the upheavals of racial and educational factions at home, distraught by continuing violence and tragedy, the nation fell into a bluesy period of introspection its leaders could not assuage. In such a mood, the people turned gratefully to a sport whose driving excitement not only filled certain needs more felt than acknowledged, but did so in patterns well suited to this complex, scientific society.51

The First Fifty Years both argues for professional football’s position as an institution that reflects American culture and creates a presence for the league outside of its games and broadcasts of them. The book enables consumers to experience the National Football League—and its meanings—as a populist living room accent. 46

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One of NFL Properties’ main objectives was to expand the NFL’s audience. For instance, it attempted to establish a relationship between the league and adolescent boys by co-sponsoring with the Ford Motor Company the nationwide “Punt, Pass and Kick” competition in 1961—an annual event that is still in operation and now includes girls. NFL Properties also began the Punt, Pass and Kick Library in 1965, a book series for young adult readers. The books ranged from instructional guides that teach football skills to collections of stories about the league’s teams, history, and most noteworthy players. The Punt, Pass and Kick Library introduced young readers to the game of football, advertised the NFL, and further cultivated the league’s respectability by suggesting that it encourages young people to read and exercise. To strengthen further the NFL’s relationship to children, Properties published a Punt, Pass and Kick comic book in 1968. The comic features an introduction by Pete Rozelle along with segments wherein different NFL players and coaches explain the competition and offer advice on how to perform the skills it requires. NFL Properties’ early efforts enjoyed little economic success. Rozelle, however, transformed the division’s relatively meager monetary returns into another PR vehicle by persuading the league’s owners to donate its revenues to charity. Instead of simply giving to an established charity, Rozelle founded NFL Charities in 1973, which advertised the league while casting it in an altruistic light. Also in 1973 Rozelle began a partnership between the NFL and the United Way—an alliance that still exists—and promoted this relationship with NFL Films– produced public service announcements that aired during telecasts of league games.52 In 1974, NFL Films began producing a series of “Great Moments” PSAs, which paired an NFL player recounting a great football moment with a celebration of one of the United Way’s “great moments” in the community. Rozelle further broadened the NFL’s presence beyond its Sunday games and the football season with the 1963 establishment of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The Hall of Fame composes a physical site devoted entirely to the National Football League. Throughout the year, it serves as a museum with a permanent collection and rotating exhibits that commemorate the NFL’s history and greatest figures. Each August it hosts an induction ceremony that celebrates the league’s best players and most important contributors. Similar to Disneyland, and again evidencing Walt Disney’s entrepreneurial influence on the commissioner, the Hall of Fame functions as a year-round NFL-themed tourist destination. By establishing national television exposure, branding various items, organizing athletic events for kids, donating to charitable causes, and creating a tourist attraction, the National Football League made connections to as many potential fans as possible. Regardless of their geographic distance from an NFL 47

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franchise, children in Montana could watch the Los Angeles Rams on television, wear Miami Dolphins stocking caps, read books about the NFL, and participate in league-sponsored athletic competitions. The National Football League became more than an institution that facilitated sporting events. It transformed into a distinctly American site that manifested in various forms, articulated common values, and established relationships with different types of people. To borrow Roland Marchand’s phrase, the NFL’s marketing and PR strategies created a “corporate soul” for the organization.53 Moreover, and expanding upon Rozelle’s “League Think” ideology, the NFL’s national television contracts and efforts like Punt, Pass and Kick and NFL Charities created relationships between consumers and the entire league. The children who participated in NFL-sponsored events and the people who benefited from NFL Charities’ donations did not simply build a relationship with their favorite teams, but with the larger organization to which those teams belong. The Rozelle-era NFL solidified its prominence in American culture through its merger with the American Football League and subsequent development of the Super Bowl. Because of the NFL’s increasing success during the late 1950s and relatively small size (only twelve teams), several investors approached Bell and Rozelle with offers to purchase expansion franchises. After the NFL continually denied their requests, a group headed by Texas millionaire Lamar Hunt began the eight-team American Football League in 1960. Though the AFL was smaller, less popular, and yielded significantly smaller revenues than the NFL, the upstart league sustained itself through television contracts.54 It also successfully lured many of college football’s greatest players away from the NFL. The competition for incoming players depleted talent in each league and escalated salaries for those whom both organizations sought. Because of the negative economic effects their competition produced, the NFL and AFL decided to negotiate a merger that would begin in 1966 and take full effect in 1970. The combined league would consist of two separate divisions—the original NFL teams and the former AFL teams—and hold a common draft. To make the merger official, the organization had to convince Congress that it was not in violation of antitrust laws, which threatened to block the merger on the grounds that it denied players the ability to negotiate with more than one organization (clearly, the merger did, and was partly designed to, deny players this right). Rozelle received the antitrust exemption by promising Senator Russell Long and House of Representatives Majority Leader Hale Boggs, both from Louisiana, an NFL franchise in New Orleans. Boggs attached the NFL’s antitrust exemption to a budget bill with strong support in both houses, the bill passed without incident, and New Orleans was granted an expansion franchise—the Saints—just days later. 48

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In actuality, the NFL-AFL merger was closer to an absorption of the AFL by the larger and more powerful NFL. The new league retained the title the National Football League, Pete Rozelle served as its commissioner, and it operated according to the same financial structure and rules that guided the NFL prior to the agreement.55 From 1966 until 1969 NFL and AFL teams played separate schedules during the season, and the winner of each division met in the NFL-AFL World Championship, which officially became known as the Super Bowl in 1969. Pre-merger NFL championship games were played in one of the competing teams’ home stadium in often frigid winter climes, like the Giants-Packers game Blair Motion Pictures documented in Pro Football’s Longest Day. In contrast, the Super Bowl was held in a neutral—and generally warm—location.56 Placing the game at a neutral site positioned it as a national event while ensuring it would not be blacked out. Moreover, and in contrast to the one week that usually separates NFL games, the league scheduled two weeks between the Super Bowl and the final playoff games to hype the event. Though the first Super Bowls were nothing like today’s excessive, advertising-laden spectacles, the newly combined league established an event that attracted an audience far larger than the league’s normal fan base. As Oriard notes, by the end of the 1960s the Super Bowl “had become not just an NFL championship game and an unofficial national holiday but also the NFL’s own best advertisement for itself.”57 The Super Bowl capped the National Football League’s transition into its “modern” phase. It established the NFL as a diversified, media-driven, and entertainment-oriented organization that boasted a recognizable, broadly appealing, and carefully managed brand. NFL Films expanded upon the league’s varied publicity and marketing activities. Even more, its early productions’ unfalteringly celebratory focus and uniform conventions stabilized the NFL’s image during a time when the league was still building its distinction and prominence. To be sure, simply creating a robust media and marketing infrastructure in no way guaranteed that NFL football would morph into America’s Game. NFL Films productions continually—and heavy-handedly—made the case for pro football’s status as a unique reflection of America during this transitional moment in the league’s history. “The Sport of Our Time”

They Call It Pro Football, the production that codified NFL Films’ signature aesthetic practices, situates professional football as “the sport of our time” by offering a position-by-position rundown of the men who participate in the National Football League and the characteristics they exemplify. Suspenseful music emerges as Facenda introduces the quarterback and explains the 49

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position’s key attributes: “Eleven trained men face-to-face on the field of play. Each man a specialist; but one man stands above the rest. He occupies the most critical position in the game. . . . He must have a cool disregard for danger and the courage to take punishment.” The quarterback is a valiant, clever, and sturdy leader who orchestrates his team’s offense. As Facenda describes the position’s qualities, a montage showcases several of the NFL’s most noteworthy quarterbacks deceiving opposing defenses, throwing perfect spirals to receivers, and risking their bodies while leading their teams downfield. The featured quarterbacks range from the precise and methodical Johnny Unitas to the Minnesota Vikings’ cunning and freewheeling Fran Tarkenton. Although they play quarterback very differently—from Unitas’s deliberate meticulousness to Tarkenton’s erratic tendency to scramble about the field before deciding what course of action to take—these men are all presented as possessing the unique mixture of intelligence, daring, and composure that the documentary casts as essential to the position and, by extension, the league. The film’s tone shifts when it introduces running backs. The section begins with rapidly cut images of various backs juking and hurdling would-be tacklers. It then turns to a medium close-up of the Chicago Bears’ Gale Sayers, one of the league’s premier players at the time, alone and out of uniform on an empty field. Expressionless, Sayers gazes coolly into the camera and states: “Give me eighteen inches of daylight; that’s all I need.” An up-tempo jazz score emerges to complement ground-level slow motion footage of Sayers twirling around and outsmarting hapless defenders. In response to the running back’s confident assertion and to punctuate the visual evidence of his on-field prowess, Facenda intones: “When Gale Sayers gets those eighteen inches of daylight, the Bears usually win. When he doesn’t, they don’t. It’s as simple as that. . . . He’s an attack all by himself; a spinning, dancing dervish.” While the film’s section on the quarterback profiles a collection of the NFL’s best performers at that position, Sayers functions as an ideal exemplification of successful running backs’ requisite combination of power, elegance, and creativity. The documentary’s depiction of Sayers also indirectly gestures toward the National Football League’s racial politics during the 1960s. It signals Sayers’s difference through its abrupt transition to a jazz soundtrack, suggesting that this African American player is a “dancer” who performs according to improvised rhythms that differ from the other, exclusively white athletes discussed up to that point in the film. Because Sayers is the only African American player to which the production gives considerable individual attention, They Call It Pro Football could easily be interpreted as reinforcing the racist stereotype that blacks are best suited for positions that rely primarily on speed, such as running

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back and wide receiver, and are not equipped to play more cerebral leadership roles like quarterback and middle linebacker. While the film certainly carries racist undertones, its celebratory representation of Sayers also implies that the National Football League is an inclusive organization that is more accepting of racial difference than many mainstream American institutions during the mid-1960s. Moreover, it indicates that all of the NFL’s players—no matter their position, the specific skills that position requires, or their racial identity—are first and foremost illustrations of the values NFL Films uses to define the league. The production filters the politically charged difference Sayers’s body signifies through the corporate mythology it constructs. Although Sayers might not appear to have much in common with the white quarterbacks that precede him, all of these players, by virtue of their connection to the NFL, are reduced to embodiments of the heroic brand NFL Films fashions, circulates, and promotes.58 They Call It Pro Football closes with a montage of miscellaneous footballrelated images—players rushing onto the field, fans exuberantly admiring their teams, television cameras capturing the action—and a symphonic climax. “It’s precision, persistence, power,” Facenda bellows. “The unleashed speed of a kickoff; the whistling of a great runner; the reckless fury of a goal line stand; the crowning glory of a winning touchdown; the swelling roar of the crowd. It’s called pro football.” As Facenda delivers these final lines and the musical score ascends to its peak, the film ends with a close-up of the National Football League’s logo—a red, white, and blue shield with the league’s initials below a football surrounded by stars. The brand-oriented finale suggests the National Football League’s unique characteristics, as players like Unitas, Tarkenton, and Sayers personify them, make pro football “the sport of our time.” Furthermore, the NFL logo—an American flag reconfigured as a martial symbol—not so subtly indicates that the National Football League is essentially American. The mythology NFL Films creates works to contain any potentially problematic difference and to recast it as an affirmation of the values the company attributes to the league. It reduces politically loaded signifiers to the “precision, persistence, [and] power” it celebrates, ensconcing them—along with their contested social meaning during this turbulent historical moment—within the patriotic brand it cultivates. Several of NFL Films’ other documentaries during the 1960s reinforce the image They Call It Pro Football established. Big Game America (1969), for example, focuses on the intersections between football’s immense popularity and its apparent reflection of American culture. Narrator Burt Lancaster, in the only NFL Films production to which the Academy Award–winning actor lent his voice, introduces pro football as “a uniquely American game with a

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The title card to Big Game America (1969), a film that described pro football as “America’s super game.”

history as rich and as rugged as the country in which it was born.”59 The film pairs Lancaster’s statement with a montage that combines snippets of game footage; images of spectators waving American flags; and red, white, and blue graphics. Similar to They Call It Pro Football, Big Game America outlines the developments that transformed NFL football into the United States’ most beloved sports spectacle. The film’s brief history of the league culminates with Super Bowl I, an event Lancaster claims launched the NFL into “a new orbit” of popularity and prestige. “Sixty-five million spectators—the largest single viewing audience in the history of sport—watched Lombardi’s Packers play the Kansas City Chiefs in the first Super Bowl game,” Lancaster explains. “Lombardi wins, but most important the game wins. On a super Sunday pro football becomes America’s super game.” Moreover, Big Game America suggests the NFL has always signified the same uniquely American qualities and that those characteristics reached full force during the 1960s. It simultaneously casts the recalcitrant Joe Namath and the old-fashioned George Halas as representative of the league’s identity and cultural meaning. As Lancaster notes along with an upbeat score and snippets of Namath’s best plays, “In its fiftieth year pro football remains an expression of America. No player fits the accepted pattern of the ’60s better than Joe Namath. He has defied coaches, curfews, and conventions, but stands unchallenged as the game’s most celebrated player and its finest passer.” The film then shifts to a wistful, slow-paced piano tune to introduce Halas, who “moves through the mod age of Aquarius like some old period piece.” Namath, the production suggests, is a cocky subversive; a devil-may-care playboy who resists the customs Halas installed decades earlier. The tension between “Papa Bear” Halas’s traditional Midwestern stolidity and “Broadway Joe” Namath’s cosmopolitan flashiness reflects the larger struggles between the establishment

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and youth culture that were destabilizing an array of social institutions and mores during this time. However, Big Game America argues that both men exemplify NFL football’s role as America’s Game.60 “George Halas, perhaps more so than Joe Namath, is a man for his time,” Lancaster states. “As you watch him on the sidelines at Wrigley Field you suddenly realize that there is very little difference from the George Halas of today and the George Halas that gave the National Football League its name a half century ago.” The sequence ends with a mosaic of game footage, images of Halas and shots of an American flag billowing in the breeze as Lancaster champions pro football as “a game for the young. A young game for a young nation. Big game America.” The documentary indicates that despite Namath’s and Halas’s marked differences, the NFL’s precocious rebel son and stodgy founding father ultimately reinforce the league’s characteristic excitement, passion, and commitment. Like They Call It Pro Football, then, Big Game America recuperates disparities that seem irreconcilable beyond the NFL and positions them as illustrations of pro football’s distinctly American character. Lombardi (1967) and The New Breed (1971) prove a similar point about the durable image NFL Films fashions. Lombardi dissects Vince Lombardi’s deific aura by examining the famous coach’s life on and beyond the football field. The production depicts Lombardi’s obsession with winning and devotion to the Packers, his family, the Catholic Church, and America as key factors informing his unprecedented success. As Lombardi matter-of-factly asserts, “Anybody who has the idea that just to play or to take part, that’s all that’s necessary—I think he’s in the wrong business. I think he’s in the wrong country. One of the things that made America great is to try to be the best at everything they do. And the best, again, is signified by winning.” The son of working-class Italian immigrants, Lombardi is portrayed as a traditionalist who firmly believes postwar America rewards diligent preparation and painstaking execution; that normal people can accomplish extraordinary feats if they responsibly, selflessly, and wholeheartedly commit themselves to a common cause. He suggests the same Cold War–inflected philosophy pays off in the National Football League. The film even indicates that the “Green Bay power sweep”—the Packers’ signature play that Lombardi ran incessantly—typifies this attitude. In contrast to Lombardi, The New Breed (1971) focuses on players’ connections to the fashions and attitudes of the 1960s and early 1970s counterculture. For example, fun-loving Philadelphia Eagles middle linebacker Tim Rossovich, whom Facenda describes as “the first football hero of the Aquarius generation,” wears tie-dyed pants, does somersaults on the beach, and makes driftwood candles as a psychedelic soundtrack plays—a far cry from Lombardi’s straightlaced

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Tim Rossovich, “the first football hero of the Aquarius generation,” makes driftwood candles on the beach in The New Breed (1971).

piety. The production ends with Rossovich reciting his trippy recurring death fantasy. “Many times when I’m walking on the beach,” he musingly admits in a voice-over as the film displays him lying prostrate in the sand, “I think that I’d like to be in the Super Bowl and be playing middle linebacker and make every tackle in the game. But my final tackle would be a game-saving tackle. And making it I would die and go to heaven and live in happiness for eternity.”61 The documentary ends with a slow tilt from Rossovich’s motionless and peaceful body up to the sunlit sky. While Rossovich’s funky appearance and eccentric off-field behavior diverge from Lombardi’s conventionalism, The New Breed suggests that he—along with the other trendy young men it profiles—possesses the legendary coach’s integrity, work ethic, and love of the game. As Facenda notes during the film’s opening montage of long-haired and chic players: “In professional football, while the game has rarely changed, the faces have. A new breed of athlete has arrived with a new look, a new lifestyle, but the same old commitment and zest for the sport. They have added dash and flash and a touch of glamour to America’s favorite pastime.” Along these lines, Rossovich stresses that his freespirited demeanor in no way slackens his devotion to pro football. “I consider myself a hippie in all the good ways,” he asserts. “I dress in different clothes and wear my hair long because I have this feeling of independence and I think the youth of today can look at me and can associate with me more than the average football player. They can see that a person with long hair doesn’t have to be associated with something bad.” Moreover, Rossovich cites The Guinness Book of World Records as his favorite book because it celebrates the world’s

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best—an elite group he tirelessly strives to enter by becoming the league’s greatest-ever middle linebacker. Regardless of his mod attire and carefree comportment, Rossovich works to achieve the same goals that define Lombardi. With Lombardi and The New Breed, then, NFL Films contains the differences that characterized the NFL—and American culture as a whole—during this time within the mythology it constructs and sells. Whether examining crewcut establishmentarian patriarchs, young players with flowing locks and open minds, or African American players still struggling for basic civil liberties, NFL Films situates subject matter as always typifying the same rather conservative values it uses to celebrate the NFL as “the sport of our time.”62 Needless to say, the 1960s NFL was far more complex—and far less harmonious—than NFL Films’ early documentaries would have viewers believe. The Washington Redskins, for example, did not include a single black player until the 1962 season.63 Many histories, exposés, and memoirs like Dave Meggyesy’s Out of Their League (1970) and novels like Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty (1973) and Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough (1972) discuss the racial tensions, labor discord, violence, and other unsavory elements that marked the league as it became the United States’ most visible and profitable sports organization.64 Despite the NFL’s well-documented past—and the broader sociopolitical conflicts that surrounded and shaped it—NFL Films’ early productions locate the league as a rare national site of unity, stability, and inclusiveness during this infamously tempestuous era. The politically sanitized yet insistently patriotic image NFL Films fashions expands upon the National Football League’s licensed glassware, children’s books, and other marketing schemes to maximize its parent organization’s demographic reach. This branding strategy endeavors to accommodate both America’s old guard and its emerging new breed. To do so, it grossly oversimplifies these communities’ political valence within and beyond the NFL. While NFL Films’ early productions make a historical argument about the NFL, the subsidiary’s works have reinforced the same heroic image ever since this formative period in the league’s evolution. Even films organized around distinct moments in time—such as segments of NFL Game of the Week, season review highlights, and documentaries like The Super Seventies and Era of Excellence: The 1980s—attach the same qualities to the NFL that the company used to make the case for the league’s unique place in and relevance to 1960s American culture. These productions carefully register the changes the NFL undergoes while maintaining the brand NFL Films formed during its first decade. In this sense, the mythology NFL Films creates at once places the league in time and situates it as impervious to change.

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In 2006 NFL Films premiered America’s Game: The Super Bowl Champions, a nostalgic series of documentaries that chronicles each Super Bowl–winning team’s championship season.65 The films, produced for the NFL Network, consist primarily of interviews with three significant members of the featured club who sentimentally reflect on the season and the obstacles they overcame on the way to winning the title. Based on the project’s initial success, NFL Films now produces a new installment every year. Building on the framework productions like They Call It Pro Football and Big Game America created, the series offers a history of the modern NFL that situates the first Super Bowl as the point when pro football became America’s Game. America’s Game’s first segment features quarterback Bart Starr, center Bill Curry, and defensive lineman Willie Davis discussing the injuries, contract disputes, uncertainties, and interpersonal tensions that threatened the 1966 Green Bay Packers’ goal of winning Super Bowl I. Starr battled against widespread doubts regarding his athleticism; Curry—a rookie from Georgia—slowly adjusted to being in the company of African American teammates who defied the racist stereotypes he was raised to believe; Davis endured Lombardi’s relentless criticism; and the entire organization adapted to life without Paul Hornung, who missed the whole season with a neck ailment. The featured interviewees outline the team’s unique ability to succeed despite these harrowing challenges. The 1966 Packers, they proudly contend, possessed the rare combination of leadership, determination, teamwork, and skill necessary to achieve the National Football League’s highest goal. Though they recount different teams, people, and times, each subsequent installment of America’s Game tells a nearly identical story. In fact, the segment on the 2010 Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl XLV victory is strikingly similar to the series’ tribute to the 1966 team. Coach Mike McCarthy, quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and cornerback Charles Woodson reflect on their club’s ability to overcome the myriad physical, emotional, and technical obstacles it faced over the course of the season. McCarthy worked to forge his place in the Packers’ storied tradition after being fired by the team earlier in his career; Rodgers fought to escape the considerable shadow of his iconic predecessor Brett Favre; and Woodson struggled to revive his career and transform his sullied reputation as an incorrigible has-been. While the details differ, the 2010 Packers are depicted as prevailing because of the same basic mixture of qualities that led to the 1966 team’s title forty-four years prior. America’s Game suggests that although time moves on and the league’s greatest teams, players, and coaches change, the Super Bowl champions will always embody the same characteristics that make professional football “America’s

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super game.” There is no telling which team will win the 2045 Super Bowl; however, it is all but certain that NFL Films will represent it as exemplifying the combination of elements—teamwork, leadership, masculine toughness, perseverance, etc.—it has used to praise every other champion. In this sense, the company constructs a celebratory history for the league that has already been written and simply needs to be updated annually. Pro football—as NFL Films depicts it year in and year out—is forever “the sport of our time.” NFL Films will not permit it to be anything else. Always America’s Game

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While there is nothing inherently American about pro football, one would never know this based on how the National Football League is routinely packaged and promoted. Flag-waving displays of hyper-patriotism are the norm, particularly during the annual Super Bowl. As Pete Rozelle admitted in a 1991 New York Times interview, “It was a conscious effort on our part to bring the element of patriotism to the Super Bowl.” Rozelle’s successor Paul Tagliabue even referred to the Super Bowl as “the winter version of the Fourth of July celebration.”66 Expanding upon the league’s diverse efforts to build a distinct and marketable image, NFL Films has aggressively and steadfastly emphasized pro football’s position as America’s Game. The mythology NFL Films established and continues to reinforce indicates that professional football’s now commonly accepted reputation as an embodiment of American identity is a construction designed to serve historical, institutional, and commercial ends. The company’s unwavering designation of the NFL as a unique and unifying reflection of America works to ensure the league will reap the cultural, political, and economic benefits this powerful association yields.

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More Movies than News How many people would go to see Jaws if they knew how it turned out in the end? Well, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time. The idea is to give a creative treatment to reality. —Steve Sabol1 To me [NFL Films] highlights were always like what [Jean-Luc] Godard says: “Every film has a beginning, middle, and end, but not always in that order.”

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—Steve Seidman, NFL Films Senior Producer2

Sportscaster Bob Costas once wryly commented that NFL Films productions had become more entertaining than the National Football League’s actual games.3 When asked about Costas’s statement Steve Sabol blithely replied, “They should be. . . . When you look at what we were doing—and we still do—is taking a game that requires 3 hours to play but only has 12 minutes of action. We take that 12 minutes and condense it and focus it and distill it and add music to it and sound effects and edit it. What we do should be more exciting.”4 NFL Films productions document and provide historical records of the league’s contests. In fact, NFL Films footage composes the only surviving moving image documentation of numerous National Football League games played during the subsidiary’s first decade, an era when many contests were not televised and when shortsighted networks would often tape over rather

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More Movies than News

than archive their sports broadcasts. However, these productions document the league selectively to maintain the corporate image NFL Films builds. In the words of longtime NFL Films producer Phil Tuckett, the company’s documentaries “portray reality as we wish it was.”5 More accurately, NFL Films portrays reality the way the National Football League wants consumers to believe it is. NFL Films creates the league’s history by arranging exceptional moments into celebratory narratives. Greatest Moments in Dallas Cowboys History (1992) edits a series of noteworthy and thrilling instances into a story that argues for the franchise’s greatness. Era of Excellence: The 1980s (1989) functions similarly. It assembles a collection of outstanding snippets that index the 1980s NFL into a form that praises the league’s apparent excellence during that decade. Likewise, the syndicated television program NFL Game of the Week reflects on a recently completed NFL contest by organizing its most important and sensational plays to emphasize the featured game’s significance within the context of the week and season when it occurred. NFL Films’ documentaries suggest the league’s past is constituted by extraordinary moments—diving touchdown catches, punishing blocks, and graceful runs—that evidence the NFL’s unique excitement and epic importance. They use conventions such as slow motion, orchestral scores, and narration to make featured instances seem as riveting as possible and then organize them into Hollywood-inspired stories of heroes uniting to battle against physical, emotional, and technical adversity. As such, these documentaries privilege arranging filmed content into dramatic narratives over providing thorough or even accurate reports of the events they examine. If footage does not readily exhibit the inspirational and broadly appealing set of qualities NFL Films uses to characterize and sell the league, the company’s productions either ignore it or—like Big Game America’s treatment of Joe Namath and The New Breed’s depiction of Tim Rossovich—take measures to contain it within the branded history the subsidiary constructs and promotes. NFL Films productions thus embody and illuminate a tension that marks all nonfiction representation: they simultaneously document “actuality” and filter it through forms influenced by a host of rhetorical, ideological, institutional, and economic considerations. The NFL Films highlight is the company’s oldest genre and most clearly exemplifies its dual efforts to document and exalt the National Football League. The highlight expanded upon—and contributed to the extinction of—a tradition of sports newsreels that were being phased out by the popularization of television during the late 1950s and early 1960s.6 Oriard describes these newsreels as “highlights in which every game is a big game, every play a great play, every crowd wildly cheering” and claims these productions were as committed

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to furnishing dramatic spectacles as they were to reporting on sporting events.7 Expanding upon the newsreels, NFL Films highlights privilege the construction of intense and moving spectacles over explaining how events unfolded. They always contain subject matter within partial narratives and even routinely abandon chronology to magnify featured content’s excitement. By 1981, franchise owner Art Modell would call these productions “the most valuable selling tool in all of pro football.”8 The NFL established NFL Films for the initial purpose of producing yearly team and championship game highlights. Shortly after the company’s development, and as a consequence of the success its earliest productions enjoyed, the highlight expanded into a series of subgenres made for various television programs and the home movie (and later home video) market. For instance, NFL Films began to create season review highlights (NFL ’65 [1965], Best of NFL ’66 [1966]) and productions that focus on individual positions (Receivers— Catch It if You Can [1966], Linebackers—Search and Destroy [1967]). It established syndicated weekly television programs like Game of the Week and This is the NFL that offer highlights of recently played games throughout the season.9 The company even created thematic highlight films, such as Bellringers (1967) and The Football Follies (1968), which weave together spine-chilling hits and uproarious blunders. Only a murky boundary separates the NFL Films highlight from the company’s other genres, most of which routinely include brief highlight sequences to illustrate and add excitement to the subjects they explore. For instance, Super Sunday: A History of the Super Bowl (1989) offers a detailed and linear account of the Super Bowl’s development into America’s most popular sporting event. Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History (1998) also chronicles the Super Bowl. It does so, however, through combining its most exhilarating moments into thematic segments that reinforce the characteristics NFL Films uses to define and market its parent organization. Both productions organize outstanding instances into celebratory narratives; however, Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History privileges showcasing these extraordinary fragments over meticulously outlining the event’s history. It even excludes several Super Bowls and transitions among time periods in the course of billing the yearly game as momentous and thrilling. Although there are differences between the highlight and NFL Films’ other genres—as well as variances among its subgenres—the logic that guides this form explains a goal that unites the company’s overall representational practices: to document the National Football League by arranging potentially stirring filmed moments into laudatory narratives that—despite the particularities that mark their content—build and buttress a stable mythology for it. 60

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NFL Films highlights differ in shape and purpose from the fast-paced, journalistic video highlights that now pervade television and online sports media. The company’s former editor-in-chief Bob Ryan dismisses television and Internet highlights as “news” in comparison to NFL Films’ more inventive “movies.”10 In contrast to mainstream highlights’ hurried recapitulation and reportage, Ryan suggests NFL Films’ highlights transform pro football games into artful and immersive cinematic experiences. Regardless of the aesthetic and ideological differences that separate NFL Films highlights from their more popular contemporary counterparts, these productions composed a starting point from which the genre morphed into what media historian Raymond Gamache calls “the dominant news frame in electronic sports journalism.”11 Beyond explaining NFL Films’ representational priorities and the factors that influence them, the company’s filmic highlights provide a way to trace the emergence of the contemporary highlight and to consider how this immensely popular form mediates sport’s meanings and uses.

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The Rules of Containment

According to Bill Nichols, documentaries provide spectators with “access to a shared, historical construct. Instead of a world, we are offered access to the world.”12 NFL Films productions, as documentaries, produce indexical signs that attest to their subject matter’s existence. Since the company’s beginnings as Blair Motion Pictures, its films have suggested that documentary representation, especially when supplemented by techniques like narration and slow motion, allows otherwise imperceptible nuances and intricacies to be isolated, showcased, and judged. For example, Pro Football’s Longest Day explicitly appeals to nonfiction film’s purported ability to provide reliable evidence of reality during a replay of a Green Bay touchdown. Directly after the play, a short run down the middle by fullback Jim Taylor, the film freezes and slowly reverses both the image and sound tracks to the beginning of Taylor’s run. It then displays the same run again in slow motion while narrator Chris Schenkel explains the details spectators may have missed on their initial viewing. At one point during the replay, the film freezes the image track entirely as Schenkel outlines precisely how Green Bay’s offensive line created the gap through which Taylor ran to score. Pro Football’s Longest Day more directly endorses documentary’s epistemological capacity when it walks spectators through footage of a blocked Green Bay punt that results in a New York touchdown. Presented in real time, the play is rather confusing. The Giants’ defense deflects Green Bay’s attempted punt, and the ball bounces through the hands of several players until a Giants defensive 61

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lineman falls on it in Green Bay’s end zone. After the play’s initial presentation, Schenkel announces, “with the aid of some movie magic, we’ll analyze that last play.” The film then provides a slow motion replay that briefly freezes at the points when the ball was blocked, missed by diving players, and eventually secured. Like documentary filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov’s conception of the Kino-Eye—a perfected mechanical eye that cinema creates—the production indicates that documentary representation augments and improves upon spectators’ sensory capabilities.13 Similar to its use of narration and slow motion, the various aesthetic practices NFL Films pioneered were established in part to add reliability to its film footage. Graphics, for instance, guide spectators’ attention and help them to judge representations with greater certainty. NFL Films productions often place bold yellow arrows near individuals about to make important plays that may otherwise go unseen. Additionally, the company would use graphics to settle debates surrounding controversial plays. The company’s 1965 Green Bay Packers highlight film—Portrait of a Team—explores a Don Chandler field goal attempt in the fourth quarter of a playoff game against the Baltimore Colts. Chandler’s successful kick sent the game into overtime. The Packers eventually won the contest and went on to win that year’s league championship. Portrait of a Team, which was not released until several months after the season concluded, uses a dotted line graphic to prove that Chandler’s field goal attempt was actually no good. Though crude by today’s standards, the graphic demonstrated the trajectory of Chandler’s kick with greater certainty than the image alone—even when presented in slow motion and with narration—could offer. The National Football League endorses the reliability of NFL Films’ footage by sometimes using this material to evaluate suspicious plays, assess officials’ proficiency, and to determine whether a league member’s conduct warrants disciplinary action. In a 1979 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Rozelle boasted that NFL Films cameras document every play—often from angles television cameras do not cover. The image-conscious commissioner then subtly warned league members who might be tempted to break the rules to be cognizant of how comprehensively their actions—even when they are away from the ball or on the sidelines—are being recorded and scrutinized.14 The league-owned footage provides yet another way for the NFL to monitor and discipline its employees. On the other hand, the league has used NFL Films footage to defend players and coaches against accusations. In 1977 the NFL authorized the use of NFL Films footage in a court case involving Oakland Raiders defensive back George Atkinson and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Chuck Noll. Atkinson filed

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a $2 million lawsuit against Noll for defamation of character after the coach publicly criticized his rough play—particularly a pair of illegal hits the defensive back inflicted upon the Steelers’ star receiver Lynn Swann. Noll referred to Atkinson as a “criminal element” that should be barred from the NFL.15 Noll’s attorney defended the coach’s statement by showing the jury footage of Atkinson’s excessively brutal hits. The lawyer initially used the Steelers’ coaching tape—which is recorded from a single camera high in the stands so every player is visible—to justify the coach’s comments. To strengthen Noll’s case, the attorney switched to NFL Films footage of Atkinson that offered clearer angles and even close-ups of his play.16 Noll was eventually judged not guilty. A similar instance occurred in 1980 when Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton—one of the league’s most popular and respected players at the time— was ejected from a game for allegedly pushing an official (NFL rules prohibit players from touching referees).17 NFL Films footage—which captured the exchange from angles that the CBS cameras used to telecast the game did not have—suggested another player had actually bumped Payton into the official. NFL Films gave its footage of the incident to ABC for use in its Monday Night Football half-time package the following evening. While ABC was most interested in capitalizing on the controversy that Payton’s uncharacteristic ejection sparked, it used the NFL Films footage to prove that he did not intentionally push the referee.18 The use of NFL Films footage to oversee, punish, and defend league employees indicates that this material offers factual representations that can be employed to make accurate judgments about the content it displays. Moreover, it suggests that the National Football League, when necessary, depends on this footage’s apparent reliability to protect its valuable image and, by extension, to safeguard its players and coaches’ reputations. In addition to showcasing phenomena from the world, documentaries arrange footage into forms that communicate their rhetorical goals. According to Nichols, documentaries “do not present the truth but a truth (or, better, a view or way of seeing).”19 They offer indexical evidence and organize it strategically. As the documentarian and critic John Grierson put it, documentary is “the creative treatment of actuality.”20 Like Steve Sabol’s description of NFL Films’ combined functions as “historians, storytellers, [and] mythmakers,” all documentaries are—to greater and lesser degrees—combinations of history and myth. These representations are shaped by factors that include filmmakers’ ideological prerogatives and creative inclinations; the institutional, economic, and political conditions informing a documentary’s creation; and even the recording technologies used. Building from Grierson’s definition, Carl Plantinga defines documentaries as “asserted veridical representations”

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that generate indexical records of reality and position those records to serve expressive and argumentative goals.21 NFL Films’ entire approach grows out of the tension between documenting actual events and arranging footage into forms that make content seem exciting and heroic. Indeed, many of the same practices NFL Films uses to add reliability to its footage—such as slow motion, narration, and graphics—also, and simultaneously, dramatize it. NFL Films’ production practices—particularly during the company’s early years—have been admonished by critics who argue documentaries should privilege clarity and neutrality. For example, the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize– winning sports columnist Arthur Daley complained that NFL Films’ highlight of the 1971 Super Bowl between the Baltimore Colts and Dallas Cowboys—an unusually mundane championship—irresponsibly sacrificed straightforward reportage to create filmic drama. He claims the film “let down football fans by going modern, neglecting the storyline for arty camera angles and directorial coups that fascinate movie critics, but leave . . . moviegoers unmoved.”22 Daley maintains that the production’s only redeeming quality was its ability to prove the legality of a contested Johnny Unitas pass. The Los Angeles Times’ Bob Oates offered a similar review. He complains that the highlight “rearranged many plays—listing them out of chronological order—and . . . used a variety of histrionic film techniques to create almost a new game. As a television program, it is sometimes more caricature than documentary.”23 Oates’s most specific grievance was that NFL Films edited the production to make it appear that Unitas, who left the game after absorbing a powerful hit, exited the contest because of a tackle different from the one that actually injured him. “The producers,” Oates laments, “preferred to give the game a stylized treatment at the expense of one of the best reasons for a documentary—namely, explaining what happened.”24 Daley and Oates expected news; NFL Films delivered a movie. Contrary to the attitude toward documentary that critics like Daley and Oates exhibit, Steve Sabol recognized that the form both displays reality and manufactures ways of imagining it. “The kinds of documentaries we do are spontaneous cinema, meaning we photograph exactly what happens,” he claimed. “But then they’re also a creative treatment of reality, meaning that we’ll varnish the truth a little bit just to make it more interesting.”25 While Daley and Oates suggest that “stylized treatment” compromises documentary’s reportorial responsibilities, Sabol—like Grierson, Nichols, and Plantinga— understood that the reportage documentaries provide is always creative and partial. “I always felt that a camera is an instrument of realism—and a creator of myth,” he said.26 NFL Films is institutionally obligated to celebrate the National Football League. This lack of objectivity, however, does not discredit its

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productions’ documentary status. On the contrary, NFL Films’ stylized works bring into relief the degree to which documentaries always selectively arrange subject matter and, in doing so, contain it within frameworks—however explicit or veiled—that support their creative goals. While NFL Films productions unwaveringly glorify the league, teams, sponsors, and clients place more specific demands upon the shape its documentaries take. For example, teams commonly provide NFL Films with editorial parameters before it constructs their annual highlights. Steve Sabol notes that the Minnesota Vikings once asked the company to exclude star running back Chuck Foreman—who at the time was clashing with management over the terms of his contract—from the team’s highlight film despite the fact that he led the squad in rushing yards. “Somebody once said that NFL highlight films have created more missing persons than Josef Stalin,” joked Bob Ryan regarding the company’s conspicuously selective representational practices. “People disappear and are never heard from again.” 27 Along different lines, certain teams have demanded that NFL Films emphasize or include particular players, coaches, and staff. During the 1970s the Oakland Raiders insisted that NFL Films mention each player by name, and Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips would reportedly visit NFL Films headquarters each year to oversee the construction of his team’s highlight.28 Of the league’s owners, George Halas made the most rigid demands of NFL Films’ productions about his team. He insisted that only footage referencing games the Bears won—no matter how spectacular plays from losing efforts might appear—could be used in his team’s highlights. He also forbade montage editing (which he found to be illogical), would not allow close-ups of players’ faces because he feared the additional exposure would compel them to request higher salaries, and once chastised Steve Sabol for including footage of a gun-toting fan in the Bears’ 1967 highlight film.29 Based on Halas’s gripes—and unbeknownst to the persnickety Bears owner—NFL Films would edit shots of the classiest spectators it could find (regardless of their location or the team they were supporting) into its productions about his organization. Most sponsored NFL Films productions are either prefaced by a commercial for the sponsor or briefly acknowledge it in their introduction. Some sponsors, however, ask NFL Films to integrate their brand into its celebrations of the league. For example, Big Blocks and King Size Hits of the NFL (1990), a documentary sponsored by Hershey Foods Corporation, examines blocking and hitting. The big blocks and king-size hits on which it focuses reference Hershey’s “Big Block” and “King Size” candy bars. Steve Sabol’s introduction to

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the film explicitly links the corporate image NFL Films fashions to Hershey’s institutional history:

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When the folks at Hershey Chocolate USA asked us to produce a film about big blocks and king size hits in the NFL, we jumped at the opportunity. . . . We decided to focus on . . . players who strive for excellence. This ties in with the founding and ongoing philosophy of Hershey Foods Corporation. Despite several failures, Mr. Hershey never gave up. His perseverance and determination led him to start what would become the world’s largest confectionary. Mr. Hershey’s philosophy was based on the premise that man’s greatest accomplishments come from hard work and pride in his workmanship. Now sit back with your favorite Hershey’s Big Block or King Size item as NFL Films and Hershey’s present Big Blocks and King Size Hits of the NFL.

Similarly, The NFL’s Hungriest Men (1989) is sponsored by Swanson’s Hungry Man frozen dinners. Building upon Hungry Man’s established brand—which links hunger to masculinity—it uses hunger as a metaphor for the resolve that the NFL’s finest players exhibit. “It’s [the NFL] a world where many men hunger for something few will ever taste,” declares narrator Earl Mann along with a booming score and a montage of slow-motion diving catches and punishing hits. “For the supreme law of the land is not glory, it is guts. . . . In the wars of the National Football League, the fiercest battles are fought within. It is only within the hearts of the NFL’s hungriest men that true heroes are born.” Like teams and sponsors, the media outlets for which NFL Films produces content influence the form that material takes. Hard Knocks, a co-production with HBO subsidiary HBO Sports, often includes the profanity that NFL Films’ microphones capture—content its other productions censor. HBO—an outlet known for producing edgy material—welcomes profanity in Hard Knocks and uses it to market the series as a provocative alternative to mainstream cable sports television.30 In fact, Hard Knocks’ 2010 season was perhaps most distinctive because of New York Jets coach Rex Ryan’s frequent use of foul language. The New York Times’ Mike Hale described Ryan as “a sideline Tony Soprano, filling the premium-cable soundtrack with words you won’t hear on Monday Night Football.”31 The program also drew criticism from viewers—most notably, the pietistic former Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy—who charged that Ryan’s salty language set a bad example.32 Despite the critiques (which ultimately generated greater interest in the series), HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg refused to censor Hard Knocks—at least when it aired in its regular evening time slot. Greenburg argued that Ryan’s language accurately reflects how many NFL coaches speak and that censorship would diminish the reality program’s authenticity.33 66

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Although inappropriate for certain viewing contexts and objectionable to some audiences, foul language does not necessarily disrupt the identity NFL Films creates for the NFL. Hard Knocks presents Ryan’s language as an illustration of his unbridled competitiveness and passion for the game—qualities that NFL Films commonly emphasizes to celebrate players and coaches. Further, Hard Knocks is principally branded and marketed as an HBO production. Most of the cable channel’s publicity for the series does not even mention NFL Films’ involvement. Unlike Hard Knocks, the NFL Films production Inside the NFL, which was initially carried by HBO (1977–2008) and moved to Showtime in 2008, censors the profanity its highlights often feature. This program, however, is more explicitly tied to NFL Films’ brand than Hard Knocks and reaches out to an older and more traditional viewership than does the HBO reality show. While both Hard Knocks and Inside the NFL reinforce the qualities NFL Films uses to mythologize and sell the league, these premium cable programs’ differing treatments of profanity demonstrate how the venue on which NFL Films productions appear and the manner in which they are branded shape precisely how they support the institutional image the subsidiary builds. Certain subject matter—such as gambling, racial and sexual inequality, labor disputes, dirty play, and drug abuse—more seriously threatens the image NFL Films creates. The company either avoids these issues or employs aesthetic strategies to contain them within, and to situate them as reinforcements of, the brand it maintains. For example, NFL Films would not produce a film that exposes racism in the contemporary National Football League. However, in 1995 it made Black Star Rising, and in 2007 it created The Leaders: Breaking Racial Barriers in the NFL, both of which offer histories of African Americans’ involvement in and importance to the league. At several points, these documentaries directly critique the racism that the NFL’s first African American players faced from fans, other players, coaches, and owners. They then praise the courage and perseverance these trailblazing figures exhibited despite the considerable barriers they encountered. While Black Star Rising and The Leaders point out the National Football League’s racism during the mid-twentieth century, they eventually suggest the organization has learned to appreciate and foster diversity. Black Star Rising and The Leaders can examine racism in the National Football League because they present it as an obstacle the league has overcome. Racism, the films suggest, is a regrettable issue from the league’s past that, because of African American players’ tremendous courage and the National Football League’s eventual tolerance, is no longer a concern (the films do not, however, explore the bigotry that players of other racial identities have faced). In fact, these productions employ racism as a dramatic trope—a difficult hurdle that 67

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makes the NFL’s development into America’s Game all the more inspiring. In this sense, and ironically, Black Star Rising and The Leaders use racism to reinforce the mythology NFL Films creates. They must first, however dubiously, position it as an issue that no longer impacts the league. NFL Films treats the scandals that befall its players and coaches similarly. It typically avoids these controversial figures. When it does represent them it tends to ignore their problems. However, the company can investigate scandalized individuals if they are either no longer in the league or have overcome— both legally and according to popular opinion—whatever issues damaged their reputations. For instance, in 1996 NFL Films produced a short profile of former Dallas Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson for ESPN’s SportsCenter. In the profile Henderson candidly admits that he abused drugs throughout his career and would sometimes even inject liquid cocaine during games. He also recounts spiraling deeper into drug addiction after leaving the NFL in 1980, a descent that reached its nadir with his 1983 conviction of possession and resultant two-year prison sentence. After Henderson remorsefully outlines his life as a drug addict, he spends the rest of the interview explaining how he eventually achieved sobriety and committed his life to helping those challenged by the same troubles he once faced. The image of a linebacker high on cocaine during a National Football League game clearly contradicts the way NFL Films encourages viewers to understand the league and its players. However, because Henderson was no longer playing when NFL Films produced the profile and because the piece depicts his drug problem as an individual issue, his behavior does not threaten the league’s identity. Like the racism that The Leaders and Black Star Rising investigate, the segment presents Henderson’s actions as an unfortunate part of the NFL’s past. More importantly, it emphasizes Henderson’s transformation from an irresponsible and dangerous criminal into an inspiring role model. The profile uses Henderson’s addiction as a narrative device to tell an uplifting story about the league while also suggesting the problems he faced are irrelevant to the contemporary NFL. NFL Films generally only mentions scandals involving active players or coaches once their images have recovered and they are no longer facing criminal charges. In January 2000 Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis—one of the most dominant defensive players in NFL history—was indicted for the murder of two men outside of an Atlanta nightclub. After four months of investigation the murder charges were dismissed in exchange for Lewis’s testimony against the men he accompanied on the night of the murders and a plea of guilty to obstruction of justice, for which he was sentenced to twelve months of proba-

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tion. Despite the fact that Lewis was never convicted or even officially charged with murder, the indictment severely damaged his reputation. Unsurprisingly, neither NFL Films nor the NFL sought to bring additional attention to an active player whom many considered to be a murderer. Any footage of Lewis NFL Films used during the controversy only—and as briefly as possible— mentioned his play on the field. While Lewis entered the 2000 NFL season under intense scrutiny, he wound up enjoying a career year. He led the Ravens to a Super Bowl title and was named the game’s Most Valuable Player—a rare accomplishment for a defensive player. For better or worse, Lewis’s accomplishments on the field helped to repair his image rather quickly. By 2004 he was gracing the cover of EA Sports’ popular Madden NFL video game—an honor reserved only for the NFL’s most admired and successful players.34 In 2006, and despite the fact that Lewis was still playing in the league, NFL Films briefly addressed his indictment in its America’s Game segment on the Ravens’ Super Bowl XXXV victory. The documentary even includes brief snippets of archived television news footage of the Atlanta crime scene and of Lewis’s legal proceedings. However, it uses Lewis’s legal troubles to demonstrate the Ravens’ ability to overcome hardship and misfortune. As narrator Alec Baldwin notes, Lewis’s controversy “made a tough team even stronger.” NFL Films could discuss the incident without upsetting the league’s image because it contains it within a narrative that celebrates Lewis and the Ravens’ steadfastness. Pro Football Hall of Fame member O.J. Simpson presents a different and far more difficult challenge. Simpson was famously charged with the 1994 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Though judged not guilty of the criminal charges, he was eventually found liable for Brown Simpson’s and Goldman’s deaths in a 1997 civil trial. Simpson’s legal issues continued after the civil trial with several arrests for a variety of crimes that culminated with his 2008 conviction and thirty-three-year prison sentence for robbery, kidnapping, coercion, and conspiracy. The severity of Simpson’s murder charges and his repeated criminal activity after the trial make it impossible for NFL Films to represent him in the same redemptive way it has depicted Henderson and Lewis. In fact, NFL Films has done its best to avoid Simpson—who is now arguably more famous for the murder trial than his football career—since his legal troubles began. However, Simpson was one of the National Football League’s greatest-ever players and cannot simply be erased from its history. Excluding Simpson from a production about the league’s best-ever running backs or even players—groups to which he undoubtedly belongs—would likely draw even more attention to him.

