How I Did It: Steve Sabol, President, NFL Films

With his very first documentary, in 1965, Steve Sabol of NFL Films became the designated mythmaker of pro football. Now the company is a $50 million family operation embedded within a multibillion-dollar business.

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As told to Patrick J. Sauer

In 1962, Ed Sabol ditched his job as an overcoat salesman, used his savings to start Blair Motion Pictures, and secured the rights to that year's NFL championship game. A fast start, but the company really came into its own in 1965 when its now iconic football-as-violent-ballet style debuted in They Call It Pro Football. The documentary was created primarily by Ed's son Steve. Commissioner Pete Rozelle loved the imagery and convinced the owners of the 14 NFL teams to put up $20,000 apiece to buy Blair and turn it into NFL Films. Forty years and 91 Emmys later, NFL Films, based in Mount Laurel, N.J., is an anomaly: a $50 million family business embedded within a multibillion-dollar operation. Ed is retired but Steve, 63, continues to march the company down the field.

Dad always wanted to make movies. When he was younger he'd been in vaudeville and appeared on Broadway in an Oscar & Hammerstein musical. The only films he'd ever shot were of my prep football games, but he managed to get a meeting with Pete Rozelle in which he doubled all the other offers in the room. Rozelle was concerned that Dad's only experience was filming his 14-year-old son, but he convinced him to give us a chance over a three-martini lunch at "21." If he could sell overcoats then he could certainly sell his passion for making films.

My father was the classic eternally optimistic entrepreneur, and in the beginning the company existed on his personality and sense of humor. I had the imagination to write and produce movies, but I had to hire people with technical know-how and learn about filming, editing, and sound. It took me three years to figure out the NFL Films style, and his personality provided a protective shell while we experimented with the vision in my head. He did a three-year vamp while we made They Call It Pro Football.

We had a premiere of the documentary at Toots Shors. At the time, pro football was behind baseball and college football in the television ratings. Pete Rozelle wanted mystique, and he loved the rhythm and romance we added to the imagery of the game in They Call It Pro Football. Rozelle saw NFL Films from a marketing standpoint, which didn't occur to me because I was 22 and just wanted to make movies.

NFL Films introduced everything that's become a cliché: montage editing, bloopers, super slo mo, original music, even keeping a camera on the quarterback after he throws a pass. We were also the first to mike a coach, Joe Kuharich of the Philadelphia Eagles. Dad and I used to take a projector and a bed sheet and screen They Call It Pro Football wherever we could: Kiwanis clubs, bar mitzvahs, foreign legions, veterans posts, Rotary clubs, etc.

We have a budget and write a business plan every year, but I have the autonomy to run my company. We have about 300 employees. We come up with ideas and then figure out what production costs will be after deciding how many cameras to use or, say, whether to use original music. We've gotten a lot more sophisticated in our business savvy, but I have never traded in my entrepreneurial vision. NFL Films has always controlled its own destiny.

Part of the reason we are left to our own devices is because there is mystery to what we do. Team owners are worth millions, but they have no idea how to do what NFL Films does.

We always stay ahead of the curve on technology because it's like rowing upstream--keep making progress or you'll fall back in a hurry. I never wanted the company to get bigger just for the sake of getting bigger because it isn't healthy. That's the ideology of a cancer cell.

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