Souhan: Ed Sabol reeled in the modern NFL

Southerners used to say their two most popular sports were football and spring football.

There was a time when that saying was cited by Northerners as proof of the simplemindedness of Southern sports fans.

Even as that saying has moldered, a new nationwide reality has replaced it. In today's America, there are four seasons: NFL draft season, NFL free agent season, NFL training season and NFL game season. It is never not football season, and the credit for that belongs as much to Ed Sabol and his son, Steve, as anyone.

One form of genius is seeing that which others can't or won't. That the world is round. That the forward pass could become the most reliable way to move a football. That the ugly, bloody, mud-strewn, primordial game of professional football in the early 1960s could be remade into populist opera.

On Monday, Ed Sabol died at the age of 98. His son, Steve, died of brain cancer in 2012.

They, along with former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, were perhaps the first men in America to recognize that professional football could become something more than stop-action rugby. That football could surpass baseball and all other sports to become a year-round national obsession.

One of Sabol's wedding gifts was a $100 gift certificate with which he bought a 16-millimeter camera. He used that device to film everything in his path, and especially Steve's football exploits.

Somewhere along the line, Ed Sabol told Vince Lombardi that Sabol would make him the John Wayne of the NFL. Lombardi liked the idea. He liked the eventual reality even more.

Sabol's work in those early days led to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a business that eventually produced more than $50 million a year, and the exponential increase in popularity in a sport that once seemed to be hopelessly lagging behind baseball. No matter how many hundreds of millions Sabol made, NFL Films did more for the league than the league did for him.

It's difficult for younger generations to grasp these days, but in the early '60s, baseball could call itself "America's Pastime" without irony.

Pro football was an intriguing oddity.

Sabol made the NFL cinematic. He took raw and often uninteresting footage and added martial scores, slow-motion replays, reverse-angle camera shots, closeups of bleeding limbs and battered faces, and added the basso profundo of John Facenda. Sabol didn't just improve the persona of the NFL. He created it.

The director Sam Pekinpah watched Sabol parse pass plays in slow-motion and adopted the device for his shootout in "The Wild Bunch."

Today, highlights of NFL games are available on multiple platforms and devices and a dozen cable channels. In Sabol's early years with the NFL, home games were often blacked out, and access to highlights often was limited to halftime of the Monday Night Football broadcasts. Sabol helped make those highlights the most exciting minutes of the week for any football fan.

Vikings coach Jerry Burns once told me of his sideline view, "Ah, you can't see anything. It's just bodies flying around. It's a mess."

Sabol saw that, with the right camera angles and craftsmanship, the NFL could look and sound like violent ballet. He sped pro football's rise to its current perch atop the North American sports world. Football may have reached these heights without him, but not as quickly, and not as surely, and not with so much infused grace.

Jim Souhan's podcast can be heard at souhanunfiltered.com. On