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To minimize the negative connotations that now inevitably accompany Simpson’s image, NFL Films only uses footage of him that reflects on his career in the league. In doing so, it strives—however futilely—to sequester his image within a time period when it was not so controversial. For instance, in 2010 NFL Films produced The Top 100: NFL’s Greatest Players for the NFL Network. The countdown program consists of short segments wherein different personalities comment on each player. The popular writer Chuck Klosterman discussed Simpson, who was ranked fortieth. Klosterman begins his commentary by acknowledging that Simpson is no longer primarily known as a football player. After this brief caveat—and without explicitly discussing any of Simpson’s legal troubles—Klosterman spends several minutes praising Simpson’s tremendous career with the Buffalo Bills. While Klosterman does not argue that Simpson’s misdeeds should be forgiven or forgotten, he does suggest that the running back’s negative image has caused many to forget how great a player he was. To minimize the strain that Simpson’s disgraced yet unavoidable image puts on the mythology NFL Films builds, the company’s productions—like The Top 100—only mention him when not doing so would constitute a glaring omission. When they do feature Simpson, they represent him strictly and exclusively as a talented running back from the 1970s. Throughout its history NFL Films has been criticized for glorifying the league’s violence. However, representations of crunching tackles compose a key way that the company displays the league’s power, and “big hit” films constitute some of its most popular works, such as Bellringers (1967), The Nutcracker Suite (1968), Crunch Course (1985), Merchants of Menace (1989), Strike Force (1989), Thunder and Destruction (1992), Total Impact (1996), and Moment of Impact (2007). To deflect the criticism these representations attracted, NFL Films would emphasize the cleanliness and legality of the hits its productions lionized. For example, a press release for Crunch Course insists the film only features “solid, clean hits.”35 However, in certain circumstances NFL Films can justify showing dirty hits. The league once chastised the subsidiary for featuring an illegal hit that Denver Broncos safety Mike Harden inflicted upon Seattle Sea­ hawks receiver Steve Largent in its 1989 installment of Road to the Super Bowl, a yearly review that airs the weekend of the Super Bowl.36 Harden’s hit—which yielded a five thousand dollar fine—broke Largent’s helmet, chipped two of his teeth, and left him concussed. NFL Films producer Bob Smith defended the film’s inclusion of the play by claiming that it was employed to set up an equally powerful—but perfectly legal—hit Largent delivered to Harden when their teams met again later in the season. Road to the Super Bowl used Largent’s clean hit to suggest that dirty play does not pay off. This point, Smith implies,

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would not have been made as forcefully without first showing Harden’s vicious act.37 In this case, NFL Films could display an illegal hit without compromising the league’s image because it presents it negatively and within a narrative that praises clean, fair play. The release of studies that link the concussions football players routinely suffer to brain damage has made it far less acceptable for NFL Films to celebrate big hits—clean or dirty. Without a doubt, many of the hits that productions like Crunch Course glorify resulted in concussions. The recently confirmed link between concussions and brain damage has transformed footage of hits from exhilarating displays of the league’s power into sad reminders of the mental and physical health problems many players suffer during and after their careers.38 Because of the meaning this footage now carries, NFL Films has begun to showcase hits less frequently and reverentially.39 In fact, NFL Films is mentioned in a June 2012 class action lawsuit filed by a group of retired players that claims the league promoted violence and failed to adequately protect its employees from head injuries. The suit charges that NFL Films “creates numerous highlight features that focus solely on the hardest hits that take place on the field” and argues that these productions “urge players at every level of the game to disregard the results of violent head impacts.”40 Not even the process of emphasizing hits’ cleanliness or using them to tell inspirational stories can overshadow the problematic connotations they have acquired. These connotations indicate that while NFL Films strives to create a stable image for the league, the factors that shape what it can and cannot represent are unstable. NFL Films must therefore adjust its famously consistent representational practices to sustain the mythology it crafted.

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Highlighting Pro Football

NFL Films highlights embody the company’s dual efforts to document and celebrate the National Football League. Senior producer Steve Seidman claims that accurately chronicling the past is secondary to the highlight’s glorification of content. “Highlights were always like what Godard says, ‘Every film has a beginning, middle, and end but not always in that order.’ You’re not portraying the whole game; you’re portraying an impression of the game.”41 Unsurprisingly, the genre tends to focus on the league’s most significant and exciting events— material that lends itself to the mythology NFL Films constructs. Highlights typically represent these events in a straightforward, chronological manner. When they address less enthralling content they take greater aesthetic measures, such as abandoning linearity, to position it as thrilling. Along these lines, highlights that focus on individual events or narrow time periods are constrained

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to explain more precisely how they unfolded. Those that cover broader topics often simply use them as starting points from which to promote the league in a sensational and creative way. While NFL Films highlights function differently depending on their subject matter, they all privilege the process of creating celebratory and stirring movies about the NFL over summarizing its past. NFL Films’ weekly highlight programs like Game of the Week and This is the NFL—neither of which is still being produced in its original form—recount recently played games through organizing outstanding moments into linear narratives. Because these programs are produced immediately after the games they document take place, they focus more on recapping those events than NFL Films’ other highlights. They often discuss games in relation to teams’ division standings and playoff hopes in a manner similar to—and that partly established a template for—the journalistic reports on contemporary sports television programs like SportsCenter. Although less overtly dramatized than NFL Films’ other subgenres of highlights, the weekly programs still place subject matter into narratives that amplify featured events’ importance and excitement. The half-hour production Game of the Week pre-selected the game it recounted each week based on which contests would most likely lend themselves to the creation of thrilling stories, such as a matchup between rival coaches or a game that includes an undefeated team. The company sent additional camera operators to that game to guarantee its editors would have a vast array of usable footage. If the featured game turned out to be mundane, NFL Films simply placed greater emphasis on these narratives to ensure it would seem noteworthy. While Game of the Week’s highlights were chronological, they did sometimes feature momentary digressions that suspended linearity to outline and celebrate aspects of the game, such as a montage of quarterback sacks, a discussion of a player returning from injury, or provocative sound bites. Like the narratives Game of the Week used to frame contests, these stylized detours worked to ensure that the game—regardless of how it resolved—would appear exciting and heroic. This is the NFL began as a half-hour review of the league’s weekly games and shifted to an hour-long format after the AFL-NFL merger (with half of the program devoted to each of the newly united leagues). Because it is not restricted to a single game, the program could be more selective than Game of the Week. It gave the most exciting and suspenseful contests greater attention and sometimes altogether avoided the least impressive games. Like Game of the Week, This is the NFL framed highlights with narratives and presented them linearly. However, it also grouped them into thematic categories. For instance, a program might categorize game highlights according to comebacks, excellent

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defensive efforts, or rivalries and only include moments from selected games that neatly illustrate those themes. While the highlights on This is the NFL were obligated to recount a collection of the past week’s games no matter how exciting or lackluster, the categories through which it filtered contests made its representations less dependent on those events. Indeed, the featured themes ultimately governed the meaning of the footage placed inside of them and, by extension, the games that footage indexes. Building upon This is the NFL’s format, the weekly NFL Network program Sound FX (2009–present) reviews the previous week’s games through the best sound footage NFL Films’ microphones gathered.42 Because it focuses primarily on showcasing exceptional sound bites, Sound FX does not provide detailed or chronological reports on league games. The featured contests merely compose a foundation from which the program emphasizes the NFL’s intensity, power, and humor through editing audio footage into narratives about the past week. The game’s themselves, then, are secondary to the featured sounds’ illustration of the signature qualities NFL Films uses to sell the league. Because of the Super Bowl’s importance—within and beyond the league— NFL Films’ annual highlight of the championship game usually recounts the event meticulously and chronologically. However, if the Super Bowl is unremarkable NFL Films will take measures to make it appear exciting enough to warrant its position as the season’s climax. As sportswriters Arthur Daley and Bob Oates complained, NFL Films’ highlight of the 1971 Super Bowl—an unusually sloppy and tedious contest—made it seem that Johnny Unitas was forced to exit the game because of a hit that did not actually injure him. While this formal decision inaccurately reports what happened to Unitas, it more effectively conveys the image NFL Films creates than it would had the highlight displayed the less powerful hit that actually caused his injury. Since the game itself did not readily illustrate the brand NFL Films maintains, the company takes aesthetic liberties to place it within that framework—regardless of the glaring gap between the document it produces and the actuality that document indexes. Like exciting Super Bowls, triumphant seasons lend themselves to the glorious image NFL Films creates. Consequently, the company’s annual team highlights can maintain this mythology by simply outlining how the successful season unfolded. Highlights that chronicle disappointing years de-emphasize those seasons and the failures that mark them. They construct hopeful movies about the featured team’s prospects for the future. For example, That Winning Feeling (1994) reflects on the 1993 Indianapolis Colts, a team that expected to do well but wound up winning just four games. The production spends only

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its first few minutes addressing the Colts’ embarrassing play. It then shifts to a discussion of the team’s efforts to develop a “winning feeling” that will change its fortunes. Rather than cataloging the season’s many struggles—indeed, the film never mentions most of the games—it presents a series of vignettes that outline why the Colts should expect better results in 1994. It suggests these points of optimism, which include promising rookies, trusted veterans, and players who will be returning from injury, compose a foundation from which the Colts will eventually regain a winning feeling—and maybe even a winning record to go along with it. Dawn of a New Day (2006), which examines the Minnesota Vikings’ mediocre and injury-plagued 2005 season, operates similarly. By the time NFL Films began producing the team’s highlight, the organization had replaced head coach Mike Tice with Brad Childress. Like That Winning Feeling, Dawn of a New Day mostly avoids the Vikings’ dreadful season in favor of urging fans to be excited about the new era that Childress’s arrival marks. While these highlight films technically document the unfortunate seasons around which they are organized, they focus less on explaining precisely how they unfolded in order to create encouraging, feel-good movies that support the brand NFL Films promotes. In doing so, NFL Films ensures that no season ever appears completely disappointing or unsuccessful. Season review highlights are less directly tied to specific events than NFL Films’ annual Super Bowl and team highlights. Consequently, they can exercise even greater selectivity than highlights attached to single games, which are sometimes uninspiring, or single teams’ seasons, which are sometimes unsuccessful, without deviating from their subject. NFL Films’ annual Road to the Super Bowl highlight reviews the whole NFL season through a series of celebratory storylines. For instance, the installment on the 1999 season includes sections entitled “Old Pros and Young Turks,” which discusses the league’s best veteran players and its rising stars; “Chemistry,” which praises several overachieving teams; and “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” which memorializes the recently deceased Walter Payton and profiles several active players who exhibit his combination of tenacity, grace, and charisma. The production’s final section, “Championship Chase”—a segment each year’s Road to the Super Bowl includes as its finale—traces how the St. Louis Rams and Tennessee Titans made it to the Super Bowl through a montage of their most exciting and significant moments from the season. While Road to the Super Bowl claims to document the 1999 season, the production evidences minimal interest in accurately or thoroughly chronicling it. It excludes most games and even many teams in order to create storylines that situate the season as engrossing and build anticipation for the championship. Road to the Super Bowl’s focus on the entire season rather than a single game 74

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or individual team allows it to place greater emphasis on creating a dramatic impression of that season. As long as it fulfills its commitment to reflect on the past year, the production can take whatever measures it sees fit to construct an exciting film about it. NFL Films highlights that celebrate broader historical moments and types of events demonstrate even less concern with precisely or comprehensively covering their subject. The Super Seventies (1988) and Era of Excellence: The 1980s (1989) transition among great games, record-breaking performances, and successful franchises in the course of situating these decades as exceptional. Along similar lines, Greatest Moments of the Super Bowl (1996) shifts among footage of Super Bowls since the spectacle’s birth. The footage these highlights feature references the era in the league’s history or the type of event they cover. However, this material is included not because of how reliably it documents subject matter, but rather how well it supports the branded history NFL Films fashions—a history in which every decade and every Super Bowl is always extraordinary. Thematic highlights that weave together exceptional hits, sound bites, and blunders are not linked to any particular event or moment. Crunch Course, for example, takes the league’s entire history as its subject. Its celebration of the NFL’s most powerful hitters is arranged to stress the game’s violent intensity. Footage of the Oakland Raiders’ Lyle Alzado from the 1970s transitions to the Chicago Bears’ Dick Butkus in the 1960s and then to the New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor during the 1980s. Similarly, follies films privilege showcasing the league’s most outstanding slipups over discussing—or even mentioning— the time, place, or event the footage they employ references. Because these thematic highlights are less burdened by time and space, they are free to focus entirely on showcasing the qualities NFL Films uses to market the league. NFL Films’ cinematic highlights work to ensure subject matter will seem thrilling regardless of what takes place. Their consistent dramatization of content—like NFL Films productions’ insistence that seemingly divergent content reinforces pro football’s apparent reflection of American identity— suggests the league’s actuality is always at odds with the image the subsidiary creates and sells. Highlights even varnish the league’s finest games, seasons, and eras in order to support and protect that identity. Ironically, then, the league’s past composes a barrier to the history NFL Films’ documentaries manufacture and sustain.43 The company’s varied highlights make apparent the gulf between the league’s past and the history NFL Films builds. In 1989 NFL Films produced Dream Season, a gimmicky eight-week series that reflected upon a fictional season wherein the league’s best-ever teams compete to determine the greatest club of all time.44 The program splices footage 75

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chapter 2 Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi and San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh square off in Dream Season (1989), a highlight program that used archive footage and computer imaging to pit teams from different eras against each other.

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and uses computer simulation software to make it appear, for instance, that the 1966 Packers compete against the 1984 49ers and the 1972 Dolphins take on the 1983 Raiders. It adopts the same basic structure as Game of the Week, creating narratives that commemorate the make-believe games. Steve Sabol described the project as “a little bit Salvador Dali, a little bit of Woody Allen’s Zelig and part Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”45 Dream Season, then, uses real documentary footage to create highlights for exceptionally captivating games that never actually happened. While Dream Season is clearly the least accurate of the various types of highlights NFL Films produces, the program illustrates how the genre—and the company’s representational practices in general—creates an engaging and salable history for the National Football League rather than reporting on its events. The mythology NFL Films’ movies produce stays the same; however, the degree to which it corresponds with what actually takes place varies depending on how neatly subject matter complements this constructed image. The Logic and Impact of the NFL Films Highlight

Aside from its position as the company’s oldest genre, the highlight composes an aesthetic logic that informs NFL Films’ simultaneous documentation and celebration of the league. All of the company’s genres—to greater and lesser degrees—privilege constructing a thrilling image over accurately recounting the league’s past. Even NFL Films’ most iconic stylistic practices, such as the tight-on-the-spiral slow-motion shots of a ball soaring through the sky and closeups of mangled hands, exhibit these priorities. NFL Films includes these shots

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regardless of whether they reference the time or event the film into which they are edited claims to document. These moments typically do not even indicate the place, time, or people they index. Rather, they are stylistic ornaments used to emphasize the content’s beauty, grace, toughness, violence, and intensity. Their frequent circulation across NFL Films’ various genres stabilizes the mythology the company manufactures. Like the highlight, then, these conventions suggest NFL Films’ documentaries—whether they offer a history of a franchise or celebrate the league’s greatest wide receivers—create exciting movies about subject matter rather than straightforwardly, or even truthfully, reporting on it. Bob Ryan claims that he cringes when NFL Films’ movie-inspired highlights are compared to the now far more popular news-driven video highlights that permeate TV and the Internet.46 While NFL Films highlights differ significantly from the mostly chronological and fast-paced recaps on outlets like ESPN, they created the structural basis from which the now-omnipresent form developed. Although comparisons between these productions and NFL Films’ highlights may irritate Ryan, his company is largely responsible for their pervasiveness. What Ryan likely finds even more unsettling is that these productions have diminished NFL Films highlights’ prominence within the sports media landscape they helped to establish. As I will discuss in chapter 6, outlets like ESPN and even the NFL Network now seldom commission NFL Films’ more stylized and cinematic productions. Instead, they use the production company to fuel their news coverage. In addition to providing a foundation from which the form emerged, NFL Films highlights illuminate how the genre shapes sport’s meaning and history. Gamache, who only briefly mentions NFL Films in his history of sports highlights, claims the genre can be divided into two primary categories that synthesize into a third. The first displays events that derive value based on the circumstances surrounding them. A game or play may not be particularly moving, but the context in which it occurs—a championship game, a record about to be broken, etc.—makes it significant. The second category comprises highlights that are objectively awe-inspiring. As Gamache asserts, “Lynn Swann’s acrobatic catch in Super Bowl X was a great play regardless of the context.”47 Finally, the third category is made up of great moments that occurred in important situations, which Gamache refers to as “iconic sports highlights—game-winners, buzzer beaters, golden goals: Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning home run; Franco Harris’ ‘Immaculate Reception’; Dwight Clark’s ‘The Catch.’”48 While Gamache’s typology references several highlights that NFL Films made famous, it overlooks the particularities that mark the company’s highlights and the priorities that guide their production. In doing so, it misses a key point

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regarding the highlight genre’s mediation of sport that NFL Films’ dramatized and corporate-funded productions bring to light. Lynn Swann’s balletic touchdown catch, for instance, was clearly excellent; however, NFL Films’ use of slow motion, an orchestral score, and Facenda’s rumbling narration makes it seem even more amazing. Similarly, NFL Films’ famous depictions of the plays that eventually came to be known as “The Immaculate Reception” and “The Catch” were carefully designed to position these events as breathtaking and unforgettable. Aside from amplifying these moments, NFL Films creates the contexts that give them meaning. The company guarantees that no game—and no play, for that matter—will appear monotonous or trivial. NFL Films’ practices suggest that highlights do not merely represent sport, but have a hand in constructing its meaning. They also indicate this significance is shaped by the institutional and economic factors that influence highlights’ production. For instance, the highlights currently featured on ESPN simultaneously recap sporting events, build and maintain a distinct identity for the media outlet, and promote its other programming. The quickly cut, hip, and sometimes sarcastic style in which ESPN packages its highlights—a contrast to NFL Films’ typically long takes and earnest tone—partly works to construct and reinforce the company’s brand during a time when it is facing increasing competition in cable TV and online. Furthermore, the exceptional moments ESPN’s highlights display are not simply chosen for their greatness or because of the circumstances surrounding them. As NFL Films highlights select moments that assist the company’s glorification of the league, ESPN chooses content that helps it publicize its other content across media platforms. It is no coincidence, for example, that certain sports leagues appear more frequently in ESPN highlights once the media outlet purchases the rights to carry them, and that other leagues fade out of view once ESPN no longer possesses the rights to air their games. While NFL Films’ highlights are now less prominent than they were during the company’s early years, they offer a model through which to explain the emergence of the contemporary sports highlight—perhaps the most powerful and prevalent genre in sports media—that takes into account its selective representational practices; the factors that influence them; and the historical, institutional, industrial, and economic purposes they serve.

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The NFL’s Smithsonian Those [NFL Films] archives constitute the soul of professional football, the stored treasures of football’s wine cellar.

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—Steve Sabol1

At any given time—day or night, during the season or not—one would be hard pressed to scan through the television channels for long without encountering at least one representation of the National Football League—from the uplifting player profiles featured on network pregame packages to commercials that use footage of muddied players to market laundry detergent. Indeed, since 2003 the NFL Network has ensured the league’s constant presence on cable TV. Much of this footage derives from NFL Films’ cameras. Before it is edited into an NFL Films production or sold to other media outlets, this material passes through the world’s largest sports film archive. NFL Films’ archive consists of two main parts that serve overlapping functions. First, there is a fire-proof, temperature-controlled (set at fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit), limited-access vault that houses and safeguards nearly all the film the company has generated and purchased since Blair Motion Pictures’ beginning.2 Second, the archive features a film library that organizes copies of footage for inclusion in the company’s productions and for sale to clients. Attached to the film library is a small print library filled with almanacs, media guides, magazines, and books to help producers fact check and to provide them with additional historical, cultural, and institutional context. At the most basic level, archives are sites where materials are stored and organized for future use. However, these collections—even those that do not

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sell or lend materials—are not simply repositories. Archives are selective in their collection, arrangement, and distribution of materials. As Allan Sekula claims, “archives are not neutral; they embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection, and hoarding as well as that power inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of language.”3 The materials archives acquire, the care with which they store contents, and the conditions under which holdings can be circulated or even discarded are all determined in part by the organizations that define their purposes and regulate their operations.4 Two complementary functions guide the NFL Films archive’s practices. First, it stores the company’s footage and acquires additional materials relevant to the league. NFL Films’ publicity materials, productions, and the discourses surrounding the company repeatedly emphasize the archive’s importance to preserving and chronicling the National Football League’s history. They use the mammoth collection to position NFL Films as the league’s official and most effective historian. Aside from storing footage, the archive prepares it for use in NFL Films’ productions and for sale to its many clients. Like most archives, it organizes materials based on the date when they were created and the subject matter they feature (teams, players, games, etc.). But this private collection also explicitly arranges holdings according to how well they complement the mythology NFL Films constructs. It suppresses footage that might reflect negatively on the league and encourages the use of material that augments and will help to sustain the institutional identity NFL Films promotes. It ensures that the company’s producers will only be able to choose from footage that has already been designated unproblematic and potentially thrilling. Moreover, it guarantees that the footage NFL Films sells will not compromise the league’s brand. The NFL Films archive thus plays a crucial role in the company’s efforts to create, circulate, and control the National Football League’s image. Football’s Wine Cellar

Steve Sabol once claimed that NFL Films has made professional football the most thoroughly documented human endeavor in history.5 He pointed to the company’s enormous archive, which contains over 100 million feet of film in 50,000 cans, as proof of that comprehensiveness.6 Although Sabol’s boast is an overstatement characteristic of the professional mythmaker’s penchant for embellishment, it illustrates the archive’s intended function as a site where the league’s visual history is housed and organized.

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When asked to explain the priorities that guide the company’s archival operations, Steve Sabol deferred to his father’s background as an overcoat salesman. After manufacturing its overcoats, Big Ed’s company would never throw away leftover material. “They figured you don’t throw this scrap away,” Sabol claimed. “It could be used as a pocket, it could be used as a liner, it could be used as a collar. So we [NFL Films] never threw anything out.”7 As Sabol’s analogy implies, NFL Films assumes that each frame of film has potential value and ought to be kept indefinitely. The archive does not literally hold every bit of film that has run through the company’s cameras—a feat that is as impossible as it is impractical. Regardless, NFL Films publicizes the archive as comprehensive and uses the collection to position itself as the official steward of pro football’s past. The archive’s centrality to constructing this identity is partly built through the value NFL Films assigns to the film medium. Since it began as Blair Motion Pictures, the company has used its practice of shooting NFL games exclusively on 16mm color film stock—a technology Steve Sabol touted as more “reflective” than videotape—to distinguish itself from other sports media outlets.8 The Sabols continually assert the use of film, as opposed to video, lends the subsidiary’s productions a sense of authenticity that enhances their potential to unlock the league’s history and to stir viewers’ emotions. Building from the authenticity and emotional power the company assigns to film, Steve Sabol calls the NFL Films archive “the soul of the NFL,” “the NFL’s Smithsonian,” and “football’s wine cellar.”9 Reinforcing Sabol’s grandiose metaphors, critics often refer to the archive as the company’s most prized possession and as the NFL Films headquarters’ featured attraction. In 1984 Twentieth Century Fox reportedly offered the National Football League $30 million for the archive—a proposition the league declined without hesitation. Steve Sabol considered Fox’s offer absurd, claiming that the network was “asking for the entire history of the game.”10 The archive, according to Sabol, is far more than a collection of visual documents; it contains, organizes, and preserves the league’s most valuable links to its past. NFL Films even hangs a “Keepers of the Flame” banner near the vault’s entrance to emphasize the archive’s importance to its role as the NFL’s designated historian. Although it is not open to the public, the archive is repeatedly made visible through the publicity materials NFL Films generates and in popular and trade press commentary on the organization, which often feature images of Ed and Steve Sabol posing in front of stacks of film canisters. Similarly, in many introductions to the programs that Steve Sabol hosts he sits next to, and is sometimes even

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surrounded by, cans of film—a staging device that emphasizes his credibility as a historian. These practices also stress the company’s role as the league’s official chronicler by suggesting it is the only organization that possesses these priceless documents. However, NFL Films producers now seldom dig through cans of film to construct their productions. Since the early 1990s, the company has primarily created its works from digital copies, much of which producers can access from their office computers. In fact, employees now rarely even handle actual film stock—digital transfers are made immediately after film is developed. Nevertheless, NFL Films uses 16mm film cans to highlight its productions’ legitimacy and quality. These strategies also assert the consistency of NFL Films’ production practices over time—despite the fact that NFL Films now uses high-definition digital video with increasing frequency. The stacks of cans indicate that even though contemporary sports media outlets privilege quick production and use newer technologies to facilitate this immediacy, NFL Films still takes the same reflective, artisanal approach it has used since the 1960s. Along these lines, the archive is sometimes used to position the sports media professionals who visit it as exceptionally erudite and committed to the game. ESPN analyst and former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski builds his professional identity in part by appealing to the time he spends studying at the NFL Films archive. Jaworski’s ESPN webpage emphasizes his expertise by noting that he keeps a permanent office at NFL Films and spends several days a week carefully scrutinizing the company’s film. Furthermore, in his television appearances Jaworski routinely defends his observations by referring to his time spent studying in the archive. Aside from underscoring his credibility and expertise, the scholarly identity Jaworski cultivates reinforces the NFL

In an introduction to Lost Treasures of NFL Films (2002) Steve Sabol sits surrounded by film canisters—a trope NFL Films productions uses repeatedly to call attention to its reliance on the film medium and its role as the league’s official historian.

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Films archive’s position as the official site where professional football’s visual history is stored. The archive’s importance to NFL Films’ public image is most directly emphasized in Lost Treasures of NFL Films (2002–2003), a syndicated television series that unearths obscure and never-before-seen footage—mostly material from the 1960s and 1970s—to create new stories about the league’s past. In 2003 NFL Films released a collection of Lost Treasures segments in a DVD box set entitled Inside the Vault and packaged as part of the company’s “Archives Collection” of home videos.11 Lost Treasures stresses the NFL Films archive’s role as a site that stores materials for future access and enables them to be employed in previously unanticipated ways. The program, for example, features footage of teams that have since changed their names and moved to different locations, uniforms that seem hideous by today’s standards, and players who became more famous after their football careers ended, such as former United States Congressman Jack Kemp (who played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills and San Diego Chargers) and the actor Carl Weathers (who very briefly played linebacker for the Oakland Raiders). The introductory sequence to Lost Treasures emphasizes the archive’s importance to NFL Films’ project of exalting the league and remembering its past. It begins with a combination of a soothing score and the sound of film running through a 16mm projector, conventions that connect film’s cultural value directly to NFL Films’ production practices. The sequence pairs the nostalgic soundscape with a montage that transitions among sepia-toned images of projectors shrouded in a smoky haze, shots that pan across stacks of old metal film canisters, and footage of the league’s past that slowly transforms from grainy black-and-white into radiant color as the score swells to its climax. These elements highlight NFL Films’ commitment to bringing old footage to life and suggest its archive makes possible this revivification. In addition to the images of projectors, footage transforming into color, and shots of old film cans, each episode’s introductory sequence briefly cuts to different fragments of interview footage with Ed Sabol, who discusses the company’s commitment to archiving its film. As Sabol explains in one of the program’s introductions: “I always thought that after you went through all that work [of filming], all you had to show for it was the film. And you’ve got to keep the film; that’s the backbone. That’s what it all goes back to.” A different introduction features Big Ed stating his insistence that the company keep all of its materials and his belief that this footage, however banal it might have seemed when it was initially taken, would eventually prove useful: “I felt, you gotta keep this stuff. Don’t throw it out. That’s almost a sin. I said, ‘don’t throw

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anything out, keep everything. Put it on a reel and put it away. Someday you’ll use it.’ That someday is now.” Though NFL Films does not literally keep everything and has not always taken the proper measures to maximize its contents’ lifespan, the company builds its image as a careful historian through advertising the meticulousness with which it organizes and preserves materials.12 Steve Sabol, who hosts Lost Treasures, extends his father’s discussion in his introduction to the program’s first episode. He notes that producer Phil Tuckett found some old, unmarked cans while rummaging around in the company’s vault. The cans were so old, Sabol claims, that they were rusted shut and had to be pried open. Impressed by both the film’s quality and content, Tuckett put together a research team to dig even deeper into the collection. Sabol notes that Lost Treasures is the result of this quest into the archival treasure trove. The previously unseen film has the potential to unlock the NFL’s forgotten history—a history that can be accessed, Sabol suggests, only because of NFL Films’ insistence that its footage is kept. While the archive holds the vast majority of the footage NFL Films has generated since its inception along with all of the programs it has produced, the company also strives to acquire a record of football that spans beyond its history and even the history of the National Football League. Most of these materials reference professional football (including leagues that preceded the NFL), but the company also sometimes purchases college and even high school football footage if it is exceptionally rare, features league members NFL Films often discusses, or will otherwise aid its production practices. NFL Films’ publicity calls attention to these holdings—such as a print of game footage shot by Thomas Edison and a 1925 film of the short-lived Pottsville Maroons franchise—to emphasize the archive’s volume and breadth.13 The subsidiary also frequently uses material it did not generate to enrich the celebratory histories it constructs. For example, 75 Seasons (1994), an Emmy Award–winning film that commemorates the league’s seventy-fifth anniversary, uses the National Football League promotional production Champions of the Gridiron (1939)—the second version of the General Mills–sponsored film—to introduce the NFL’s early, and relatively unsuccessful, efforts to market itself as an exciting, safe, and wholesome entertainment spectacle. Like NFL Films’ productions, Champions of the Gridiron sought to promote the league. However, it lacks the hyperbolically celebratory tone and formal lavishness that characterize the company’s typical work. 75 Seasons thus incorporates Champions of the Gridiron into the tradition NFL Films constructs. In doing so, it suggests the brand identity NFL Films creates was in place long before the company started documenting and glorifying the league.

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A 2003 documentary on Harold “Red” Grange, America’s first football celebrity who helped propel pro football into the national spotlight, uses non-NFL Films footage similarly.14 The short production, which initially appeared on NFL Films Presents, employs newsreel footage; material from The Galloping Ghost (1931), a fictionalized biographical film serial wherein Grange stars as himself; and sequences from several short films in which Grange appeared—none of which the National Football League had a hand in producing. Though most of this footage was created to celebrate Grange’s talents and to capitalize on his notoriety—goals that would have informed any NFL-produced representations of him—the program incorporates this material into the mythology NFL Films builds. Grange is situated as embodying the same characteristics NFL Films has assigned to Gale Sayers, John Elway, and Jerry Rice. To be sure, many documentaries use outside materials for purposes other than those that informed their production. The compilation film genre, for example, is founded entirely on the process of repurposing archived film. NFL Films’ adoption of this common practice is noteworthy, however, because it reflects the company’s efforts to contain the league’s history within the branded framework it manufactures. As NFL Films has created a predictable image through which it filters each season with productions like Road to the Super Bowl and in teams’ annual highlights, it uses outside materials—both those produced by the NFL and unaffiliated sources—to make the league’s past consistent with the history it builds and preserves. While NFL Films routinely inserts outside footage into its texts—particularly in productions that examine the history of football prior to the company’s development—it does not pass this material off as its own. Many of these films mark the outside content they employ with captions that list their titles and dates of production. In some cases, NFL Films is legally obligated to mention the outside material it uses as it appears.15 Beyond these legal constraints, Steve Seidman, who produced the Red Grange documentary, claims that marking the source from which footage derives provides the company’s productions with legitimacy they would not have were content simply inserted into programs as if the company manufactured it.16 This practice, according to the institutional logic that informs NFL Films’ production practices, lends its programs a greater sense of authority—the loose equivalent to citing sources—while enabling the company to broaden the history it creates. Furthermore, the outside footage NFL Films uses—whether it is marked as such or not—seldom appears as vibrant or skillfully shot as the company’s content. Transitions from fuzzy television footage or scratched black-and-white film to NFL Films’ well-maintained 16mm color stock call attention to the care

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and liveliness with which the company conveys the league’s history. NFL Films now even color corrects its film after processing to maximize its resonance. The often striking visual contrast between NFL Films’ footage and the outside material it uses allows the company to advertise—albeit subtly and indirectly—its place as the league’s most artful and meticulous historian. NFL Films has the resources to pay rights fees for nearly any footage it would want to use. However, its main goal is to purchase this material and to secure its reproduction rights. Chris Willis, the head of NFL Films’ library and the author of several books on pro football’s early history, claims that the company “strives to get any footage it can that references the league”—whether it directly documents National Football League games or somehow relates to it.17 Willis’s primary responsibility is to help producers locate footage for their films. Aside from finding footage for specific productions, Willis oversees the company’s acquisition of film materials. He scours the Internet and auctions for miscellaneous football content that might help to expand the archive and broaden the narratives NFL Films can compose about the league. Steve Sabol began the project of acquiring outside footage soon after NFL Films’ incorporation. During the late 1960s he ran advertisements throughout the country—mostly in locations that were near or once near an NFL franchise—and drove from town to town to purchase almost everything he found.18 In the early 1980s NFL Films bought the entire film library of Tel-Ra Productions, America’s main sports filmmaking company from the late 1940s until the early 1960s and the organization that Ed Sabol outbid for the rights to film the 1962 NFL championship. Steve Sabol described this as the smartest business decision he ever made.19 Acquiring Tel-Ra’s library provided NFL Films with ownership of footage of almost every NFL game played between 1948 and 1964. Along with Steve Sabol’s other acquisitions, the Tel-Ra library gives NFL Films a near monopoly of pro football footage since 1948—particularly since television broadcasts were seldom saved prior to the late 1960s—and enables the company to use this material for whatever purposes it sees fit. As Sekula notes, “the purchase of reproduction rights under copyright law is also the purchase of a certain semantic license.”20 Gaining ownership of Tel-Ra’s footage allows NFL Films to ensure that this material will only be used to augment its branded vision of the NFL. By extension, it enables NFL Films to exert greater control over the information circulating about the league. Though NFL Films carefully restricts its archived materials’ circulation, the company has the resources to care for this footage in ways that many private collectors and even professional archives cannot. Much of the footage that

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comes into its possession is incredibly rare and fragile. Prior to NFL Films’ procurement of it, the majority of this material was not housed in locations that provided sufficiently safe storage. For instance, in 2006 NFL Films purchased a 1926 home movie of Jim Thorpe punting for the Canton Bulldogs—the only known footage of the Olympian and multisport star playing in the National Football League—that had spent the previous eighty years in a collector’s musty northeastern Ohio basement. According to Willis, museums, archives, and private collectors periodically offer NFL Films materials for sale or donation. In 2010 the Pro Football Hall of Fame even donated its entire film library to NFL Films. Furthermore, Willis asserts that the company ensures the safety of any acquisitions that require special attention. Since the archive is not properly equipped to store highly flammable nitrate stock, it has copies of the nitrate prints it purchases made for its library and then deposits the original film at the Library of Congress for safekeeping. Although NFL Films only uses the footage it acquires to assist its institutional mission, it takes steps to safeguard that material’s previously uncertain survival.21 In reference to Steve Sabol’s likening of the logic that guides NFL Films’ archival practices to his father’s thriftiness in the overcoat business, the company ensures that the film it produces and purchases is available for future use. As a saved piece of fabric might have eventually become a pocket, footage of an otherwise unimportant interception may someday be used in a montage of exciting defensive plays, and a snippet of a coach quibbling with officials could end up in a highlight of the league’s greatest sound bites. The follies genre actually resulted from this attitude. Footage of embarrassing blunders, which might have been discarded had NFL Films not committed itself to keeping material that did not seem immediately useful, provided the foundation for what would become one of the company’s most popular and influential genres. Layers of Selectivity

The NFL Films archive’s organization facilitates the company’s aesthetic practices and illustrates how archives—particularly private commercial archives—shape their contents’ meaning. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault claims “[t]he archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” 22 Jacques Derrida extends Foucault’s discussion to theorize archives in terms of “consignation”—they collect, organize, and make sense of their varied parts.23 Archives place materials into association with other, sometimes seemingly very different, contents. Texts that engage disparate subject matter are put into

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proximity because they have similar dates of production; materials produced decades apart share archival space because of their comparable subject matter. As such, Sekula refers to archives as “clearing house[s] of meaning” that broaden contents’ significance beyond their originally intended meanings.24 Archives, however, do not foster pluralism. Rather, their priorities and policies shape the significance they assign to holdings. For instance, while NFL Films’ archive expands the meaning of the footage it acquires, it also redefines that material’s potential uses and value according to a strict institutionally and commercially driven logic. Archives primarily assign significance through the catalog terms they use to describe and organize their holdings. Most archives log materials according to stable quantitative categories, such as the date when a text was produced, its author, or the objects it depicts. However, as long ago as Sir Arthur Elton’s 1955 presentation “Film as a Source Material for History,” scholars have argued that including qualitative cataloging criteria, such as terms that indicate the emotional state or degree of intensity an image displays, can enhance film archives’ utility.25 As film historian Patrik Sjöberg claims, “unlike looking for a title of a book in a library,” those searching for film “could very well be looking for a certain quality of the subject in the footage.”26 Before NFL Films’ footage is classified and placed into the archive, it is molded by the company’s cinematographic practices. Although Ed Sabol initially urged his camera operators to “let the film run like water,” most games have just two or three cameras present. One of these cameras always serves as a “tree” to ensure each play is documented. When there are only two cameras at a game, the non-tree might serve as both a “mole” and a “weasel.” The game footage NFL Films shoots and then archives is a decidedly partial record shaped by cinematographers’ dual efforts to document the entire game and produce artful shots of its most thrilling moments. Camera operators balance their selective practices with an attempt to capture seemingly insignificant footage that might later have value. When a player becomes a star in the league, for example, NFL Films wants to be certain that it possesses footage of him as an unglamorous backup eager for an opportunity to showcase his skills. A 2011 segment of the biographical NFL Network series A Football Life that focuses on quarterback Kurt Warner’s unlikely emergence as an NFL star relies heavily on footage of him as an unknown reserve watching his team play from the sidelines. While this footage had no apparent utility when shot, it is now indispensible to the documentary’s dramatized depiction of Warner’s ascendance from irrelevance to stardom.

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NFL Films’ formulaic documentaries routinely feature the same players and even sequences of footage. A particular touchdown pass, for example, might appear in one or more weekly highlight programs, a team’s annual highlight film, a production that reflects on the season’s best plays, and a profile piece on one of the players involved. Footage of “The Immaculate Reception” and “The Catch” is still used as frequently as it was during the eras when these plays occurred—perhaps even more so given the marked increase in venues that feature sports content. During the company’s earliest years, there were several veteran employees who knew where popular shots were located and could direct producers to them.27 To increase efficiency and foster the company’s repetitious practices, NFL Films developed “melt reels” of certain key figures. Producers would, for instance, construct reels of the company’s most exciting footage that featured players like Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw or Baltimore Colts receiver Raymond Berry. Expanding upon this practice, the company created specific reels for Inside the NFL—a weekly program that must be produced very quickly—that included footage suitable for use in the show. Those assigned to produce films about certain significant players or segments for Inside the NFL were assured that the footage on these reels would complement NFL Films’ established aesthetic priorities. Based on the increased efficiency melt reels brought to NFL Films’ production practices, the company started producing “special rolls” of all its game footage immediately after it was developed.28 Special rolls are reels composed of the best and most exciting shots from a single contest. Producers go through each roll of film from each camera present at a game, extract what they believe is the material most appropriate for use in the company’s productions, and place that footage onto a single reel. Likewise, they exclude content that is not suitable for use in NFL Films productions, such as injuries and dirty hits. Special rolls add a degree of selectivity to NFL Films camera operators’ already selective filming. They enable producers to quickly locate footage that both represents a specific event and lends itself to the company’s conventions. Willis even describes special rolls as the “lifeblood” of the company’s projects.29 While nearly all of NFL Films’ content is stored in its archive and can be accessed as needed, the majority of its productions are made exclusively from special-rolled material. As the special rolls’ construction suggests, the NFL Films archive organizes game footage based partly upon its potential to aid the company’s glorification of the league. While the special rolls always reference the particular event their contents document, the fragments placed onto these reels are not arranged

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chronologically. The filmed moments’ potential to excite is as important to their position on the special roll as the subject matter they index. Like NFL Films’ highlights, then, special rolls privilege the inclusion of exceptional and potentially thrilling moments over those that simply evidence what took place. In fact, as the “lifeblood” of NFL Films’ productions and the foundation from which they are constructed, special rolls enforce the company’s representational priorities. The NFL Films archive’s organization of game footage has shifted over time along with the technologies that aid its operations. Until 1994 NFL Films only cataloged its special rolls and the programs it produced. It organized special rolls according to the date and participants of the game their contents referenced, and it arranged programs according to their titles and dates of production. This cataloging system contained contents’ particularities within broad, quantitative categories. Moreover, NFL Films cut the footage it put onto special rolls and used in its programs from original game film. Once special rolled footage was used in an NFL Films program it would be stored along with that film until it was edited into a different production—where it would remain until it was used again. For example, the iconic footage of Lawrence Taylor hollering “let’s go out there like a bunch of crazed dogs!” has appeared and continues to appear in many NFL Films productions: the Giants’ season highlights, films that showcase the league’s best defenders, productions that feature the greatest onfield sound bites NFL Films has gathered, and others. Clearly, this fragment’s implied significance shifts slightly depending on the production in which it is used. In the Giants’ highlight film the sequence primarily references Taylor’s value to the team and to its season; in the films on the league’s best defenders it is mainly included to illustrate the NFL’s tenacity and aggression. The sequence’s repetition in various contexts and movement throughout the archive suggests it lends itself to multiple narrative uses. However, NFL Films merely cataloged it along with the most recent production in which it was featured until it was taken from that film and edited into another. The archive only explicitly marked this footage’s potential significance in relation to the date and title of the film in which it last appeared. Though the Lawrence Taylor sequence has been used in a variety of NFL Films productions, the footage does not reference a particularly significant game or even play. Furthermore, none of the films that incorporate this moment mention the game at which it was filmed, and many of them are only indirectly concerned with Taylor. Rather, this footage’s value and usefulness to NFL Films is based primarily on the emotional and physical power it conveys. While the sequence’s intensity is the primary reason behind its inclusion in so many NFL

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Films productions, the company’s archival system before 1994 did not directly recognize this quality as a factor informing its position in the collection. Jeremy Swarbrick, the head of NFL Films’ Media Relations Department, notes that the process of cutting special rolls and productions from original film exerted considerable wear and tear on the company’s prints. He also claims that this system, though it fostered more streamlined production practices than in the days before the company used special rolls, still had inefficiencies. Materials’ movement through the archive with each use often made it difficult for producers to locate specific footage. Moreover, it indirectly encouraged the unnecessary repetition of certain moments.30 Indeed, it was much speedier for producers, who were already operating under incredibly tight deadlines, simply to use generic shots they could easily find rather than take the time to scour the archive for previously unused footage that would serve similar purposes. Thus, the same shots of fans reacting to plays and filing through stadium gates crop up in many NFL Films productions made between the 1960s and the early 1990s. Unlike the repetition of moments like Taylor hollering, which very deliberately reinforces the brand NFL Films constructs, the continual use of the same fan cheering can seem like haphazard filmmaking. To preserve the company’s film, increase the efficiency and precision with which producers can locate footage, and decrease superfluous repetition, NFL Films implemented a digital archival system in 1994. Within this system, all film is transferred onto digital tapes directly after it is processed.31 Special rolls are then made with AVID editing systems and stored in the library while the original film is placed in the vault. Since NFL Films instituted this system, it has transferred most of its extant productions and special rolls onto tapes and has begun to work backwards through its archive with the goal of eventually transferring all of its materials. In fact, NFL Films established its library to organize the thousands of tapes it began to produce starting in 1994. Within NFL Films’ digitized archival system, the amount of usable footage multiplies. Individual sequences are archived with the original roll on which they were filmed, the digital transfer of that roll, the special roll made from that digital transfer, and each production in which they are used. This practice makes it easier for film materials to be located and enables more than one producer to use the same footage at a single time. Moreover, it illustrates the archive’s capacity to catalogue holdings’ multiple potential meanings by storing the same footage in various narrative contexts simultaneously. While the company’s previous system only archived footage with the most recent production in which it was used, the digitized system keeps copies of footage along with all of the films in which it appears. If all archives, as Sekula suggests, have the capacity

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NFL Films’ Server and Archive Based Editing and Research (SABER) system digitally organizes footage according to hundreds of catalogue terms that complement, and even enforce, the company’s aesthetic tendencies. Courtesy of NFL Films.

to broaden their materials’ significance, NFL Films’ archive explicitly assigns contents multiple meanings simultaneously and readies them for different possible uses. To increase further the precision and efficiency with which footage could be located, NFL Films’ Director of Information Technologies Dave Franza developed a digital cataloging system that employees could access directly from their office computers. Launched in 1996, the SABER (Server and Archive Based Editing and Research) system classifies NFL Films’ special-rolled game footage according to hundreds of search terms in categories that range from the season it references to the position of the camera that generated the film. NFL Films now has a staff of cataloguers whose entire job consists of classifying footage. During the NFL season, cataloguers tag footage in the special rolls that producers create each week. In the off-season they work backwards through the archive’s holdings with the ultimate goal of logging its entire contents.32 The SABER system is searchable through six main categories: Season, Players, Juncture, Action, Camera, and Other. Each category has multiple sub­ categories attached to it. For example, once a particular season is selected a search can be further limited to a given week during that season; the cinematographer who took the footage; the uniforms a team was wearing (home or away); and the stadium where a game was played. The system’s “Players” category is organized similarly. It contains a section for each of the league’s teams with subcategories that separate offensive and defensive players and identify whether they were competing at home or away. The SABER program adds another layer of selectivity to camera operators’ shooting techniques and to the special rolls producers construct.

