A Troubled Decade

The Nineteen-Sixties was a decade of change and turmoil as, what David Zang, termed the “American One Way” was challenged on multiple fronts. Authority was challenged and in the NFL that meant a challenge to Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Rozelle was faced with issues surrounding gambling, drugs, and race. He was criticized for his handling of the NFL response to the Kennedy Assassination. Gambling involved players and owners. The issues involving race centered on segregation, the civil rights movement, and authority. The career of Jim Brown illustrated many of these issues. Joe Namath and Commissioner Rozelle faced off over issues of gambling, authority, and the counter-culture. Vince Lombardi became a national symbol for authority and discipline. This was also a decade when NFL Films--the creation of Ed Sabol--emerged as a powerful force for marketing the NFL and its values.

Search and Destroy

This chapter discusses the impact of the 1960 CBS documentary The Violent World of Sam Huff, which treated professional football as a painful workplace, and NFL Films’ subsequent reshaping of that story to celebrate the sport’s spectacular aspects, ignore its physical toll, and mute individual players’ ability to capitalize on their images. In the hands of Ed and Steve Sabol, professional football, rather than any individual player, was the product on display. NFL Films rendered the sport’s violence impersonal, a matter of technique, and its focus on the skill and expertise necessary to play muted the notion of football as a job. By 1967, thanks to NFL Films, football looked and sounded different on TV than it had in 1957, and it meant different things.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter examines the continued presence of NFL Films' traditional practices—and the values they deliver—at a time when the National Football League (NFL) evidences less support for programming that displays these conventions. Despite its decreased importance to the contemporary league, the cultural and aesthetic significance of NFL Films productions exceeds the realm of pro football and even sports media. 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. 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. This chapter discusses the legacy of NFL Films, including the establishment of a league-owned media infrastructure upon which the NFL continues to expand and that all other major sports organizations have since emulated, along with the creation of a framework from which contemporary sports television developed its formal practices and enhanced its presence on the medium.

Cable, NFL Media, and NFL Films’ Dinosaur Television

This chapter examines how the development of cable television and NFL Media enhanced the production and circulation of 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 (NFL) formed its own network, the NFL Network. 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. This chapter explores how NFL Films, which established a foundation for the development of cable sports television and the transformation of the NFL into a multiplatform media institution, has been constrained to adjust its practices to maintain a place within the contemporary sports media landscape and league it helped create. It also considers how the Internet created new opportunities for the NFL to build and circulate its image.

Keeping the Flame in the Broadcast Era

This chapter examines how broadcast television helped NFL Films transform 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. It discusses NFL Films productions designed to augment and publicize exceptional National Football League (NFL) broadcast events, specifically the annual Super Bowl and ABC's Monday Night Football. It shows how NFL Films strengthened the NFL's relationship to television to attract television viewers (and sell advertising time) around the clock. The company's productions demonstrated that nonlive sports television programming could have appeal throughout the week and throughout the year. Furthermore, NFL Films anticipated and precipitated the continuous sports television that developed along with cable television.

The NFL’s Smithsonian

This chapter focuses on the NFL Films archive, the largest sports film archive in the world. Building from the authenticity and emotional power the company assigns to film, president Steve Sabol calls the NFL Films archive “the soul of the NFL,” “the NFL's Smithsonian,” and “football's wine cellar.” NFL Films' archive consists of two main parts that serve overlapping functions: a fire-proof, temperature-controlled, limited-access vault that houses and safeguards nearly all the film the company has created and purchased since Blair Motion Pictures' beginning; a film library that organizes copies of footage for inclusion in the company's productions and for sale to clients. This chapter examines the NFL Films archive's role in the company's efforts to create, circulate, and control the National Football League's image.

Creating and Sustaining America’s Game

This chapter charts the National Football League's (NFL) meteoric rise, thanks to NFL Films' unwavering designation of pro football as a unique and unifying reflection of America. Fueled by a combination of sport and media's increasingly profitable symbiosis and Commissioner 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. 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. This chapter examines how the NFL made connections to as many potential fans as possible by establishing national television exposure, branding various items, organizing athletic events for kids, donating to charitable causes, and creating a tourist attraction. It looks at one production that codified NFL Films' signature aesthetic practices, They Call It Pro Football, and how it situates professional football as “the sport of our time.”

The Shakespeares of Sports Films

This chapter examines how 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 (NFL) from competing sports organizations. Throughout its history, NFL Films 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 NFL's commercial motives. This chapter explains NFL Films' use of aesthetic traditions and discourses to craft its image and position the company as part of an artworld—a status that is remarkably rare in sports television and in sports media more generally. It also considers how NFL Films situates Ed and Steve Sabol as artistic visionaries who play central roles in reinforcing its efforts to claim status as a site that produces art.

More Movies than News

This chapter examines the productions of NFL Films that not only document but also exalt the National Football League (NFL). NFL Films productions document and provide historical records of NFL games. It creates the league's history by arranging exceptional moments into celebratory narratives, such as Greatest Moments in Dallas Cowboys History (1992), Era of Excellence: The 1980s,(1989), and the syndicated television program NFL Game of the Week. NFL Films' documentaries suggest the NFL's past is constituted by extraordinary moments—diving touchdown catches, punishing blocks, and graceful runs—that evidence the league's unique excitement and epic importance. This chapter discusses NFL Films' production practices that aim to glorify pro football and how its material is influenced by the media outlets for which the company produces content. It shows that NFL Films' highlights offer a model through which to explain the emergence of the contemporary sports highlight—perhaps the most powerful and prevalent genre in sports media.

Introduction

This book explores how NFL Films shaped the way Americans view football and paved the way for the emergence of cable television and Internet sports media. Baseball is traditionally recognized as America's favorite pastime, but the country's most popular and lucrative sports organization since the late 1960s has been the National Football League (NFL). NFL football's tremendous 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. More than merely a game, the sport embodies and articulates characteristics, beliefs, attitudes, and values unique to American history, identity, and everyday life. This book examines the ways that NFL Films' productions changed how pro 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. It discusses the institutional and cultural history of NFL Films as well as its circulating and archived productions, the discourses it generates, and the discourses surrounding the company.