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The SABER system’s “Other” category. Non Game

Product Shot

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Other Personnel

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Aerial Adidas Angry Administration Banner/Sign Apex Ball Celebrity Challenge Play Converse Blood Cheerleaders Press Conference Franklin Breath Coaches Scoreboard Gatorade Cleats Entertainers Sky Lines Logo Athletic Dejection Fans Stadium Motorola Equipment Former Players Timeout Newman Eyes Funky Fans Tunnel NFL Equipment Frustration Grounds Crew NFL Pro Line Grass/Dirt Mascot Nike Hands Media Powerade Huddle NFL Cameraman Puma Patriotic Official Reebok Praying Players Riddell Records/Milestones Security Starter Snap Trainers Wilson Sun Sweat Talking on Phone Torn Uniforms

In addition to constraining archived footage’s meanings, the SABER system broadens its potential functions. Footage is listed and can be searched according to various categories simultaneously. Staff need not merely search for a player, but can search for that player at a specific time, in a distinct place, and engaging in particular actions. Even if one searches only for a player or game, the results will always also include the other terms according to which the footage was logged. In this sense, SABER explicitly points to an individual piece of catalogued footage’s multiple meanings and the potential uses to which it lends itself. It does not allow a clip only to reference a game or player. Moreover, SABER’s categories and subcategories expand along with increasing demand for film that displays particular content. For example, it developed a “Celebrity” category because of increasing requests for footage of celebrities attending National Football League games. SABER also has a “comments” section for cataloguers to add observations about footage that may not fit into its already established categories. Beyond cataloguing footage according to multiple quantitative criteria, the SABER system explicitly organizes materials according to several qualitative

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The SABER system’s “Juncture” category. Juncture of

Scene Rating

Sound

Conditions

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Action Poor Arguing/Officials Cheatable Bench OK Booing Cold Game Prep Good Chalk Talk Fog Half Time Very Good Chastise Hot Locker Room Great Cheering Mud Non-Game OH GOD Chit Chat Rain Post-Game Classic Bites Snow Practice Commentary Wet Pre-Game/Fans Compliment Wind Pre-Game on Field Pep Talk Play Calling Reaction Shooting Singing Strategy Swearing Trash Talk

characteristics. Searches for a team or player are cross-listed with an evaluation of the content’s intensity. For instance, the “Juncture” category includes a “Scene-Rating” subcategory that allows cataloguers to rate footage as “Poor,” “OK,” “Good,” “Very Good,” “Great,” or “OH GOD” based on how they decide it matches NFL Films’ dramatic expectations. This cataloguing feature marks material according to its potential to excite viewers. In fact, the “OH GOD” category is named for the thrilled response footage given this designation is presumed to elicit. SABER’s cross-listing of footage according to quantitative and qualitative categories expands archived contents’ potential significance; however, the meaning it assigns is defined in relation to—and therefore contained within—the mythology NFL Films creates. For example, the SABER system’s “Other” category marks footage with terms that reference certain qualities NFL Films productions commonly use to dramatize the league, such as “Dejection,” “Frustration,” and “Patriotic.” Footage logged with the term dejection might display players weeping after a difficult loss; material tagged as frustration could feature a coach yelling at officials; and sequences deemed patriotic may showcase fans singing along with the pregame performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.” While producers can search for patriotic footage from a specific game, the SABER system allows them to privilege searching for this quality over looking for content that displays

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The NFL’s Smithsonian

particular times and places. This feature complements NFL Films productions’ prioritization of creating dramatic and thrilling impressions of the league over straightforwardly chronicling particular times, places, and people. SABER also includes search terms that reference conventions specific to NFL Films’ established aesthetic practices, such as close-ups of players’ hands; footage of balls spiraling through the air in slow motion; snippets that display sweat dripping from players’ faces; and images of breath rising from helmets during cold weather games. Even more specifically, SABER’s “Classic Shots” subcategory tags footage as suitable for use in an NFL Films production by marking frequently used material that embodies the company’s recognizable style, such as “The Catch” and “The Immaculate Reception.” These subcategories allow producers to locate footage that not only exhibits qualities the company commonly uses to celebrate the league, but that also signifies NFL Films. There is a hierarchy implied in the SABER system’s organization that first arranges footage according to the season and players it references. But the system does not prevent users from searching exclusively according to content’s qualitative characteristics, and those characteristics are always cross-listed with the quantitative results. Moreover, there are potential problems of consistency with the SABER system’s qualitative criteria that its quantitative categories do not present, as one cataloguer might classify a snippet as “Very Good” while another might mark the same fragment as “Good.” NFL Films has implemented no hard-and-fast rules to distinguish among these subjective categories and the indistinct boundaries that separate them. They serve as starting points from which producers can find material that is both consistent with the image NFL Films constructs and that depicts specific subject matter. The SABER system’s idiosyncratic classification of footage institutionalizes and imposes NFL Films’ aesthetic practices. It only features categories for qualities that lend themselves to the brand NFL Films creates. Certain footage—the snippet of Taylor hollering, for instance—might arguably display hatred and recklessness. But these characteristics are left out of SABER and, as a result, excluded from the range of possible uses to which it suggests content might be put. The varying levels of selectivity through which the NFL Films archive filters footage before it appears in a production—from the cinematographers’ filming to SABER’s catalogue terms—always and only organize that material based on its potential to help the company manage the NFL’s image. Indeed, every detail of this private commercial archive is shaped by the institutional ideology and stylistic protocols that govern NFL Films’ celebration of the league.

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Disseminating the Mythology

Beyond assisting the production of NFL Films’ dramatized texts, the archive functions as the starting point from which the company provides footage to outside clients. NFL Films’ Media Services Department, in cooperation with its Licensing Department, locates and sells these materials.33 When clients request footage, Media Services uses the SABER system to compile a selection of suitable material. John Murphy, the employee in NFL Films’ Information Technology Department whom Dave Franza hired to write and update SABER’s code, notes that the program was conceived and created based partly on Media Services’ needs to accommodate so many requests.34 The relationship between Media Services’ operations and the SABER system is perhaps most clearly evident in the “Product Shot” portion of SABER’s “Other” subcategory. The subcategory has terms for the brands whose logos most frequently appear in NFL Films footage—Gatorade, Motorola, Nike, Adidas, and so forth. It increases the facility with which NFL Films can provide footage that displays these companies’ connection to the National Football League and maximizes the amount of footage it can sell to them.35 Furthermore, because the product shots are cross-listed with a variety of other terms, Media Services can offer clients film material that features their brands, showcases particular subject matter, and conveys a certain degree of intensity. Though it is not always readily perceptible from viewing the content, NFL Films creates a significant percentage of the nonlive footage of the National Football League that appears on American and international television.36 During the season, Media Services provides the league’s network partners—the networks that have contracts to televise NFL games—with special rolls relevant to the contests it will air.37 Network partners use this footage for their pregame programming and half-time shows. Although the materials appear in non-NFL Films programs, the network partners only receive footage that NFL Films producers have deemed worthy of inclusion on a special roll. There are thus no shots of injuries, dirty plays, or occurrences that resulted in fines. This cautious distribution procedure allows the company to assert a degree of control over the footage the league’s network partners showcase. Network affiliates and cable outlets’ news programs are permitted to use footage from telecasts of NFL games for only a limited amount of time after those contests end. In 2002 the league restricted television outlets to the use of six minutes of footage on the day of games and two minutes a day for the following seven days. A memo from the league to its franchises asserts that “[i]f stations or programming services have a need to use film or tape in addition to

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the footage permitted on regularly-scheduled newscasts (e.g., in a team-related coach’s show), they should contact NFL Films for the necessary authorizations.”38 The National Football League certainly benefits from the exposure television news programs provide. However, it ensures that if those outlets plan to use game footage for anything more extensive than brief reports that they will have to purchase content NFL Films has approved for circulation.39 According to Swarbrick, Media Services sells footage to nearly one hundred different television programs and other media outlets every week.40 Beyond news and highlight programs, it frequently constructs reels for reality and talk shows that include current and former league members. These programs typically use NFL Films content to introduce and characterize featured league members. For instance, when retired running back Emmitt Smith competed on—and eventually won—ABC’s Dancing with the Stars in 2006 the program displayed NFL Films footage of his prodigious play for the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals to emphasize the athleticism and competitive spirit he brought to his dancing. Media Services exerts even greater control over the footage it sells to these clients than it does over the special rolls it gives to the league’s network partners. When clients request film of a particular player or game, Media Services decides precisely what content they will receive. It also retains the right to deny requests if it suspects clients might use the footage to display the league in an unfavorable light. If a program requests material of a player or coach who is facing legal troubles, Media Services would likely decline the request. Footage of O.J. Simpson, for instance, is largely off-limits. Furthermore, if the league or individual teams decide for whatever reason that they do not want certain content to circulate, NFL Films will not distribute it. Because Media Services primarily gathers footage from already special-rolled materials catalogued through the SABER system, it would be difficult to find problematic content to sell. Furthermore, Media Services’ careful distribution practices do not prevent clients from using footage in unglamorous or critical ways. Once these outlets purchase footage they are free to use it however they choose. Be that as it may, by exercising control—however limited—over the archived footage it distributes, NFL Films attempts to maintain the brand it creates for the league beyond its own productions. Part of Media Services’ regulation of archived footage is organized around an effort to uphold NFL Films’ distinction among sports media outlets. Media Services primarily does this by limiting the sale of sound footage. Because of its position as a league-owned entity, NFL Films has the exclusive ability to microphone players and to use roving boom microphones on the sidelines

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during games.41 In fact, along with its narration and music, on-field sound is currently the company’s most recognizable stylistic characteristic within the context of sports media—a distinction it flaunts with programs like Sound FX and in videos like Turftalk. While NFL Films does sell some sound footage to clients, it charges different rates for this material and does not include it with the special rolls it provides the league’s network partners each week during the season. Media Services thus protects NFL Films’ exclusive association with sound footage, and, by extension, the branded viewing experience this material helps the company to create. The Soul that Sells the NFL

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Though exaggerated, Steve Sabol’s gushing references to the NFL Films archive as the “soul of the NFL,” “football’s wine cellar,” and “the NFL’s Smithsonian” are not altogether inaccurate. NFL Films productions build the National Football League’s identity and history through showcasing—and amplifying—exceptional moments. But before these outstanding instances are edited into a production or sold to outside clients they are mediated by NFL Films’ archive, which marks them as suitable for circulation. This institutional archive, then, is as vital to NFL Films’ creation and regulation of the league’s mythology as the documentaries for which the company is primarily known.

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The Shakespeares of Sports Films Picasso looked at an image—a bowl of fruit or a woman’s face— from multiple perspectives and from different moments of time. We do the same thing with a football play. —Steve Sabol1 Marketing always seemed like a bad word to me.

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—Steve Sabol2

Pete Rozelle’s major point of praise after viewing They Call It Pro Football— Steve Sabol’s self-described Citizen Kane of football films—was that the production was more sophisticated than run-of-the-mill sports telecasts. The commissioner deemed it a “real movie” comparable in drama, quality, and potential marketability to a Hollywood film.3 Rozelle’s glowing review implies that representations of football up to the point when They Call It Pro Football was released were not as compelling or artful as “movies.” It also suggests NFL Films’ productions are aesthetically superior to typical sports TV. According to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, art functions as a tool through which people and institutions distinguish themselves and reinforce cultural and economic differences. A commercial institution’s capacity to claim its products as inspired artworks rather than mere commodities can set it apart from, and situate it as superior to, its competition. Throughout its history, NFL Films

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has taken great pains to emphasize its distinction within sports media and in the broader contexts of art and media culture. The company places its productions in dialogue with established aesthetic traditions, reinforces its producers’ status as legitimate artists, advertises the various accolades it has received, and distances itself from the NFL’s commercial motives. Bourdieu argues that artworks exist as such because of their placement within an “artworld” or “a social universe that confers upon [a work] the status of a candidate for aesthetic appreciation.”4 Artworlds are constituted through a variety of intersecting components that include the work and the traditions it engages, the status of the source that produces it, and the cultural intermediaries who endorse these contexts’ importance and authorize certain items to exist within them. The work of art, then, “is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art.”5 This belief is created through a “social alchemy jointly conducted, with equal conviction and very unequal profits, by all the agents involved in the field of production, i.e. obscure artists and writers as well as ‘consecrated’ masters, critics and publishers as well as authors, enthusiastic clients as well as convinced vendors.”6 A combination of the works NFL Films produces, the discourses it generates, and the discourses surrounding it position the company as part of an artworld—a status that is remarkably rare in sports media, and in sports television more specifically. These productions and discourses encourage viewers to approach NFL Films with what Bourdieu calls an “aesthetic disposition,” or the expectation that watching the company’s programming requires the knowledge and cultivation normally reserved for examining art.7 NFL Films’ engagements with aesthetic traditions, the discourses surrounding the company, and its selective incorporation of positive critical reception into its publicity materials separate the organization from other sports media outlets and, by extension, distinguish the National Football League from competing sports organizations. Furthermore, these practices suggest the image NFL Films creates both for itself and the league is not simply manufactured through its distinctive documentaries, but also the aesthetic traditions they engage and the discourses surrounding them. NFL Films has used aesthetic traditions and discourses to craft its image since the company’s genesis as Blair Motion Pictures. However, the strategies it employs to assert this status are inconsistent. On certain occasions NFL Films aligns its conventions with canonical painters and poets; on others it compares its works to popular Hollywood films. While these techniques do not offer a stable view of what exactly NFL Films imagines “art” to be or precisely where

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it believes its productions fit into this scheme, they are all oriented around a mission to assert the company’s sophistication. The outlet’s cultural aspirations and self-presentation develop a middlebrow sensibility that engages highbrow signifiers without alienating the NFL’s core audience of middle-class consumers.8 Indeed, NFL Films suggests its productions entertain and inform football fans while also delivering knowledge and tastefulness that other—and presumably less refined—sports media do not offer. The subsidiary’s varying, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, strategies indicate that it privileges the contextual process of constructing aesthetic distinction over aligning itself with a particular artistic tradition or a fixed set of criteria. Beyond illuminating NFL Films’ efforts to build a refined image, these practices illustrate the broader discursive process by which certain objects and institutions manufacture and gain cultural value. Moreover, they showcase how that value is marshaled to serve economic ends.

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A Fertile Patch in the Vast Wasteland

Art, according to Bourdieu, is defined relationally. An artwork partly gains its status by being positioned and recognized as different from other, apparently inartistic, objects. Although NFL Films’ documentaries are primarily shown on television, the company often categorically separates its productions from sports TV—and the medium in general—by deferring to and reinforcing discourses that suggest television is aesthetically impoverished. Asserting this distinction was more urgent when NFL Films was establishing its presence on the medium during the 1960s and 1970s. These strategies assisted the company’s efforts to claim its productions’ value on TV despite the fact that live broadcasts of NFL games were, and are still, far more popular and profitable. Television’s traditional status as popular culture rather than “art” is largely a consequence of the medium’s intimate connection to commerce. TV’s incessant references to sponsors and the commercials that periodically interrupt programs serve as constant reminders that these texts are not “art for art’s sake,” but vehicles that aid the circulation of corporate economic capital. In part because of television’s commercialism, arbiters of taste and culture have disregarded and even railed against the medium. In a 1954 essay, the notoriously elitist philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno argued that television is not art because it is produced by businesses interested in maximizing revenue rather than by artists who aspire to lofty aesthetic ideals. “To study television shows in terms of the psychology of the authors,” Adorno chided, “would be tantamount to studying Ford cars in terms of the psychoanalysis of the late Mr. Ford.”9 Television,

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to Adorno, is an authorless, mass-produced, and blindly commercial product that lacks art’s contemplative disinterestedness.10 Extending Adorno’s critique, in a 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairperson Newton Minow famously referred to the medium as a “vast wasteland” of useless content. Minow lamented that although television had tremendous potential to educate and enrich, it typically preferred to showcase vacuous but lucrative programming.11 Similar to Adorno’s critique, Minow ridicules television’s typical commitment to delivering profit-driven content rather than material that serves what he considers to be in the public’s interest. Furthermore, both Adorno and Minow suggest that television’s commercial priorities hinder the medium’s capacity to create legitimate art. NFL Films distances itself from the medium that Adorno and Minow ridicule. In the introduction to the 1979 syndicated special Super Sunday with NFL Films, Steve Sabol sits next to a stationary television camera placed near the sideline of a football field and cites television as “the biggest influence in sports filmmaking.” After establishing this connection between TV and sports filmmaking, he notes that “[f]or us [NFL Films] to just be at a game and film it in the same way television covers it would be to duplicate what you’ve already seen. But even worse, it would be abusing our profession as filmmakers.” Sabol acknowledges that both television broadcasts and NFL Films programs represent football, but he suggests NFL Films is motivated by different aesthetic goals. Along these lines, in the 1967 episode of NFL Action wherein They Call It Pro Football made its television debut, host Pat Summerall introduced the production by mentioning awards it had earned at both the Cortina Film Festival and the Sports Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany. In doing so, he stressed the documentary’s status as an honored part of film culture (as well as NFL Films’ position as the producer of reputable film productions) despite its appearance on a TV show. Moreover—and similar to his emphasis on the care with which NFL Films preserves the league’s history—Steve Sabol continually located his company’s use of film rather than video as an indicator of its aesthetic superiority over television. As he claims in a 1986 interview with American Cinematographer, “When we see film we get a richer feeling, we think high class. When we see [video]tape we think news.”12 Similarly, in a 1987 interview with Focus Magazine, Sabol asserted, “film is more romantic. It’s a tactile kind of medium, with texture and molding. It’s the kind of medium for Casablanca. [Ingrid] Bergman and [Humphrey] Bogart wouldn’t have cut it on videotape. Videotape is flat, it’s for the 11 o’clock news, not Raiders of the Lost Ark.”13 Sports television, as Sabol implied, simply displays sporting events. NFL Films’ 102

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In the introduction to the 1979 syndicated special Super Sunday with NFL Films, Steve Sabol, seated alongside a television camera, explains the differences between sports television and his company’s filmmaking.

documentaries, by contrast, offer refined, contemplative, and carefully crafted cinematic experiences. Echoing Minow’s “vast wasteland” remarks, in a 1977 interview with American Film Magazine Steve Sabol explicitly derided television’s apparent lack of refinement. “The medium is to me a running faucet of raw sewage,” he claimed, “but they [programmers] have the right to show what they want, I guess, no matter how bad.”14 Sabol’s statement suggests that the majority of television is mindless dreck. He did not, however, differentiate NFL Films’ productions from all TV. He repeatedly cited the influence of NBC’s Victory at Sea (1952– 1953), a jingoistic series of compilation films that celebrates the United States Navy’s role in World War II, on his aesthetic sensibilities.15 He claimed that as a child he would spend countless hours watching the frequently rerun program’s mythic treatment of naval warfare. He was particularly enamored by Leonard Graves’s booming narrations and Richard Rodgers’s dramatic scores. When Sabol finally received the opportunity to make his own epic historical films, he used his memories of Victory at Sea as a foundation for NFL Films’ narration, orchestral scores, and martial themes. In addition to noting the program’s stylistic influence on his filmmaking, the connections Sabol made between his company’s productions and Victory at Sea align NFL Films with a tradition of exceptionally artful television. Victory at Sea was one of the first TV series to achieve status as an enriching aesthetic accomplishment. In 1953 it won the prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting, along with thirteen other national awards. Minow even praised it as one of television’s rare moments of aesthetic and cultural triumph—a standard to which the medium should aspire.16 Differentiating NFL Films productions from normal television and connecting them to Victory at Sea position the 103

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company as an extraordinarily artistic media institution whose works happen to appear on an inartistic medium. Aside from the way a text is publicized, Bourdieu asserts that its aesthetic status must be confirmed by those with the authority to make these cultural judgments. He claims that “works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of designating them as such.”17 These cultural intermediaries legitimize objects as artworks and facilitate others’ recognition of them as art. Further, they wield varying degrees of authority depending on their pedigree and the reputation of the institution they represent. Media historian Lynn Spigel asserts that during the 1960s and 1970s the discursive conditions determining what could be identified as legitimate art broadened to include television.18 Sports TV, however, remained firmly a part of popular culture—a status it retains aside from some possible exceptions in the documentary genre. While certain sports television producers, in particular ABC’s Roone Arledge, were increasingly gaining recognition as skillful and technologically innovative storytellers, they were not typically deemed artists. Regardless of sports television’s conventionally lowbrow status, NFL Films productions were received as extraordinarily artistic. For example, in 1968 the Los Angeles Times’ Don Page named NFL Action “one of the most artistically filmed series on television, whether it be sports, drama or anything.”19 NFL Films’ representations even received complaints from critics who found them too artistic. The Los Angeles Times’ Bob Oates opined that NFL Films’ highlight of the 1971 Super Bowl “overvalue[d] art at some cost to content” and claimed the production was “so much the art film” that it sacrificed straightforward explanation of critical moments in favor of treating the contest cinematically.20 While Page and Oates offer very different evaluations of NFL Films’ practices, they each find the company’s “artistic” conventions to be a distinguishing characteristic. Similar to Page’s and Oates’s assessments, but with far different implications in terms of the value it bestows upon NFL Films, avant-garde filmmaker and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas celebrated the company in a 1967 edition of his “Movie Journal” column. Mekas, who is sometimes referred to as the “Godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” had served as an intermediary between New Yorkers and the underground film scene since the 1950s. “I am spending more time these days watching the National Football League film series,” Mekas noted. “It is not a great secret that sport filming has really paved the way to the cinema vérité techniques. You can see some of the fastest film thinking in sport coverage.”21 Just as important as Mekas’s endorsement of NFL Films’

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innovative aesthetic practices was his mentioning of the company in the Village Voice—an arts-oriented alternative newspaper. Furthermore, Mekas’s column discusses NFL Films alongside allusions to the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard. In doing so, the piece implies that NFL Films productions exist within the same aesthetic world inhabited by Brakhage and Godard—a status that is inconceivable for typical sports television. In 1972 the Washington Post’s Nicholas von Hoffman praised NFL Films by asserting that its productions ought to be preserved and honored like any other artworks. As he writes, “[u]nless you’re a football fan you probably haven’t heard of NFL Films. Their work is played mostly on television or shown to those manly-malesy football hero worship clubs. Consequently, the efforts of this remarkable outfit go unnoticed when they should get a showing at the American Film Institute in Washington or the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”22 Just two months later, the American Film Institute (AFI) actually held a two-week sports film exposition that programmed NFL Films productions alongside Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), Francesco Rosi’s The Moment of Truth (1965), and several Drew Associates documentaries.23 Part of the AFI exposition’s purpose was to locate sports film as a legitimate film genre and to establish a canon of its finest works. The festival placed NFL Films at the forefront of this burgeoning tradition. Several of the films it selected, including Olympia and The Moment of Truth, are still considered canonical within the sports film genre in particular and the broader context of cinema history. Moreover, and perhaps more important given the company’s efforts to establish itself as aesthetically superior to typical sports television, NFL Films productions’ inclusion in this event situates them as unequivocal parts of the film tradition that are more akin to Riefenstahl’s classic film of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games (despite the obvious disadvantages of being associated with this infamous Nazi-funded production) and Rosi’s visceral meditation on bullfighting than to the programming that surrounds them on TV. The AFI exposition indicates that by 1972—less than a decade after its programs began to appear on American television—NFL Films was widely, and even officially, recognized as an honored part of film culture. In combination with the discourses surrounding it, NFL Films casts its productions as outstanding moments of aesthetic accomplishment within the vast wasteland of television—and the even more barren context of sports television. This aesthetic and discursive positioning illustrates the process by which certain programs gain status as exemplars of “quality TV” through cultivating a filmic identity.24 It also suggests that sports TV—a genre not typically mentioned

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in critical or academic discussions of quality television—could be artistic if it adopted certain aesthetic practices and gained the proper endorsements. However, NFL Films’ constructed status as part of an artworld is dependent on sports television’s traditional reputation as inartistic. It reinforces television’s lowbrow status in order to build prestige. This is not to say that NFL Films discourages viewers from watching live television broadcasts of football—far from it. In fact, the company twice produced films entitled How to Watch Pro Football (1965, 1980) that use graphics and interviews with NFL coaches to teach viewers how to understand the televised game. Rather, the discourses surrounding NFL Films—both those the company generates and those created by cultural intermediaries—suggest viewers who consume its productions, whether they know it or even care, participate in a uniquely refined televisual experience that elevates their appreciation for the gridiron game’s intricacies and beauty.

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From Disney to Duchamp

Beyond differentiating the company from television, NFL Films builds distinction by associating with a variety of influential aesthetic traditions. Bourdieu defines this power as “symbolic capital,” or “economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby recognized, hence legitimate, a credit which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees economic profits.”25 While aesthetic value is not economic per se, it creates social authority that can transfer into economic capital. Sabol’s description of They Call It Pro Football as “the Citizen Kane of sports movies,” for example, abstracts the documentary from the realm of sports media and places it into the artworld that Orson Welles’s classic film occupies. Instead of simply reaching out to cultural elites—many of whom may scoff at both pro football and television—NFL Films engages aesthetic traditions in order to offer football fans who may not be familiar with or even care about works like Citizen Kane a different kind of sports media experience. Steve Sabol uses Walt Disney’s famous platitude “There is a little lowbrow in every highbrow, but there’s no highbrow in a lowbrow” to describe the strategy through which NFL Films productions entertain mainstream audiences while cultivating an aura of distinction.26 Building upon Disney’s maxim, NFL Films fashions a middlebrow genre of sports media. Its productions strive to be artistic enough to attract those who might otherwise dismiss the combination of football’s masculine brutality and TV’s commercialized vulgarities while offering those primarily interested in watching the games a more dramatic and artistic brand of mediated football.

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“[Auguste] Rodin was one of my favorite sculptors,” Steve Sabol noted in an interview with the trade magazine American Cinematographer. “He always said that his work didn’t convey any ideas, just emotions. Sometimes I think that’s what we do. Football is too visceral to be intellectualized.”27 Along similar lines, Sabol claimed, “[m]y grandfather in the overcoat business used to say, ‘You make for the masses and eat with the classes.’ I make films for myself. I think of myself as a common schlump home watching the game with beer and pretzels. So if I enjoy it and I’m the average fan, then I figure everybody’ll enjoy it.”28 He situated NFL Films productions as artworks informed by and intimately familiar with Rodin’s sculptures while disavowing the snobbery commonly associated with the artworld Rodin inhabits. Bob Ryan asserts that Steve Sabol and the company’s producers are voracious cinephiles who intently monitor film culture to see what storytelling tricks they might discover and borrow.29 NFL Films productions are littered with implicit and direct references to a range of well-known American and international films, as well as sporadic allusions to canonical literature and art. As Bourdieu writes, “an art which ever increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent . . . but to the universe of past and present works of art.”30 NFL Films’ homages to and evocations of different artworks do not necessarily equate its productions to the texts they reference; however, they suggest the company is conversant with and enmeshed in aesthetic traditions. NFL Films’ textual references to film culture range from subtle evocations to wholesale parodies. For instance, Strange but True Football Stories (1987), a production hosted by Vincent Price that recounts some of the league’s most bizarre moments in a macabre tone, uses an expressionist set that mimics Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).31 Similar to Caligari, Strange but True’s set features angular doorways lit to cast jagged shadows. Though the reference is subtle and never explicitly announced, Steve Seidman, the film’s lead producer, admits that he very consciously used Wiene’s film to construct Strange but True’s mysterious look and, in turn, used Strange but True to pay homage to Wiene’s classic film.32 Dave Plaut makes a similarly understated reference to Citizen Kane in the Seattle Seahawks’ 1985 highlight film, Rollercoaster Ride. Seattle head coach Chuck Knox insisted that his team’s yearly highlight films recognize each of the Seahawks’ assistant coaches—a difficult challenge for producers tasked with outlining an entire season in only thirty minutes. To satisfy Knox’s request, Plaut used a trick inspired by one of Citizen Kane’s most famous sequences. During an early moment in Citizen Kane when Charles Foster Kane is beginning

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to build his newspaper empire, the protagonist peers at a photograph of a rival newspaper’s well-respected staff and expresses a desire someday to have writers of that caliber at his own paper. The camera then zooms in on the photograph and cuts to a shot, six years later, which features the same writers in an identical pose. This time, however, they are posing for a picture to advertise Kane’s paper: he had hired them all away. Welles used the photograph to showcase Kane’s rapid rise to prominence. Plaut did something similar to feature all of the Seahawks coaches in his highlight film. First, he filmed the team photographer taking a picture of the entire coaching staff before a game. He then developed the photo and placed it on the wall of a fictional coach’s office. His highlight film displays a coach (played by an actor) in a dark office studying game film and reflecting on how the Seahawks built their gritty team. It cuts to a point-of-view shot of the coaching staff photograph hanging on the wall and then, like Citizen Kane, cuts again to the footage Plaut took of the staff posing for the picture. Similar to Seidman’s set design, Plaut uses Welles’s sequence to help accomplish his narrative goals and to pay tribute to the film tradition. Though these subtle references will likely only be ascertained by those intimately familiar with Hollywood and European film, they evidence NFL Films’ efforts to engage these traditions and display its cultural literacy. Along different lines, The Championship Chase (1974) uses Gertrude Stein’s poetry to explain the 1974 New England Patriots’ inability to make the playoffs despite the team’s tremendous promise. The film outlines a key turnover that caused the Patriots’ elimination from playoff contention. To illustrate the Patriots’ misfortune, Facenda intones, “Gertrude Stein would have said, ‘Instead of going the way they were going, they went back the way they had come.’” On one level, the line serves a useful narrative function by explaining the Patriots’ inability to finish the season on a strong note. Directly mentioning Gertrude Stein, however, does not illuminate the sequence. Given the line’s status as an evocation of Stein’s poetic style rather than a direct quotation from her work, the film’s reference to her is superfluous at best. While explicitly referencing Stein is not necessary for The Championship Chase’s narrative, it signals the company’s familiarity with modern literature. Indeed, previous knowledge of Stein’s work is not necessary to ascertain NFL Films’ reference to it. Viewers need only be familiar with her name and status in order to acknowledge NFL Films’ aesthetic positioning. Aside from the momentary references to aesthetic traditions that pervade NFL Films’ catalogue, several of the company’s texts parody these traditions. These parodies both demonstrate NFL Films’ aesthetic literacy and suggest

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NFL Follies Go Hollywood (1983) parodies the MGM Company’s iconic trademark.

the company is not wholly taken in by—and even pokes fun at—high culture. Furthermore, NFL Films’ parodies often include references to a mixture of popular and consecrated works, suggesting the company engages a range of traditions without taking any of them too seriously and is even willing to parody its own recognizable practices and their characteristic earnestness. For example, Follies Go Hollywood (1983) presents a collection of humorous vignettes done in the style of popular film trailers.33 The film even opens with a parody of MGM Studios’ roaring lion trademark by presenting a closeup of a curly-locked and mustachioed football player framed by film. The production itself features follies done in the style of trailers for different film genres. “Opening Day” mimics a horror film trailer and “Football Beach Frolic” presents a series of blunders done in the style of a 1960s “beach party” film. NFL Follies Go Hollywood’s more direct film parodies include “The Mediocre Eleven,” a western-themed takeoff on The Magnificent Seven (1960), and “Dial M for Moron,” which evokes Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954). The Football Follies (1968), NFL Films’ first follies film, opens with a fullscreen image of Johnny Unitas. Directly after the titles emerge, a thick black mustache is drawn on Unitas’s face backed by a squeaking comic sound effect. Placing a mustache on Unitas’s face embodies the follies’ overall function—to humanize the players NFL Films typically deifies. Additionally, the mustache is nearly identical to the one Marcel Duchamp appended to a print of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in his famous “readymade” work, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919). To be sure, Duchamp’s Dadaist aesthetic project is not unlike NFL Films follies’ lampooning of the league and its players. The introductory sequence places

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The title card to The Football Follies (1968) evokes Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).

NFL Films’ humorous treatment of the NFL into dialogue with Duchamp’s tongue-in-cheek, but decidedly highbrow, artistic practices. In 1992 and 1993 NFL Films simultaneously engaged popular and high cultural aesthetic traditions in two segments of This is the NFL—a weekly syndicated magazine program that adopted the original highlight series’ title and eventually morphed into NFL Films Presents—called “Highlights for Highbrows.” The parodies, as Steve Sabol explained in his introductory statements to the programs, imagine what would happen if famous authors and filmmakers made films about the National Football League. A graphic featured in the segments’ introductions and after commercial breaks emphasizes its unique combination of football and the arts, the lowbrow and the highbrow, by situating a bottle of wine with “The is the NFL” on its label in front of a modified film poster of Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). While Cocteau’s original film poster features a crude drawing of Orpheus’s profile accompanied by a lyre, NFL Films’ version of it displays a similar image of Orpheus with a football. The episodes feature parodies that examine facets of the NFL through the distinct styles of Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Ernest Hemingway, Mickey Spillane, Danielle Steele, Dr. Seuss, and a host of others. “Rush-a-Man,” for instance, uses the look and story of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) to examine a controversial play that caused the Dallas Cowboys to lose the 1966 NFL Championship game. The segment is shot in black-and-white, features narration in Japanese with English subtitles, and has musical accompaniment comparable to the soundtrack Kurosawa used. Like Rashomon’s examination of a woman’s rape from varying sources, “Rush-a-

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The 1992 This is the NFL segment “Highlights for Highbrows” humorously displays NFL Films’ engagement with a range of aesthetic traditions.

Man” recounts the play from three contradictory perspectives. Using a similar method, “A Farewell to My Arm” investigates the trials and tribulations of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham in a form that evokes Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). The segment is narrated with a terse script reminiscent of Hemingway’s prose and, in a manner that loosely reflects the ups and downs that befall A Farewell to Arms’ protagonist, examines how Cunningham had periodically fallen into and out of Philadelphia fans’ favor over the course of his career. The program’s references to more popular works include parodies of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957), Danielle Steele’s romance novels, and Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972). “The Joy of Sacks” uses the sensuous, instructional style of The Joy of Sex to discuss the NFL’s defensive players. It features a smooth, sexualized narration riddled with innuendo and accompanied by pencil drawings of various football “positions” similar to those in Comfort’s book. Toward the segment’s beginning the narrator suggestively announces, “Many coaches are preoccupied with the size of a pass rusher. Size is a dominant signal, much like a deer’s antlers. The average defensive lineman stands six feet five inches and weighs 275 pounds. But while large pass rushers can be spectacular to watch, it has consistently been proven that smaller ones can work equally well from various positions.” Though “Highlights for Highbrows” is marked in name as “highbrow,” the range of texts it references suggests that NFL Films reaches out to a variety of taste cultures—from those familiar with Japanese film to those interested in mainstream thrillers, romance novels, and guides to sexual enrichment. Indeed, whether or not viewers are acquainted with Eisenstein, Kurosawa, or even Dr.

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Seuss, “Highlights for Highbrows”’ defamiliarizing presentation of football functions similar to the company’s standard follies films. Aside from its textual references, the discourses NFL Films produces often draw links between its practices and well-known artworks and artists. Most of these discourses derive from interviews with Steve Sabol, who would cite a litany of Hollywood and international films to articulate NFL Films’ conventions. To elucidate the company’s frequent close-ups on hands and slow-motion shots of sweat dripping from players’ helmets that NFL Films productions often feature, Sabol relied on a scene from King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) where Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones are climbing up a mountainside. The scene features close-up shots of sweat dripping from their faces and of their bloodied fingers digging into the dirt. “I thought this would be a great way to show pro football, said Sabol. “The hands caked with mud, the eyes through the facemask. What a way to convey the passion, rather than a narrator saying ‘both teams were fired up.’”34 Along these lines, Sabol used Riefenstahl’s camera work in Olympia (1938) to explicate NFL Films’ cinematography; referenced a scene in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and A Woman (1966) to discuss the company’s combination of editing and music; and deferred to Alfred Hitchcock’s statement that “drama is life with the dull parts cut out” to outline the organization’s selective representational practices.35 In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer Sabol even used the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), wherein the film’s befuddled protagonist observes and eventually participates in a mimed tennis match, to make sense of (though not very clearly) how NFL Films’ productions simultaneously document professional football games and construct dramatized reinterpretations of them.36 Sabol used literature and visual art to similar ends, piling aesthetic references upon each other to explain NFL Films’ conventions and to advertise the company’s engagement with aesthetic traditions. When asked what separates NFL Films productions from regular television representations of the same games, Sabol asserted, “Nobody would look at Vermeer and Cezanne’s paintings of bowls of fruit and say these paintings are alike because they’re bowls of fruit. It’s not that they’re bowls of fruit, it’s how they’re depicted. Like that poem from Wallace Stevens [“The Blue Guitar”] when he says, ‘You have a blue guitar you do not play things as they are. The man replied, “Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.”’”37 Similarly, Sabol rationalized NFL Films programs’ narrative appeal by referring to their “Shakespearean arc”; referenced Paul Cezanne’s comment that “all art is selected detail” to explicate NFL Films’ reliance on close-ups and slow motion; deferred to Claude Monet’s two hundred depictions of the same lily pond to explain how he found enjoyment

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filming football games after decades in the business; evoked Henri Matisse’s claim that “the importance of an artist is bringing new signs into language” to promote NFL Films’ various innovations; and described his company’s montage editing as Cubistic.38 To solidify its position as part of an artworld, NFL Films, like many other companies, incorporates the positive critical reception it receives into its publicity. For instance, the company’s website, which was taken over by NFL.com in 2010 and transformed into a blog, mentioned the scores of Emmy Awards NFL Films has gathered over the years and boasted that “no other organization has won more Emmys in as many categories as NFL Films”—a statement that aligns the company with television but, like Sabol’s references to Victory at Sea, suggests its productions are exceptionally refined. Prior to its redesign, the website also contained a section entitled “The Buzz” that displayed the praise NFL Films received from well-known publications, filmmakers, and members of the sports community. In addition to highlighting the acclaim NFL Films garnered, the site was careful to mention the cultural pedigree of the sources that praised it. It captioned Oliver Stone, for instance, as an “Academy Award Winning Director” rather than merely a filmmaker.39 Notably, NFL Films also sometimes invents this reception. For instance, Sabol claimed that American filmmaker Sam Peckinpah cited the company’s use of slow motion as an influence on the famous final shootout in his western The Wild Bunch (1969) in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.40 While The Wild Bunch’s final scene resembles NFL Films’ use of slow motion and was made well after the company’s productions emerged on American television, Peckinpah actually did not mention NFL Films in this publication, and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever named the company as an influence—or was even familiar with it. Nevertheless, Sabol’s references to the filmmaker’s apparent compliment situate NFL Films as sophisticated enough to attract attention from a respected international publication like Cahiers du Cinéma and to influence a classic moment in American cinema. NFL Films most explicitly asserts its contributions to aesthetic traditions with Stylists and Storytellers (1992), a documentary that examines the organization’s place in American popular culture. NFL Films produced Stylists and Storytellers for a celebration of its thirtieth anniversary held at the Philadelphia Film Festival.41 The film uses interviews with journalists, scholars, filmmakers, and members of the sports industry to argue that NFL Films creates unique and sophisticated texts that are more similar to Hollywood cinema than typical sports media. Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie affectionately claims that “[p]eople grow up with Disney, they grow up with Spielberg, they grow up with

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NFL Films.” Along these lines, the film critic Leonard Maltin praises the company’s textual references to Hollywood cinema; film historian and critic David Thompson locates NFL Films productions’ masculine themes as an outgrowth of the Hollywood western; and filmmaker John Frankenheimer—who commissioned NFL Films to produce B-roll for his football-themed thriller Black Sunday (1977)—commends the company’s unique ability to move audiences emotionally. Other experts laud NFL Films’ technical practices: cinematographer and director Haskell Wexler celebrates the company’s camera work; former Fox Sports president David Hill extols its ability to offer a more dramatic rendering of football than telecasts; and film editor Don Zimmerman compliments its productions’ coordination of editing and music. Like NFL Films’ other productions and the discourses it generates, Stylists and Storytellers situates the company as a respected and undisputed part of an artworld that engages, contributes to, and influences both highbrow and popular aesthetic traditions. Bourdieu maintains that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make.”42 NFL Films’ incessant, wide-ranging, often unnecessary, sometimes odd, and occasionally untrue cultural references and promotional practices engage these classifications. In doing so, they differentiate the company from other sports media and situate its productions as equipment through which a wide swath of viewers can assert and craft their cultural identities. Specifically, NFL Films has created a middlebrow culture of sports media that evokes, illuminates, and builds upon highbrow taste cultures while serving as a more accessible mass cultural “counterpractice” that eschews, and even pokes fun at and resists, their elitism.43

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The Picassos of Pigskin

Reinforcing its efforts to claim status as a site that produces art, NFL Films situates Ed and Steve Sabol as artistic visionaries. As Michel Foucault argues, texts produced by those recognized as artists become artworks, quite simply, by virtue of their derivation from an artistic source.44 Bourdieu even claims that belief in the artistic vision of a single, exceptional creator “is the ultimate basis of belief in the value of a work of art.”45 He notes that a “charismatic ideology” of authorship casts authors as inspired geniuses in part by obscuring the networks of discourse and power that create them and benefit from their influence.46 Like the artwork, an author’s status is constituted through a discursive web that consists of the aesthetic traditions they engage, the discourses they generate, and the cultural intermediaries that endorse them.

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To emphasize its development from an original artistic vision, NFL Films’ productions and publicity materials consistently reference the company’s formation as Ed Sabol’s humble independent outfit. They emphasize Big Ed’s unusual desire to treat football cinematically and his ambitious pursuit of this creative goal despite a lack of formal training. For instance, Steve Sabol introduced a 2007 DVD re-release of early NFL Films productions by recounting the company’s founding: “More than forty years ago my father, Ed Sabol, had a vision. It began with an 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera and a love of football and grew into what we know today as NFL Films. . . . This was my father’s vision, now it is football history.” Similar to many popular artistic and entrepreneurial biographies, Ed Sabol is presented as possessing a unique dream and the resourcefulness necessary to materialize it. Indeed, the company narrative mirrors the individualistic storylines NFL Films uses to celebrate so many of the league’s coaches and players. Commentary on NFL Films also often reproduces its creation myth and emphasizes the Sabols’ uncommonly artistic sensibilities and entrepreneurial foresight. In a 1967 Sports Illustrated feature Tom Brody refers to Ed Sabol as the “C.B. DeMille of the Pros” and lauds his ability to actualize his vision despite being an amateur filmmaker and league outsider when he began his project.47 The article’s title page reinforces Sabol’s position as an individual creator and the apparent semblance between him and DeMille by featuring various images of a solitary, hardworking Sabol framed inside of filmstrips. A 1976 Washington Post article echoes Brody’s discussion by claiming that “Ed Sabol simply thought about the ways the game could be moved to film that had never been tried before. And he had the guts to try them—despite the criticism from some segments of the sports press, when everything was at stake in his daring to be different.”48 In both cases, critics locate Ed Sabol as the single point from which NFL Films began; he is an embodiment of the American Dream narrative with the pluck and creativity necessary to realize his goal. Critics position Steve Sabol as the artist who developed his father’s vision by describing him as the “Homer of the NFL,” “the Shakespeare of sports films,” the “Picasso of Pigskin,” and even “the most underrated filmmaker on the scene today.”49 “When Sabol talks about film,” writes sports columnist Bill Fleischman, “he sounds like an artist speaking fondly of language.”50 Perhaps the most apt characterization of Sabol as an artist whose creativity guides the company’s practices is Steve Seidman’s description of him as “NFL Films’ Walt Disney.”51 Indeed, Sabol himself once claimed to “want to be to sports what Walt Disney was to cartoons.”52 These characterizations suggest all of the company’s productions can be traced back to Sabol—whether or not he had a direct hand in producing

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them. To reinforce Sabol’s identity as a creative leader, the company’s promotional materials typically feature images of him in front of the shelves of Emmy Awards NFL Films collected over the years. Sabol’s role as host of several NFL Films programs even more directly emphasized his position as the company’s guiding artistic force. Like Walt Disney in Walt Disney Presents and Alfred Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Sabol’s dual function as host and producer provided NFL Films with a concrete artistic identity that is uncommon in sports media. In fact, NFL Films Presents, which Sabol hosted until he fell ill in 2011, evokes Disney’s and Hitchcock’s programs. NFL Films even retitled the show Steve Sabol’s NFL Films Presents after he stopped hosting to honor its figurehead and to stress the program’s derivation from his distinctive aesthetic. To solidify his position as NFL Films’ artistic leader, Steve Sabol de-emphasized the creative contributions that John Facenda—the company’s most iconic member aside from him and his father—made to the organization. While Sabol never diminished Facenda’s distinctive talent, he did maintain that the Philadelphia news anchor “was just a voice” who “had no interest at all in football.”53 “I just developed a style of writing that really fit into the resonance of his voice and the balance and rhythm of his voice and I could imitate him perfectly when I was writing a script,” Sabol explained. “[Facenda] never even saw the film. He just read the script and we fit the script to the film.”54 While Sabol always lauded Facenda’s vocal flair, he made it abundantly clear that the narrator was not responsible for developing the company’s similarly unique writing style. For instance, he noted that Facenda—an opera fan—would write cues like “profundo” and “allegro” in the margins of scripts as reminders of how to read certain passages. Aside from characterizing Facenda’s process, the statement emphasizes the famous narrator’s principal role as a performer rather than an author.55 Sabol suggested that his writing style effectively showcased and even helped Facenda to realize his vocal potential. To complement his role as NFL Films’ artistic figurehead—and expanding upon his earlier self-mythologizing as the “Fearless Tot from Possum Trot”— Steve Sabol often emphasized his casual and formal training in art history. During the 1950s and 1960s his mother Audrey served as the head of Philadelphia’s Art Alliance. He recalled artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha, and Robert Rauschenberg visiting his home on a regular basis and noted that some of their now-classic works were even temporarily displayed around his childhood home.56 He also claimed that this early exposure to the art world, particularly the burgeoning Pop Art movement, helped him to develop his unique appreciation for the intersections between high and popular cultures that he put into practice with NFL Films.

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Sabol further developed his understanding of aesthetic traditions during his undergraduate education at Colorado College, where he majored in Art History and composed a thesis on Joseph Cornell’s assemblages. Sabol’s frequent references to how his education informed his artistic development exemplify what Bourdieu calls “cultural transmission”; how symbolic capital from one source transfers to something or someone associated with it.57 Sabol’s expertise was cultivated and legitimized through his personal experiences with nowcanonical artists, upbringing in a learned atmosphere, and academic training. As this symbolic capital was transmitted to Sabol through his family ties and schooling, he presumably transferred it to his employees at NFL Films and even to those who consume the company’s productions. In the late 2000s, Sabol began to market himself as a visual artist as well as a filmmaker. His works are mostly collages that resemble the Pop Art with which he grew up and boxes that evoke the Cornell assemblages he studied in college. One collage entitled Cosell and Hemingway Met Twice, Neither Being Impressed features images of Howard Cosell and Ernest Hemingway’s faces on opposite ends of a rectangular frame. He combined their faces with cutout images of various football players, Muhammad Ali, bullfighters, and other colorful miscellany that relate to each figure’s public image. Along slightly different lines, the kitsch-inspired collage Dutch Masters includes images of Los Angeles Rams quarterback Norm Van Brocklin, Philadelphia Eagles running back Steve Van

Steve Sabol, Cosell and Hemingway Met Twice, Neither Being Impressed (2007). Courtesy of the Steve Sabol Foundation

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Steve Sabol, Dutch Masters (1995). Courtesy of the Steve Sabol Foundation

Buren, and Vincent Van Gogh atop a swirling yellow and blue background that evokes Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Cypresses and Starry Night.58 Sabol’s collages and boxes have been included in several art exhibits around the United States, and in 2008 he published a selection of them in a promotional book entitled The Guts and Glory of Football.59 The book’s first page reinforces Sabol’s engagement with aesthetic traditions and outlines his passion for the intersections among art, popular culture, and football. “Norman Mailer remarked that all artists tend to be governed by a ruling passion,” Sabol wrote. “I regard myself as lucky to have been able to discover mine.”60 Sabol emphasized his authorial vision on the book’s back dust jacket with an artistic statement that reiterates his unusually creative understanding of and engagement with football. The statement is situated below a photograph of him standing proudly in front of a wall of Emmy Awards:

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The first time I put on a football uniform I was in the 4th grade. I can still remember the smell of my shoulder pads, the sound my cleats made on the concrete path to the field and the impact of my first tackle. Football appealed to me in an almost mythic way. It was about the uniform you put on that turned you into a warrior. It was about being on a team, being part of something larger than yourself. I loved the competition; but more than the outcome, it was the struggle, the striving, the story of the contest that interested me. I have spent my entire life documenting and thinking about the sport of football. It’s a theater of grand passions and bold gestures. As I have grown older I now see it as a prism through which to interpret our culture and history.

Sabol indicated that he does not simply depict football, but relates to and engages with the sport in a uniquely inspired manner. Moreover, he suggested that NFL Films productions are a direct outgrowth of his singular vision. Extending his artistic persona beyond the act of personally manufacturing artworks, Sabol positioned himself as an arts-minded administrator who fosters a creative environment for his staff. Once Sabol finds suitable employees, he claimed to train them in the aesthetic traditions that inform his filmmaking. “When we have people come in for the first time to work here,” he explained, “I tell them to read Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Rudyard Kipling. All those guys communicate to the masses, yet still have a certain intellectual richness. . . . Then I have them read Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway because of a certain brevity they have in expressing themselves.”61 Sabol suggested that he transmitted his cultural knowledge to his staff, and he positioned NFL Films as a continuation of the middlebrow storytelling tradition that writers like Stevenson and Poe represent. Former NFL Films producer Jonathan Hock, who went on to form his own independent production company—Hock Films—and to direct several awardwinning sports documentaries, recalls that when he applied to work at NFL Films in 1987, Bob Ryan asked him to submit a writing sample rather than display any evidence of film training. Hock, who had no filmmaking experience to share, composed a creative nonfiction essay about listening to NFL games on Armed Forces Radio while he was a homesick college student studying abroad in Europe. Steve Sabol hired Hock based solely on the promise his writing sample displayed.62 Similarly, in 1969 Ed Sabol hired Phil Tuckett—a former San Diego Chargers receiver without a filmmaking background—based on an article he published in SPORT magazine about his experience playing on the Chargers’ practice squad. Like Hock and Tuckett, few NFL Films producers hired during the company’s early years attended film school. However, they possess a deep familiarity with

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the humanities. Hock earned a bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Pennsylvania, and Bob Ryan earned a master’s in Journalism from Penn’s Annenberg School; Dave Plaut studied Film at Northwestern University; Tuckett studied English Literature at Weber State University; and Steve Seidman has a PhD in Film Studies from UCLA and is the author of two well-regarded scholarly studies, The Film Career of Billy Wilder (1977) and Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (1981). These NFL Films producers are film buffs, intellectuals, and football fans who incorporate their aesthetic knowledge into their work at the subsidiary. Further, they praise Steve Sabol’s commitment to aesthetic traditions and willingness to let his staff indulge their sometimes idiosyncratic creative interests. In reference to his Emmy Award–winning work on “Highlights for Highbrows,” Seidman explains that making a quirky segment like this would not have been possible if not for Sabol’s willingness to support these unorthodox productions.63 Hock, who worked for another sports media production company before joining NFL Films, echoes Seidman’s assertion by noting that the creative environment Sabol fosters separates NFL Films from most sports media outlets, which are guided entirely by commercial imperatives.64 To encourage his staff ’s artistic growth Sabol claimed to give an annual “spectacular failure award” of a thousand dollars to the employee who took the greatest artistic risk that didn’t work out.65 As well as an artist, then, Sabol cultivated an image as an open-minded administrator who privileged creative expression over efficient production, sought employees schooled in aesthetic traditions, and encouraged—or at least allowed—his staff to engage those traditions in their work at NFL Films.

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A Consecrated Space

While NFL Films fosters a refined image by positioning Sabol as an artist, it creates an artistic space with the interior design of its Mount Laurel, New Jersey, headquarters. From the outside, the nondescript building tucked away in a suburban office park seems anything but a place devoted to producing and celebrating art. Inside, however, the building’s décor reminds visitors that NFL Films is an honored and uncommonly inspired site of sports media—and cultural— production. The headquarters’ appearance employs a variety of practices to advertise NFL Films’ status, from calling attention to its distinction within television to placing it in dialogue with film and art history. For instance, large shelves filled with Emmy Awards are placed just inside the building’s main entrance, directly across from the reception desk. The Emmys ensure that everyone

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who enters this space—from famous actors commissioned to narrate a segment of America’s Game to plumbers hired to fix a drain leak—will be confronted with testaments to the company’s renown. The headquarters’ interior walls are lined with photographs, paintings, and frame enlargements from NFL Films footage of professional football’s most iconic moments. Amidst these images of the league’s past are dozens of Hollywood football movie posters, most of which are from a spate of fictional, and now largely forgotten, “pigskin” football films made between the 1930s and 1960s.66 In one corner of the building’s labyrinthine halls is a framed 1942 issue of the long-defunct hobby and trade magazine Home Movies, the cover of which features a young boy surreptitiously watching a football game through a knothole in a fence. In another section of the museum-like building, surrounded by dozens of vintage football board games and other memorabilia, is one of the 16mm cameras Blair Motion Pictures used to film Pro Football’s Longest Day. The combination of football film artifacts, images of the league’s past, and traces of NFL Films’ heritage situates the company as an authority on the relationship between film and football in American culture—a status that has strengthened since the Pro Football Hall of Fame entrusted the subsidiary with its film holdings. Though the thematic parallels are obvious, NFL Films does not make aesthetic comparisons between its productions and the football movies it commemorates on its walls—most of which are formulaic “B” movies typically considered insignificant within the film tradition. Rather, the building’s extravagant interior design casts NFL Films as a cultural intermediary that remembers and preserves this relatively obscure facet of cinema history. The headquarters’ collection and arrangement of these materials position NFL Films as an institution that, like a museum, has the cultural power to decide which objects should be remembered and appreciated. Steve Sabol’s collages and boxes are interspersed with the film posters and images of the league. His works’ combinations of football, popular culture, and high culture expand upon the connections between the sport and film that the building’s other décor articulates. If the relationship between film culture and football is implied by the mixture of movie posters and images of the league, Sabol’s artworks bring these elements into concrete dialogue. More important, the placement of Sabol’s collages and boxes amid the headquarters’ pastiche of football and cinema history marks NFL Films’ headquarters as his aesthetic domain and positions him as the visionary who developed the associations between sport, pop culture, and high culture upon which NFL Films productions build. The headquarters’ thematic design shifts abruptly in the hallways outside of its shooting stages and in the “green room” where programs’ hosts and guests

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prepare to appear on camera. Surprisingly, there are no references to football in these spaces. All of the posters and photos outside of the shooting stages are from fictional films, such as Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), and Sergio Leone’s The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Most of the images on display in the green room are stills and headshots of famous film stars like Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, and Clint Eastwood. The transition from the amalgam of football, popular culture, and Steve Sabol’s art that pervades most of NFL Films’ headquarters to an exclusive focus on classic films and manly movie stars reminds and reassures the programs’ talent and production staff—the only people who typically enter these spaces—that they are at a unique sports media production facility steeped in established aesthetic traditions. Although the shooting stage is a site of television production, the posters position this space as part of the film tradition. NFL Films’ headquarters thus complements the company’s overall engagement with aesthetic traditions and reinforces Steve Sabol’s artistic status. It is a physical site that builds the company’s prestige by stressing its relationship to cinema history and role as an institution with an interest in vocalizing and preserving the intersections between football and film culture. In doing this, it reminds those who enter this space—from staff to casual visitors—that NFL Films is guided by aesthetic imperatives. While the discourses that cite NFL Films as “Hollywood on the Delaware” and “the last great Hollywood studio” emphasize the company’s similarities to the American film tradition, the organization’s headquarters physically marks it as invested in and even continuing the history of cinema—from low-budget 1930s pigskin movies to classics like 8½—and presents Steve Sabol as the creative force that develops these relationships. “We’re Just Passionate Observers of a Sport We All Love”

To separate itself further from its competition, NFL Films downplays its relationship to the National Football League’s corporate economic operations. According to Bourdieu, an artwork’s status as “art for art’s sake” rather than a commercial product amplifies its distinction. Likewise, artists gain greater symbolic capital based on the distance they assert between their artistic prerogatives and the marketplace. The most respected and legitimate artists would presumably produce their art regardless of whether it yields revenue. As Bour-

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dieu claims, “The literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness.”67 In this sense, art is produced in an “economic world reversed” where works less interested in generating economic capital possess more symbolic power.68 NFL Films’ productions have understandably been critiqued as corporate propaganda that strategically ignores the league’s seedier side. Steve Sabol never denied NFL Films’ congratulatory tendencies. However, he defended the company’s approach by arguing that he and his fellow filmmakers are artists fueled by their genuine love of the game’s beauty. As such, they are simply not inspired by the league’s scandals. “I’ve never considered myself a journalist,” Sabol said, “and I never will. To me, we’re storytellers and advocates. I mean, where would Paul Revere be without Longfellow’s poems? Every great adventure needs its storyteller, and that’s what we are. . . . We’re romanticists.”69 While critics may find NFL Films’ productions overly supportive of the league they advertise, Sabol averred that his company serves a higher aesthetic mission. NFL Films’ romanticism, he suggested, is first and foremost an expression of his own and his staff ’s lifelong emotional attachment to professional football rather than a consequence of the company’s subordination to the NFL’s bottom line. The distance NFL Films asserts between its practices and advertising also works to amplify its productions’ symbolic value. Sabol maintained that NFL Films is guided by an autonomous artistic vision that just so happens to glorify the league. According to this logic, the work it produces—despite the commercial ends it ultimately serves—is art for art’s sake. “We never thought of ourselves as packagers or promoters,” Sabol claimed. “We were just a bunch of young guys who loved pro football and loved to make movies.”70 Indeed, Sabol declared that he would create sentimental football films whether or not it benefitted the NFL. He unsurprisingly made his argument by deferring to aesthetic traditions: “Even if I wasn’t part of the league, I wouldn’t make films like that [journalistic exposés]. They say that films are a reflection of the producer’s feelings or perspective, and I love football. If you were a king and you wanted a painting called ‘The Horrors of War,’ you would hire Goya and he would paint these horrible, dismembered people. But if you wanted a beautiful painting of your knights, you might go to Rembrandt.”71 NFL Films productions’ carefully crafted status as creative works produced by artists with a genuine passion for their subject matter distances them from corporate, revenue-driven products. Ironically, however, the company’s success in creating and selling the league’s image is partly contingent upon its disavowal—however dubious—of the economic ends its productions ultimately serve.

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Steve Sabol and his staff ’s apparently disinterested aesthetic practices situate NFL Films within what Bourdieu calls an “autonomous artistic field.”72 Despite the fact that NFL Films is part of the National Football League’s broader public relations efforts and is constantly marked in name and logo by that corporate identity, its productions’ constructed status as artworks symbolically abstracts the company from that corporate process. In doing so, it inflects the National Football League with the aesthetic value and consequent symbolic capital NFL Films builds. As Sabol told National Public Radio’s Marty Moss-Coane, “People look back at what we did and say ‘you guys were great marketers; you were great packagers; you were great promoters.’ But we never thought that way. And I still never think of NFL Films as promoting or advertising or marketing. We’re just passionate observers of a sport we all love.”73 In fact, Sabol would sometimes even brag about his lack of business acumen to make clear that—regardless of his official title as NFL Films’ president—his interests and talents were primarily artistic.74 Although the National Football League has 100 percent ownership of NFL Films, Steve Sabol continually reinforced NFL Films productions’ status as labors of love independent of the league’s commercial interests by positioning the company as a family business guided by the same passion for filmmaking that motivated his father’s development of Blair Motion Pictures. He often stressed this independence by mentioning the company’s geographic distance from the league’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan. Moreover, he claimed that the NFL nurtures NFL Films’ autonomy. According to Sabol, shortly after NFL Films began Pete Rozelle told him and his father that “we [the NFL] are corporate. You [NFL Films] are the image-makers. You don’t need to be around the constraints and politics.”75 Along these lines, Sabol boasted that NFL Films has “been given a freedom that’s very unique in our business. And there are two types of freedom that every artist would strive for. One is the freedom to. And that’s the freedom to come up with an idea. And then the next freedom is the freedom from. And that’s the freedom from someone saying, ‘oh, that’s a good idea, but this is how we’re going to do it.’ We’ve had freedom to and freedom from and we’ve had the trust of both the league and the teams to give us that freedom to express ourselves.”76 These statements emphasize the company’s status—despite the particularities of its ownership—as a relatively independent operation run by a football-loving father and son filmmaking team. As such, NFL Films indicates that its productions are not created by the National Football League, but by a group of artists and football enthusiasts who—by happy coincidence—are in the league’s employ.

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Critical and trade reception of the company also often separates NFL Films from the National Football League’s business interests. An American Cinematographer article asserts that “[i]n an avarice-soaked era when gloomy business bywords like ‘collective bargaining’ and ‘lockout clause’ have somehow infiltrated the once-therapeutic sports page, [Steve] Sabol’s unadulterated affection for his favorite sport is downright refreshing.”77 This passage illustrates the “charismatic ideology of authorship” that Bourdieu claims creates the foundation for belief in an artwork’s value. This ideology “directs attention to the apparent producer, the painter, writer or composer, in short, the ‘author,’ suppressing the question of what authorizes the author, what creates the authority with which authors authorize.”78 NFL Films exploits this ideology by situating its productions as the Sabols’ inspired artworks rather than corporate-funded marketing. This is not to say that the Sabols and their staff do not genuinely love football and filmmaking. All evidence indicates that they adore the game and their jobs—deeply so. Though he could have retired years earlier and was very sick during the final months of his life, Steve Sabol continued to show up for work nearly every day until his passing. As he told the New York Times in 2000—a remarkably sad statement given his untimely death—“I will be taking care of this place every day when I’m 85, I assure you. I haven’t gotten tired of it yet, so I can’t see it ever happening. I fell into this and I can’t believe how lucky a life I’ve lived.”79 Regardless of his sincerity, Sabol’s comments also worked to enhance NFL Films’ cultural value by dissociating it from the NFL’s business interests. Bourdieu claims “the makers and marketers of works of art are adversaries in collusion, who each abide by the same law which demands the repression of direct manifestations of personal interest, at least in its overtly ‘economic’ form.”80 The National Football League created NFL Films to build a profitable image. NFL Films helps to achieve this economic purpose in part by dissociating from the league’s corporate practices. As Art Modell asserted, “the money we make from NFL Films is petty cash. We sold the beauty of the game through NFL Films.”81 The subsidiary does not simply sell football; rather, it inflects the league with cultural value that increases its economic worth. The Art of Selling Football

While NFL Films sometimes associates itself with Renoir and at other times evokes Danielle Steele—signifiers that carry vastly different types and degrees of symbolic capital—all of these efforts are organized around the attempt to

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situate the company as artistic, or at least more artistic than typical sports television. To be sure, NFL Films’ textual references to Gertrude Stein and assertions that Steve Sabol is a legitimate artist likely make no difference to many viewers. Regardless, they usefully illuminate how the company constructs and emphasizes its sophistication. To locate the social alchemy by which NFL Films creates and asserts a refined image it is necessary to examine varied source materials that span the organization’s history. These sources combine to showcase the broad-ranging—and at times seemingly contradictory—practices NFL Films uses to build distinction within and beyond sports media. They suggest that despite its typically lowbrow reputation, sports media can be considered artistic if they adopt certain formal practices, engage the proper artistic traditions, gain the right critical endorsements, and are motivated by sufficiently lofty goals. Furthermore, they indicate that while NFL Films consistently positions itself as part of an artworld, it does not promote a consistent vision of what constitutes art. The company’s shifting strategies display the cultural power of art to distinguish objects and the institutions that create them. In doing so—and more broadly—they remind us that art is a floating signifier constructed through a contextual, discursive process. Moreover, NFL Films’ posturing established a model other sports media outlets have since used to cultivate their own sense of prestige. NFL Films was asserting its productions’ difference from—and superiority to—regular TV long before HBO began to promote itself as “Not TV,” but something more gripping and refined. HBO Sports now markets its documentaries by emphasizing their association with HBO’s painstakingly crafted and celebrated brand. Along these lines, ESPN subsidiary film production company ESPN Films advertises its made-for-television documentaries’ artistry by calling attention to their use of the film medium, the involvement of well-known filmmakers in their production, and their inclusion in film festivals prior to their appearance on TV. These media subsidiaries continue and expand upon the strategies NFL Films has employed since the mid-1960s to build refinement within a media context typically understood as unsophisticated.

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Keeping the Flame in the Broadcast Era If football didn’t exist, a bunch of television executives after a fourmartini lunch in Manhattan would have said, “What can we invent to get great ratings week after week?” They would have come up with football. —Steve Sabol1 Our [NFL Films] goal was to make football a twelve-month-a-year sport.

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—Bob Ryan, NFL Films Editor in Chief and Producer2

The week after They Call It Pro Football’s premiere, Pete Rozelle summoned Ed and Steve Sabol to his Manhattan office. The commissioner handed them the most recent Nielsen ratings, which listed pro football in third place among television sports, still trailing professional baseball and college football—though by a narrower margin than when he took office. After explaining the ratings to the Sabols—who had precious little understanding of the TV industry at the time—Rozelle said, “[i]n order for the NFL to grow and flourish, we have to succeed on television. And in order for us to succeed on television, we need to create an image for the game, a mystique. And the film I just saw can help us to create that mystique.”3 NFL Films developed its signature style with the league’s increasing reliance on TV in mind.

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Although NFL Films often altogether separates its productions from the medium, the company crafted its style in part through building upon sports TV’s established aesthetic practices. Moreover, its syndicated programs and specials strove to complement and create anticipation for live network telecasts of NFL games. They shifted in form and content depending on their temporal proximity to live game broadcasts. NFL Films constructed other productions to augment and publicize exceptional NFL broadcast events, specifically the annual Super Bowl and ABC’s Monday Night Football. Before cable TV expanded viewing options from a small handful of networks and stations to dozens of outlets that catered to niche demographics, NFL Films productions transformed pro football from a sport that appeared primarily on Sunday telecasts and evening news recaps into a spectacle that could be consumed throughout the entire week and year. The company strengthened the National Football League’s relationship to the medium from which it now generates the majority of its revenue and for which it now provides some of the most consistently popular and lucrative programs.4 It also showed that sports programming could attract television viewers (and sell advertising time) around the clock, a revelation that cable television—in particular ESPN—would heartily exploit upon its emergence.

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Wide and Violent Worlds: Television, Football, and Drama in the 1960s

Sport has pervaded American television since the medium’s inception in the late 1930s. This pervasiveness is, of course, largely a consequence of sport’s widespread popularity. However, the intimate union between sport and television is in part a marriage of convenience. Sporting events are ready-made dramas with which many viewers have familiarity and in which they have an emotional (and sometimes illicit monetary) stake. Building from sports radio, television allowed spectators to witness these dramas as they happened without having to attend the actual events. Also, as Jane Feuer notes, sport broadcasts call attention to television’s capacity to display live events.5 Perhaps just as important as the live amusement these texts provided is that representing sporting events, at least during television’s first decades, required minimal production expenses—TV crews only had to point their cameras at the field, court, track, or ring and let the competition provide the entertainment. As Ron Powers dramatically claims in reference to sports television’s birth: “Television needed something to eat, something live, something conspicuous and established as a

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field of human interest; something that could be transmitted from a relatively small, highly defined field of activity.”6 Sporting events were decidedly cheaper fare than programming that necessitated studio production. Because of their immense popularity, sporting events constituted one of the key elements TV manufacturers initially used to market their products. Former NBC director Harry Coyle claims that sport contests were a primary means through which the medium established itself as a standard presence in American households. “Television,” he reminisces, “got off the ground because of sports. Today, maybe, sports need television to survive, but it was just the opposite when it first started.”7 Sports television also had the unique ability to attract an adult male audience—a coveted demographic that the traditionally feminized medium had struggled to draw since its inception. The Gillette Company, a razor manufacturer, was sports television’s most prominent advertiser during the 1950s—and is still a major player in sports media. The company sponsored Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, a collection of programming that aired on NBC and featured different live and taped sporting events (mostly boxing). It also purchased advertising on a variety of sports broadcasts in order to expose male viewers to its products. According to sport historian and television analyst Bert Sugar, Gillette saw its market share rise from 16 percent during the 1930s to over 60 percent after it began to advertise on sports television during the 1950s.8 Partly because of Gillette’s success, networks started to charge premium rates to advertise during sports broadcasts—even more than they demanded for prime time. High-profile organizations like auto manufacturers, credit card companies, and airlines began using sports TV to reach their target markets. Chevrolet general manager John DeLorean asserted that the relatively exorbitant costs of advertising time during sports broadcasts were justifiable given these productions’ presumed ability to attract men: “[T]he difference in paying seven dollars a thousand [viewers] for sport and four dollars a thousand for ‘bananas’ [prime-time programming] is well worth it. . . . You’re reaching men, the guys who make the decision to buy a car. There’s almost no other way to be sure of getting your message out there.”9 Though popular, early sports television broadcasts only faintly resembled today’s highly stylized spectacles. Telecasts prior to the 1960s—whether they displayed football games or track meets—typically used only one stationary camera placed high in the stands and another at ground level for close-ups. Because of these technological constraints, certain sports were better suited to televisual representation than others. In 1939 New York Times radio columnist

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Orrin Dunlap criticized TV’s ability to depict baseball’s diamond-shaped field satisfactorily. He asserts that “a single camera anchored at one spot does not see the complete field. . . . Baseball by television calls for three or four cameras, the views of which can be blended as the action calls for it.”10 While Dunlap dismissed baseball telecasts as “no substitute for being in the bleachers,” he considered football well suited to the nascent medium.11 The sport’s rectangular field lends itself to panoramic shots, and its organization around a game clock generally limits contests—unlike prizefights that can end with a first-round knockout or baseball games that can drag out into potentially infinite extra innings—to an estimable duration that is unlikely to disrupt programming schedules. The wariness Dunlap expressed toward televised baseball was absent from his enthusiastic endorsement of the medium’s ability to showcase football. “Science has scored a touchdown at the kick-off of football by television,” he raved. “So sharp are the pictures and so discerning the telephoto lens as it peers into the line-up that the televiewer sits in his parlor wondering why he should leave the comforts of home to watch a gridiron battle in a sea of mud on a chilly autumnal afternoon.”12 While the marriage between television and football would not reach maturity until the late 1950s, Dunlap’s statement situates the sport as a spectacle that complemented the budding medium’s representational potential.13 Dunlap’s endorsement of televised football champions the medium’s presumed ability both to open a window onto games as they unfold and to bring viewers closer to those events through the use of multiple cameras, editing, and telephoto lenses. Television sports, according to Dunlap, should not merely display events, but ought to construct more engaging perspectives than even those that live spectators have. By the late 1950s, roughly twenty years after Dunlap’s assessment of the first sports telecasts, sporting events had firmly established themselves as a staple of network TV and an increasingly important ingredient for sports leagues’ financial health. In order for networks to distinguish their sports coverage and expand its audience, they began to create more stylized depictions. They increased the number of cameras, enhanced their editing, and developed sophisticated graphics packages. Furthermore, they used these stylistic practices to maximize productions’ drama. Dramatization is closely related to, but not a necessary consequence of, stylization. While drama is always constructed through style, texts can be highly stylized without necessarily being dramatic. Drama in sports television is often constructed by filtering events through narratives that illustrate and build upon commonly held myths and values. A program might,

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for instance, focus on a player striving to overcome an injury, a bitter rivalry between two coaches, or a record about to be broken. On a more mundane level, telecasts might simply emphasize the statistical likelihood a team will accomplish a particular feat in certain circumstances (a fourth-down conversion, a fifty-yard field goal, etc.) and, in doing so, create suspense surrounding whether the team will succeed. These practices create protagonists, antagonists, and plotlines that give meaning to, augment, and amplify the drama that the game itself provides. John Goldlust notes that sports television during the late 1950s and early 1960s transitioned “from a type of journalistic reportage toward a form of pre-structured, but still open-ended, live dramatic spectacle.”14 More specifically, Phil Patton argues that broadcasts of football during this moment created a “razzle dazzle” game constituted by both the event unfolding on screen and the stylized drama telecasts create.15 These productions composed, according to Garry Whannel, “a crucial formative period” that Robert McChesney refers to as “the first wave of the TV sports explosion.”16 Though the late-1950s marked a significant increase in sports television’s popularity and profitability, none of the major networks had separate sports divisions during this time. In 1959, NBC decided not to renew its contract with Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, which typically aired during prime time, in order to make room for sitcoms the network believed would attract a larger and more diverse audience. Gillette consequently brought its sports advertising budget to ABC, America’s least successful major network at the time, on the condition that ABC attach the razor company to its Wednesday evening prime-time boxing package. The $8 million annual budget was more than ABC had spent on sports programming over the course of its entire history.17 Gillette’s investment provided the start-up capital from which the network formed ABC Sports. The new division began to bid aggressively for the rights to broadcast high-profile events and to develop a presence in sports television that would distinguish the struggling network as a whole. Most significantly, it purchased rights to telecast NCAA football in 1960 and developed ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1961. ABC paired its increased sports programming with a more dramatic and narrative-driven approach. The young producer Roone Arledge, who joined ABC in 1959 after working on Shari Lewis’s children’s puppet show for NBC’s New York City affiliate WRCA-TV and producing a pilot for a men’s lifestyle magazine program based on Playboy, spearheaded ABC Sports’ establishment of this style. Immediately after coming to the network, Arledge sought to develop a detailed, intimate, and exciting way of representing sporting events—a

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method he would later dub “up close and personal.” In his memoir, Arledge compares 1950s sports television to “looking out on the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door.”18 Many sports executives wary of TV’s potential effects on ticket sales demanded the unadorned approach Arledge critiqued. Former Major League Baseball commissioner Ford Frick, who presided over the league from 1951 to 1965, even commanded that “the view a fan gets at home should not be any better than that of the fan in the worst seat of the ball park.”19 Arledge, by contrast, strove to create immersive viewing experiences. While attending a Notre Dame–Army college football game with his wife, Arledge noticed that she was as interested in the halftime entertainment as the game itself. He recounted this observation to his boss Edgar Scherick and concluded that most sports telecasts simply pointed cameras at the game.20 Arledge, however, wanted to make viewers feel as if they were at the game by focusing on the event as a whole in addition to the competition on the field. He believed that doing so would help ABC Sports to expand its audience beyond the stereotypical middle-class adult male sports fan and to attract those who, like his wife, were as interested in the pageantry surrounding sporting events as they were in the events themselves. Scherick found Arledge’s observations provocative and asked him to compose a memo detailing this approach and outlining how ABC Sports might use it to improve its college football broadcasts. The energetic and ambitious Arledge wrote the following, which now serves as a founding document for contemporary sports media: Heretofore, television has done a remarkable job of bringing the game to the viewer—now we are going to take the viewer to the game! We will utilize every production technique that has been learned in producing variety shows, in covering political conventions, in shooting travel and adventure series to heighten the viewer’s feeling of actually sitting in the stands and participating personally in the excitement and color walking through a college campus to the stadium to watch the big game. All these delightful adornments to the actual contest have been missing from previously televised sports events . . . To improve upon the audience . . . we must gain and hold the interest of women and others who are not fanatic followers of the sport we happen to be televising. Women come to football games, not so much to marvel at the adeptness of the quarterback in calling an end sweep or a lineman pulling out to lead a play, but to sit in a crowd, see what everyone else is wearing, watch the cheerleaders, and experience the countless things that make up the

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feeling of the game. Incidentally, very few men have ever switched channels when a nicely proportioned girl was leaping into the air or leading a band downfield . . . We will utilize six cameras for our basic coverage of the game, but each [camera]man will have a complete schedule of additional assignments that will allow him to cover all the other interesting facets of the game when he is not actually engaged in covering a game situation. In addition to our fixed cameras (using the term advisedly) we will have cameras mounted in Jeeps, on mike booms, in risers or helicopters, or anything necessary to get the complete story of the game. We will use a “creepie-peepie” camera to get the impact shots that we cannot get from a fixed camera—a coach’s face as a man drops a pass in the clear—a pretty cheerleader after her hero has scored a touchdown—a coed who brings her infant baby to the game in her arms—the referee as he calls a particularly difficult play—a student hawking programs in the stands—two romantic students sharing a blanket late in the game on a cold day—the beaming face of a substitute halfback as he comes off the field after running seventy yards for a touchdown on his first play for the varsity—all the excitement, wonder, jubilation, and despair that make this America’s number one sports spectacle, and a human drama to match bullfights and heavyweight championships in intensity. In short—WE ARE GOING TO ADD SHOW BUSINESS TO SPORTS!21

Arledge’s approach strives to transform sports telecasts into highly stylized spectacles that use all available technological and aesthetic resources to create drama comparable to documentary and even fictional television programming. If other telecasts were analogous to opening a peephole onto the Grand Canyon, Arledge wanted ABC Sports’ productions to provide guided tours that showcase—and enhance—its grandeur. The practices Arledge developed for ABC’s college football telecasts preceded several of NFL Films’ trademark conventions, from the use of multiple and roving cameras to the company’s broader effort to depict football the way Hollywood portrays fiction. In addition to bringing this “up close and personal” method to ABC Sports’ college football coverage, Arledge and Scherick advertised the division’s dramatized approach to sports television production with ABC’s Wide World of Sports, an original program that displayed a mixture of popular, international, and obscure sporting events—ranging from sumo wrestling in Japan to log rolling in Wisconsin. From a practical standpoint, Wide World, which debuted in April 1961, was designed to capitalize on the gap between the football and baseball seasons and the relative dearth of sports programming during the

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summer. Moreover, ABC could acquire broadcasting rights to many of the little-known sporting events Wide World covered for a fraction of the price that more popular sports demanded. But securing the rights to air prominent sporting events was not necessary for Wide World to achieve its goal of emphasizing athletic competition’s excitement and emotion. The program used sport as a starting point from which to create moving human interest stories. As the voice-over portion of Wide World’s introduction—delivered by longtime host Jim McKay—famously declares, the production “span[s] the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition.” Unlike ABC’s NCAA football broadcasts, the vast majority of Wide World’s programming was displayed on tape delay. The unfamiliarity of the sporting events Wide World commonly showcased allowed it to present them retrospectively without most viewers having foreknowledge of their outcomes. Wide World’s nonlive approach also allotted the program significantly more production time than live broadcasts and enabled it to focus more on creating dramatic narratives than ABC’s live college football coverage. The program, however, was compelled to dramatize its subject matter because it did not present popular events as they unfolded. Rather, and like the productions NFL Films eventually developed, Wide World’s documentary segments created dramatic reinterpretations of events that sought to build viewer interest independent of their outcome and despite the fact that they had already occurred. Around the same time that Wide World developed, a smattering of madefor-television documentaries about professional football began to appear— no doubt capitalizing on the sport’s increasing popularity on TV and the stardom a handful of players and coaches were gaining as a consequence of this amplified media coverage. In October 1960 CBS debuted The Violent World of Sam Huff as part of its 20th Century documentary series hosted and narrated by Walter Cronkite. The film profiles New York Giants middle linebacker Sam Huff—one of the NFL’s best-known defenders at the time who played in its largest market—and uses him to showcase professional football’s masculine intensity.22 As Cronkite announces during the documentary’s opening moments: “If you were a football player, the middle linebacker for the New York football Giants and your name was Sam Huff, this is what it would be like. . . . Today you will play pro football riding on Sam Huff ’s broad back.” Violent World, as Cronkite indicates, purports to reproduce the experience of playing professional football’s most action-packed position. It features a wireless microphone placed in Huff ’s shoulder pads to capture

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the game’s sounds—from helmets colliding to players’ goading each other between downs.23 Cronkite stresses that Violent World is the first program ever to employ this technique, and he suggests the audio material it offers will give viewers unprecedented access. “You’re on the receiving end,” he sternly announces, “and you’re going to see pro football like you’ve never seen it before.” Violent World combines its examination of pro football’s on-field violence with a narrative that links Huff ’s rugged upbringing in a Farmington, West Virginia, mining camp to his development into one of the NFL’s best players. It pairs images of Huff taking a nostalgic stroll through his hometown with interview footage of him and his wife discussing his road to athletic stardom. It also features Huff outlining football strategies, clowning around with his teammates during the Giants’ summer training camp, and explaining his love for professional football’s violence. “There is no place for nice guys [in football],” Huff matter-of-factly explains. “It’s a rough game. It’s for the men, not the boys.” Violent World provides an intimate view of pro football that both humanizes and glorifies one of the dangerous sport’s toughest players. Moreover, CBS was the NFL’s primary network television partner in 1960. Violent World, which premiered in late October, augmented and indirectly publicized the network’s Sunday afternoon football coverage. Similar television documentaries appeared throughout the early and middle 1960s. Run to Daylight (1964), an adaptation of Vince Lombardi’s book (co-written with the sportswriter W. C. Heinz) about his coaching philosophy and experience with the Green Bay Packers, provides a glimpse into the famous coach’s day-to-day operations during his team’s summer training camp.24 Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon (1965), a co-production of David L. Wolper and ABC News, celebrates the sport’s increasingly prominent place in 1960s American culture. William Friedkin—who later made The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973)—directed the film and the actor Van Heflin—who once starred as a college football star in the pigskin movie Saturday’s Heroes (1937)—narrated it. Similar to Violent World, Mayhem emphasizes pro football’s ferocity and its players’ hardiness. It opens with alternating shots of suburbanites quietly raking leaves and Cleveland Browns players relaxing on the bus en route to play the San Francisco 49ers. Heflin’s deep voice, with a timbre not unlike Facenda’s, emerges to warn— and perhaps assure—viewers that “this quiet Sunday afternoon will end in violence.” The film proceeds to construct a brief history of the sport that ends with coverage of the Browns and 49ers’ game. It hyperbolically champions

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the mayhem and danger that have marked football since its beginnings and indicates that these qualities have come into full focus with the 1960s NFL. Like Arledge’s NCAA broadcasts and Wide World of Sports, these madefor-TV football documentaries anticipated several of the practices NFL Films would later claim as its inventions. Because the National Football League only allowed Violent World to microphone Huff during practices and exhibition games, NFL Films stands as the first outlet to use wireless mikes during official league contests. However, when the company first wired a player in 1967, it chose the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Bill Saul, who, like Huff, was a middle linebacker with a brutal reputation.25 Producing as many censored “bleeps” as intelligible sound bites, Saul’s wiring, similar to Violent World, suggests that effective middle linebackers play with a combination of anger and masculine relentlessness. NFL Films also built upon Violent World’s interview footage of Huff explaining his love for the game’s viciousness. For instance, More Than a Game (1970) features an interview with the Chicago Bears’ Dick Butkus—the league’s most feared middle linebacker since Huff—who confesses his affection for pro football’s brutality and admits to taking inspiration from a grisly scene in the 1964 film Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte where a severed head rolls down a flight of stairs. “I don’t go to the movies too often,” Butkus mutters with a knowing smirk. “But one movie that sticks out was with Betty Davis, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. I got kind of a charge when that head came rolling down the stairs. I like to sit back and . . . maybe project those things happening on the football field. And not to me.” While NFL Films’ wireless microphones and player interviews are now two of its signature conventions (although it would certainly no longer use footage of players claiming that they imagine knocking opponents’ heads off), Violent World provided a framework from which the company adopted and developed them. Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon uses montage editing, sideline sound, color film, and masculine narration to present pro football as an epic and violent spectacle that reflects 1960s America.26 They Call It Pro Football’s assertion that NFL football is “the sport of our time” and Big Game America’s description of it as “America’s super game” expand upon Mayhem’s celebration of the league’s cultural meaning during this time. Moreover, and again similar to They Call It Pro Football and Big Game America, Mayhem profiles several exceptional NFL players—including Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas—to explain football’s characteristic qualities and make the case for its significance. Mayhem thus provides a structural and thematic precursor to two of NFL Films’ defining productions.

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Although NFL Films separates its productions from TV, the subsidiary built upon and borrowed from Arledge’s “up close and personal” approach and made-for-television documentaries like The Violent World of Sam Huff and Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon to build the mythology it uses to market the league. NFL Films’ practices are as indebted to 1960s sports television as they are to the films, paintings, and works of literature the company more commonly cites as its primary aesthetic influences.

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Pro Football All the Time

Scholarly investigations of the increasingly dramatized sports television that emerged during the 1960s usefully explain and critique how these productions’ formal conventions work to maximize entertainment value regardless of their subject matter.27 However, they tend to treat sports television productions as autonomous entities rather than considering the institutional, economic, and industrial factors that guide their practices. In his groundbreaking study of broadcast television—published as NFL Films’ was completing its first decade of operation—Raymond Williams cites “planned flow” as the medium’s “defining characteristic,” technologically and culturally.28 In an effort to retain viewers, broadcasters arrange programs to complement those that precede them and to publicize those that follow. Moreover, programs are scheduled during days of the week and times of the day when their primary audience will most likely be watching television. As Williams’s concept suggests, a television production is not a discreet unit, but part of a larger aggregate of programming that includes other productions and even the advertisements that appear during and between them. “The real programme that is offered [in television],” Williams maintains, “is a sequence or set of alternative sequences.”29 Williams indicates that analyses of television programs ought to consider their commercially driven position within programming flows as well as their aesthetic practices. Far from discreet units, NFL Films productions augment live broadcasts of NFL games. The majority of the company’s productions before cable were syndicated or sold on an individual basis to network affiliates and other stations rather than broadcast directly by networks. Inez Aimee, who served as NFL Films’ director of sales from 1965 to 1978 (and was the NFL’s first female executive), primarily pitched these productions to stations through appealing to the increasing popularity of live game broadcasts.30 NFL Films productions could complement these telecasts and allow stations unaffiliated with one of the league’s network partners to establish an association with the NFL.

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Furthermore, NFL Films charged relatively low rates to maximize its programming’s presence on the medium. Once Aimee sold programs to enough network affiliates and stations to claim they had a national reach, she would secure sponsors. The programs were then arranged with opening and closing sections that mentioned the sponsor’s patronage (“This program is brought to you by . . .”) and blank commercial slots for stations to sell to advertisers. Over the years, companies that include American Airlines, American Express, Gillette, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, and even The United States Army have sponsored NFL Films productions. Moreover, NFL Films’ syndicated programs were not limited to American television. It distributed productions to Americans stationed at military bases, incarcerated in federal prisons, working on coastal oil rigs, and involved in the Foreign Service.31 It also strove to cultivate a global following for the league. After exhibiting several NFL Films productions at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, Aimee negotiated a fifty-two-week deal with a Japanese network to carry several programs. She also persuaded the Canadian Broadcasting Company to purchase multiple productions throughout the 1970s.32 In addition to selling NFL Films programming, Aimee strove to ensure that the company’s productions would be scheduled at times when their sponsor’s target audience—middle-class adult men—most frequently watched television. Specifically, she attempted to place the programs on evenings during the week, Saturdays before or after Wide World of Sports, or Sundays before broadcasts of NFL games.33 However, because NFL Films’ programming was so inexpensive, clients often used it as filler shown late at night and early in the morning. Steve Sabol even joked that bartenders, hospital orderlies, and parents with newborns were NFL Films’ primary viewers during the 1960s and 1970s because of the unpopular time slots in which its productions were commonly scheduled.34 NFL Films’ in-season syndicated weekly programs, Game of the Week and This is the NFL, had to be completed and shipped to clients by the Wednesday morning after the previous weekend’s games were played. In part because of these constraints, they provided linear highlights that typically avoided montage editing, poetic scripts, and original scores—conventions that would slow their frenzied production schedules. While Game of the Week and This is the NFL never ceased to celebrate the league, they were primarily designed to recap recently played games—though in a more stylized manner than news programs—and to generate interest in upcoming matchups. In contrast to productions like They Call It Pro Football, they were not intended to air beyond the week for which they were created (although snippets of film that originally appeared in these programs were often later recycled into different

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NFL Films content and sold to outside clients). These productions’ primary focus on individual games and their impact on league standings rendered episodes obsolete beyond the week they aired. Game of the Week and This is the NFL’s principal purpose, then, was to broaden the NFL’s presence on television during the season and to create excitement for live game broadcasts. These industrial and economic concerns shaped their comparatively plain formal practices. NFL Action, which ran from 1967 to 1976 and was sponsored by American Express, was NFL Films’ weekly syndicated summer series. As Game of the Week and This is the NFL gave the league a presence on TV during the season beyond Sundays, NFL Action established a place for pro football on the medium throughout the off-season. Furthermore, and similar to Wide World of Sports, NFL Action capitalized on the relative lack of popular sports television during the summer months. In a May 1970 Los Angeles Times column, Don Page rejoiced in the presence of NFL Action on television during a time when he claimed there were “no legitimate [sport] seasons.”35 Along these lines, the New York Times’ Frank Litsky praised NFL Action as an entertaining way to tide voracious football fans over until the season began again.36 NFL Action typically debuted with the previous season’s Super Bowl highlight film. Aside from this first annual segment, the off-season program did not recap individual games or the previous season. Instead, it featured highly dramatized and formally adventurous documentaries that educated viewers about professional football and its history; follies films and novelty productions; and human interest stories about players, coaches, and others connected to the league. For example, Linemen—Eyeball to Eyeball (1967) examines the NFL’s often overlooked offensive and defensive linemen. With a booming score, montage editing, Facenda’s narration of a lyrical script, and ground-level slow-motion close-ups shot with telephoto lenses, the documentary celebrates NFL linemen’s power, intelligence, and self-discipline. Linemen, Facenda forcefully announces, are “men of huge dimensions, built and constructed for contact of awesome proportion . . . the rogue elephants of professional sport.” The documentary introduces viewers unfamiliar with football to these less visible but crucially important players while offering seasoned fans a perspective that live broadcasts and news recaps seldom provide. Eyeball to Eyeball thus works to establish an understanding of and appreciation for linemen—and, by extension, professional football’s intricacies—that will provide viewers with added incentives to follow the league during the season. The Hunters (1970), which also debuted on NFL Action, examines the off-season activities of three of the NFL’s toughest stars: Minnesota Vikings

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defensive lineman Carl Eller, Oakland Raiders linebacker Ben Davidson, and Dallas Cowboys running back Walt Garrison. Eller takes acting classes in Hollywood, Davidson rides his motorcycle along northern California’s desolate highways, and Garrison competes in rodeos as a steer wrestler. The film suggests professional football is but a part of these athletes’ surprisingly complex lives. Eller, The Hunters asserts, is one of the league’s most vicious defenders. The production combines footage of him pummeling opponents on the football field and rehearsing an intensely emotional scene in an acting class. It then presents interview footage with his drama instructor, who cites Eller’s tremendous sensitivity as his greatest acting asset. The instructor also admits he was surprised to discover Eller’s exceptional tenderness given his occupation as a football player. Similar to its depiction of Eller, the documentary pairs snippets of Davidson’s violent play with footage of him riding his motorcycle in solitude. The film—produced just one year after Dennis Hopper’s countercultural classic Easy Rider (1969)—indicates that while Davidson plays linebacker with reckless abandon, he seeks peaceful sanctuary beyond the field. In contrast to Eller and Davidson, the documentary depicts Garrison’s off-season rodeo career as even more dangerous than his life as a running back. It showcases Garrison wrestling steers to the ground as Facenda dubs him “the only real cowboy on the Cowboys.” The Hunters’ profiles show that Eller, Davidson, and Garrison’s off-field personalities do not necessarily align with the reputations they developed through their play. They disabuse the stereotype of football players as one-dimensional jocks while establishing familiarity with these multifaceted figures that viewers can carry over into their experience watching them when the season begins. This is a Football (1967), perhaps NFL Action’s most bizarre documentary, is a formally discordant meditation on the sport of football and what compels men to play it. The film begins with an image of a football suspended in air and slowly rotating. Facenda outlines the ball’s physical dimensions and notes that the object is “made to take punishment.” The production then provides a short explanation, which adopts the format of an educational film, of how these durable pieces of equipment are made, after which Facenda pensively asks: “The football, what is its fascination? What is its lure? Why are more than five million people drawn to it annually? Why do more than five hundred men devote themselves to playing it professionally? What manner of man plays this game?” To address Facenda’s queries, the documentary presents a series of interviews with players who discuss their powerful attraction to the savage sport. Sam Huff claims to enjoy the camaraderie; Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman

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Oakland Raiders defensive lineman rides his motorcycle in The Hunters (1970), a film that explored NFL players’ offseason pursuits.

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Bob Brown revels in its violence; and Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman Merlin Olson simply loves the game, although he can’t quite find the words to adequately explain why. After these generic interviews, This is a Football shifts to Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Bernie Casey—who became a successful actor after his brief career in pro football—painting at the beach.37 When asked why he plays football, the articulate and cerebral Casey dispassionately admits, “I play the game for the money. Does that sound callous? I think it’s the dissonant sound of honesty. But I do enjoy the game, for you could not play it, you see, if you didn’t care for it. Because it’s too demanding and too cruel and too tough.” After explaining the combination of economic and emotional factors that inform his involvement in the sport, Casey proceeds to wax philosophical about the links among his art, ontology, and the universe at large. Right now I am painting fantasy landscapes—landscapes that approach surrealism but are not quite as severe. They’re more lyrical. I think the most significant thing about my painting is a very necessary feeling that I seem to have for incorporating the sun’s shape—planetary bodies’ shape—into my work. . . . We are affected, directly or indirectly, by all things. And certainly the planetary bodies are a very important part of our existence. Many people say on the night of a full moon people come out, the night people, the moon people. I think there could be some credibility to that statement.

The film then cuts from one of Casey’s fantasy landscapes to a shot of the moon and back to the suspended football that opened the production. Facenda brings

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the peculiar documentary to a close by comparing football’s power to that of the planetary bodies: “What is [the football’s] fascination, what is its lure? The men who play the game may or may not know. But there is a secret world within us all that remembers.” Though formally distinct from and far less coherent than Eyeball to Eyeball and The Hunters, This is a Football similarly works to broaden—and even complicate—common understandings of professional football and those who play it. Unlike Game of the Week and This is the NFL’s focus on the week for which they were produced, NFL Action’s documentaries lent themselves to repetition. Industry professionals refer to these types of productions as “evergreens” because they can be rerun long after their premiere and still serve the same general purpose.38 In fact, more recent NFL Films programs—particularly Lost Treasures and NFL Films Presents—have repackaged documentaries and segments originally produced for NFL Action. Furthermore, the summertime’s position as television’s least popular season enabled NFL Action to produce less conventional material like This is a Football while still attracting affiliates and securing a sponsor. Beyond the lower expectations affiliates and channels had for summer programming’s ratings, NFL Action’s documentaries could be quirkier because they were not obliged to review and build excitement for NFL games. Instead, they focused on mythologizing the NFL as a whole, broadening its fan base beyond those primarily interested in games, and offering already devoted fans additional reasons to follow the league. As Game of the Week and This is the NFL’s proximity to the NFL season constrained their conventions, NFL Action’s distance from the season gave it greater aesthetic leeway. Aside from the series it produced, NFL Films created “one-time-only” syndicated specials that stations could purchase without committing to a program’s entire run. For instance, Pro Football—Pottstown, PA (1971) is a vérité style documentary that examines the Pottstown Firebirds, a minor league team from Pennsylvania. The production uses the Firebirds—a colorful cast of characters that includes bumbling head coach Dave DeFilippo, narcissistic quarterback Jimmy “King” Corcoran, and quixotic defensive lineman Joe Blake—to explore professional football’s less glamorous side. In particular, it focuses on the team’s quest to win the Atlantic Coast Football League championship and its players’ dreams of eventually making it to the NFL.39 It even opens with a heartening folk ballad that affirms, “I’m gonna make it someday.” The documentary premiered before CBS’s broadcast of the 1972 Super Bowl in most television markets. It allowed NFL Films to capitalize on the Super Bowl’s popularity and enabled CBS affiliates to expand their sports programming on a day when there is an unusually large and diverse audience for it. Along similar lines, NFL

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Films sold various short pieces that networks and stations used to build their pregame, half-time, and postgame coverage. For example, in 1969 the subsidiary produced If, a vignette that features Facenda reading Rudyard Kipling’s motivational poem of the same title along with a montage of exciting plays and an uplifting score. CBS used the piece as a preface to its NFL broadcasts that advertised pro football’s potential to thrill, inspire, and build character and that suggested the network’s upcoming telecasts were sure to exhibit these qualities. Based on the success of NFL Films’ syndicated series and specials, CBS hired the company to produce its Sunday pregame program, The NFL Today, from 1975 to 1993.40 The program featured highlights of the previous week’s games similar to Game of the Week and This is the NFL, short documentary segments and player profiles like those on NFL Action, and studio commentary that previewed the network’s impending telecasts. In one segment the hosts accompanied Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips—known for his folksy manner and for wearing a large cowboy hat during games—to an oyster bar where he discussed his long history in the league and his intertwined love for Texas and football. In a more serious episode, former Miss America Phyllis George, who co-hosted the program from 1975 until 1983 (with a one-year hiatus in 1978), conducted a candid interview with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach. Staubach, whom the Dallas press often critiqued as lacking charisma, admitted how much the negative media attention hurt his feelings. The quarterback even mentioned his sex life in an attempt to display his apparent verve. The pregame segment constructs an emotional subplot for the game CBS is about to air by suggesting that Staubach is competing against his insecurities as well as his opponents on the field. The NFL Today used NFL Films productions’ celebration of the league and enhancement of its presence on television to publicize the games CBS carried and to extend the network’s Sunday football coverage. The program also strove to broaden interest in those games. It hired Phyllis George and included emotional segments like her interview with Staubach in an effort to increase female viewership. Building the NFL Television Event

Aside from enhancing the league’s presence on television as a whole during the broadcast era, NFL Films produced content to build, augment, and publicize exceptional individual telecasts of league games. By the time cable TV emerged, the Super Bowl was routinely America’s most watched annual televised sporting event. Similarly, ABC’s Monday Night Football was—by leaps and bounds—the highest-rated weekly NFL broadcast and one of the most

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popular prime-time TV programs in general. Aside from their high ratings, the Super Bowl and Monday Night Football were—and continue to be—heavily promoted and extravagantly produced cultural events that stood apart from television’s regular broadcasting flows.41 In fact, they compose points around which those flows are organized. NFL Films shared in the construction of these events that helped to establish pro football as America’s premier television sports spectacle. As of 2013, Super Bowls stand as the top five most watched American television programs of all time.42 The ability to periodically broadcast the Super Bowl is a key factor that now motivates CBS, NBC, and Fox to pay over $1 billion annually for the rights to air NFL games.43 Attesting to its exceptional status among football broadcasts, the NFL has almost always scheduled two weeks between the league’s conference championship games and the Super Bowl to allow networks additional time to market the extravagant event and to give the press more time to build excitement for it.44 As well as marketing the game itself, the Super Bowl is now advertised months in advance based on who will sing the National Anthem, the acts scheduled to perform during halftime, and the companies planning to unveil new advertising campaigns— elements that constitute the broadcast’s spectacular status and help it to attract a crossover audience. Since 1969, NFL Films has produced Road to the Super Bowl, an annual onehour review leading up to the Super Bowl.45 As part of the NFL’s television contracts, Road to the Super Bowl premieres during Super Bowl weekend (most often on Saturday evening or Sunday morning) on the network scheduled to broadcast the game.46 The highlight film filters the season through a series of inspiring themes and explains how the competing teams made it to the championship. As Steve Sabol asserted in a 1989 press release for the program, “If you were on Mars and missed the entire season, this special will not only show you the how’s and why’s, the trials and tribulations, but will give you the true flavor of the NFL.”47 Road to the Super Bowl functions as an extended pregame program that builds anticipation for the year’s biggest television event. It always ends with the same line, which emphasizes the upcoming game’s singular importance: “On the road to the Super Bowl, only two teams remain and now compete for a prize that only one can win.” As Road to the Super Bowl creates excitement for the Super Bowl, since 1987 NFL Films has produced a postgame commercial spot for the Walt Disney Company that mawkishly reflects upon the recently completed event. The commercial, which airs during the postgame coverage, features slow-motion

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video highlights that focus primarily on the winning team’s most valuable player along with a rendition of the schmaltzy Disney song “When You Wish Upon a Star.” The commercial then cuts to the featured player celebrating after the game. A disembodied interviewer asks, “You just won the Super Bowl. What are you going to do next?” The player emphatically replies, “I’m going to Disney World!” as the Disney logo appears.48 The phrase “I’m going to Disney World!” has since become a popular—and often parodied—way to celebrate significant accomplishments. The now iconic advertisement uses NFL Films’ glorified aesthetic to build an alliance between Disney and the NFL—two monoliths of American corporate and popular culture. Moreover, the commercial has become an anticipated part of the Super Bowl tradition that, while nowhere near as popular as the game itself, provides an incentive for viewers to continue watching the broadcast after the contest ends. Sport historian Jeff Neal-Lunsford observes that sporting events enjoyed a brief tenure in prime-time network television during the 1940s and early 1950s.49 By the middle 1950s, however, networks discovered that it was more profitable to fill prime-time schedules with programming that would presumably appeal to the largest possible audience, such as sitcoms and variety shows. With the exception of Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, certain summer sports programming, and major events like the World Series, network sports broadcasts were relegated to the weekends. The ever-entrepreneurial Pete Rozelle believed that professional football— if packaged in a sufficiently compelling manner—could draw a competitive prime-time audience. He experimented with an untelevised Monday evening game in 1964 at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, which attracted the city’s largestever professional football audience. Based on this success, Rozelle sought a deal with a major network for weekly telecasts of Monday night games. NBC and CBS, both of which already had successful prime-time Monday evening lineups and were broadcasting NFL games on Sundays, turned him down. He then shifted his attention to ABC, which had not carried NFL games since 1955.50 Though ABC Sports was innovative and gaining increasing notoriety with its NCAA football coverage and Wide World of Sports, the network as a whole was significantly less successful than both NBC and CBS. Competitors, in fact, mockingly referred to it as the “Almost Broadcasting Company.” Desperate for an original way to improve the network’s then dismal primetime ratings, Arledge—who had been promoted to president of ABC Sports in 1968—negotiated a contract with Rozelle to produce what would become Monday Night Football.

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In keeping with his overall commitment to add “show business to sports,” Arledge strove to construct a media event that would appeal even to those who did not particularly care about football. He was specifically interested in attracting women—a necessary demographic for any successful prime-time program. To help transform football games into prime-time caliber entertainment and to distinguish the production from run-of-the-mill broadcasts, Arledge framed matches with storylines; used three commentators instead of the standard two; increased the number of cameras beyond even the amount used for ABC Sports’ NCAA football telecasts; included an array of graphics; and employed technologies like slow motion, split-screen visuals, and reverse-angle replays. The program’s original introductory sequence opened with shots of a frantic production room filled with high-tech gadgetry to emphasize the innovation and labor necessary to produce a media spectacle of this magnitude. In fact, Monday Night Football was by far the most expensive and technologically sophisticated program ABC Sports had ever created. It composed such an economic risk for the network that its failure, according to journalists Marc Gunther and Bill Carter, would have threatened to destroy its entire sports division.51 Perhaps the most effective entertainment-driven decision Arledge made when developing Monday Night Football was hiring the brash and opinionated former attorney Howard Cosell (who previously appeared on ABC’s Wide World of Sports and the network’s boxing coverage) as the program’s lead commentator. Cosell had become famous in the sports world during the 1960s for his unconventional voice, polarizing commentary, and showy intellectualism.52 “Howard is very opinionated,” noted ABC president Leonard Goldenson, “[h]alf the audience likes him; the other half hates him. But they all talk about him.”53 Joining Cosell for the program’s inaugural year were play-by-play announcer Keith Jackson and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. After Monday Night Football’s first season, Arledge replaced Jackson with Frank Gifford. The debonair and well-known Gifford— who was unable to join the program during its first year because of a contractual obligation to CBS—offered a high-profile alternative to Jackson’s more traditional broadcasting persona. Cosell, the program’s most visible and verbose host, had two primary roles: to maximize games’ drama by teasing out their storylines and to play antagonist to his less controversial cohosts. His nasally voice, sometimes pretentious affectation, and abrasive commitment to “telling it like it is” contrasted Meredith’s humorous, friendly commentary and Gifford’s earnest play-by-play.54 The often heated banter between Cosell and his colleagues constituted one of Monday Night Football’s

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most popular components during its early years, prompting the New York Times’ Neil Admur to call the program “television’s first sports soap opera.”55 Cosell would jokingly cast Gifford and Meredith as his intellectual inferiors while his co-hosts would needle him for having never played the game about which he claimed to possess such an expert understanding. Aside from Meredith’s temporary departure from 1974 to 1976, the trio shared announcing duties until Cosell left the program after the 1983 season and is generally considered Monday Night Football’s most memorable announcing team. Monday Night Football became a nationwide sensation almost immediately after its September 21, 1970 premiere. As Patton notes, the program was “acknowledged by the industry with its highest accolade—event.”56 Bars began to install large-screen televisions to lure back customers who were presumably staying home on Monday evenings to watch the program; the automobile industry started to identify Tuesday, rather than Monday, as the most popular day for employees to call in sick; New York City police officers reported that crime rates lowered on Monday nights; a Seattle hospital jokingly established a rule that no babies could be born during the program; a community college in Florida offered a course entitled “Understanding and Appreciating Monday Night Football”; and a Santa Barbara man even started a Church of Monday Night Football complete with a set of commandments including “Thou shalt keep Monday night holy” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s beer.”57 As this anecdotal evidence suggests, Monday Night Football was as much a popular culture phenomenon as a sports television program. It regularly featured celebrity guests in the announcing booth and charged premium rates for advertisers clamoring to benefit from its prestige and expansive demographic reach. As Cosell would frequently boast, the show had become “bigger than the game”—which is precisely what Arledge had hoped.58 The program gave ABC a much needed prime-time hit and a platform to publicize its other programming at a moment when the network was struggling to keep pace with its competitors. By 1977, ABC was America’s highest rated network—a status Monday Night Football, along with ABC Sports’ other productions, played no small role in helping it to attain.59 In addition to the program’s stylized and dramatic depiction of the Monday night games themselves, Arledge had to devise a way to retain viewers throughout contests’ half-time periods. Traditionally, networks used halftime to recap the first two quarters’ action, speculate on the upcoming half, and perhaps comment on the league’s other games. Though half-time programming was decidedly less exciting than the game-time action, Sunday broadcasts were

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not generally scheduled against programming that threatened their audience. Monday Night Football, however, aired in competition with established primetime programs. The key way the program strove to retain its audience during halftime was through a six-minute, NFL Films–produced highlight package of the previous day’s games narrated by Cosell—a practice that lasted from 1970 until his departure from the program. Each Sunday, ABC would select a number of games it wanted NFL Films to feature in the half-time package. Immediately after the games, which, because of production time constraints, were most often those played in the eastern or central portion of the United States, the films were rushed back to NFL Films headquarters to be developed and edited. NFL Films producers would work through the night to finish the highlight package by Monday morning, when it would be flown to the site of that evening’s game. Cosell would record a narration, often extemporaneously, for the highlights in the afternoon before the contest. In addition to Cosell’s narration, the highlights distinguished themselves from typical television recaps through ground-level slow-motion and montage editing. Shortly after its 1970 debut, the highlight package became a distinguishing feature of Monday Night Football—an event within an event. The Washington Post’s Leonard Shapiro claimed that the highlights had become “as much of an institution as Monday Night Football itself.”60 “Even in blowouts,” Michael MacCambridge writes, “the audience numbers stayed strong through the halftime package.”61 NFL Films’ half-time highlight package also became a point of debate and controversy for many fans. ABC, and Cosell in particular, would receive hundreds of angry letters from fans who complained that the highlights intentionally neglected their favorite team. A pub in Denver that believed Cosell had a personal vendetta against the Broncos held a raffle that allowed the winner to throw a brick through a television set while he was on the air. The Pennsylvania State Legislature even passed a resolution to censure Monday Night Football for its apparent unwillingness to feature the Pittsburgh Steelers on the highlights.62 As Monday Night Football producer Dennis Lewin observed, “the degree to which fans take our halftime highlights is lunacy.”63 This lunacy and Cosell-directed vitriol only increased interest in the weekly highlight package and amplified Monday Night Football’s position as an exceptional television event. Incensed viewers like those in Denver intently watched the highlights specifically to observe what they did not include. Cosell actually had nothing to do with the selection of games featured in the half-time highlights. Beyond production constraints, NFL Films even had little say in which contests would be included. Rather, ABC chose the games based primarily on which teams would be competing on the program in upcoming 148

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weeks. This is not to say that the network would ignore significant games simply because teams would not be appearing on Monday Night Football later in the season. However, the NFL Films–produced highlight package principally functioned as an instrument through which to create excitement for the program’s future broadcasts while offering an entertainment that would maintain viewers’ interest in Monday Night Football telecasts throughout games’ half-time periods.

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The Coming of Cable

In addition to building upon 1960s sports television and augmenting the NFL’s presence on the medium, NFL Films established practices that other sports TV outlets began to imitate. Ground-level slow motion, for instance, is now a standard feature of sports coverage, and each of the league’s broadcast partners now create pregame programs like The NFL Today. The company’s productions also demonstrated that nonlive sports television programming could have appeal throughout the entire week and year. In 1977 Major League Baseball Productions—a subsidiary modeled in large part after NFL Films—worked to capitalize on this expanded interest by launching This Week in Baseball, a syndicated program that mimicked NFL Game of the Week’s format, relied heavily on ground-level slow-motion footage, and sometimes included follies segments.64 Perhaps even more significantly, NFL Films anticipated and precipitated the continuous sports television that developed along with cable TV. To be sure, sports programming—with its established male viewership—neatly complements cable’s focus on serving niche audiences. Cable television outlets broadened further the circulation of NFL Films’ weekly programs and led to the development of additional NFL Films series like Inside the NFL.65 They also, however, began to produce their own programming that provided up-to-the-minute commentary on the sports world. Viewers no longer had to wait until mid-week—or even Monday night, for that matter—to see highlights of NFL games. The never-ending stream of cable sports TV to which NFL Films productions gave rise further changed expectations surrounding sports programming’s availability on the medium and, as a result, significantly altered the subsidiary’s relationship to both television and the league.

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Cable, NFL Media, and NFL Films’ Dinosaur Television Our [NFL Films] slogan is, “Where heroes are born and legends never die.” That has remained unchanged, despite the way the media now covers the game. —Steve Sabol1 If NFL Films is a dinosaur, I’d like to be surrounded by dinosaurs. . . . It’s sort of like Beatles music or Beethoven’s symphonies or Brahms.

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—Robert Kraft, New England Patriots Owner2

In 1987, NFL Films produced NFL TV Follies, a bloopers film that stars comedian Jonathan Winters. Winters plays J. J. Faircatch, a hapless cable television executive who is desperately attempting to improve the fortunes of his struggling “24 Hour Channel.” The production begins with the channel playing a dull educational documentary on the function, properties, and importance of water. After the tedious documentary—complete with bland music and monotone narration—drags on for several seconds it is interrupted by a special announcement wherein an exasperated Faircatch expresses his frustration with the channel’s uninspired and presumably unprofitable programming. Faircatch’s proposed solution is to replace the 24 Hour Channel’s content with a variety of

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football programs. “I’m talking about football programming twenty-four hours a day,” he exclaims. “I wanna see football and you wanna see football. You’re going to get it.” Similar to Follies Go Hollywood and Highlights for Highbrows, the film edits blooper sequences in the style of popular television genres, each of which features Winters—a comedian known for adopting zany personas— playing one or more oddball characters. Mr. Fumble’s Playhouse is a children’s program similar to Pee-wee’s Playhouse; MasterPunt Theatre lampoons PBS’s Masterpiece Theater; a weather report presents follies that take place in the rain and snow; and a news show features correspondent Geraldo Crossbara entering the NFL Films vault in search of rare and mysterious footage—a play on Geraldo Rivera’s highly publicized and ultimately fruitless 1986 excavation of Al Capone’s secret vault beneath Chicago’s Lexington Hotel. Although TV Follies primarily uses television as a gimmick to repackage NFL Films’ follies footage—much of which had appeared in previous films—it also comments on the shifting conditions that marked sports television during the 1980s. Like Faircatch’s 24 Hour Channel, cable channels emerging at this time urgently needed provocative content. Football programming, TV Follies suggests, could help them to establish and sustain an audience in an increasingly crowded media marketplace. By the time TV Follies was produced, the idea of having sports on television twenty-four hours a day was no longer novel. ESPN, which launched in 1979 and was taken over by ABC in 1984, had established itself as a staple of most

Jonathan Winters as cable TV executive J. J. Faircatch in NFL TV Follies (1987).

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cable TV packages. While twenty-four-hour sports television was a reality, the notion of a channel devoted to a single sport was still unheard of. TV Follies’ comic appeal hinges in part on this outlandishness. It was produced before ESPN began to splinter into different and more specific channels like ESPN2 (1993) and ESPN Classic (1997) and prior to the creation of channels devoted to single sports and sports genres, such as The Golf Channel (1995), The Outdoor Life Network (1997), and Speedvision (1996). In fact, the program anticipates the NFL’s 2003 creation of the NFL Network, a channel devoted entirely to the National Football League that now serves as the primary outlet for NFL Films content. As NFL Films’ programming set the stage for the development of twenty-four-hour sports channels like ESPN, it established a starting point from which the National Football League formed its own network. The company demonstrated that varied types of football programming could attract viewers throughout the year, and it provided a massive archive of productions and footage the NFL Network could use to fill its programming schedule. In 2004 NFL Films was designated part of NFL Media, a multiplatform subsidiary run by former ESPN president Steve Bornstein that now includes the NFL Network, NFL.com, and offshoots like the RedZone specialty seasonal cable channel and the NFL Mobile smartphone application. NFL Media’s divisions expand upon NFL Films’ initial goal of transforming the league into a year-round sport. They ensure fans can literally access NFL-related material—from live events to injury reports and statistics—at any time of the day and from anywhere with an Internet signal. The development of cable TV and NFL Media enhanced considerably the production and circulation of NFL Films content. In just the first week after its December 2011 production, audio footage from an NFL Films microphone worn by then Denver Broncos quarterback and pop culture sensation Tim Tebow appeared on ESPN’s NFL Matchup and Sunday NFL Countdown, Showtime’s Inside the NFL, NBC Sports Network’s NFL Turning Point, an NFL Network special, and was available on NFL.com and NFL Mobile.3 Although its content is remarkably widespread, NFL Films’ relationship to television and the National Football League has shifted severely along with these industrial and institutional changes. Outlets like ESPN were eager to use NFL Films’ celebratory programming during their early years. However, they now primarily use the company’s material to facilitate their commentary on day-to-day league news rather than to mythologize the league. Similar priorities guide NFL Media. Most of the content NFL Films provides its younger corporate siblings supports their production of comparatively straightforward, up-tothe-minute NFL coverage. While cable TV and NFL Media have made NFL

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Films’ material more pervasive than ever, a smaller percentage of it resembles the dramatic productions on which the company formed its identity. NFL Films established a foundation for the development of cable sports television and the transformation of the NFL into a multiplatform media institution that now continuously churns out content. However, the aesthetic, industrial, and institutional conditions NFL Films precipitated have drastically altered its position within these contexts. While some of its productions remain as celebratory and dramatic as They Call It Pro Football and Big Game America, the company has been constrained to adjust its practices to maintain a place within the contemporary sports media landscape and league it played such a prominent role in creating.

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NFL Films and Cable

NFL Films had established a significant presence on network television by the time cable emerged. Its in-season and summer programs were shown in most American markets, and millions viewed the weekly material it produced for Monday Night Football and The NFL Today. These programs’ popularity suggested there was sufficient interest in sports television—and representations of football in particular—to attract viewers at all times of the day and throughout the year. Cable TV channels and providers sought to capitalize on and intensify this interest. More than any other development in cable TV, ESPN—the first twentyfour-hour channel devoted entirely to sports—expanded NFL Films’ presence on and changed its relationship to the medium. Before dubbing itself “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” the fledgling channel was only able to secure the rights to feature unpopular and even obscure sporting events. Tape-delayed telecasts of Australian Rules football, dog racing, and tractor pulls were commonplace during ESPN’s first decade. Comedian George Carlin once even joked that ESPN featured “Australian dick wrestling” to make light of the littleknown sports it regularly covered. Needless to say, ESPN could not afford the rights to telecast NFL games. The only link it initially had to the NFL was the commentary it provided on its flagship news program, SportsCenter. NFL Films productions, which were well within ESPN’s then relatively modest budget, allowed the channel to cultivate an association with America’s most popular sports organization. ESPN quickly became the principal outlet for NFL Films programming—from syndicated weekly series like Game of the Week to team highlights and follies films. In 1987 the Washington Post’s Norman Chad sarcastically wrote that NFL Films provided so much of ESPN’s material that if the

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production company ever went out of business, “ESPN might have to change its name to EPN,” taking the word “Sports” out of its title.4 Although ESPN was not as accessible as the network affiliates that carried NFL Films productions, the cable channel showed more of these programs, did so with greater frequency, and scheduled them in popular time slots. The channel, according to Dave Plaut, gave NFL Films “a forum it never had before.”5 “Before ESPN,” claimed Steve Sabol, “NFL Films was like an underground movie company only seen [on TV] early in the morning and late at night. ESPN literally opened the vault for us. A lot of the films we made in the ’60s and ’70s never really seen on television were suddenly being shown in primetime on ESPN.”6 Beyond expanding the amount of NFL Films programming on television, ESPN featured different types of productions throughout the year. Evergreens and offbeat films previously reserved for the summer months were scheduled during the season to satisfy the channel’s ravenous appetite for content. Because it relied so heavily on NFL Films productions, ESPN gave the company significant creative leeway.7 NFL Films manufactured some of its strangest pieces for the cable channel, such as Autumn Ritual (1986), a pet project of Steve Sabol’s that examines football’s cultural meaning by interviewing an eclectic mix of experts from “outside the arena.”8 Fashion designer Bill Blass discusses different teams’ uniform choices; Christian evangelist Jerry Falwell considers the sport’s religious valence; composer Philip Glass explains the role music plays in the game; and poet Allen Ginsberg, who disapproves of football’s hypermasculine violence, recommends meditation as a more productive and spiritually enriching way to channel aggression. Quite simply, ESPN needed NFL Films programs and did not yet have the economic or cultural clout to constrain the company to transform its often quirky practices. As Plaut notes, “In those days they were so happy to have the programming that they just took whatever we sent to them. They had almost no input on it whatsoever. They were just happy to know that it was one-stop shopping, that they were given a finished product.”9 The channel’s desperate need for content allowed Sabol and his staff to indulge their sometimes eccentric aesthetic whims. After ABC acquired majority ownership of the channel in 1984, ESPN hired NFL Films to produce Monday Night Match-Up, a half-hour chalkboard program that previewed and led in to ABC’s 9:00 p.m. Monday Night Football broadcast by combining analysts’ observations with NFL Films footage and coaching tape.10 Because it likely would not be able to compete with other networks’ prime-time offerings, ABC did not carry a pregame program before Monday Night Football. Using ESPN, via NFL Films, to publicize the broadcast

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Allen Ginsberg recommends meditation as a more enriching way to channel aggression than playing football in Autumn Ritual (1986), a film that examines football’s cultural meaning by interviewing a wide range of personalities from outside the world of sport.

allowed ABC to maintain its prime-time audience numbers while providing fans with a pregame viewing option and promoting its newly acquired cable channel. In 1987, ESPN added another half-hour NFL Films production to its pregame Monday evening lineup, Monday Night Magazine, which included segments that examined each competing team’s history—such as famous players and iconic games—and pieces on the squads that grew out of those legacies and were about to play. Building upon its affiliation with ABC, ESPN gained enough carriage and credibility by the late 1980s to secure a stable of prominent advertisers. Consequently, it could afford to purchase the rights to telecast big-ticket events. In 1987, the channel began carrying a single Sunday evening NFL game, initially packaged as ESPN Sunday Night NFL and rebranded as Sunday Night Football in 1998.11 As its prominence increased, ESPN exercised greater control over the content it featured, privileging material that facilitated its up-to-theminute sports news commentary, augmented its coverage of live events, and promoted its talent. Growing out of these institutional and aesthetic shifts, ESPN cancelled both Monday Night Match-Up and Monday Night Magazine in 1993 to produce its own ninety-minute pregame program, NFL Prime Monday (which it renamed Monday Night Countdown in 1998). NFL Films continued to provide the program with footage and occasional segments. Most notably, from 1993 to 2002 it produced “Distant Replay,” a short historical segment on the competing teams similar to the nostalgic pieces featured on Monday Night Magazine. Beyond “Distant Replay,” however, ESPN’s pregame programming abandoned NFL Films’ approach for self-produced content that was more consistent with the channel’s changed priorities.

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Along these lines, NFL Films highlights composed a starting point from which ESPN developed its own version of and identification with the genre. In fact, the channel is now more intimately associated with sports highlights than is NFL Films.12 Unlike NFL Films’ productions, ESPN highlights privilege efficiently recapping events as quickly as possible after they occur over using them to construct dramatic narratives. They contain quick cuts in contrast to NFL Films highlights’ long takes; are narrated by live announcers who often season their commentary with wry wit and pop culture references; and typically do not exceed thirty seconds.13 NFL Films’ slower-paced and earnestly narrated highlights— which cannot be produced nearly as rapidly as ESPN’s video content—became less useful to the channel as it increasingly prioritized recapping events as quickly and economically as possible. While Game of the Week constituted one of ESPN’s key links to the NFL during its first decade, the channel cancelled the program in 1986, a decision that compelled NFL Films to stop producing it for syndication. By the time Game of the Week aired, ESPN had already showcased its own highlights of the program’s featured contest multiple times. Indeed, the process by which ESPN’s continuous stream of highlights led the channel to cancel Game of the Week reflects NFL Films highlight programs’ contribution to the sports newsreel’s extinction during the 1960s. ESPN’s steadily decreasing reliance on NFL Films’ productions forced NFL Films to produce content that complemented the channel’s practices—a dramatic difference from the days when the cable outlet would gratefully accept productions like Autumn Ritual. After Monday Night Match-Up’s cancellation, NFL Films transformed the production into NFL Matchup, which exclusively uses coaching tape to dissect a collection of the previous week’s games and to preview the upcoming week’s contests. Aside from using no NFL Films’ footage, NFL Matchup features none of the company’s signature conventions. It bears more resemblance to ESPN’s various studio programs than to a traditional NFL Films production. However, since 2011 it is the only NFL Films program ESPN carries on its main channel. By the early 2000s it was more common for NFL Films productions to appear on ESPN’s less popular and accessible sister channels. In fact, ESPN Classic grew in part out of the market for nostalgic sports media productions that NFL Films’ documentaries helped to create.14 In 2001 The Sporting News’ Fritz Quindt cited NFL Films content as “the equivalent to daily bread” on the specialized channel, which routinely scheduled the series NFL’s Greatest Games and Lost Treasures of NFL Films.15 However, ESPN Classic steadily purchased less NFL Films material as ESPN produced historical documentaries with its SportCentury series of biographical profiles and its subsidiary ESPN Original

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Entertainment, which it rebranded as ESPN Films in 2008. While NFL Films’ programming is relatively inexpensive, ESPN Classic can use ESPN-produced documentaries for free in perpetuity. A far cry from ESPN’s initial function as an unprecedented and welcoming forum for NFL Films, by 2011 the main channel and its varied progeny regularly carried only two of the company’s programs—NFL Matchup on ESPN and NFL Films Presents on ESPN2. Neither is scheduled in the prominent time slots NFL Films enjoyed during ESPN’s first decade, and only NFL Films Presents employs the company’s signature aesthetic practices. While ESPN continues to use snippets of NFL Films footage on a daily basis, it evidences minimal interest in patronizing the company’s celebratory documentaries beyond the occasional segment or special.16 NFL Films has been constrained to alter rather significantly its iconic aesthetic practices to maintain even a marginal presence on “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.” NFL Films’ relationship with the subscription channel HBO follows a similar trajectory. Sports programming has played a critical role in HBO’s programming and branding efforts since its 1972 formation. In fact, the second program HBO featured after its launch was a National Hockey League game between the New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks. Moreover, the channel established a strong base of subscribers during its first decade by purchasing the rights to marquee sporting events such as Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier’s 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” heavyweight title match and the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which it carried from 1975 until 1999. Like ESPN, HBO used NFL Films to expand its sports programming and to establish an association with the NFL. In 1977 the channel started carrying Inside the NFL, which features extended NFL Films highlights of the previous week’s games, studio commentary, interviews, and short historical and human interest features. Beyond Inside the NFL, NFL Films has co-produced several documentaries with HBO subsidiary HBO Sports, such as The History of Pro Football (1982); Unitas (1999); The Game of their Lives (2001); Lombardi (2010), an update of NFL Films’ 1967 documentary on the coach that won the 2011 Emmy Award for Best Sports Documentary; and Namath (2012), which won the 2013 Emmy for Best Sports Documentary. In each case, HBO uses NFL Films’ recognizable practices to build a unique identity in sports television that reinforces the prestigious brand—encapsulated by the tagline “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO”—it cultivates. Despite Inside the NFL’s position as HBO’s longest-running series, the channel cancelled it in 2008—a decision that former Inside the NFL co-host Bob Costas condemned as “boneheaded.”17 HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg

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explained the cancellation by suggesting the program had lost its distinction in sports television: “We’ve seen the proliferation of so many highlight-driven football shows on TV, online, on-demand. . . . The marketplace has changed and we’re [Inside the NFL] not unique anymore.”18 Greenburg suggested the highlight genre’s pervasiveness and the prevalence of NFL-related programming diminished the production’s value to a channel that trades on its ability to provide viewers with content they cannot get anywhere else. Moreover, since the 1990s HBO Sports has increasingly commented on the NFL through journalistic magazine programs and talk shows that explore—and seek to expose—sport’s most controversial issues, such as Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (1995–present), On the Record with Bob Costas (2001–2004), and Costas Now (2005–2009).19 In both 2007 and 2010 Real Sports received Emmys for investigative features on concussions in the NFL—a topic Inside the NFL has mentioned, but always in a highly selective manner that ultimately paints the league in a redemptive light. The combination of NFL Films highlights’ diminished uniqueness and HBO’s increased production of programs that cover topics in ways NFL Films cannot reduced Inside the NFL’s usefulness to the premium channel. In fact, when HBO competitor Showtime picked up Inside the NFL just four months after its cancellation the channel scaled back the series’ highlights—its main point of distinction when HBO carried it and its primary link to NFL Films’ traditional aesthetic—and increased its studio commentary and analysis.20 These changes suggest Inside the NFL’s value to Showtime is partly contingent upon the program distancing itself from the cinematic NFL Films conventions that originally set it apart. Aside from the documentaries it occasionally co-produces, NFL Films’ main presence on HBO since Inside the NFL’s cancellation is the reality program Hard Knocks. Co-produced with HBO Sports since 2001, the series provides an intimate glimpse into an NFL team’s preseason training camp and chronicles the obstacles its players, coaches, and management endure while preparing for the year.21 For instance, it typically profiles several veteran players and undrafted rookies struggling to make the team. Similar to many popular competitionbased reality programs, Hard Knocks builds suspense surrounding whether these players—whom it humanizes through narration and interviews—will be part of the opening day roster. It even includes footage of coaches and general managers gently informing players that they did not make the team, and it follows the rejected athletes as they solemnly pack their belongings, return their playbooks, and leave training camp. While Hard Knocks briefly features some of NFL Films’ traditional conventions—such as voice-of-god narration, on-field sound, montage editing, and original scores—it is branded primarily

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as an HBO Sports reality program that makes use of NFL Films’ access. Like the company’s relationship with ESPN, NFL Films helped HBO establish a presence in sports television. However, it has been forced to stray from its signature practices in order to satisfy the channel’s efforts to maintain distinction in premium cable and to keep up with trends in popular media culture. NFL Films now struggles to continue its project of mythologizing the league while maintaining a niche within a sports television landscape that no longer has the same use for or interest in it. Contemporary sports media outlets spend countless hours probing and sensationalizing the scandals surrounding sport—from Tiger Woods’s extramarital trysts to Lance Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs. In 2009 the tawdry gossip website TMZ even formed a spin-off that focuses entirely on sports. Steve Sabol lamented these developments and separated NFL Films from them. “When we first started the media was a magnifying glass,” he opined. “It amplified athletes. And now, we’ve gone from telescope to microscope to proctoscope. We’re right up your ass. No man is hero to his valet, and television has become a valet, following a guy to his car, to his house, to the night club.”22 “Our slogan,” Sabol staunchly asserted, “is ‘Where heroes are born and legends never die.’ That has remained unchanged, despite the way the media now covers the game.”23 Regardless of Sabol’s claim that NFL Films does not perpetuate these trends in sports media, the subsidiary’s survival is partly dependent upon its participation in the sensationalism and gossip surrounding the league. For a highlight of a 2009 Philadelphia Eagles game that appeared on Inside the NFL, Showtime asked NFL Films to emphasize quarterback Michael Vick, who had recently been reinstated into the league after serving nineteen months in prison for his involvement in an underground dogfighting ring. Vick only participated in the game briefly and made no significant impact on it. But because there was so much hype surrounding Vick at the time, Showtime insisted that the highlight focus primarily on him, regardless of his lack of importance to the game and despite the fact that NFL Films had wired the Eagles’ outspoken defensive lineman Trent Cole for the same contest. Similarly, Hard Knocks’ 2010 season, which covered the New York Jets, devoted a great deal of attention to cornerback Darrelle Revis’s highly publicized refusal to report to training camp until he received a more lucrative contract. Although Revis’s holdout and eventual return to the Jets at the end of training camp provided a suspenseful subplot that increased Hard Knocks’ allure, and that HBO used to persuade viewers to tune in each week, NFL Films would historically not provide such concerted attention to contract disputes—events that suggest players’ labor carries with it a degree of alienation that the company’s productions traditionally work to

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suppress in favor of suggesting they play primarily for the love of the game. These instances indicate that NFL Films’ cinematic mythmaking increasingly takes a backseat to keeping up with and contributing to coverage of the league’s juiciest stories. However, NFL Films is partly responsible for cultivating an interest in league members’ private lives that built their celebrity status and, consequently, contributed to the frequent production and circulation of gossip about them. Productions like Big Game America, The Hunters, Lombardi, This is a Football, and The New Breed suggested players and coaches’ off-field lives provide engaging content for fans who previously only saw them on the field and in the occasional interview. Regardless of Sabol’s complaints about contemporary sports media’s intrusiveness, these NFL Films productions—though guided by different purposes—did follow players to their house, car, out on the town, and beyond. Contemporary sports media’s focus on gossip and scandal expands upon these productions’ investigations of league members’ personal lives. To use Sabol’s terms, NFL Films’ worshipful magnifying glass had a hand in precipitating contemporary sports media’s invasive proctoscopes. While NFL Films helped emerging cable outlets like ESPN and HBO fill their vast programming schedules and establish valuable associations with the NFL, it also contributed to the development of a sports media landscape that no longer has the same use for its aesthetic approach. Aside from forcing NFL Films to adjust its practices in order to maintain relevance within this changed setting, these shifts have altered its relationship to the league. For instance, teams now place far less worth on their annual highlight films—one of the main reasons the NFL incorporated NFL Films. During the 1980s, 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo would fly his entire organization to Hawaii for the premiere of the yearly highlight film, and the New York Jets would exhibit theirs at Radio City Music Hall. These extravagancies no longer occur. Highlights have become less important to teams as many of the moments they feature can be viewed repeatedly for months before they are finished (albeit in a different form). In fact, teams now seldom even promote their annual NFL Films–produced highlights. Instead, they tend to upload clips to their websites—provided by a combination of NFL Films, NFL Network, and their own communication and public relations departments—throughout the entire year. While Sabol asserted that NFL Films’ slogan remained the same despite changes in sports media, its practices are markedly different. These shifts are most dramatically illustrated by the subsidiary’s redefined relationship to the league since the creation of NFL Media.

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Two Different Cultures

Similar to the channel J. J. Faircatch develops in NFL TV Follies, the NFL Network is a twenty-four-hour outpost for NFL-related news and programming. The Los Angeles–based channel, which launched in a cable television record eleven million homes, brands itself as a place “Where Football Season Never Ends.” Like NFL Films, the Network is an outgrowth of the National Football League’s efforts to build and expand its fan base. Pete Rozelle, in fact, briefly flirted with the idea of creating an independent network for telecasts of NFL games in the 1960s.24 As with the formation of NFL Films, the league’s teams combined to provide the initial $100 million investment to start the network, and they share its revenues. Unlike NFL Films, however, the Network is not primarily designed to set the league apart from other sports organizations. It also strives to compete with television outlets—some of which the league counts among its broadcast partners—for market share of pro football coverage. One of the principal goals behind its construction and a key way it has attracted advertisers is by telecasting league games, which it began in 2006 with Thursday Night Football.25 Expanding upon the “modern” NFL Rozelle set in motion during the 1960s, the contemporary NFL is not satisfied with simply being America’s most popular sports organization; it also works to become the leader in media coverage of the league. As a league subsidiary, NFL Films now operates in the service of these changed institutional aspirations. Despite its far narrower focus, the NFL Network modeled itself after ESPN. NFL Total Access, the channel’s flagship news program, adopts the same basic format as ESPN’s SportsCenter and is hosted by former SportsCenter anchor Rich Eisen, whom the Network hired to serve as its featured studio personality. At the administrative level, the NFL brought in former ESPN president Steve Bornstein to serve as the Network and NFL Media’s top executive. It also hired ESPN senior vice president Howard Katz, who worked under Bornstein when they were both with ESPN, to be NFL Films’ COO—a position that did not previously exist.26 While Steve Sabol remained the subsidiary’s president until his death (though he preferred the title artist-in-residence), Katz oversees its business operations and functions as a liaison between the company, Bornstein, and the league’s corporate offices in New York. Like NFL Films, the Network has cameras present at every league game generating footage to fuel its content. It also has access to NFL Films’ library and all of the material catalogued through the SABER system. However, it primarily uses this footage—along with material from NFL Films’ cameras—to produce coverage similar to ESPN’s that provides analysis, fast-paced highlight

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packages, and updates on statistics, trade rumors, injuries, players’ fantasy football value, and so forth. Though its coverage is more protective of the league’s image than ESPN’s often gossipy material, the Network distinguishes itself by emphasizing the volume of football-related content it produces, the exhaustive detail with which it covers the league, and its position as the NFL’s “official” channel—a status that grants it access (hence its flagship program’s title) that its competitors do not possess. The National Football League initially advertised the Network as an outlet that would feature prominently NFL Films productions and make consistent use of the company’s archive. As commissioner Paul Tagliabue noted just prior to the Network’s launch: “Our mission is to be as great a network as NFL Films has been in all of its various programming endeavors. That includes continued heavy use of Steve Sabol’s talents and his signature-type coverage.”27 “We’re going to be the foundation of the whole network,” beamed an elated Steve Sabol. “If NFL Films is the Starship Enterprise, Steve [Bornstein] and Howard [Katz] are the booster rockets that are going to take us where no man has gone before.”28 Sabol’s ecstatic reaction to the Network’s development and NFL Films’ presumed role within it mirrors his response to the programming opportunities ESPN provided during its infancy. He suggests NFL Films’ value to cable and network television outlets had plummeted since the days when ESPN would schedule productions like Autumn Ritual during prime time. “We’ve [NFL Films] had so many ideas that we’ve never had the chance to do,” Sabol noted. “Things in a file drawer have had the quietus placed on them for 25 years. We’ll have carte blanche [at the Network] to do what we want to do. And instead of being on ESPN at 4:30 p.m. or 1:00 a.m., we’ll be appointment viewing. It’s all you could want if you’re a filmmaker.”29 Sabol indicated that the Network would give his company the creative freedom and prominence it initially enjoyed on ESPN. In fact, one of the Network’s first programming decisions was to revive Game of the Week—which had not been produced since ESPN cancelled it in 1986—as an hour-long, prime-time program. It also encouraged NFL Films to create other shows that employed its traditional practices, such as Six Days to Sunday (2003–2006), a short-lived weekly series that documented an individual league member’s preparation for their upcoming game, and the America’s Game series, which did not debut until 2006 but began production shortly after the Network’s launch. Bob Ryan maintains that NFL Films has produced some of its best work since the Network’s creation. He also dolefully asserts that the Network’s emergence marked a point when NFL Films was forced to go “corporate.” 30

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The Network, Ryan notes, provided NFL Films with a consistent venue for its programming. However—and in contrast to Sabol’s hopeful assertion that the Network would give his company boundless creative latitude—it ushered in an unprecedented degree of budgetary and editorial oversight. NFL Films cinematographers, for instance, are no longer allowed to “let the film run like water,” despite the fact that this approach led to some of the company’s most iconic shots and, as a result, some of the NFL’s most cherished moments. Katz defends these changes by claiming that he has merely instilled greater fiscal responsibility on a media outlet—guided by an executive who proudly admitted to having little interest in or talent for business matters—that often used its resources carelessly. He asserts that none of NFL Films’ administrators or employees even knew the cost to film a league game when he arrived.31 Beyond limiting NFL Films’ production budgets, this oversight constrained the company to privilege producing content that supplemented the Network’s league news coverage—such as segments for Total Access—over material that mythologizes the NFL. As NFL Films producer Neil Zender claims, upon the Network’s launch “the evangelizing of football became less important and the accounting numbers became a bigger part of our mission.”32 Prior to the NFL Network’s formation, Tony Ponturo, the vice president of global media and sports marketing for Anheuser-Busch—one of the Network’s first major clients and one of sports media’s most powerful advertisers— suggested that in order for the new channel to compete with established sports media outlets like ESPN it would have to cater to the young adult male demographic they so effectively attract. “It’s got to be fresh,” Ponturo asserted, “have an edge, a contemporary feel and not just a retread. If it’s just, ‘here’s the 1963 championship game,’ then that’s less appealing.”33 As Ponturo implies, NFL Films’ traditional formal practices and frequent focus on the league’s history would do little to satisfy younger audiences’ presumed interest in fast-paced and hip programming and would consequently be of minimal benefit to advertisers like Anheuser-Busch that are striving to reach that coveted and elusive demographic. To accommodate these shifting interests the Network steadily carried fewer traditional NFL Films programs, which require more time, resources, and personnel to create than its self-produced material. “The shots that people associate with [NFL] Films,” said an unnamed league official in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, “those long, beautiful, super slo-mo shots of a spiraling football—the NFL Network people hate that. It’s too slow for them. The people they’ve brought in are either from ESPN or Best Damn Sports Show.”34 Former NFL Films producer Ray Didinger, who derides the

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Network as a generic ESPN “knockoff,” claims the channel’s management frequently dismisses NFL Films’ documentaries as “dinosaur television” that is no longer relevant within the contemporary sports media marketplace.35 Sports Illustrated even quoted Bornstein calling the subsidiary “obsolete” and “passé.”36 “Everything about the network is about what’s happening right now,” complained another NFL Films employee. “Some of the best stuff we’ve done over the years has been the historical stuff. But they just don’t want to go there. . . . They think if people tune into the NFL Network and see black and white footage, they’re on to the next channel.”37 NFL Films’ iconic productions, then, have steadily become secondary to the Network’s efforts to create inexpensive programming similar to its competitors’ content. For example, in 2006 the NFL Network replaced Game of the Week with NFL Replay, a Network-produced program that condenses a television broadcast feed of the featured game into a one-hour review. While Didinger claims that Game of the Week was “one of the best things [NFL Films] did,” he acknowledges that the program necessitated four or five producers and far more postproduction labor than Replay, which can be cobbled together by just one producer.38 Replay can be created less expensively and more quickly than Game of the Week in part because it excludes NFL Films’ original music and narration. Instead of hiring a narrator, the production uses television announcers’ commentary, and it includes no soundtrack aside from the music that plays along with its opening and closing credits. Replay does, however, supplement the edited television feed with brief snippets of NFL Films’ ground-level slow-motion and audio footage. Its introductory segment emphasizes the program’s “advanced footage from NFL Films” and suggests this material brings viewers closer to the game. Replay even displays “All Access” graphics when it transitions to NFL Films footage to signal the different—and apparently more intimate and dramatic—perspective this content provides. Like ESPN, the Network used Game of the Week to establish a foundation for its programming only to cancel it in favor of a less expensive, self-produced show that is more consistent with the style it eventually developed. While Replay still uses fragments of NFL Films footage, these brief and sporadic snippets suggest the Network primarily values NFL Films as a supplement to rather than a focal point of its regular programming. Since Game of the Week’s cancellation, only a small handful of the programs NFL Films creates for the Network—such as America’s Game, the weekly series Sound FX, and the biographical documentary series A Football Life—resemble the company’s most iconic productions.39 For instance, Playbook, which NFL

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Films has produced for the channel since its launch, is a chalkboard program similar to NFL Matchup that uses coaching tape to analyze the previous week’s games. Like its counterpart on ESPN, the production uses no NFL Films footage and features none of its traditional conventions. Along slightly different lines, in 2007 NFL Films developed the Top Ten series. Each half-hour episode of Top Ten uses interviews and archive footage to count down a different list, such as the best teams that failed to win the Super Bowl, the greatest quarterbacks of the 1980s, the most valuable Oakland Raiders, and the gutsiest play calls. Throughout its history NFL Films has created several productions that rank players, teams, and coaches, including Legends of the Fall (1980) and the Best Ever series of documentaries it spawned.40 These productions—which anticipate the scores of countdown programs that now pervade sports television—feature extended and dramatized highlights that celebrate their subjects’ contributions to the league’s mythic history. Legends of the Fall, for instance, opens with Facenda’s rumbling guarantee that everything featured in the film is of utmost historical importance. “There is magic in the game of football,” he intones. “Twenty-two men on a field one-hundred-yards long, and at times history is made.” Top Ten abandons Legends of the Fall’s solemnity for a format that borrows from a combination of sports talk radio and the cable channel VH1’s zany countdown programs. Instead of dramatized highlights and reverential narration, Top Ten features quickly cut footage accompanied by journalists and sports radio personalities’ sarcastic and argumentative commentary. Moreover, and perhaps more significant given the Network’s industrial ambitions, the series mimics ESPN highlight shows’ popular use of the “Top Ten” format. Though not as comical as Top Ten, the ten-part 2010 series The Top 100: NFL’s Greatest Players also evidences less commitment to NFL Films’ signature conventions.41 The program, again similar to VH1’s countdown series, uses different personalities to present each player and explain their significance. For instance, the filmmaker Spike Lee comments on Joe Namath and the actor Billy Dee Williams discusses Gale Sayers. The production combines the interviewees’ commentary with brief highlights of each player that feature NFL Films’ footage, narration, and music. These highlights, however, are situated as ancillary to the featured interviewees’ takes on the players. The segment on Joe Namath focuses primarily on Lee’s lifelong admiration for the quarterback, and the portion on Sayers emphasizes how Williams—who played the running back in the 1971 made-for-television melodrama Brian’s Song—took creative inspiration from his grace on the field. Though they do so differently, Top Ten and Top 100 both demonstrate the Network’s replacement of NFL Films’ more

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traditional productions with programming that strives toward the newness Ponturo suggested the cable outlet would need to establish a profitable niche in the contemporary sports media marketplace. Zender describes NFL Films and the NFL Network as “two different cultures” whose vastly divergent perspectives sometimes generate tension. “All LA [the Network] cares about,” he says, “is today, today, today because they have to get [content] on the air today. We’re a production house. We’re planning ahead. We want to make it perfect.”42 The Network, Zender asserts, has forced NFL Films to compromise its commitment to producing artful content in order to supply the channel with a consistent flow of material. “Our focus is good programming,” Zender notes. “There are very few shows we do where we look at the ratings. And that’s where you see people butting heads [with the Network]. Because the natural instinct here is ‘I just want to be an artist and produce the best show that I can.’”43 For instance, Zender claims that many NFL Films producers do not like to cut teases—which lead in and out of commercial breaks—into programs because they disrupt productions’ aesthetic rhythm. In contrast, he notes the Network considers teases to be among programs’ most important components because they help to retain viewers. Critics suggest these changes evidence the league’s ultimate intention to phase out NFL Films. In 2008 NFL Films was forced to lay off 150 employees while the Network continued to expand.44 Former NFL Films producer Phil Tuckett—who retired after thirty-eight years in large part because of the institutional changes the Network’s emergence produced—called Bornstein and Katz “cold-eyed network killers.” “With every action spoken and unspoken since they got there,” Tuckett fumed, “they’ve said, ‘we’re in charge now.’ . . . Their approach is how much cheap crap can you turn out as quickly as possible so we can stick it on this god awful network.”45 Although Tuckett acknowledges the Network’s enormous profitability, he bemoans the aesthetic sacrifices it forced upon NFL Films and its staff. Similarly, the Philadelphia Daily News’ Paul Domowitch claims that using the company to support programming like Total Access and Playbook is comparable to “having Picasso paint ‘Dogs Playing Poker.’”46 He suggests the Network has transformed NFL Films from a group of specialized, painstaking artisans into a dwindling and underappreciated crew of assembly-line workers tasked with feeding the channel’s unceasing need for simple and uniform content. NFL and NFL Network officials maintain that NFL Films remains vitally important to the league. “If NFL Films is a dinosaur,” says New England Patriots owner and member of the executive committee on the NFL Network Robert Kraft, “I’d like to be surrounded by dinosaurs. . . . It’s sort of like Beatles music

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or Beethoven’s symphonies or Brahms. When you and I aren’t here anymore, people will still love to watch it because of the quality of it and the uniqueness and the appeal.”47 Similarly, NFL Network vice president of programming Charles Coplin claims he “bristles” at the suggestion that the Network is eliminating NFL Films. However, he also notes “[NFL] Films was never designed to be a news and information outlet. That is not their core competency. We’ve taken advantage of everything NFL Films offers while also trying to develop a good news and information capability.”48 While Kraft and Coplin affirm the league’s commitment to NFL Films, they also suggest that the company’s traditional productions do not align with the Network’s primary mission. The Network is not, as some suggest, killing NFL Films—far from it. In fact, NFL Films now produces more content than ever. However, the Network is forcing the company to change its practices—so much so that most of its productions do not display its recognizable look. While these shifts irk many critics and employees, they are an outgrowth of the same commercially driven logic that motivated the National Football League’s initial incorporation of NFL Films. As Zender notes, “Pete Rozelle didn’t buy Blair Motion Pictures to be a nice guy or out of charity, he thought he was going to make money. . . . All the shows we did [before the Network] were valuable for the business . . . Now we’re doing the most valuable things that can be done for the business. They’re different things in a lot of cases, but it’s what matters to the business and what’s going to make money.” Even though much of NFL Films’ current programming appears dissimilar from the content that originally distinguished it, Zender suggests the company’s broader effort to publicize the league has remained consistent. He even implies that given the realities of the contemporary sports media landscape NFL Films more effectively serves this purpose by supporting the Network’s programming than by continuing to create traditional productions. Moreover, and despite complaints that the material NFL Films produces for the Network demonstrates minimal concern for the league’s past, Zender asserts series like Top Ten and Top 100 actually generate as much historical content as the company has ever provided. “We’re doing what NFL Films has always done,” he says, “we’ve just modernized it.”49 Similarly, Dave Plaut—who jokingly refers to programs like Top Ten as “ADD Theater” because of their sometimes frenzied pace in contrast to NFL Films’ vintage works—describes these programs as “history on the quick for younger audiences.”50 He suggests this style of programming is a practical necessity given contemporary sports television audiences’ interests and advertisers’ resultant expectations. Furthermore, Plaut notes that while NFL Films is known for its epic documentaries, it

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has always produced a range of content—from daring films like This is a Football to comparatively banal segments for network pregame programs. “We have always done the nuts and bolts, quick turnaround stuff and we’ve done the stuff that gets nominated for Emmys. We’ve always done both the hamburger and the filet mignon, that’s just the nature of the company.”51 Although Plaut rightly claims NFL Films has produced varying types of productions throughout its history, since the Network’s creation a far larger percentage of its resources is used to make so-called hamburgers. The Network, however, capitalizes on NFL Films’ established image as a site that produces exceptionally artistic sports media even as it constrains the company to produce fewer productions that employ its signature practices. For example, it periodically features commercials that praise NFL Films’ accomplishments and advertise its relationship to the subsidiary. One of these presents the Network as “the home of NFL Films—the most honored filmmaker in sports.” Similar to NFL Films’ frequent references to classic films and artworks, the Network uses NFL Films as a mark of distinction. The subsidiary’s recognizable image gives the Network a significant advantage over similar cable channels like the MLB Network, NBA TV, and the NHL Network, none of which have a comparable established brand to supplement their programming and marketing. Furthermore, the Network markets its relationship to NFL Films by appealing specifically to the company’s traditional formal practices. The commercials that situate the Network as NFL Films’ proud home draw a sharp division between the subsidiary’s content and the Network’s other programming—even though NFL Films now produces much of this less sentimental and dramatic material. They display a combination of iconic NFL Films footage, sound bites, and scores that urge audiences to associate the company entirely with its “classic” conventions and focus on the league’s history. The NFL Network champions NFL Films’ position as keepers of the league’s flame and even situates itself, however speciously, as an organization that is rooted in, cherishes, and supports the mythology it creates. NFL Films’ importance to the Network— and, by extension, the league—is therefore largely symbolic. As the Network decreases the amount of traditional NFL Films productions it uses in favor of edgier, faster-paced content, it employs the company’s image to imbue its identity with historical weight, authenticity, and aesthetic credibility. Even beyond the Network’s programming, the league uses NFL Films to support and promote the cable channel. For instance, between 2010 and 2012 NFL Media provided free streaming content on the website Hulu.com. All of the mate-

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.

rial offered on Hulu was produced by NFL Films—from annual team highlights to segments of America’s Game and NFL Films Presents. To be sure, NFL Films’ documentaries are far more conducive to repeated viewings than the Network’s decidedly ephemeral coverage of the league’s daily news. Furthermore, NFL Media had little to lose by making these productions available on Hulu—which generates revenue for content providers through its advertising—since the Network tends to use them rarely and, when it does, only as filler scheduled in unpopular time slots. Despite the fact that NFL Films produced all of the content the league licensed for use on Hulu, these materials were branded as products of the NFL Network in order to promote the channel. There were even graphics of the Network’s logo inserted into NFL Films productions, like NFL TV Follies, that preceded its formation.52 The NFL’s 2009 development of the NFL RedZone Channel, an extension of the NFL Network that runs on Sundays during the season, further evidences NFL Films’ subordination to the Network and NFL Media’s related developments. The specialty subscription channel features studio commentary, NFL Network–produced highlights, and live “look-ins” to each league game when a team enters the “red zone” (is inside of its opponents’ twenty-yard-line and likely to score). Prior to 2010, NFL Films edited the television feeds of Sunday games into dramatized highlights shown in stadiums during the league’s other contests. Though made entirely on video, the highlights featured NFL Films music and narration. In 2010, however, the league replaced the NFL Films– produced highlight packages with RedZone highlights, which publicize the specialty channel and the NFL Network that produces it.53 Despite these changes, NFL Films has found opportunities—albeit limited— to create productions that employ its traditional conventions for other cable channels. In 2011 it debuted NFL Turning Point, a reinvention of Game of the Week, for Versus (which was renamed NBC Sports Network in 2012). The hour-long program uses ground-level slow-motion cinematography, audio footage, music, and narration to review two of the previous week’s games, focusing in particular on the key moments—or “turning points”—that influenced their outcome.54 Also in 2011, NFL Films began to produce NFL Single Coverage and Greatest NFL Rivalries for the Discovery Communications–owned male lifestyle channel Velocity. Single Coverage reviews and analyzes a contest from the previous week. Greatest NFL Rivalries, which is scheduled directly after Single Coverage, provides a historical investigation of the relationship between the teams featured on Single Coverage similar to the segments NFL Films produced for Monday Night Magazine during the 1980s. Regardless of suggestions that NFL Films

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is obsolete, these programs showcase demand in venues beyond the NFL Network for the company’s more traditional programming. Reminiscent of ESPN’s initial relationship to NFL Films, NBC Sports Network and Velocity use NFL Films to build a niche within sports television. As Velocity senior vice president Bob Scanlon claimed, creating “[a] relationship with the world’s most powerful sports brand lent us credibility right out of the gate.”55 Time will tell, however, if these nascent channels—like ESPN, HBO, and the NFL Network—will eventually cancel their traditional NFL Films programs in favor of content that corresponds more neatly with dominant trends in sports television. Regardless of any external demand for NFL Films programming, NFL Media reserves the right to restrict its circulation and even retract it from syndication to safeguard the Network’s position as the subsidiary’s “home” and its overall market share of pro football coverage. In doing so, it ensures that NFL Films devotes most of its resources to supporting the cable channel it helped to establish—even as that channel demonstrates less appreciation for the subsidiary’s classic production practices. While the Network has not exactly forced NFL Films’ dinosaur television into extinction, it has rendered it an increasingly endangered species in contemporary sports media.

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They Call It Pro Football 2.0

As with the rise of cable TV, the development and popularization of online media created new opportunities for the National Football League to build and circulate its image. The Internet allowed the NFL to provide fans with instant updates and offered league-produced media content greater mobility than conventional broadcast and cable television afford. While the NFL Network gave the National Football League a continuous presence on TV, NFL. com and NFL Mobile make it available anywhere within range of an Internet signal. Moreover, these online media subsidiaries foster increased convergence among NFL Media’s divisions.56 ESPN hosted NFL.com from its 1996 launch until 2001, when Sportsline purchased the rights to produce and host it for $120 million in what was then the largest contract in the history of Internet sports media.57 Recognizing online media’s rapidly increasing prevalence and value, in 2006 the NFL took full control of the website.58 Similar to the NFL Network, NFL.com competes for market share of online football coverage and distinguishes itself by stressing its position as the league’s official website and emphasizing the access to and amount of information that privileged status provides. The site furnishes a constantly updated stream of league news and exclusive video content; allows

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users to create personalized profiles; promotes and augments NFL Network programming with clips, podcasts, and forums; and, of course, provides fans the opportunity to purchase league-licensed merchandise. In 2010—and despite the game’s intimate association with gambling—NFL.com began to facilitate fantasy football leagues, a profitable feature that nearly all major sports websites use to enhance their traffic. Even more comprehensively than the NFL Network, NFL.com strives to organize and intensify fans’ mediated engagement with the league. NFL Films has produced exclusive content for NFL.com since 1998. In fact, after the NFL Network cancelled Game of the Week, NFL Films continued to create a shorter version of it for the website through the 2008–2009 season. Moreover, NFL.com encourages viewers to engage with NFL Films programming in ways other than simply watching it. For example, it housed a poll in conjunction with The Top 100: NFL’s Greatest Players’ premiere that compared fans’ votes for the top one hundred NFL players to the program’s rankings. Reflecting NFL Media’s attempts to keep up with ESPN, this project mimicked the convergent format the “Worldwide Leader” used for its 1999 SportsCentury project, which both commissioned an expert panel to rank the twentieth century’s top one hundred North American athletes and allowed fans to cast their votes online. More generally, NFL.com provides forums for fans to comment on the company’s productions and to link their observations to social media networks like Facebook and Twitter—a feature that is as much designed to use fans’ leisurely labor to promote the league as it is to enrich their experience consuming NFL Media content. Despite these examples, NFL Films material enjoys only a marginal presence on NFL.com. Like its relationship to the Network, the majority of NFL Films programming included on the website simply supports its daily league coverage and does not feature the company’s signature conventions. Furthermore, NFL.com brands the more traditional NFL Films content it features—such as clips from America’s Game and segments of the web-only version of Game of the Week—as Network products. The website reinforces the Network’s indication that the league primarily values NFL Films as a support to and way to publicize NFL Media’s other, and more immediately lucrative, divisions. Along these lines, Verizon Wireless’s NFL Mobile application distributes NFL Films footage and productions.59 Like the Network and website, however, NFL Mobile primarily markets itself as a tool that offers fans instant updates on league news—specifically through NFL Network and NFL.com content—that can be accessed in the absence of and provide supplements to their television and computer screens. For a monthly fee it also offers live streaming access to

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the Network, the RedZone Channel, ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and NBC’s Sunday Night Football. Beyond Verizon’s application, NFL.com produces several of its own apps that focus on fantasy sports, news, statistics, and so forth. While most of these mobile services offer the potential to access NFL Films material, none of them advertise it as a featured component. Since 2010 NFL.com most explicitly publicizes NFL Films through hosting its official blog, They Call It Pro Football (nflfilms.nfl.com). Prior to 2010, NFL Films’ website was not part of NFL.com. The comparatively simple site explained the company’s history, advertised its many accolades, included information about licensing footage, and housed a special order catalogue.60 They Call It Pro Football, by contrast, offers posts accompanied by NFL Films footage that set out to examine the league and its history from the production company’s unique perspective. Named for the documentary that established NFL Films’ traditional formal practices, the blog is the only section of NFL. com that draws explicit distinction between the subsidiary and NFL Media’s other divisions. Many of They Call It Pro Football’s posts simply promote NFL Films productions and remind viewers when they will next appear on TV. Others supplement and enhance the company’s programming. For instance, NFL Matchup producer Greg Cosell (who is, incidentally, Howard Cosell’s nephew) writes the recurring column “Cosell Talks,” which offers his technical analyses of league games and strategy. His posts provide detailed discussions of X’s and O’s that span beyond NFL Matchup’s already meticulous dissections of coaching tape. Moreover, they allow NFL Films to provide the seasonal weekly television program with a year-round presence. While “Cosell Talks” promotes NFL Matchup and expands upon its straightforward investigations of league games, the series “This Day in Football” furnishes brief historical examinations of the league. The nostalgic posts celebrate notable events in league history that occurred on the date when they are published—classic games, significant players’ birthdays, teams’ anniversaries—and use archived NFL Films footage to illustrate them. In doing so, the series calls attention to and commemorates the central role NFL Films plays in documenting these important moments and using them to build and maintain the league’s heritage. Expanding upon “This Day in Football”’s short remembrances, NFL Films producer Steve Seidman—who writes as “The Vault Keeper”—contributes a series of humorous historical posts entitled “Tales From the Vault.” Seidman’s series builds upon NFL Films’ offbeat examinations of the relationship between pro football and popular culture in NFL Films Presents and in documentaries like The New Breed and Autumn Ritual. For instance, one of his posts explained

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the custom of Super Bowl champions visiting the White House and how this practice developed into a highly publicized annual ritual that U.S. presidents use to cultivate identification with ordinary citizens. Another post, published in 2012 on the day before New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning hosted Saturday Night Live, probes the increasingly intimate relationship between the NFL and celebrity culture by discussing the various league members who have appeared on the popular NBC television program. “Tales from the Vault” also frequently includes investigations of NFL Films’ past and the company’s place within the history of sports media. One post examines Pete Smith, a filmmaker who produced a series of short novelties—entitled Pete Smith Specialties—from 1931 to 1955. Seidman focuses on Pro Football (1934), one of several Pete Smith Specialties that takes sport as its topic, which features members of the 1933 NFL champion Chicago Bears demonstrating trick plays that Smith transforms into comic stunts through the use of slow motion, silly narration, and sound effects. Beyond briefly outlining Smith’s work and its significance to the history of American cinema, Seidman contends that Pro Football and Smith’s other Specialties influenced NFL Films’ use of slow motion and development of the follies genre. The post illuminates a seldom-discussed part of film history and explains how NFL Films—like its textual and discursive engagements with so many aesthetic traditions—built upon it. Another of Seidman’s posts discusses a relatively obscure 1976 NFL Films production entitled Birth of the Bucs, which documents the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ first training camp. Published the day of Hard Knocks’ 2012 season premiere and contributing to NFL Media’s promotion of it, the post explains how Birth of the Bucs established a framework from which the reality program emerged and grew into one of NFL Films’—and HBO’s—most popular productions. Unlike the NFL Films content that NFL.com features, Seidman’s posts emphasize the company’s significance in popular media culture while calling attention to its distinct practices. As NFL Media’s other divisions evidence little interest in the particularity of NFL Films beyond occasionally using its accolades as marketing opportunities, Seidman’s “Tales from the Vault”—and the They Call It Pro Football blog in general—work to preserve its history. Indeed, Seidman’s adopted persona as “The Vault Keeper” (beyond its allusion to the comic book and TV series Tales from the Crypt) signals his effort to protect the company’s institutional and aesthetic legacy—to keep the keepers of the flame. Moreover, the producer’s blogging persona indicates that his focus on telling peculiar historical tales is now largely an exception within a company that constructed its identity in part by producing idiosyncratic and often self-referential explorations of the league’s past.

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chapter 6

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Similar to its treatment of NFL Films’ programming, NFL.com does little to promote They Call It Pro Football. On rare occasions the website briefly features one of the blog’s posts on its main page. It showcased Seidman’s piece on the NFL and Saturday Night Live, for instance, the day before Manning hosted the program. Not coincidentally, however, this occurred during the off-season when there is less news for the website to report and, consequently, less traffic on it. Typically, NFL.com provides only a single link to They Call It Pro Football that is buried among various other links to the many league-related blogs the site hosts. The history They Call It Pro Football preserves is thus suppressed by the lack of exposure NFL.com provides it—a muffling that reflects NFL Films’ diminished prominence within its parent company’s media operations. Like the Network, then, NFL.com takes NFL Films’ attempts to build and circulate the league’s image to new heights. However, the website’s very limited use of NFL Films further suggests the subsidiary is out of tune with the NFL’s current efforts to build its fan base. While NFL TV Follies used J. J. Faircatch’s proposal for a twenty-four-hour football channel as a hyperbolic comic trope, the imagined television outlet is modest in comparison to the ever-expanding multitude of increasingly specific and convergent media that now surround the NFL. The National Football League’s efforts to build and circulate its brand have not changed; however, the organization has adjusted to take advantage of and to maintain its prominence within this swelling sports media landscape. In making these alterations, some of its priorities—including its commitment to NFL Films—have shifted.

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Conclusion The Persistence and Obsolescence of NFL Films We’re [NFL Films] prepared to continue as sons and daughters of Steve Sabol and as grandsons and granddaughters of Ed Sabol. —Ken Rodgers, NFL Films Producer NFL Films will silently fade away into the western sun, narrated by John Facenda, with music by Sam Spence.

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—Steve Sabol1

Despite their increased scarcity on venues like ESPN and NFL Network, NFL Films’ traditional aesthetic practices and the values they convey circulate independently of the company’s depictions of pro football. Throughout NFL Films’ history a diverse range of clients has licensed its content and contracted its narrators to inflect subject matter with the epic drama it famously attaches to the league. Others have commissioned it to create segments and full-length films similar to its moving football documentaries. Hollywood production companies have hired NFL Films to shoot second unit action footage; NBC recruited it to help humanize the network’s coverage of the 1988 and 1992 Summer Olympic Games; and The University of Notre Dame conscripted it to build an epic history of its football program—Wake Up the Echoes: A History of Notre

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Dame Football (1982)—similar to those it created for the NFL in documentaries like The History of Pro Football (1983), 75 Seasons (1994), and The Green Bay Packers—A Complete History (2003).2 More recently, German automobile manufacturer Audi hired NFL Films to glorify its auto racing team’s 2008 and 2011 victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race. Truth in 24 (2009) and Truth in 24 II: Every Second Counts (2012) use orchestral scores, intense narration by gravelly voiced action film star Jason Statham, slow motion, and wireless microphones to depict Le Mans—in typical NFL Films fashion—as an event “where careers are made and legends are born.” “The people who grew up with us are the movers and shakers now,” boasted Steve Sabol of NFL Films’ frequent work for outside clients. “They want some of the magic of NFL Films.”3 In 1979 NASA hired NFL Films to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Apollo 11’s mission to the moon. The Greatest Adventure: The Story of Man’s Voyage to the Moon, which initially aired on PBS and features an original Sam Spence score and narration by Orson Welles, depicts the 1960s U.S. space program as a group of masculine underdogs that banded together to overcome political adversity, technological difficulties, and the dangers of space travel to achieve an unprecedented feat. The film’s opening sequence displays slowmotion, close-up shots (culled from NASA’s vast film archive) of rockets gracefully flying through the heavens that mirror NFL Films’ tight on the spiral sequences. At another point, the documentary features astronauts suspended in space along with Spence’s stirring score and Welles’s emphatic reading of John Magee’s sentimental aviation poem “High Flight” (1941), which describes the sky as “the untrespassed sanctity of space” and likens flying to “slip[ping] the surly bonds of earth” and “touch[ing] the face of God.” The Greatest Adventure follows the same structure as NFL Films’ documentaries on championship seasons, using its familiar format to dramatize the Cold War “space race” through a nationalistic lens. This, according to Sabol, is precisely what NASA hired NFL Films to do. He claims the government agency asked his company to “make when Neil Armstrong plants the flag on the moon like when the Dallas Cowboys win the Super Bowl.”4 After viewing the film, Apollo 11 crewmember Buzz Aldrin reportedly claimed that if NASA had NFL Films working for it full-time, the government would never dare cut its budget.5 Like NFL Films’ work for Hollywood, NBC, Notre Dame, Audi, and others, The Greatest Adventure suggests the company’s signature conventions—even when they do not represent pro football or sports—compose a recognizable framework that imbues subject matter with the drama, heroism, and nostalgia NFL Films uses to sell the league.

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In 1979 NASA hired NFL Films to produce The Greatest Adventure: The Story of Man’s Voyage to the Moon. The production used NFL Films’ trademark conventions to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Apollo 11’s mission to the moon.

A similarly diverse collection of productions parody NFL Films to provide subject matter with a tongue-in-cheek sense of grandeur. For instance, during the 1996 Super Bowl Nike unveiled a series of “Pee Wee Football: The Year in Review” commercials that provide an NFL Films–inspired treatment to young boys barely large enough to keep their balance while wearing full pads. One of them focuses on Javelle “The Bull” Cooks, whom narrator Harry Kalas—hired for the spot with NFL Films’ blessing—describes as “batter[ing] his way goalward like a Packard 8 in a demolition derby” as cymbals crash and groundlevel slow-motion footage displays the pint-sized running back weaving around opponents.6 “Number 30 is not a beautiful runner, he is a powerful runner,” Kalas proclaims. “But in the end, his power is beautiful to behold.” Facenda uttered the same lines to deify O.J. Simpson in 1980’s Legends of the Fall. The Nike commercial transforms the statement from heroic to humorous by using it to showcase a boy who is glaringly different from the men these scripts—in combination with NFL Films’ other conventions—typically glorify. Along slightly different lines, a 1987 Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Joe Montana included the short parody “Super Bowl Gambling Memories.”7 The piece used a Facenda impersonator and NFL Films footage to reflect on Super Bowl X, wherein the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Dallas Cowboys 21–17. Rather than focus on the Steelers’ victory—like NFL Films’ official highlight of the game—the segment celebrates a fourth quarter Dallas touchdown that allowed the team to beat the point spread and, consequently, ensured winnings for gamblers who bet against it. “The Cowboys, six-point underdogs, have beaten the spread,” announces the narrator as if Dallas had won the championship. The piece ends with an orchestral climax and NFL Films footage from a

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A 1991 episode of The Simpsons parodied NFL Films’ “big hit” productions and glorification of the league’s violence.

Super Bowl the Cowboys actually did win of coach Tom Landry being carried off the field in triumph. Like “Super Bowl Gambling Memories,” a 1991 episode of The Simpsons features Homer Simpson watching Football’s Greatest Injuries, a video that spoofs NFL Films’ big hit productions like Crunch Course and Moment of Impact. The video, which Homer views while gulping down a beer on the couch, dramatizes a grisly injury suffered by a player known as “The Galloping Gazelle.” “They call him The Galloping Gazelle,” thunders the video’s Facendaesque narrator as the featured player prances downfield in slow motion. “For six seasons and two Pro Bowls he grazed on the tasty green turf of the end zone. Until one fateful Saturday in November when The Gazelle was stopped in his tracks by a big cat named Wayne Kryzewski.” The video then showcases Kryzewski snapping The Gazelle’s neck along with the “on-field” sound of bones crunching. These parodies, produced for audiences much broader than NFL Films’ typical viewership, use the company’s traditional style in unexpected and exaggerated ways.8 In doing so, they reinforce—sometimes in a subtly critical manner—this style’s intended meanings and uses. The parodies indicate that these meanings and uses are widely understood (indeed, their humor would fall flat without this common knowledge). More broadly, and like the commissioned productions, they suggest NFL Films’ signature practices do not merely constitute a branded way to represent pro football, but also compose a popular framework through which to communicate an idealized, reverent, and nostalgic attitude toward subject matter in general. Steve Sabol hoped that beyond watching the company’s programming NFL Films’ viewers would incorporate the moving experiences its productions fur-

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nish into their everyday lives and fantasies. He refers to the thrilling instances that compel audiences to integrate the drama they witness on screen into their lives and dreams as “backyard moments”—NFL Films sequences that consumers act out and fantasize about while playing catch in the backyard or even engaging in mundane activities.9 Sweeping the floor, for instance, is far more pleasurable when done in slow motion while weaving around imaginary defenders as the Voice of God comments. Sabol claimed the concept of the backyard moment composes a criterion according to which NFL Films evaluates its footage. After games, Sabol would ask his cinematographers if they captured a sequence with the potential to be a backyard moment—a close-up of a running back’s straining face as he sprints downfield, a slow-motion shot of a receiver striving to keep his toes in bounds as he stretches to catch a pass, etc.10 In the language of the NFL Films archive’s SABER system, backyard moments would be classified as “OH GOD.” While NFL Films cannot control how viewers decode and use its content, these backyard moments—along with the broader circulation of the mythology the company builds through its productions about the league, the content outside clients commission, and works that evoke and parody its signature style—fulfill a central goal of branding in contemporary culture. They provide equipment by which consumers build and assert their identities and, in the process, circulate the brand independent of the products that bear its name.11 This circulation ensures a continued presence for NFL Films’ traditional practices—and the values they deliver—during a time when the league evidences less support for programming that displays these conventions. Additionally, they suggest this style has cultural and aesthetic significance that exceeds the realm of pro football and even sports media. It is an identifiable and mobile branded framework through which subject matter—real and imagined—is commonly transformed into an epic spectacle. Indeed, it is now virtually impossible to watch TV for very long during the football season without witnessing at least one commercial that evokes NFL Films’ conventions in an attempt to cultivate an association with America’s Game. While this distinctive style’s importance to the National Football League has diminished, its enduring significance in American popular culture is evident. Every slow-motion close-up of a spiraling football sailing through the air; use of wireless microphones; and combination of orchestral crescendos, baritone narration, and 16mm action cinematography—whether deliberate or unintentional, sarcastic or sincere—draws from, circulates, and expands upon the aesthetic NFL Films popularized. In doing so, it shares in the company’s efforts to keep the flame it built.

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A Propertied Vernacular

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In a 2011 edition of Sports Illustrated’s weekly “Point After” column, Joe Posnanski discussed former NFL head coach Marv Levy’s publication of Between the Lies, a mystery novel centered on the Super Bowl. He praised Levy as an unusually cerebral and professorial coach whose decision to compose a novel in retirement comes as little surprise. To illustrate his characterization of the former coach, Posnanski asks, “who else would call a ref an ‘over-officious jerk?’”12 Posnanski is alluding to a moment captured by an NFL Films microphone Levy once wore that is commonly replayed in productions that feature funny sound bites. He suggests the moment exemplifies Levy’s unique personality and provides a frame of reference that even those unfamiliar with the coach will recognize. Posnanski’s depiction implies that we do not simply remember Marv Levy; rather, we remember NFL Films’ depiction of him. In 2012 Kevin Cook published The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s, a book that claims to offer a previously untold and unauthorized investigation of the National Football League before it transformed into a sanitized corporate product.13 Cook defines the rough-and-tumble 1970s as the ten years between 1972’s Immaculate Reception and 1982’s The Catch— two moments that NFL Films transformed into cultural myths. Moreover, his depiction of the unruly 1970s builds upon NFL Films’ celebration of the decade’s most feared players. For instance, the video Tough Guys (1988) features on its cover Pittsburgh Steelers’ linebacker Jack Lambert, whom NFL Films fashioned into a symbol of the era’s often brutal play by combining footage of his ferocious tackles—some of which would now be illegal—with close-ups of

Cerebral Kansas City Chiefs coach Marv Levy calls a referee an “overofficious jerk.” Captured by NFL Films’ wireless microphones, the sound bite became one of the company’s most famous and frequently recycled moments.

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his toothless grimace. Like Tough Guys, The Last Headbangers features Lambert on its cover. Although Cook only references NFL Films in passing, his take on the 1970s NFL—both in how it defines and describes the era—draws liberally from the corporate-sponsored history NFL Films built. In doing so, it implies that we do not exactly know the NFL’s past; rather, we know the history NFL Films created for it. Also in 2012, J.R. Moehringer penned an ESPN The Magazine feature that examined football’s increasingly uncertain future. He argues that football will continue to thrive despite the widespread criticism that discoveries about concussions’ gravely serious health risks have provoked. “Football simply has an iron grip on our collective psyche,” Moehringer asserts. “We love it. God help us, we love it.”14 Americans, Moehringer suggests, are culturally predisposed to adore America’s Game—regardless of its dangers. His glib explanation evokes a frequently recycled snippet of an NFL Films interview with former Green Bay Packers center Bill Curry. Overwhelmed with emotion, Curry earnestly strives to articulate his complex and deep-rooted affection for football. The best he can come up with is a simple admission: “I love it. God help me, I do love it so.” While Moehringer makes no mention of NFL Films, he references Curry’s statement to explain Americans’ attachment to the game—an illogical fondness that ensures pro football’s continued popularity despite its myriad problems. Moehringer’s discussion suggests we do not merely love the NFL; rather, we love NFL Films’ depiction of it. Steve Sabol liked to point out that a small and inexperienced independent production company like Blair Motion Pictures would not even be able to secure a meeting with the contemporary National Football League, let alone gain exclusive rights to film its most important game of the season. Needless to say, much has changed—in and beyond the NFL—since Big Ed convinced Pete Rozelle to let his fledgling company produce Pro Football’s Longest Day. In a media culture that increasingly caters to ever-narrowing demographic niches, live television broadcasts of NFL games still attract a mass audience. During fall 2012, for instance, twenty-nine of the thirty most-watched TV programs in America were NFL games.15 NFL Films solidified the league’s relationship to television and, in doing so, played a key role in cultivating America’s most popular media spectacle. Its programming distinguished NFL football from competing sports, amplified the league’s presence on the medium beyond autumn Sundays, and promoted and supplemented live telecasts of its games. NFL Films established a league-owned media infrastructure upon which the NFL continues to expand and that all other major sports organizations have since emulated.

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The company also created a framework from which contemporary sports television developed its formal practices and enhanced its presence on the medium. Building upon Hollywood cinema, television documentaries like Victory at Sea and The Violent World of Sam Huff, and Roone Arledge’s “up close and personal” production practices, NFL Films popularized a set of conventions—from ground-level slow motion to on-field sound—that sports media outlets commonly mimic to dramatize and provide a more intimate view of subject matter. Productions like This is the NFL and NFL Action also demonstrated that nonlive sports programming could attract viewers throughout the entire week and year. Like its role in expanding the National Football League’s visibility and renown, NFL Films helped to spark sports TV’s evolution from a stylistically bland genre that appeared primarily on weekend afternoons into a lavishly produced and omnipresent facet of media culture that now features entire channels organized around individual sports, regions, institutions, and even teams. NFL Films’ highly selective productions indicate that sports media representations do not merely display events, but also constitute their meaning. They construct narratives that suggest sport reinforces—and has the potential to challenge—dominant values and ideologies (teamwork, persistence, leadership, patriotism, etc.). This book has used NFL Films to illuminate the historical, discursive, institutional, economic, industrial, and technological circumstances that shape these representations and the cultural work they perform. These contexts—from NFL Films’ specialized archive to the discourses surrounding sports television’s aesthetic merit—are crucial to understanding the subsidiary’s distinctive practices and important place in the history of sports media and American culture more generally. Beyond this specific investigation of NFL Films, studying sports media from an interdisciplinary, humanistic perspective like the one I’ve adopted generates nuanced understandings of the intimate and complex relationship between sport’s cultural meanings and its depiction—as well as the forces that impact this relationship—that cannot be gleaned from simply considering the content of representations, however conspicuously stylized or ideologically loaded they might be. The scholarly study of sports media is still a relatively new endeavor that promises to expand significantly as sport’s proliferation makes apparent and intensifies its social, economic, and political power. The vast and exciting academic opportunities sports media offer—especially considering the relative lack of extant scholarship on this topic—come with choices regarding how to study, explain, and contextualize these phenomena. While the approach I’ve taken here is certainly not the only way to usefully examine sports media, I hope it has illustrated the value of con-

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sidering sport and media’s interrelated meanings and uses through taking into account the varied and intersecting factors that produce and articulate them. Aside from fashioning a highly selective, commercially driven version of sport’s visual history, NFL Films’ exhaustive documentation of pro football since 1964 makes the construction of that history possible. None of America’s other major—or even minor—sports have anywhere near the amount or quality of footage NFL Films generated and possesses. Ground-level slow-motion 16mm footage of Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente rounding the bases after a home run, close-ups of sweat dripping from tennis great Billie Jean King’s chin as she prepares to receive a serve, or audio footage of Boston Bruins defenseman Bobby Orr delivering a body check would undoubtedly change understandings of their respective sports’ histories and meanings. This footage, however, does not and will never exist. We only have pro football. And it is therefore no coincidence that figures like Jim Brown, Dick Butkus, Vince Lombardi, Joe Namath, Lynn Swann, and Johnny Unitas persist as mythic heroes. They are, quite simply, the idols we were provided. NFL Films created this vast cultural archive and carefully governs its uses. Butkus’s big hits, Lombardi’s sideline antics, Namath’s cocksure preening, and Swann’s balletic catches are not going anywhere. They sit in a fireproof, limited-access vault in a southern New Jersey office park waiting to be edited into NFL Films’—or one of its many clients’—next depiction of the “legends of autumn.” Broadly speaking, NFL Films’ history and practices demonstrate the corporate production of cultural meaning in contemporary America. The company’s role in manufacturing pro football’s significance illuminates the social world’s increasing construction by branded commercial goods that sell the ideals they situate as central to consumers’ identities and aspirations. While pro football may be America’s Game (regardless of the fact that many Americans cannot afford tickets to attend one of its games), it is NFL property. NFL Films’ primary goal, then, is to cultivate emotional investment in the commercial organization it represents. As The Atlantic Monthly’s Rich Cohen claimed, “Ed and Steve Sabol taught the average fan how to consume football.”16 Even more so, they taught us how to love consuming pro football. To evoke J.R. Moehringer’s evocation of Bill Curry, God help us. Symbolic Fathers in the Corporate Family

In 2011, the ninety-four-year-old Ed Sabol was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame—an honor his fans had been demanding for years. Appropriately, Sabol created a film for exhibition at the induction ceremony. The six-minute

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production presents a montage of iconic NFL Films shots, sound bites, and scores along with a voice-over where Big Ed explains the company’s mission and importance to the league’s history. “In the NFL, the torch—like a perfect spiral—is passed from one generation to the next,” he says. “It’s the same way at NFL Films. We’re keepers of football’s eternal flame. We make sure that the spirit of the game burns bright forever.” Sabol and his film received a roaring ovation from the audience of fans, league members, and Hall of Famers assembled in Canton to honor him and his fellow inductees. The ceremony gave every indication that the National Football League cherishes dearly Sabol and his company’s contribution to—and role in creating—its heritage. The event, however, seemed as much a farewell to Sabol and NFL Films as a celebration of them. The once flamboyant and imposing Big Ed—though still impressively sharp-witted—was thin and wheelchair bound. Alongside him stood his sixty-eight-year-old son and business partner, who had gone bald from radiation treatments to combat brain cancer discovered five months earlier and that would claim his life just one year later. Although NFL Films now produces more overall content than it did when Ed Sabol called the shots, the ceremony suggested the company’s identity and importance are primarily linked to the league’s past. Beyond evidencing NFL Films’ decreased importance to the contemporary National Football League, Sabol’s induction ceremony—like the NFL Network commercials that boast the channel’s status as NFL Films’ “home”— suggests that the NFL still benefits from the subsidiary’s recognizable history and identity. While the league now most frequently uses NFL Films to support its cable channel and website’s daily coverage of league news, it continues to maintain and strategically deploy the subsidiary’s brand to take advantage of whatever economic and symbolic value it has retained. It emphasizes, for instance, NFL Films’ derivation from and relationship to the Sabols’ entrepreneurial and artistic vision even though they had considerably less say in how it was run since NFL Media’s creation. The various tributes NFL Network and other media outlets made to Steve Sabol after his passing fervently reinforced this attitude. Total Access host Rich Eisen described him as “the artist and heart of NFL Films,” and the channel’s studio personalities all wore lapel pins with his initials inside a filmstrip—a thoughtful though somewhat ironic gesture considering the aesthetic restrictions the Network placed on his company’s production practices. Along these lines, in a short memorial segment made for Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, NFL Films producer Ken Rodgers promised Sabol’s influence on the company and filmmaking style will

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Ed and Steve Sabol after Big Ed’s 2011 induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Courtesy of Kevin McLoughlin/NFL Films.

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persist. “He [Sabol] spent a lot of time preparing a generation of filmmakers for his leaving,” Rodgers noted. “And while it happened in a way none of us expected, we’re prepared to continue as sons and daughters of Steve Sabol and as grandsons and granddaughters of Ed Sabol.” Beyond praising Sabol’s extraordinary life and career, these tributes suggest NFL Films will not only continue to keep the league’s flame, but will maintain and honor the specific tradition Ed and Steve founded. Rather than simply dissolving NFL Films and folding it into NFL Media, the league positions it as a boutique subsidiary—similar to Miramax Films’ role within The Walt Disney Company—and capitalizes on its artistic renown and credibility. In fact, the National Football League’s limited use of NFL Films’ signature material since NFL Media’s development suggests this content is less valuable to the NFL than the subsidiary’s brand. The NFL—as Ed Sabol’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony and the tributes to Steve Sabol indicate—nurtures this brand as it demonstrates less support for the practices it signals. NFL Films is no longer tasked with reaching out to the league’s entire fan base. The few traditional productions it still creates are geared primarily toward older adult males in contrast to the eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old demographic that composes the NFL Network and NFL.com’s principal audience. The company is now part of an increasingly diversified multiplatform media conglomerate that employs manifold strategies to attract a variety of consumers. NFL Films thus provides a thread that can be used to trace the National Football League’s metamorphosis from an organization that furnished football games into a multifaceted and media-driven institution. More broadly, the subsidiary’s history and shifting relationship to the league illustrate the common transformation of media outlets from distinct and relatively autonomous production “houses”—which often adopted recognizable aesthetic practices and were identified with individual artistic and entrepreneurial figureheads—into specialized parts of enormous and diversified corporate media outlets. For instance, Paramount Pictures, founded by Adolph Zukor, is now part of Viacom, and Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures is now ensconced in Comcast’s corporate web. Like NFL Films, these entities often maintain distinct brands despite their subordination to a parent company’s institutional, economic, and political goals. Indeed, the depiction of Ed and Steve Sabol as NFL Films’ “fathers”—men whose unique personalities, tastes, and aspirations embody and guide the organization’s core values—obscures the degree to which “their” company is and always has been beholden to its corporate parent. The NFL thus controls NFL Films’ practices while benefitting from its constructed autonomy.

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Before Big Ed’s Hall of Fame induction, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Frank Fitzpatrick asked Steve Sabol to comment on NFL Films’ future. The typically jovial filmmaker provided an unusually wistful response. “NFL Films will silently fade away into the western sun, narrated by John Facenda, with music by Sam Spence,” Sabol mused. “We may be remembered for a few days, but then I’m sure someone will pick up the reins and continue to idolize the game of pro football.”17 Whereas so many of his comments exaggerate NFL Films’ influence, here Sabol acknowledges the company’s diminished significance in sports media and popular culture more generally. Beyond the decreasing interest NFL Films’ signature productions now receive from the league and other media outlets, the company is limited by technological changes. In 2012 Eastman Kodak—NFL Films’ 16mm film supplier— filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Kodak’s financial troubles and the broader lack of demand for 16mm that contributed to them have put the future of NFL Films’ traditional production practices—not to mention the future of the film medium—in even greater jeopardy. NFL Films now more frequently uses highdefinition video, a medium that is far less expensive than film and that allows the company—which devotes a rising percentage of its resources to supplying NFL Media’s incessant programming needs—to produce content more quickly. Aside from the archive footage they use, programs like Top Ten and Top 100 are video productions. In 2012, Hard Knocks, which had employed video elements throughout its history, shifted entirely to the newer medium. While the league’s changed priorities have reduced the amount of NFL Films content that features its traditional conventions, these industrial and technological shifts threaten to make those practices impossible—and to render NFL Films’ moniker a misnomer in the process. However, just a few months after Hard Knocks moved to video the United States National Film Preservation Board selected They Call It Pro Football for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, a collection reserved for “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films.”18 This honor permanently places the stylish documentary Steve Sabol boastfully dubbed “the Citizen Kane of football movies” in the company of Welles’s masterwork, as well as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and the rest of America’s film canon. While this distinction installs NFL Films as an important part of our cultural past, the prospects for the subsidiary’s significance to our future seem exceedingly grim. Complaints that the National Football League has destroyed NFL Films in its quest to forge a niche in contemporary sports media miss the point that the

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subsidiary has always dutifully served the NFL’s efforts to build and expand its fan base. NFL Films productions and their circulation propelled the league’s transformation into a diversified, multiplatform, media-driven empire that eventually grew to rely less on the company’s services (if not its brand). While critics and fans lament NFL Films’ decreased importance to the league, the subsidiary was, in a way, designed with the ultimate goal of creating a media infrastructure that would eventually pass it by.

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Notes

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Introduction

1. Murphy, et al., “The Path to Power,” 82. 2. Qtd. in Bennett, “Sports Programming that Appeals to Fans’ Senses,” 30. 3. It is debatable as to the precise year when football overtook baseball as America’s most popular sport. However, sources typically agree that football established itself as the country’s most widely consumed sport spectacle by the end of the 1960s, shortly after the 1966 NFL-AFL merger agreement and resultant establishment of the Super Bowl. 4. See Oriard, “Professional Football as Cultural Myth”; Real, “Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle”; and Ross, “Football Red and Baseball Green: The Heroics and Bucolics of American Sport.” 5. Paolantonio, How Football Explains America, xiii. 6. “NFL Films Inc.: Father-Son Team Establishes Gold Standard for Sports Photography.” 7. Qtd. in Tight on the Spiral. 8. Macnow, “NFL Films is Scoring High,” 46. 9. Block, “The 27th Team,” 22. 10. Scholarly research on sports media is slowly expanding along with the development of journals like Journal of Sports Media (2006–present), International Journal of Sport Communication (2008–present), and Communication and Sport (2012–present). These journals, however, tend to publish scholarship more firmly rooted in the social sciences. Practitioners of humanistic media studies have been slower to embrace sports media as a serious research topic. 11. Michael Oriard’s Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport provides the most comprehensive academic discussion of NFL Films. Oriard succinctly outlines

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the company’s dominant aesthetic practices and contextualizes its development in relation to the league’s amplified use of media and marketing during the 1960s. 12. Qtd. in Fitzpatrick, “NFL Films Founder Finally Getting Ultimate Honor from the Sport He Helped Make America’s Most Popular.” 13. Qtd. in Durslag, “They Sell Everything but the Goal Posts,” 7. 14. “NFL Films Inc.” 15. NFL Films later repackaged the film as part of the NFL Network’s A Football Life series. 16. In 2009, the Haverford School renamed their field Sabol Field to honor Ed and Steve Sabol. 17. Blair Motion Pictures made a series of productions before its incorporation by the NFL. All About Ice Cream (1964), for instance, was a promotional film made for Abbotts Dairies that explained how ice cream is made. The immodest Ed Sabol gave himself brief cameos a la Alfred Hitchcock in many Blair Motion Pictures productions. He played a fisherman in To Catch a Whale and a factory worker—who peers directly into the camera and raises his eyebrows in satisfaction as he tastes a spoonful of ice cream—in All About Ice Cream. 18. The exact price of Blair Motion Pictures’ winning bid shifts in different accounts of the company’s history. Three thousand dollars is the generally agreed upon figure. 19. Brody, “The Fearless Tot from Possum Trot,” 69. 20. Ibid., 69. 21. Levy, “Sudden Death Sabol Reels Again.” 22. Sabol, “Steve Sabol, President of NFL Films.” 23. Steve Sabol did not join his father on a full-time basis until 1964. 24. Ross, “Filming the NFL,” 11. 25. Qtd. in Danyluk, The Super ’70s: Memories from Pro Football’s Most Memorable Era, 102. 26. MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 183. 27. Yagoda, “Not So Instant Replay,” SM65. 28. Qtd. in Davis, Rozelle: Czar of the NFL, 156. 29. The league expanded from twelve to fourteen teams between 1960 and 1965, adding the Dallas Cowboys and Minnesota Vikings. While the league incorporated NFL Films in 1964, the company did not begin its project of documenting all of the league’s games until 1965. 30. “The Daily Goes One on One with Steve Sabol.” 31. Sabol, “Pro Football’s Own Mythmaker: How I Did It.” 32. NFL Films headquarters was originally located in downtown Philadelphia. It moved to a larger facility in tax-friendly New Jersey in 1968. It again moved to a different building in Mount Laurel in 2002. In 2009 the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission placed a historical marker at the location of the company’s original Philadelphia offices. 33. Wise, “The Music of the Spheres: Composers who Bring the NFL to Life,” NJ1.

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34. Sabol, “Pro Football’s Own Mythmaker: How I Did It.” 35. Lomartire, “NFL Films Frozen in Time,” 1D. Neither the NFL nor NFL Films publish their financial figures. 36. Qtd. in Berger, “Sabol: He Carries the Ball for NFL Films,” X106. 37. Qtd. in Macnow, “NFL Films is Scoring High,” 44. 38. Von Hoffman, “Yardage Footage,” B1. 39. NFL Films has provided conflicting dates for They Call It Pro Football’s production, which include 1965 and 1967. The company officially endorses 1966 as the documentary’s date on its official blog, which is, incidentally, named after the famous production. 40. There are also some games NFL Films records with only a single top camera. 41. Though she does not reference NFL Films in particular, Dona Schwartz outlines the phenomenon of fans self-consciously performing for cameras in Contesting the Super Bowl. 42. Qtd. in Fisher, “Branching Out: NFL Films Does More than Just Football Games,” C1. 43. See Morse, “Sport on Television: Replay and Display.” 44. It has since been debated as to whether or not the ball actually touched the ground before Harris caught it. Unsurprisingly, NFL Films has examined this controversy in several programs. 45. Sabol, “NFL Films Cameraman Always on the Marx.” 46. When a player or coach wears a wireless microphone, the company includes an additional camera that focuses only on that individual. 47. In his exposé on the NFL’s sometimes unseemly underbelly, former player Tim Green asserts that Taylor, and other players, would exaggerate their behavior when they were wired with NFL Films microphones. “When it comes to sound bites,” he warns, “you can never trust what you hear when a player has been ‘wired.’” See Green, The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL, 158. 48. Qtd. in Myslenski, “A Conversation with Ed and Steve Sabol,”11A. 49. Qtd. in Dvorchak, “NFL Films Sheds Light on Sports Highlights,” SW10. See also Johnson, “NFL Films and the Re-Production of Football.” 50. Sabol, “Steve Sabol, President NFL Films.” 51. Qtd. in Durslag, “They Sell Everything but the Goal Posts,” 8. 52. Spence’s involvement is also a product of the less expensive cost to produce music in Germany because of the different regulations regarding musicians’ unions. 53. Qtd. in Lomartire, “NFL Films Frozen in Time,” 1D. 54. Qtd. in Macnow, “NFL Films is Scoring High,” 46. 55. Qtd. in Heath, “NFL Is Getting with the Program; League Follows Suit with Own Network,” D1. 56. In his presentation “Stylists and Storytellers,” NFL Films senior producer Steve Seidman locates four basic genres of the company’s productions: the highlight, epic history, biography, and follies. 57. NFL Films has also produced an array of programming geared toward niche audiences. Children’s productions include NFL Kids: A Field of Dreams (1992); NFL Under

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the Helmet (1992–1995), a series for adolescents that adopts a format similar to NFL Films Presents and sought to capitalize on the popular program NBA Inside Stuff (1990–2005); and Backyard Basics (2002), a partially animated production wherein various NFL players offer instruction on the game’s foundational skills. Women’s Football (1971) explores the league’s increasing number of female fans during the 1960s and 1970s, and A Woman’s View of Pro Football (1993) is a lighthearted documentary that features interviews with a diverse group of noteworthy women (Gloria Steinem, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Phyllis Diller, and others) who discuss their understanding of and passion for professional football. Building upon this production, NFL Films collaborated with the cable television channel Lifetime to produce the two hour-long specials NFL Stories: Straight from the Heart (2001) and Her Life and the NFL (2002). These productions focused on women’s perspectives toward football and packaged human-interest stories regarding the league in a format similar to Lifetime’s other fare. One segment focuses on the NFL’s partnership with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Finally, NFL Films produced a collection of music video compilations during the early 1990s to market the league to fans of different musical genres. In the same year that it released NFL Rocks, NFL Films created NFL Country, which pairs NFL Films footage with popular country songs. Based on NFL Rocks and NFL Country’s success, and capitalizing on the overall popularity of the music video during the early 1990s, NFL Films released several other country and rock music themed productions, such as NFL Outlaw Country (1993), NFL Honky Tonk Country (1994), NFL Rocks: Extreme Football (1993), and NFL Rocks on the Edge (1994). While identical in format to their predecessors, these films tailored themselves to subgenres of country and rock. NFL Outlaw Country focuses on “outlaw” country songs performed by the likes of Travis Tritt and Dwight Yoakam, and NFL Rocks on the Edge features “alternative” rock songs by bands like Fishbone and Pantera. 58. In 2010, NFL Films produced the short-lived reality program NFL Full Contact for the cable channel TruTV. The self-reflexive reality program focused on the production of NFL games and events from various perspectives. One episode even focused on the process through which NFL Films documents a game. 59. NFL Films first used the reverse-angle replay in 1971. It first paired football footage with popular music in 1975, when it combined the nostalgic Barbara Streisand song “The Way We Were” (1973) with footage of Bart Starr. Starr had taken over as the Packers’ coach and the team was off to an unsuccessful start—a glaring contrast to the days when Starr played for Lombardi. NFL Films used the song to convey—in a tongue-in-cheek manner—the Packers’ dramatic transformation since the years when Starr served as the team’s quarterback. 60. Sabol received Emmys for writing, cinematography, editing, directing, and producing. No one in the history of television has won as many Emmy Awards in as many categories. 61. Yagoda, “Not So Instant Replay,” SM65. 62. Barra, “On NFL Films’ Home Turf,” D15.

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63. The Power and the Glory: The Original Music and Voices of NFL Films. 64. Taaffe, “Footage that Can Go to Your Head,” 84–85. 65. MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 286. 66. David Anspaugh, telephone interview by author, June 8, 2011.

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Chapter 1. Creating and Sustaining America’s Game

1. “Vinnie, Vidi, Vici,” 54. 2. Keating, “NFL Nation.” 3. Baker, “Are You Blocking For Me, Jesus?,” 997. 4. Oriard, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport. 5. Qtd in Modoono, “NFL Films Celebrates 25th Anniversary,” D5. 6. The National Football League began as the American Professional Football Association in 1920. It changed its name to the National Football League in 1922. 7. The Oorang Indians was named after its sponsor, Oorang Dog Kennels. The team was composed of an entirely Native American roster. Oriard notes that the club—for which Jim Thorpe played from 1922–1923—would stage short Wild West shows before their contests and at halftime, wherein they would “play Indian” for the crowd by performing Native American dances and demonstrations with knives, tomahawks, and lariats. See Oriard, King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, The Weekly and the Daily Press, 285. 8. Willis, Joe F. Carr: The Man Who Built the National Football League, 306–307. 9. Qtd. in Willis, Joe F. Carr: The Man Who Built the National Football League, 384. The film also incorporated several product placements to celebrate General Mills’ products. One scene, for example, featured a cafeteria full of players eating Wheaties. As the NFL’s contract with General Mills states: “Said film [Champions of the Gridiron] shall be produced by such technique as the Company [General Mills] in its discretion deems best, shall be from four to five thousand feet in length, shall be non-commercial but may contain implied or inferred references to Company’s Wheaties by such means as the appearance of Wheaties packages on the table in training table scenes, the conspicuous display of Wheaties advertising signs on practice fields and such other means as Company, with the cooperation and relying on the ingenuity of the Clubs [National Football League], can devise.” 10. The second and only other installment of Champions of the Gridiron was produced shortly after Carr’s death and was introduced by his successor as NFL president, Carl Storck. Storck provided a similar spoken introduction to the film that stressed professional football’s excitement and safety. 11. The draft is the one major violation of antitrust laws that persists surrounding the contemporary league’s treatment of its employees (NFL players gained free agency in 1993). The draft endured the 2011 NFL labor stoppage, wherein NFL owners “locked out” the players and the NFLPA filed a fifty-two-page antitrust complaint against the league.

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The Collective Bargaining Agreement the NFL and NFLPA eventually reached allowed the draft to continue in its previous form. 12. Qtd. in Robert S. Lyons, On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell, 62. 13. Neither of the two administrators who served between Carr and Bell was particularly impactful or innovative. Carl Storck served as interim president from 1939–1941. Elmer Layden was elected commissioner in 1941 (the NFL changed the title of its top executive from president to commissioner upon Layden’s election) and worked to keep the league afloat during World War II. 14. Michael MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 40–41. 15. Associated Press, “Players Association Doesn’t Bother Bell.” 16. Free substitution had existed prior to 1950. In 1941 the league ruled that players could substitute at any time but could not be taken out until one play had transpired. In 1946 the league moved to limit substitutions to a maximum of three players at a time. Unlimited substitution was adopted on a temporary basis in 1949 before being permanently adopted in 1950. 17. If playoff games were still tied after an overtime period, they would go to subsequent periods until a team finally scored. 18. Graham, “Football is Getting Too Vicious,” 26; “Savagery on Sunday.” 19. Lyons, On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell, 278. 20. Qtd. in Orr, “The Commissioner Who Commissions.” 21. Twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker Alvin Paris offered Giants’ halfback Frank Filchock and fullback Merle Hapes each $2,500 in cash, a $1,000 bet on the Bears, and a $15,000 off-season job to throw the game. A team of detectives uncovered the plot just one day before the championship. Hapes, who admitted that he was offered a bribe, was suspended for the championship. Filchock, who initially denied being offered a bribe but later admitted that Paris did offer him money while testifying at the gambler’s criminal trial, was allowed to play. The Giants lost 24–14. Although Filchock played poorly, it was never proven that he threw the game. See Feinberg, “‘Fixer’ Jailed Here for Bribe Offers to Football Stars”; Lyons, On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell, 130–32; and Coenen, From Sandlots to the Super Bowl: The National Football League, 1920–1967, 127–28. 22. See Bell and Martin, “Do the Gamblers Make a Sucker Out of You?” Austin Gunsel served as interim NFL commissioner between Bell’s passing and Rozelle’s election. 23. Focusing on CBS, Dale L. Cressman and Lisa Swenson investigate these early network football telecasts in “The Pigskin and the Picture Tube: The National Football League’s First Full Season on the CBS Television Network.” 24. Brulia, “A Chronology of Pro Football on Television, Part 1,” 21. 25. Many individual teams imposed blackouts prior to Bell’s implementation of them as a league-wide policy. In fact, the Los Angeles Rams imposed local blackouts as early as 1951. 26. Qtd. in MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 106. 194

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27. Davis, Rozelle: Czar of the NFL, 79. 28. Qtd. in Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: The Life of Vince Lombardi, 169. 29. Qtd. in Lyons, On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell, 282. 30. The 1958 championship game was not the first nationally televised championship game. NFL championships had been televised nationally since 1951. Despite its location in the United States’ largest media market, Bell did not provide the game with an exemption from the blackout rule. 31. Qtd. Davis, Rozelle: Czar of the NFL, 123. 32. Rozelle’s profound success as commissioner, however, changed how the league selected its administrators. Neither of the two commissioners since Rozelle began their careers as players or coaches. Paul Tagliabue (1989–2006) was a lawyer for the NFL prior to being elected commissioner. Tagliabue’s successor Roger Goodell (2006–present) was trained in business and served as the league’s COO before being elected commissioner. 33. Steinberg, “He Could Always Move Merchandise,” 38. 34. Oriard, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport, 3. 35. Aside from Davis’s account, John Fortunato’s Commissioner: The Legacy of Pete Rozelle also casts Rozelle as an exceptional individual who single-handedly ushered the league into its modern era. Fortunato also details Rozelle’s role in developing the NFL’s brand identity in “Pete Rozelle: Developing and Communicating the Sports Brand.” 36. Accorsi, Foreword to Rozelle: Czar of the NFL, viii. 37. Gorman and MacLean, Media and Society in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction, 128. 38. Davis, Rozelle: Czar of the NFL, 203. 39. Kahn, “Emperors and Clowns,” 40. 40. “Vinnie, Vidi, Vici,’’ 54. 41. Sports Illustrated celebrated the firm stance Rozelle took against activities that might compromise the league’s image, in particular his suspension of Green Bay Packers halfback Paul Hornung and Detroit Lions lineman Alex Karras for gambling earlier in the year. See Rudeen, “Sportsman of the Year.” 42. Attner, “The Power of Persuasion: The Most Powerful People in Sports for the 20th Century.” 43. Harris, The League: Inside the NFL, 12. 44. Rozelle, “Is it ‘Parity’? ‘Mediocrity’? Pete Rozelle Says No,” S2. 45. The NFL’s Annual Pete Rozelle Award—an honor developed in 1989—is given to “longtime exceptional contributions to radio and television in football.” 46. Maher, “The Great American Publicity Machine,” D1. This article also mentions that the National Football League actually collected more information on the American Football League than did the AFL itself before it incorporated the rival organization. 47. MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 179. 48. Qtd. in Talley, “Timing the Key to Success,” J21. Hornung and Karras each comment extensively on the suspension in their respective autobiographies, Golden Boy and Even Big Guys Cry. 195

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49. The compromise allowed Namath to retain ownership of other Bachelors III restaurants he opened in Boston and Fort Lauderdale. See Kriegel, Namath: A Biography. 50. The First Fifty Years: A Celebration of the National Football League in its Fiftieth Season, 1. 51. Ibid., 23. 52. According to the United Way, “Great Moments” was the largest-ever public service advertising campaign in America. See “About the NFL and United Way Partnership.” 53. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. 54. In Supertube: The Rise of Television Sports, Ron Powers describes the AFL as a “studio” sport because so few people actually attended the league’s games. Telecasts would often cut directly from the kicker to the kick returner rather than trace the ball’s flight in order to avoid displaying the sparsely populated stadiums in which AFL contests were held. See also Felser, The Birth of the New NFL. For a detailed account of the AFL’s development see MacCambridge, Lamar Hunt: A Life in Sports. The NFL has endured other competitors throughout its history, but none as successful as the AFL. Red Grange and his agent C. C. Pyle formed the American Football League (no connection to the organization Hunt later developed) in 1926, which initially lasted one year. The earlier American Football League emerged twice more, from 1936–1937 and 1940–1941. More successful than the first American Football League’s varied iterations, The All-American Football Conference lasted from 1946–1949 and developed three clubs that were eventually incorporated into the NFL—the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and Baltimore Colts. Since the AFL-NFL merger, several other professional football leagues have emerged with little success, most notably the World Football League (1974–1975), United States Football League (1983–1987), and the XFL (2001), a famously unsuccessful organization founded by World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon that strove to provide a more “extreme” brand of pro football. See Byrne, The $1 League: The Rise and Fall of the USFL; Forrest, Long Bomb: How the XFL Became TV’s Biggest Fiasco; Gluck, While the Getting’s Good: Inside the World Football League; Oriard, King Football, 5; Quirk and Fort, Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports. 55. While the merger clearly sought to retain the NFL’s institutional identity, the newly combined league adopted several practices that the AFL developed to make the game more entertaining, such as the two-point conversion and the custom of placing players’ names on the backs of their jerseys. Further, the AFL used a combined league-wide television contract before the NFL adopted this practice. 56. The NFL traditionally only holds Super Bowls in locations where average early February temperatures exceed fifty degrees Fahrenheit—a rule that has limited most Super Bowls to either warm-weather cities or to domed stadiums. It granted an exemption to the 2014 Super Bowl, which was held in MetLife Stadium, the home of the New York Giants and New York Jets. In fact, the group representing MetLife Stadium used NFL Films footage of the 1967 “Ice Bowl” to present their successful bid to host the event. Their pitch employed this classic NFL Films footage to suggest that a cold weather Super

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Bowl would possess greater authenticity than those held in southern California, Florida, or New Orleans. See Mosley, “Super Bowl’s a Lock for NYC/NJ.” 57. Oriard, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport, 98. 58. Charles Kenyatta Ross outlines the NFL’s integration, at the level of players as well as management, in Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League. 59. Lancaster, a former athlete and a passionate football fan who established his celebrity in part by playing Jim Thorpe in Jim Thorpe—All American (1951), agreed to narrate Big Game America for no payment other than a football autographed by Pete Rozelle. Furthermore, shortly after narrating Big Game America Lancaster went to work on a film entitled Valdez is Coming, which was being shot in Spain. In a letter to Ed Sabol, the actor noted that he and the other Americans on the crew had no way of seeing any NFL games and asked Sabol if he could ship them weekly highlights. Sabol enthusiastically granted Lancaster’s request and shipped them each weekly installment of NFL Game of the Week. See Seidman, “Tales from the Vault: Vocal Hero.” 60. NFL Films’ use of the league’s countercultural elements to market the league’s image reflects several of the tropes of mainstream American advertising during the 1960s that Thomas Frank discusses in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. 61. The same year that The New Breed was produced, Sports Illustrated’s John Underwood penned a profile of Rossovich entitled, “He’s Burning to Be a Success.” The article provides anecdotes that describe Rossovich setting himself on fire, jumping naked out of birthday cakes, and partying with his similarly exuberant roommate—Steve Sabol. 62. In College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era, Kurt Edward Kemper examines how the discourses surrounding college football often situated it as a unique reflection of American identity during the Cold War era. He focuses in particular on college football’s position as an institution that reinforced a sense of national identity during a historical moment when American society was riddled with political insecurities. The National Football League mobilized some of these same sentiments in order to build support for its brand. 63. The Washington Redskins franchise only integrated after the Kennedy administration threatened its notoriously racist owner George Preston Marshall with federal retribution. See Smith, Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins. 64. See Duru, Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL; Freeman, Jim Brown: The Fierce Life of an American Hero; Gent, North Dallas Forty; Jenkins, Semi-Tough; MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation; Meggyesy, Out of Their League; Oriard, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Game; and Zirin, A People’s History of Sports: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play. 65. America’s Game was designed and marketed as a celebration of the Super Bowl’s fortieth anniversary. It premiered as a weekly countdown of the top twenty Super Bowl champions that ran from November 2006 until the weekend of Super Bowl XLI. While

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the NFL Network carried the America’s Game documentaries on the top eighteen Super Bowl champions, CBS aired the top two (which celebrated the 1985 Chicago Bears and 1972 Miami Dolphins respectively) the day before the Super Bowl—a programming decision that gave the NFL Network significant exposure during a time when it was still working to establish widespread carriage from cable television providers. NFL Network scheduled America’s Game’s remaining twenty episodes during the off-season. 66. Berkow, “Once Again, It’s the Star-Spangled Super Bowl,” S6.

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Chapter 2. More Movies than News

1. Qtd. in Yagoda, “Not So Instant Replay,” SM65 2. Steve Seidman, personal interview by author, April 8, 2008. 3. Sabol, “Steve Sabol—NFL Films,” 3–9. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Qtd. in Inside NFL Films: The Idolmakers. 6. Raymond Fielding discusses television’s role in precipitating the newsreel’s decline in The American Newsreel, 1911–1967. 7. Oriard, King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, The Weekly and The Daily Press, 51. 8. Qtd. in Wallace, “Sundays are Super on Highlight Films,” S9. 9. Game of the Week aired in syndication uninterrupted from 1965 until 1986. The NFL Network revived it from 2003 until 2006 as an hour-long program. After the Network cancelled it in 2006, Game of the Week moved to the cable channel ION (formerly known as PAX TV and i:Independent Television) for the 2007 season. While ION only carried the program for the 2007 season, NFL Films produced a shorter version for NFL.com for the 2007 and 2008 seasons. Originally titled This is the NFL, NFL Films’ weekly highlight program has appeared under several names since its development. Its title would typically change when the program’s sponsor shifted. The program’s titles throughout the years are as follows: This is the NFL (1965–1966); This Week in the NFL (1967–1968); This Week in Pro Football (1969–1976); This is the NFL (1977–80); NFL Review and Preview (1980–1981); and NFL Week in Review (1982–1986). In 1977, NFL Films adapted a version of this program into Inside the NFL (1977–present). In 1982, the company developed a magazine program that built from this format. Like This is the NFL, the magazine program has carried several overlapping titles: NFL Weekly Magazine (1982–1985), NFL Films Presents (1985), This is the NFL (1986–1994), and finally back to NFL Films Presents (1995–present). 10. Bob Ryan, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 11. Gamache, A History of Sports Highlights: Replayed Plays from Edison to ESPN, 1. 12. Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 109. 13. See Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. 14. Qtd. in Steiner, “Pete Rozelle—The Realm is Thriving,” F4. 15. See Cook, The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s: The Era that Created Modern Sports, 170–73; and Koppett, “Atkinson Loses Suit Against Noll,”

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35. Cook describes Atkinson’s lawsuit as symptomatic of a broader conflict between Al Davis’s recalcitrant Oakland Raiders and the NFL establishment. 16. “Former Receiver Defends Atkinson’s Actions,” C5. 17. In 1999 the NFL changed the name of its annual Man of the Year Award—which is given to a player committed to volunteer and charity work—to the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. 18. See Pierson, “Cameras Support Payton’s Side,” D1. 19. Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 118. 20. Grierson, “The Documentary Producer,” 8. 21. Plantinga, “What a Documentary Is, After All.” 22. Daley, “Ars Gratia Football,” 27. 23. Oates, “Documentary or Caricature?: NFL Films Create Almost New Super Bowl Game for Television,” E4. 24. Ibid. 25. Levy, “Sudden Death Sabol Reels Again,” 103. 26. Qtd. in Stelter, “The Film Archivist of Legendary Football Preps for Game Day,” B1. 27. Qtd. in “NFL Teams Tell the Reel Story in Highlight Films,” 2C. 28. Wallace, “Sundays are Super on Highlight Films,” S9. 29. Danyluck, “Steve Sabol—NFL Films,” 8. 30. Despite the all-access image HBO attaches to Hard Knocks, the program—like all of NFL Films’ productions—is carefully edited to avoid compromising the league’s brand. Before each episode premiers HBO allows coaches to preview it to make sure it does not leak any sensitive information about the team’s strategy for the upcoming week. 31. Hale, “TV Loves Rex Ryan but Sacks His Mouth,” C1. 32. See Chase, “Tony Dungy wouldn’t Hire Rex Ryan because he Curses too Much.” 33. See Stableford, “HBO’s ‘Hard Knocks’: It’s Hot, It’s Vulgar, but Is It For Real?” HBO would, however, censor profanity for Hard Knocks episodes that were rerun during the daytime. 34. Moreover, the annual Madden games use NFL Films material—most notably music and on-field sound—to enhance their entertainment value and authenticity. 35. “NFL Films Press Release,” November 20, 1985. Pro Football Hall of Fame Archive. 36. “NFL Films has One Fine Hit,” 9. 37. Ibid. 38. Recent studies indicate that the average life expectancy for an NFL player is between fifty-three and fifty-nine—far below average male life expectancies in the United States. See Campbell, “For Retired NFL Players, Most Challenging ‘Season’ Just Beginning.” 39. Television and radio commentators have also begun to discuss “big hits” in a less celebratory manner and are less frequently criticizing players who decide to sit out after sustaining a concussion. See Schwarz, “Football Analysts Cast a New Eye on Injuries,” A1. 40. United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. National Football Players Concussion Litigation, June 2012. Hundreds of other players have joined the lawsuit

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since its initial filing. The lawsuit features an entire section titled “The NFL Markets and Glorifies Football’s Violence Through NFL Films” that explains how NFL Films productions like Crunch Course praise as tough and heroic those players who play recklessly. 41. Steve Seidman, telephone interview by author, April 8, 2008. 42. NFL Films produced similar programs for the NFL Network that precede Sound FX, including Sounds of the Game (2003–2008) and Live Wire (2008–2009). 43. The tension between the NFL’s past and the history NFL Films documentaries build reflects Keith Jenkins’s theorization of the gulf between “the past” and “history” that marks the overall production of historical narratives in Re-Thinking History. 44. NFL Films produced another similar program in 2000 entitled Team of the Millennium. 45. Qtd. in Smith, “What Would Happen If . . .,” 159. 46. Bob Ryan, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 47. Gamache, A History of Sports Highlights: Replayed Plays from Edison to ESPN, 8. 48. Ibid, 9.

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Chapter 3. The NFL’s Smithsonian

1. Qtd. in Macnow, “NFL Films is Scoring High,” 44. 2. While its vault certainly slows holdings’ deterioration, the NFL Films archive does not necessarily preserve materials—at least not in the traditional sense of the term. According to the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), the term “preservation” is traditionally equated with duplication, or copying film onto a new and more stable film stock. However, the NFPF asserts that the definition of “preservation” has recently broadened to include the range of activities used to protect and share film. See The Film Preservation Guide: The Basics for Archives, Libraries, and Museums, 3–4. In Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice Karen F. Gracy reiterates the NFPF’s discussion of “preservation” by claiming that the term now has fluid, though contested, meanings in the film archive community. According to this expanded definition of film preservation, the NFL Films archive does technically preserve its materials by storing them in a controlled environment. 3. Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 118. 4. There is a dearth of scholarship on the relationship between moving image archives and the institutions that guide their operations. Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema is an exception. Wasson examines how the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library ushered a new understanding of film’s aesthetic and civic value during the middle twentieth century. The Library collected only those texts perceived to fulfill its primarily cultural and educational mission. Furthermore, the Library’s mission was shaped significantly by the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided the majority of its funding. Wasson’s study thus considers both how archives contribute to the institutions to which they are connected and how those institutions influence their operations. Along similar lines, in “Victory at Sea: A Case Study in ‘Official’ Telehistory” Richard C. Bartone notes that 95 percent of the footage used in the NBC television docu-

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mentary series Victory at Sea (1952–1953) derived from already edited productions stored in the Navy film archive. The content the program used was taken almost exclusively from footage produced with the main objective of positively depicting the Navy. 5. Qtd. in Macnow, “NFL Films is Scoring High,” 45. 6. “Our History.” 7. Steve Sabol, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 8. Ibid. 9. Celizic, “NFL Films: Football as Cinematic Art,” 42. 10. Rosenblatt, “NFL Films: Football’s Soul Preserver,” 56. 11. NFL Films has never since released DVDs under the Archives Collection brand. 12. Willis notes that since the 1990s NFL Films has significantly increased the care with which it organizes and stores its archived materials. Chris Willis, personal interview by author, May 12, 2009. 13. On its website, NFL Films claims that it owns a print of an 1894 game between Princeton University and Rutgers University shot by Thomas Edison. According to Charles Musser’s annotated filmography of Edison Motion Pictures, however, Edison never shot a football game between Princeton and Rutgers. He did film a contest between Orange Athletic Club and the Newark Athletic Club in 1899. Since both of these clubs were, like Princeton and Rutgers, located in New Jersey it is likely that NFL Films owns a print of this production. See Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900, An Annotated Filmography, 566. 14. See Carroll, Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football. 15. The specific conditions under which NFL Films must give credit to the outside materials its productions use are decided on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes the company is only obligated to cite the materials in credit rolls at the end of a production. At other times it is required to reference them as they appear in a text. Chris Willis, telephone interview by author, February 18, 2010. 16. Steve Seidman, personal interview by author, May 12, 2009. 17. Chris Willis, telephone interview by author, July 30, 2009. 18. Steve Sabol, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 19. Steve Sabol, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. Sabol did not remember exactly when NFL Films purchased Tel-Ra’s library, and NFL Films did not keep any receipts of the transaction. 20. Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 116. 21. Chris Willis, telephone interview by author, July 30, 2009. 22. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 129. 23. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 3. 24. Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 117. 25. Elton claims that cataloging material according to qualitative criteria might be “essential” for film archives to provide sufficiently detailed descriptions of their holdings. Qtd. in Leyda, Films beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, 46. 26. Sjöberg, The World in Pieces: A Study of the Compilation Film, 54.

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27. John Murphy, telephone interview by author, July 22, 2009. 28. NFL Films only puts its game footage onto special rolls. While it transcribes the interviews it films and catalogs them according to the interviewee, date of production, and the specific project for which they were made, it does not separate this material’s most potentially useful parts in the same way it does with game film. Likewise, it does not create special rolls of the outside footage it acquires. 29. Chris Willis, personal interview by author, May 12 2009. 30. Jeremy Swarbrick, telephone interview by author, August 3, 2009. 31. NFL Films now transfers all of its game and interview footage onto high-definition digital videotapes. 32. During SABER’s first year, the system only referenced still images, which referred to specific sequences in special rolls. By 1997, NFL Films producers were able to access actual video content on their desktops. As of this writing, every special roll from 1990 is logged. Beyond 1990, the company privileges logging film materials that are used for specific projects. For instance, when NFL Films was producing America’s Game it logged all of the film relevant to the teams it featured as its producers were researching the project. It follows the same process when producing more recent series like A Football Life and The Top 100: NFL’s Greatest Players. SABER established a model for logging film and video content that other software companies have since mimicked. Moreover, other sports media outlets and subsidiaries, such as NASCAR Media, use comparable software to keep track of their content. 33. Prior to Media Services’ location and distribution of film materials all footage must be approved for outside use by NFL Films’ Licensing Department. The length of time a client can use footage is decided on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, NFL Films sells any footage for which it owns reproduction rights, not simply the material it originally produced. 34. John Murphy, telephone interview by author, July 22, 2009. 35. Because of the National Football League’s immense popularity, companies pay large sums for the opportunity to associate with the league or gain status as “the official . . . of the NFL.” In 2011, Pepsi paid nearly $1 billion dollars to extend its sponsorship of the NFL for ten years. See “PepsiCo, NFL Renew Sponsorship Deal.” 36. When NFL Films sells footage to clients it typically does not demand that they mark the footage as NFL Films material when it is used, only in the credit roll at the end of the production. Chris Willis, telephone interview by author, February 18, 2010. 37. Jeremy Swarbrick, telephone interview by author, August 3, 2009. NFL Films’ practice of providing its weekly special rolls to the league’s network partners is written into the contracts that networks sign with the league. In 2012, the NFL—via the NFL Network and NFL.com—made coaching tape of all league games available to fans through the Game Rewind package. While NFL Films does not provide this video footage, the league vets the material before it is distributed to Game Rewind subscribers. 38. National Football League, “Film/Tape Usage Guidelines” (Memorandum). June 18, 2002. Pro Football Hall of Fame Archive. The memo also encouraged individual franchises to institute methods of monitoring the amount of footage local affiliates and cable channels were using and to report violations to the league. 202

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39. Outlets that have not purchased the right to use NFL Films footage typically illustrate their commentary with still images. 40. The amount of footage it sells throughout the year fluctuates, with the highest volume of sales obviously occurring during the NFL season. 41. In 2011, the NFL started to place a microphone into the pads of competing teams’ starting and backup centers or both of their starting guards in order to enhance telecasts. NFL Films manages the microphones, and they only use sound gathered during the plays to avoid divulging any tactical information that might have been released in the huddle or on the sidelines. NFL Films remains the only media outlet that can microphone other players and collect sound from the sidelines and locker room. Other media outlets have adopted NFL Films’ use of audio by securing the rights to capture sideline sound from the other sports they cover. ESPN and TNT’s coverage of the NBA, for instance, feature sequences—respectively titled “Wired” and “Inside Trax”—that incorporate sideline and locker-room sound into replays.

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Chapter 4. The Shakespeares of Sports Films

1. Alan Ross, “Filming the NFL,” 11. 2. Steve Sabol, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 3. Steve Sabol, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 4. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 254. 5. Ibid., 35. 6. Ibid., 81. 7. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 28–32. 8. See Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire; Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Both Radway and Rubin locate the rise of American middlebrow culture between World War I and World War II—incidentally, the same decade when the NFL developed as a major sports organization—and link it specifically to the popularization of book clubs and reading groups that exposed aspiring middle-class consumers to artifacts traditionally associated with elite taste cultures. 9. Adorno, “Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture,” 482. 10. Adorno is building from Immanuel Kant’s theorization of aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment. According to Kant, art is purposive without having a concrete purpose. True art, Kant’s theorization implies, cannot be economically motivated because this purpose would distance the work from the disinterestedness that constitutes its aesthetic status. 11. Minow, “Address to the 39th Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.” Other studies that examine popular attitudes toward television’s cultural status during this time include Michael Curtin’s Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics and Mary Ann Watson’s The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years. 12. Qtd. in Fisher, “120 Million Watch This Show,” 96. 13. Qtd. in Drill, “Finding a Way to Humanize Olympic Contestants,” 33.

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14. Beale, “Moles, Groundmen, and Weasels,” 66. 15. Yagoda, “Not So Instant Replay,” SM65. 16. Minow, “Address to the 39th Annual Conventions of the National Association of Broadcasters.” 17. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 37. 18. Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television. Spigel is careful to note that the discursive shift that enabled television and advertisements to be considered art was not a wholesale transformation; TV was still most often considered part of popular culture. See also, Spigel’s Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, 265–309. 19. Page, “Football’s Flying in Television Air,” B2. 20. Oates, “Documentary or Caricature?,” E4. 21. Mekas, “Movie Journal,” 32. 22. Von Hoffman, “Yardage Footage,” B1. 23. Turan, “Sports on Film,” G1. 24. See, Feuer, et al., MTM: ‘Quality Television’ and McCabe and Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. Furthermore, the industrial and critical discourses that emphasized NFL Films’ uniqueness among television anticipate several of the discursive practices that John Thornton Caldwell, in Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, locates in association with network television’s efforts to maintain its relevance amid the rise of cable during the 1980s, such as advertising texts’ aesthetic distinction and their producers’ cultural pedigree. 25. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 75. 26. Qtd. in Taaffe, “Footage that Can Go to Your Head,” 85. 27. Pizzello, “On Touchdowns, There Are No Second Takes,” 79. 28. Qtd. in Block, “The 27th Team,” 20. 29. Bob Ryan, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 30. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 3. 31. The NFL’s Punt, Pass and Kick Library published two volumes of its young adult book series organized around this theme, Strange But True Football Stories (1967) and More Strange But True Football Stories (1973). 32. Steve Seidman, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 33. John Facenda provides an on-camera introduction to Follies Go Hollywood. It is the only NFL Films production in which the narrator is visibly present. 34. Silverman, “Q&A with Steve Sabol.” 35. Pizzello, “On Touchdowns, There Are No Second Takes,” 69; “Steve Sabol—President, NFL Films,” 4. 36. Block, “The 27th Team,” 20. 37. Steve Sabol, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 38. Qtd. in Dave Barron, “Fear Not—NFL Films No Dinosaur”; Cohen, “They Taught America How To Watch Football,” 40; Quindt, “NFL’s Flame—and Film—in Good Hands with Sabol,” C2; Ross, “Filming the NFL,” 11; Silverman, “Q&A with Steve Sabol,” 39.

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39. The new website no longer has a “Buzz” section, but it still foregrounds the number of Emmy Awards NFL Films has received. 40. Pizzello, “On Touchdowns, There Are No Second Takes,” 69; Roessing, “Scribes of the Scrimmage,” 72. 41. Stylists and Storytellers was later repackaged as an episode of NFL Films Presents. 42. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 6. 43. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and MiddleClass Desire, 9. 44. Foucault, “What is an Author?” 45. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 76. 46. Ibid., 77. 47. Brody, “The C.B. DeMille of the Pros.” 48. Furlong, “Sabol Plays Film Game into Sports Millions,” D1. 49. Frager, “NFL Films Marking 25 Years of Giving Football Fans Plenty of ‘Uh-Ohs’ to Savor,” B20; Ross, “Filming the NFL,” 11; Bond, “Blood, Sweat, and Tunes”; Strauss, “An Empire Built on the Ballet of Football.” 50. Fleischman, “NFL Films Will Celebrate 25 Years with Special Stories,” B6. 51. Steve Seidman, personal interview by author, May 12, 2009. 52. Qtd. in Levy, “Sudden Death Sabol Reels Again,” 228. In fact, NFL Films’ promotion of Ed and Steve Sabol as the company’s guiding creative force mirrors many of the tactics Disney’s company used to market Walt Disney as the point around which the company’s creative activities are organized—despite the extent of his actual involvements in its dayto-day operations. See Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960, 25–32. 53. Qtd. in Barra, “The NFL’s Ultimate Highlight Reel,” 30. 54. Steve Sabol, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 55. Qtd. in Danyluck, The Super 70s: Memories from Pro Football’s Greatest Era, 105. 56. Steve Sabol, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 57. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 23. 58. See Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch.” 59. As of this writing, Sabol’s works have been exhibited at galleries in New York City, Miami, Washington, D.C., Fort Worth, Texas, and Moorestown, New Jersey. 60. Sabol, The Guts and Glory of Football, 3. 61. Rathet, “A Conversation with Steve Sabol of NFL Films,” 15A. 62. Jonathan Hock, telephone interview by author, June 25, 2009. 63. Steve Seidman, personal interview by author, May 12, 2009. 64. Jonathan Hock, telephone interview by author, June 25, 2009. 65. Lidsky, “This is NFL Films,” 44. 66. Oriard discusses the football film genre in King Football. He notes that 120 football films, most of which were about the college game, were made between 1920 and 1960. 67. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 40. 68. Ibid., 29.

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69. Hubbuch, “NFL Films Football as Art,” C13. 70. Danyluk, “Steve Sabol—President, NFL Films,” 4. 71. Qtd. Pizzello, “On Touchdowns, There Are No Second Takes,” 76. 72. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 79. 73. Sabol, “Interview with Steve Sabol” conducted by Marty Moss-Coane, November 14, 1997. 74. Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” 75. Pirro, “Fantasy Football.” 76. Sabol, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 77. Pizzello, “On Touchdowns, There Are No Second Takes,” 68. 78. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 76. 79. Qtd. in Strauss, “Catching Football on Film,” NJ4. 80. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 79. 81. Lidsky, “This is NFL Films,” 44.

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Chapter 5. Keeping the Flame in the Broadcast Era

1. Qtd. in Aldridge, “NFL and Television Remain a Rewarding Combination,” D1. 2. Bob Ryan, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 3. Steve Sabol, personal interview by author, May 12, 2009. 4. “In a League of its Own.” After striking a 2011 deal with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, and DirecTV that will run from 2013 to 2022, the NFL is set to make roughly $6 billion annually from television. See Flint, “NFL Signs TV Rights Deals with Fox, NBC, CBS.” 5. See Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” 6. Powers, Supertube: The Rise of Television Sports, 46. 7. Qtd. in Luciano and Fisher, Remembrance of Swings Past, 254. 8. Sugar, The Thrill of Victory: The Inside Story of ABC Sports, 47. Gillette still relies heavily on sports to market its products. Gordon McKibben further explains Gillette’s use of sports media as an advertising vehicle in Cutting Edge: Gillette’s Journey to Global Leadership. 9. Qtd. in Johnson, Super Spectator and the Electric Lilliputians, 229. DeLorean is referring to “cost per thousand,” a commonly used measure by which advertisers are charged that determines rates based on how many thousands of viewers an ad is likely to reach. 10. Dunlap, Jr., “Batter Up!: Baseball Telecast Seen in a Dark Room On a Sunny Afternoon in May,” X10. 11. Ibid., X10. 12. Dunlap Jr., “Television Forward Passes Football into the Home,” 150. 13. See Berkman, “Long Before Arledge . . . Sports & TV: The Earliest Years: 1937–1947.” 14. Goldlust, Playing for Keeps: Sport, the Media and Society, 82. 15. Patton, Razzle Dazzle: The Curious Marriage of Television and Football. There is an abundance of scholarship that examines how television since the 1960s—particularly live broadcasts—stylizes football games and that probes the ideological implications of this

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stylization. In “The Structure of Televised Football,” Brien Williams argues that live football telecasts actually consist of three intersecting events. The “game event” is the action on the field combined with the directly related events taking place on the sidelines; the “stadium event” is the total sequence of activities occurring in the stadium (the crowd, cheerleaders on the sidelines, etc.); and finally, the “media event” is the total telecast of which the game and stadium event are a part. The media event supplements the game and stadium events with commentary, interviews, graphics, and other events to frame them in legible, engaging, and dramatic ways. Goldlust even extends Williams’s formulation by dividing the media event into various visual and aural stylistic components. On the visual side, the media event consists of the live-action, premade material, graphics, replays, spontaneous live coverage of nongame elements (fans, coaches, etc.), and finally, commercials. The aural component consists of soundtracks, music, actual sound from the sporting event and stadium, and commentary. Although Goldlust’s formulation is created in response to Williams’s discussion of the game event, stadium event, and media event, he addresses television sports in general, not simply broadcasts of football. 16. Whannel, “Pregnant with Anticipation: The Pre-history of Television Sport and the Politics of Recycling and Preservation,” 411. McChesney, “Media Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States,” 63. 17. Sugar, The Thrill of Victory: The Inside Story of ABC Sports 47–49; Rader, In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports, 100–103. 18. Arledge, Roone: A Memoir, 29. 19. Qtd. in Arledge and Rogin, “It’s Sports, It’s Money, It’s TV,” 100. James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy also detail Frick and Major League Baseball’s hesitance to embrace television in Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television. 20. Arledge, Roone: A Memoir, 29. Scherick’s role in developing ABC Sports was nearly as significant as Arledge’s. Scherick created Sports Programs Inc. in 1957, a sports programming packager. His company merged with ABC in 1961. 21. Ibid., 30–31. 22. Prior to CBS’s production of The Violent World of Sam Huff, the middle linebacker was featured on the cover of Time Magazine’s November 30, 1959, issue and was a focal point of its feature article on the NFL, entitled “A Man’s Game.” 23. The National Football League would not allow Huff to wear a microphone during a league game. The sequences that The Violent World of Sam Huff features were captured during the Giants’ practices and in a preseason exhibition game against the Chicago Bears. 24. Run to Daylight was produced by Howard Cosell’s company, Legend Productions. Cosell’s outfit produced several other documentaries during the 1960s—making a major contribution to the first wave of American network and syndicated television sports documentaries. Legend Productions’ other works include Babe Ruth: A Look Behind the Legend (1963); Requiem for an Arena (1964), a retrospective produced amid the demolition of New York City’s Polo Grounds stadium; and One Hundred Yards to Glory (1967), a celebratory examination of Grambling State University’s football program.

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25. NFL Films also selected Saul because, quite simply, the Steelers were the first team to give them permission to microphone a player during a league game. 26. Only the final part of Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon uses color film. It abruptly transitions into color film when the Browns-49ers game begins to emphasize professional football’s vitality. 27. See Goldlust, Playing for Keeps: Sport, the Media and Society; Mullen and Mazzocco, “Coaches, Drama, and Technology: Mediation of Super Bowl Broadcasts from 1969 to 1997”; Real, “Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle”; and Williams, “The Structure of Televised Football.” 28. Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 86. 29. Ibid., 87. 30. Inez Aimee, telephone interview by author, May 25, 2009. 31. From 1969 to 1979 NFL Films repackaged its weekly highlight program for the American Armed Forces Motion Picture Service. 32. Many Japanese consumers actually learned the game of American football through NFL Films’ dramatized highlight programs. In his New York Times article “Not So Instant Replay,” Ben Yagoda recounts a 1976 NFL exhibition game in Tokyo. Largely because NFL Films productions had been a favorite on Japanese television since 1970, the game sold out. But once the actual game started, fans began to boo and hiss, apparently distraught that the actual game did not feature the expertly edited, slow-motion drama that NFL Films productions created. NFL Films’ internationally distributed programming also aided the development of the American Bowl, a series of exhibition games played beyond U.S. borders from 1986 to 2005, and NFL Europe, a European NFL offshoot that operated from 1991 to 2007. In 2005, the NFL replaced the American Bowl with the NFL International Series, which stages a regular season game in an international location. From 1997 to 2003 NFL Films produced the syndicated program NFL Blast, a highlight and magazine program designed for European audiences. In an effort to explain American football to European audiences, episodes would edit soccer footage into its coverage and would use European cultural references to explain the NFL. A 2003 episode of NFL Blast, for instance, somewhat bizarrely compares Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis to Winston Churchill. 33. Inez Aimee, telephone interview by author, May 25, 2009. 34. Steve Sabol, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 35. Page, “Sportslook,” A2. 36. Litsky, “Sherman Ready to Brief Tarkenton,” 56. 37. NFL Films repackaged its interview materials with Casey into another documentary entitled Bernie Casey—Portrait of the Artist (1967). 38. Dave Plaut, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. Although these programs were designed as “evergreens,” their meaning does shift significantly over time. Productions that were once considered “evergreens” are now used on programs like Lost Treasures to nostalgically evoke the NFL’s early years.

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39. In 2003 NFL Films produced a “where are they now?” segment on the Firebirds entitled “Pottstown Revisited” for the series Lost Treasures of NFL Films. 40. NBC also briefly hired NFL Films to produce a very similar weekly pregame program, Grandstand, from 1975 to 1976. 41. Beginning in the late 1990s ABC started to lose money on Monday Night Football. ABC eventually moved Monday Night Football to ESPN, which is owned by ABC parent The Walt Disney Company, in 2006. The NFL’s Sunday evening game—Sunday Night Football—is now its most popular broadcast. In fact, NBC’s Sunday Night Football was 2011–2012’s highest-rated television program in general—a feat Monday Night Football never accomplished. 42. “Record 164.1 Million Fans Tune in to Super Bowl XLVII on CBS,” NFL Press Release, February 4, 2013. This statistic is calculated in terms of “total viewers,” which measures the number of people who watched at least six minutes of the broadcast rather than the average amount of viewers for the entire event. 43. The rights to broadcast Super Bowls are included in the NFL’s network contracts. It generally rotates among its partners. Although ESPN pays more per year than the league’s other network partners for the rights to Monday Night Football, the cable channel’s contract does not include the right to telecast a Super Bowl. See Deitsch, “NFL, Networks Win in Extended Rights Deal.” 44. Only six Super Bowls have been played one week after the conference championship games: Super Bowl IV (1970), XVII (1983), XXV (1991), XXVIII (1994), XXXIV (2000), and XXXVI (2002). See Magee, “Is One Week Better than Two Leading to Super Bowl?” 45. The 1979 installment of Road to the Super Bowl is NFL Films’ first Emmy Award– winning production. According to an NFL Films press release, Road to the Super Bowl is the longest running and most honored television sports special, winning twenty-eight Emmy Awards from 1969 to 2012. See “NFL Films’ ‘Road to the Super Bowl’ Debuts on NBC at Noon ET On Super Bowl Sunday.” NFL Press Release, January 30, 2012. The production sporadically experimented with different titles over the course of its history. The 1978 version, for example, was entitled Mighty Men and Magic Moments. The special permanently returned to the title Road to the Super Bowl in 1984. Evidencing the company’s engagement with the film tradition, Sabol named Road to the Super Bowl after the 1940s Hollywood comedy series of “Road to” . . . films starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour (The Road to Singapore [1940], The Road to Zanzibar [1941], etc). 46. Road to the Super Bowl was not always included as part of the network contract to televise the Super Bowl. NFL Films did not have information regarding when this shift occurred. 47. NFL Films, Press Release. 1989. Pro Football Hall of Fame Archive. 48. NFL Films typically shoots two versions of the commercial for east and west coast audiences, one where the player says, “I’m going to Disney World,” and another where he says, “I’m going to Disneyland.” Since the franchise began, Disney has produced similar spots for most major sporting events, the Miss American pageant, and even the television program American Idol. NFL Films only produces the commercials for the Super Bowl.

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Notes to Chapter 5

49. Neal-Lunsford, “Sport in the Land of Television: The Use of Sport in Network Prime-Time Schedules 1946–50.” 50. In 1955 ABC had a contract to cover the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals (which moved to St. Louis in 1960). ABC primarily covered the AFL from 1960 to 1964. The network did sign a contract with the NFL in 1964 to televise five Friday evening games. However, the contract was cancelled upon complaints from high schools, which traditionally play football games on Friday nights. See Brulia, “A Chronology of Pro Football on Television, Part 1.” 51. Gunther and Carter, Monday Night Mayhem: The Inside Story of ABC’s Monday Night Football, 57–58. 52. In 1973 NFL Films produced the documentary profile, What’s He Like?—Howard Cosell. Like The Hunters, the documentary sought to provide a portrait of Cosell that looked beyond his reputation as a polarizing loudmouth. 53. Goldenson, Beating the Odds: The Untold Story Behind the Rise of ABC, 210–11. 54. Cosell continually touted his commitment to “telling it like it is” to advertise his journalistic integrity and to emphasize his professional superiority to the former athletes who routinely secured broadcasting jobs despite never having received formal training. In 1974 he even published a book entitled Like It Is. Cosell also expounds his approach to broadcasting and attitude toward the profession in Cosell and I Never Played the Game. 55. Amdur, “ABC Game: A Football Soap Opera,” 59. 56. Patton, Razzle Dazzle: The Curious Marriage of Television and Football, 110. From 1972–1979, NFL Films would cut highlights of Monday night games in the style of Game of the Week for the American Armed Forces Motion Picture Service. The separate highlight package for the Monday night game attests to Monday Night Football’s status as an exceptional television event that not even Americans stationed abroad wanted to miss. 57. Gunther and Carter, Monday Night Mayhem: The Inside Story of ABC’s Monday Night Football, 137–42; Simross, “Church of Monday Night Football,” E1. 58. John Bloom provides an overview of Cosell’s experience on Monday Night Football in There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell. See also Mark Ribowsky, Howard Cosell: The Man, The Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports. 59. Noyes, “American Broadcasting Company.” 60. Shapiro, “Halftime Highlights Got You Down? Don’t Blame Howard,” TV5. 61. MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, 279. 62. Gunther and Carter, Monday Night Mayhem: The Inside Story of ABC’s Monday Night Football, 111. 63. Qtd. in Amdur, “ABC Game: A Football Soap Opera,” 59. 64. Originally hosted and narrated by Mel Allen (who served as the program’s figurehead until his death in 1996), This Week in Baseball initially ran from 1977 to 1998. The Fox Network rebooted the series in 2000, using it as the lead-in to its Saturday Major League Baseball broadcasts. Fox cancelled the program after the 2011 season and replaced it with MLB Player Poll.

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65. While Inside the NFL, like This is the NFL, takes up an hour in television programming schedules, Inside the NFL’s episodes are longer because they air without commercial breaks.

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Chapter 6. Cable, NFL Media, and NFL Films’ Dinosaur Television

1. Qtd. in Freeman, “Of Myth and Men,” 16–17. 2. Qtd. in Smith, “NFL Films, an American Institution, Might be Endangered.” 3. See Stelter, “The Film Archivist of Legendary Football Preps for Game Day.” 4. Chad, “With ESPN, Stay Alert to the Web it Weaves,” B2. 5. Dave Plaut, personal interview by author, May 24, 2012. 6. Lomartire, “NFL Films Frozen in Time,” 1D. 7. Bob Ryan, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 8. In 2003, NFL Films produced an updated version of Autumn Ritual for Lost Treasures of NFL Films. The film combined footage from the original Autumn Ritual with new interviews that featured “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson and rapper Snoop Dogg. 9. Dave Plaut, personal interview by author, May 24, 2012. 10. ABC acquired 80 percent of ESPN, and Nabisco Brands Inc. purchased the other 20 percent. Capital Cities Communications purchased ABC—and therefore majority ownership of ESPN—in 1985. In 1996 the Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities Communications. The Hearst Corporation purchased Nabisco’s 20 percent stake in ESPN in 1990. 11. From 1987 to 1989 the NFL only played Sunday evening games during the second half of the season. It began holding them throughout the entire season in 1990. At this time ESPN partnered with the Turner Broadcasting System channel TNT to carry Sunday evening games. TNT carried games during the first half of the season, and ESPN carried them during the second half. ESPN took over the entire season of Sunday evening games in 1998. To signal this shift, ESPN rebranded the program from ESPN Sunday Night Football to Sunday Night Football. ESPN produced Sunday Night Football until 2006, when ABC moved Monday Night Football to the cable channel. At this time, and attesting to the prestige ESPN gained since its formation, ABC rebranded all of its sports content from ABC Sports to ESPN on ABC. Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner describes ESPN’s 1987 contract to carry a weekly NFL game as a watershed moment that accelerated the outlet’s transformation into the world’s most valuable cable property. See Eisner, Work in Progress: Risking Failure, Surviving Success, 393. 12. As part of ESPN’s excessive twenty-five-year anniversary celebration in 2004— ESPN25—it published an illustrated book that situated itself as the guiding force behind the sports highlight’s development and cultural significance. See Hirschberg, ESPN25: 25 Mind-Bending, Eye-Popping, Culture-Morphing Years of Highlights.

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13. In “Cool as the Other Side of the Pillow: How ESPN’s SportsCenter Has Changed Television Sports Talk,” Grant Farred notes that the channel has built a discourse that “values ‘coolness’ above all”—a contrast to NFL Films’ old-fashioned and sincere style. 14. ESPN Classic launched in 1995 as Classic Sports Network. ESPN purchased and rebranded the channel in 1997. 15. Quindt, “Why Old School Isn’t in Session,” 7. 16. For instance, in 2013 ESPN Films commissioned NFL Films to produce Elway to Marino—which examines the quarterback-rich 1983 National Football League draft—as part of its 30 for 30 series of documentaries. However, this ESPN Films production was the first of over seventy since the subsidiary’s 2008 development that used NFL Films. Moreover, it featured none of NFL Films’ signature conventions and even little of its archived footage. 17. Qtd. in Hiestand, “‘Inside the NFL’ Ends Long Run,” 3C. 18. Ibid., 3C. 19. ESPN produces similar programs, most notably Outside the Lines (1990–present) and E:60 (2007–present), an evocation of CBS’s news magazine program 60 Minutes. 20. Beyond Inside the NFL, in 2009 Showtime and NFL Films co-produced the fivepart series Full Color Football: A History of the AFL. 21. As of 2012, Hard Knocks has been produced the following years: 2001 (Baltimore Ravens); 2002 (Dallas Cowboys); 2007 (Kansas City Chiefs); 2008 (Dallas Cowboys); 2009 (Cincinnati Bengals); 2010 (New York Jets); 2012 (Miami Dolphins). While HBO did not feature Hard Knocks in 2004, NFL Films produced a nearly identical program for the Network entitled Inside Training Camp. The production’s only season focused on the Jacksonville Jaguars. 22. Rushin, “Getting to Know U,” 21. 23. Freeman, “Of Myth and Men,”16. 24. Keisser, “Cable Effort a Hit for League,” 20. See also Yost, Tailgating, Sacks, and Salary Caps: How the NFL Became the Most Successful Sports League in History, 77. Yost suggests that Rozelle’s threats to create the all-NFL network were actually rooted in a crafty effort to increase major networks’ bids for broadcasting rights. 25. Thursday Night Football generated controversy because of the NFL Network’s lack of availability from several cable providers. The Network pressured cable providers to include it in their basic packages (at a higher price per subscriber than most other channels because of the NFL’s popularity) rather than as part of specialty sports bundles. Critics like the American Cable Association claimed the Network was preventing consumer choice. In response, the Network argued that the National Football League’s popularity warrants the Network’s inclusion in basic cable packages rather than sport-only add-on packages. 26. Bernstein, “Katz Joins NFL Films, Reunites with Bornstein.” 27. Qtd. in Domowitch, “Are You Ready for Some More Football?” 62. 28. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” 29. Qtd. in Sandomir, “Giving N.F.L. Fans More, More, More,” D4.

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30. Bob Ryan, personal interview by author, May 11, 2009. 31. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” 32. Neil Zender, personal interview by author, May 23, 2012. 33. Qtd. in Heath, “NFL is Getting with the Program; League Follows Suit with Own Network” D1. Incidentally, Anheuser-Busch also helped ESPN to get off the ground—an investment that paid off handsomely and established the company’s consistent involvement in cable television sports. See Miller and Shales, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, 26. See also Rasmussen, Sports Junkies Rejoice! The Birth of ESPN, 151. 34. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” The Best Damn Sports Show Period was a humorous, macho, and at time crass sports talk show that aired on Fox Sports Net from 2001 to 2009. 35. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” 36. Zimmerman, “Goodell, NFL Turn Blind Eye to Plight of NFL Films.” 37. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films is Taking Shots.” Incidentally, NFL Films productions seldom include black-and-white footage. When they do, it is typically used to address subject matter that precedes the subsidiary’s development. 38. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” 39. In fact, Bornstein claimed NFL Network modeled America’s Game in part after ESPN’s successful SportsCentury series of biographical profiles. He wanted the America’s Game series to be NFL Network’s “signature show” and serve a branding role similar to the one SportsCentury plays on ESPN Classic. See Andrew Marchand, “NFL Network Wants Super Bowl Series to be Signature Show.” 40. The Best Ever series includes Best Ever Coaches (1981), Best Ever Professionals (1981), Best Ever Teams (1981), Best Ever Quarterbacks (1985), and Best Ever Runners (1985). 41. In 2011, the NFL Network began an annual spin-off of Top 100 that counts down the top one hundred players of the year—a list determined by a poll conducted among active NFL players. Unlike Top 100’s use of celebrities as commentators, the series relies primarily on fellow players, coaches, and sports media personalities to introduce the featured athletes. 42. Neil Zender, personal interview by author, May 23, 2012. 43. Ibid. 44. Domowitch, “NFL Is Not Poor, and Layoffs Are In Poor Taste.” 45. Qtd. in Domowitch, “NFL Films and Network: A Marriage Gone Bad.” 46. Domowitch, “NFL Films is Taking Shots.” 47. Ibid. 48. Qtd. in Barron, “Fear Not—NFL Films No Dinosaur.” 49. Neil Zender, personal interview by author, May 23, 2012. 50. Dave Plaut, personal interview by author, May 24, 2012. 51. Ibid. 52. NFL TV Follies opens with a graphic of a television set. It displays the production’s opening credits on the TV’s screen. When the film was repackaged for use on Hulu, it added an NFL Network graphic to its opening credit sequence.

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53. Kaplan, “NFL Stadiums Driving into RedZone.” 54. The two games Turning Point features typically include the teams scheduled to play on NBC’s Sunday Night Football the following week. 55. Qtd. in Stelter, “The Film Archivist of Legendary Football Preps for Game Day,” B1. 56. NFL Media’s multiplatform efforts to connect with fans and to facilitate their participation—however limited—with the varied content it produces reflects the shifting media landscape that Henry Jenkins discusses in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. 57. Sportsline’s contract with the NFL was for five years and $120 million. Sportsline changed its name to CBS Sportsline in 2004 after Viacom purchased it. The website was rebranded CBSSports.com in 2007. 58. Kramer, “NFL Ends Deal With CBS; Opts For DIY Model.” 59. NFL Mobile began as the Sprint Nextel Corporation–produced NFL Mobile Live in 2008. In 2010, the NFL signed a four-year $720 million contract with Verizon Wireless. Verizon advertised streaming access to live games and the NFL RedZone Channel as the main feature that distinguishes its application. See Futterman, “Verizon Adds NFL Broadcasts,” B2. 60. NFL Films still maintains a separate website for information on special orders and licensing footage. While the site does not contain as much information about NFL Films’ history and accolades as the company’s original site, it does feature a link to the They Call It Pro Football blog.

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Conclusion

1. Qtd. in Fitzpatrick, “NFL Films Founder Finally Getting Ultimate Honor from Sport He Helped to Make America’s Most Popular.” 2. In 1982 NFL Films developed a small Special Projects division that produced nonfootball related material for a broad range of clients. Rick Angeli, NFL Films’ director of sales and marketing, claims that the company has become “a full-service postproduction facility, with a roster of directors open to outside work that is not related to football at all.” Qtd. in Armstrong, “NFL Films Signs Dir. Pier Nicola D’Amico,” 6. Special Projects was scaled back shortly after NFL Media’s creation so the subsidiary could focus on producing content for the NFL Network and NFL.com. The division produced commercials for organizations ranging from Huggies Diapers to the Office of National Drug Control; filmed documentary features for the History Channel; and created music videos and concert films for an array of performers that includes Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, George Harrison, Journey, Sister Sledge, Cyndi Lauper, and Marilyn Manson. Moreover, it created an epic history similar to Wake Up the Echoes for Army’s football program, Field of Honor: 100 Years of Army Football (1989), and the U.S. government even hired it to film George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration parade. 3. Qtd. in McCarthy, “NFL Films Makes A Run into Showbiz,” 5B. 4. Qtd. in Tight on the Spiral.

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Notes to Conclusion

5. Taaffe, “Footage that Can Go to Your Head,” 85. Critics, however, have suggested it is dangerous to mobilize NFL Films’ recognizable conventions to depict certain content. After the first Gulf War, NFL Films claimed it was collaborating with the Department of Defense to develop a documentary about the war entitled Victory in the Desert—an adaptation of Sabol’s beloved Victory at Sea. The project, which was never actually produced and in which the Department of Defense denied any involvement, planned to celebrate soldiers’ service. Sabol claimed the Gulf War lent itself to NFL Films’ already martial aesthetic. Various commentators—from sportswriter Robert Lipsyte to the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East’s Leslie Cagan, critiqued NFL Films’ willingness to glorify the first Gulf War. They suggested that an NFL Films–style documentary on the Gulf War would celebrate the war’s violence, champion the problematic political operations that informed it, and undermine war’s seriousness by associating it with a game. See Freeman, “TV’s Desert Fox Thinks Up a Storm”; Larsen, “Gulf War TV”; Lipsyte, “From Draft to Desert Storm, It’s Football”; and Wickman, “NFL Films out of Element in Mideast.” 6. Before his death John Facenda signed a release barring NFL Films from using his voice to endorse a product or service, or from selling it for use in endorsements. The productions that reference the NFL Films voice either imitate Facenda or hire one of the company’s other narrators. In 2006 Facenda’s son sued NFL Films for using his father’s voice in a documentary the company produced on EA Sports’ popular Madden NFL video game. He claimed that NFL Films was using the voice to advertise the game. NFL Films claimed its production was a documentary that explored Madden NFL rather than an endorsement of a product made by one of the league’s corporate partners. See Osborn, “Facenda v. NFL Films, Inc.” 7. In 2009, Saturday Night Live produced a comparable segment featuring actor/comedian Steve Martin that lampoons NFL Films’ hagiographic practices. The program outlines the career of Billy “The Gun” Van Goff, a fictional quarterback who enjoyed success by threatening opposing defenses with a pistol. The spoof evokes programs like NFL Films Presents and Lost Treasures of NFL Films by interspersing “archived” game footage of The Gun waving his pistol at opponents with dramatic narration and interview footage with experts and colleagues who sentimentally reflect upon his apparent greatness. 8. NFL Films has also been parodied by commercials for AT&T, Pepsi, and Sunny Delight; promos for The Late Show with David Letterman; the introduction to the television sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond; Chappelle’s Show; Todd Field’s 2006 feature film Little Children; and, of course, countless amateur videos circulating online. 9. Steve Sabol, telephone interview by author, April 7, 2008. 10. Ibid. 11. See Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture; Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. 12. Joe Posnanski, “No Loss for Words,” 64. 13. Cook, The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s: The Era that Created Modern Sports.

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Notes to Conclusion

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14. Moehringer, “Football is Dead. Long Live Football,” 47. 15. “NFL Game Telecasts 29 of 30 Most-Watched TV Shows this Fall.” The only nonNFL program that ranked in the top thirty was NBC’s telecast of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. 16. Cohen, “They Taught America How to Watch Football,” 49. 17. Qtd. in Fitzpatrick, “NFL Films Founder Finally Getting Ultimate Honor from Sport He Helped to Make America’s Most Popular.” 18. King, “National Film Registry Adds 25 Titles,” D12.

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Index

ABC Sports, 131–33, 145–46 ABC’s Wide World of Sports, 131, 133–34, 146 aesthetic practices, NFL Films, 3–4, 5, 49, 59, 95, 158, 179. See also close-ups; graphics; ground-level cameras; multi-camera; montage editing; narration; 16mm film; slow motion; sound, on-field; tight on the spiral; wireless microphones AFL-NFL World Championship. See Super Bowl Aimee, Inez, 137–38 Ameche, Alan, 42 American Armed Forces Motion Picture Service, 208n31, 210n56 American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 40, 63, 131, 134, 145, 147, 149, 154–55, 209n41, 210n50, 211nn10–11. See also ABC Sports; ABC’s Wide World of Sports; Monday Night Football American Film Institute (AFI), 105 American Football League (AFL), 48–49, 196n54 America’s Game: The Super Bowl Champions, 56–57, 69, 162, 197n65, 213n39 Anatomy of a Championship, 15 Anspaugh, David, 33

archives, 79–80, 87–88, 200n4. See also NFL Films archive Arledge, Roone, 30, 104, 131–33, 145–47, 182 art, 99–102, 104, 107, 112–13, 122–23, 125, 203n10; artworlds, 100, 106, 113, 114; and the Sabols, 11, 114–20 Atkinson, George, 62–63 Autumn Ritual, 27, 154, 211n8 Bahamas Bound, 7 Baltimore Colts, 42, 62, 64 Baltimore Ravens, 69 Bell, De Benneville “Bert,” 39–42 Big Blocks and King Size Hits of the NFL, 65–66 Big Game America, 23–24, 51–53, 136 biographies, 26, 42 Birth of the Bucs, 173 blackouts. See television Black Star Rising, 67–68 Black Sunday, 114 Blair Motion Pictures, 7–9, 11, 15–16, 121, 190nn17–18 bloopers. See follies bobblehead dolls. See merchandising Boggs, Hale, 48

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Index

Bornstein, Steve, 152, 161 Butkus, Dick, 22, 136

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Carr, Joe F., 38 Casey, Bernie, 141, 208n37 “The Catch,” 3–4, 77–78, 89, 180. See also Clark, Dwight chalkboard programs, 27, 154, 165 The Championship Chase, 23, 108 Champions of the Gridiron (1938), 38 Champions of the Gridiron (1939), 84, 193n10 Chandler, Don, 62 Chicago Bears, 65 Childress, Brad, 74 cinephilia, 107, 120 Citizen Kane, 107–8 Clark, Dwight, 2–4. See also “The Catch” Cleveland Browns, 40 close-ups, 20, 21, 65, 76, 112, 129 college football, 9–11, 38, 48, 132–33, 197n62 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 45, 135, 143 compilation film, 85 corporate sponsorship, 65–66, 202n35 Cosell, Greg, 172 Cosell, Howard, 146–47, 148, 207n24, 210n54 Cronkite, Walter, 134–35 Crunch Course, 70, 75 Cunningham, Randall, 111 Curry, Bill, 56, 181 Dallas Cowboys, 3, 4, 64, 177 Dancing with the Stars, 97 Davidson, Ben, 140 Davis, Willie, 56 Dawn of a New Day, 74 Deadline to Glory, 15 Disney, Walt, 115, 116. See also Walt Disney Company Disney World, 144–45, 209n48 documentary, 61, 63–65 Dream Season, 75–76 Duchamp, Marcel, 109–10 Duel in the Sun, 112 Duluth Eskimoes, 38 Eastman Kodak, 25, 187

Ed Sabol: The King of Football Films, 7, 183–84 Eller, Carl, 140 Elway to Marino, 212n16 Enberg, Dick, 23 Endy, Dan, 9 epic histories, 26, 103, 175 Era of Excellence: The 1980s, 55, 59, 75 Ernst, Ernie, 20–21 ESPN, 30, 78, 151–52, 153–57, 161–62, 170, 209n43, 211nn11–12; ESPN Classic, 156, 157, 212n14; ESPN Films, 126, 157, 212n16. See also SportsCenter ESPN Sunday Night Football, 155, 211n11 Facenda, John, 23, 25, 49–50, 116, 143, 204n33, 215n6 fantasy football, 171 The First Fifty Years: A Celebration of the National Football League in its Fiftieth Season, 46 follies, 26–27, 75, 87, 109–12, 151 The Football Follies, 26, 109–10 A Football Life, 88 Foreman, Chuck, 65 Franza, Dave, 92 Friday Night Lights, 32 gambling, 38, 40, 45–46, 171, 194n21, 195n41 Game of the Week, 16, 26, 59, 72–73, 138–39, 156, 162, 164, 171, 197n59, 198n9 Garrison, Walt, 140 General Mills, 38, 193n9 George, Phyllis, 143 Gifford, Frank, 13–14, 146–47 Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, 129, 131 The Gillette Company, 129 Grange, Harold “Red,” 85 graphics, 27, 62, 106, 130 The Greatest Adventure: The Story of Man’s Voyage to the Moon, 176 “greatest game ever played,” 42. See also National Football League championship (1958) Greatest Moments in Dallas Cowboys History, 59 Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History, 60 Greatest Moments of the Super Bowl, 75

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Index

Greatest NFL Rivalries, 169 Green Bay Packers, 11–14, 38, 52, 56, 61–62 Greenburg, Ross, 66, 157–58 ground-level cameras, 3, 14, 20, 33, 129, 149 Gunsel, Austin, 40, 194n22

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Halas, George, 17–18, 52–53, 65 Harden, Mike, 70–71 Hard Knocks, 27, 66–67, 158–59, 173, 187, 199n30, 212n21 Harris, Franco, 20–21, 191n44. See also “Immaculate Reception” HBO Sports, 27, 66, 126, 157–59 Heflin, Van, 135 Henderson, Thomas “Hollywood,” 68 Hentz, John, 16 Hershey Foods Corporation, 65–66 highlights, 22, 25–26, 29, 59–61, 65, 71–78, 156, 158, 165; Monday Night Football halftime, 17, 148–49 “Highlights for Highbrows.” See This is the NFL Hock, Jonathan, 119–20 Home Box Office (HBO), 66–67, 157, 199n30 home video, 17, 60, 83 Hornung, Paul, 45, 56 How Football Explains America, 2–3 How to Watch Pro Football, 106 Huff, Sam, 134–36, 207n22 Hulu, 168–69, 213n52 human-interest programs, 26, 134, 139 Hunt, Lamar, 48 The Hunters, 139–40 Ice Bowl, 4, 32, 196n56. See also NFL championship (1967) If, 143 “Immaculate Reception,” 4, 20–21, 77–78, 89, 180, 191n44 Indianapolis Colts, 73–74 Inside the NFL, 17, 26, 67, 89, 157–58, 159 Inside the Vault. See Lost Treasures of NFL Films Internet, 170 Jackson, Keith, 146 Jacob Siegel Coat Company, 6

Jaworski, Ron, 82 Kalas, Harry, 23, 177 Kansas City Chiefs, 52 Karras, Alex, 45 Katz, Howard, 161, 163 Kemp, Jack, 83 Kennedy, John F., 45 Kishi, Yoshio, 22 Lambert, Jack, 180–81 Lancaster, Burt, 51–53, 197n59 Largent, Steve, 70 The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s, 180–81 The Leaders: Breaking Racial Barriers in the NFL, 67–68 Legend Productions, 207n24. See also Cosell, Howard Legends of the Fall, 165, 177 Levy, Marv, 180 Lewis, Ray, 68–69 Linemen—Eyeball to Eyeball, 139 Lombardi (1967), 53, 55 Lombardi (2010), 157 Lombardi, Vince, 1–2, 13–14, 52, 53–54, 135 Long, Russell, 48 Los Angeles Rams, 42–43 Lost Treasures of NFL Films, 83–84, 142, 215n7 Madden NFL, 69, 199n34, 215n6 Major League Baseball Productions, 149 McCarthy, Mike, 56 McKay, Jim, 134 Mekas, Jonas, 104–5 melt reels, 89 merchandising, 42–43. See also NFL Enterprises; NFL Properties; Punt, Pass and Kick Meredith, Don, 146–47 Minnesota Vikings, 65, 74 Minow, Newton, 102, 103 The Moment of Truth, 105 Monday Night Countdown, 155 Monday Night Football, 63, 143–44, 145–49, 154, 209n41, 210n56 Monday Night Magazine, 155

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Monday Night Match-Up, 154–55 montage editing, 22, 33, 65, 136, 139, 148, 158 Montana, Joe, 2–3, 177 More Than a Game, 136 multi-camera, 9, 19–20, 88, 130, 133, 146 Namath, 157 Namath, Joe, 4, 46, 52–53, 165, 196n49 narration, 22–23, 59–61, 103, 148 NASA, 176 National Football League (NFL), 1, 2, 28, 33, 36, 57, 161, 180, 186, 190n29, 193n6; AFL merger, 48–49, 196n54–55; broadcast rights, 16, 78, 144, 209n43; draft, 38–40, 193n11; filming rights, 7–9, 15; headquarters, 45; logo, 51; organization and development, 37–49; racial politics, 50–51, 67–68; relationship with NFL Films, 15, 18, 122–25, 160, 166–67, 184–86 The New Breed, 53–55, 197n61 New England Patriots, 108 New Orleans Saints, 48 New York Giants, 13–14, 42, 61–62, 90, 207n23 New York Jets, 159–60 NFL Action, 17, 102, 104, 139–42. See also The Hunters; Linemen—Eyeball to Eyeball; This is a Football NFL championship (1958), 42, 195n30 NFL championship (1962), 7, 11–14. See also Pro Football’s Longest Day NFL championship (1967), 4. See also Ice Bowl NFL Charities, 47, 48 NFL.com, 30, 113, 170–74 NFL Enterprises, 43 NFL Films: awards, 28, 102, 113, 116, 120–21, 192n60, 205n39, 209n45; “backyard moments,” 179; creative liberties, 73, 76; dramatization, 18, 75, 94, 112, 130–31, 137; and ESPN, 153–57; establishment of 2, 6–9, 11, 15, 115; as factual record, 61–63 ; “Great Moments” PSAs, 47, 196n52; and HBO, 157–59; headquarters, 16, 120–22, 190n32; as historiographer, 18, 33, 58–59, 75–76, 85, 181; ideological significance 3–4, 5, 49, 55, 182; and image, 67–71, 73–74, 85–86, 97; incorporation, 160; internet presence, 170–74; “Keepers of the Flame,”

17; Media Services Department, 96–98, 202n33; mythmaker, 4, 31, 32, 37, 51, 55, 63, 80, 142, 159–60; NFL brand building, 36–37, 51–53, 179; and the NFL Network, 161–70; niche productions, 191n57; popular imagination, 4–5; and propaganda, 5, 18, 34, 123; relationship to Blair Motion Pictures, 15–16; romanticism, 123; special projects, 214n2; syndication, 137–39, 143. See also aesthetic practices, NFL Films; corporate sponsorship; NFL films archive; NFL Films genres; Ed Sabol; Steve Sabol NFL Films archive, 16, 29, 79–98, 162, 200n2. See also melt reels; SABER system; special rolls NFL Films genres, 25–27, 76, 191n56. See also biographies; chalkboard programs; epic histories; follies; highlights NFL Films Presents, 17, 85, 110, 116, 142, 157, 205n41 NFL Follies Go Hollywood, 109, 204n33 NFL Full Contact, 192n58 NFL Matchup, 27, 156, 157, 172 NFL Media, 30, 152, 160, 171, 186. See also NFL.com; NFL Films; NFL Mobile; NFL Network NFL Mobile, 30, 152, 170, 171, 214n59 NFL Network, 17, 30, 79, 152, 161–70, 171, 184, 197n65 NFL Players Association, 39 NFL Prime Monday. See Monday Night Countdown NFL Properties, 46–47 NFL RedZone Channel, 169 NFL Replay, 164 NFL Rocks, 27, 191n57 The NFL’s Hungriest Men, 66 NFL Single Coverage, 169 The NFL Today, 143 NFL Total Access, 161 NFL Turning Point, 169, 214n54 NFL TV Follies, 150–52, 213n52 Noll, Chuck, 62–63 Oakland Raiders, 20, 23, 65 Old Gold Cigarettes, 15 Olympia, 105, 112 Oorang Indians, 193n7

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Index

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parody, 108–9, 177–78, 215nn7–8 Payton, Walter, 63 Peckinpah, Sam, 113 Phillips, Bum, 65, 143 Pittsburgh Steelers, 20, 40, 148, 177, 208n25 Plaut, Dave, 107–8, 120 Playbook, 164–65 Portrait of a Team, 62 Pottstown Firebirds, 142, 209n39 Price, Vincent, 27, 107 Pro Football, 173 Pro Football Hall of Fame, 32, 47, 87, 121, 183–84 Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon, 135–37, 208n26 Pro Football—Pottstown, PA, 26, 142 Pro Football’s Longest Day, 11–15, 49, 61–62, 121 Punt, Pass and Kick, 47 race: African American players and racism, 67–68; and the NFL, 50–51, 55; Native Americans, 193n7 Rashomon, 110 Revis, Darrelle, 159 Ritz Brothers, 6 Road to the Super Bowl, 70, 74–75, 144–45, 209n45–46 Rodgers, Aaron, 56 Rollercoaster Ride, 107 Rosenbloom, Carroll, 15–16 Rossovich, Tim, 53–55, 197n61 Roy Rogers Enterprises, 42–43 Rozelle, Pete, 8–9, 14, 15, 28, 42–49, 127, 145, 161, 195n32 Run to Daylight, 135, 207n24 Ryan, Bob, 119–20 Ryan, Rex, 66–67 Saban, Lou, 31–32 SABER system, 92–6, 161, 202n32. See also NFL Films archive Sabol, Ed, 6–11, 14–16, 20, 83, 114–15, 183–86, 190n17 Sabol, Steve, 7, 9–11, 16, 22–25, 81–82, 84, 86, 102–3, 125, 184–86; artist, 11, 114–20, 121–22; awards, 28, 192n60 San Francisco 49ers, 3 Saturday Night Live, 174, 177, 215n7

Sayers, Gale, 50–51 Schenkel, Chris, 13, 23, 61–62 Scherick, Edgar, 132–33, 207n20 Seattle Seahawks, 107–8 Seidman, Steve, 85, 107, 120, 172–74 75 Seasons, 84 Shofner, Del, 15 Showtime, 158, 159, 212n20 Simpson, O. J., 69–70, 97, 177 The Simpsons, 178 Singletary, Mike, 2, 3 Six Days to Sunday, 162 16mm film, 25, 81, 82, 187 slow motion, 3, 5, 20–21, 33, 50, 61–62, 112, 113, 148, 149, 173 Smith, Emmitt, 97 Smith, Pete, 173 social media, 171 sound, on-field, 18, 97–98, 158, 199n34. See also wireless microphones Sound FX, 27, 73, 164 soundtracks, 24 “special rolls,” 89–92, 96, 97, 202n28, 202n32, 202n37 Spence, Sam, 23, 24–25, 32, 176 sponsorship. See corporate sponsorship Sports Broadcasting Act (1961), 45 SportsCenter, 68, 72, 153, 161 Sports Illustrated, 11, 17, 44 Starr, Bart, 13–14, 56, 192n59 Staubach, Roger, 143 Stein, Gertrude, 108, 119, 126 Stram, Hank, 22 Strange but True Football Stories, 27, 107 Stylists and Storytellers, 113–14, 205n41 Summerall, Pat, 102 Sunday Night Football, 155, 209n41 Super Bowl, 19, 33, 49, 52, 56, 60, 73, 143–45, 196n56, 209n43 Super Sunday: A History of the Super Bowl, 60 Super Sunday with NFL Films, 102 Swann, Lynn, 63, 77–78 syndication. See NFL Films; television “Tales from the Vault,” 172–73. See also They Call It Pro Football (blog) Tarkenton, Fran, 50 Taylor, Jim, 61 237

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Taylor, Lawrence, 2, 3, 90, 191n47 television, 29–30, 40–41, 44, 45, 96–97, 127, 181–82, 206n4; blackouts, 41, 45, 194n25; broadcast television, 137; cable television, 30, 149, 151–53; commercialism, 101–2; live television, 8, 101, 128, 181; NFL films “artful” television, 102–5; quality television, 105–6; reality television, 27, 192n58; sports television, 16–17, 102, 104, 128–37, 145, 151–52, 206n15; Super Bowl, 33, 143– 44; syndication, 137–39, 143; tape delay, 134; television time-outs, 41 Tel-Ra Productions, 7, 9, 86 That Winning Feeling, 73–74 They Call It Pro Football (blog), 172–74, 214n60 They Call It Pro Football (1966), 19, 22–23, 36, 49–51, 99, 102, 136, 187, 191n39 This is a Football, 140–42 This is the NFL, 17, 60, 72–73, 138–39, 198n9; “Highlights for Highbrows,” 110–12. See also Inside the NFL; NFL Films Presents Thorpe, Jim, 43, 87, 193n7 Thursday Night Football, 161, 212n25 “tight on the spiral,” 21, 76, 176 To Catch a Whale, 7, 190n17 The Tonight Show, 17 The Top 100: NFL’s Greatest Players, 70, 165–66, 171, 187, 213n41 Top Ten, 165–66, 187

Tough Guys, 180 Tuckett, Phil, 84, 119–20, 166 Unitas, Johnny, 4, 42, 50, 64, 73, 109 United Way, 47, 196n52 Vick, Michael, 159 Victory at Sea, 103, 200n4 video, 25, 81, 82, 102, 187, 202n31. See also home video violence, 5, 31, 70–71, 135 The Violent World of Sam Huff, 134–37, 207n22–23 Walt Disney Company, 44, 144–45, 205n52, 209n48 Warner, Kurt, 88 Washington Redskins, 55, 197n63 Weathers, Carl, 83 Whitaker, Jack, 23 The Wild Bunch, 113 Willis, Chris, 86–87 Winters, Jonathan, 150–51 wireless microphones, 3, 21–22, 136, 191n46, 203n41 Woodson, Charles, 56 Yankee Stadium, 42. See also National Football Conference championship (1958) The Young, The Old, and The Bold, 31

238

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Travis Vogan is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication and American studies at the University of Iowa.

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Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Keepers of the Flame : NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,