Steve Sabol of N.F.L. Films Dies at 69

Steve Sabol, who was the creative force behind NFL Films, his father's innovative enterprise that melded cinematic ingenuity, martial metaphors and symphonic music to lend professional football the aura of myth and help fuel its rise in popularity, died on Tuesday in Moorestown, N.J. He was 69.

The cause was brain cancer, said Dan Masonson, a spokesman for the National Football League. Mr. Sabol learned of the cancer in March 2011.

In 1960, pro football was ranked as the nation's fourth most popular spectator sport after baseball, college football and boxing. But over the next decade it rocketed to first place in polls, TV ratings and revenues, and NFL Films, begun in 1962, helped propel it. Sports Illustrated called the enterprise “perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America.”

Though his father, Ed, founded NFL Films, Steve Sabol - the producer, writer, director and cameraman - created the images and sounds it became famous for: a kicked football floating end-over-end or a pigskin bullet spiraling in slow motion; a row of bruised and dirtied gladiators hunkering on the sideline; the crunch of bodies brawling at the line of scrimmage or colliding in the open field.

And overlaying all of it was stirring orchestral music and, for many years, the ringing narration of John Facenda, a former television news anchor in Philadelphia whose rolling bass was called “the voice of God.”

Art Modell, who owned the Cleveland Browns and then the Baltimore Ravens (and who died on Sept. 6), said NFL Films “sold the beauty of the game.” Chris Berman, the ESPN sportscaster, said the Sabols could make a 49-14 game “seem like some kind of epic Greek tragedy.”

Ed Sabol, who at 96 survives his son, founded the company in 1962 after giving up selling overcoats, a job he hated, to take on the movie game. An early venture, a film about whales, went under after he failed to find any whales.

Soon, perhaps over a legendary four-martini lunch, Ed persuaded Pete Rozelle, commissioner of the National Football League, to hire him to film the 1962 N.F.L. championship game between the Giants and the Packers, even though he had no experience beyond filming Steve's high school football games. It didn't hurt that Ed made the lowest bid: $12,000, split evenly between him and a partner.

Three years later, after the Sabols had established a brisk business selling the league films of itself, Ed Sabol persuaded it to buy his company, originally named Blair Motion Pictures, after his daughter and Steve's sister. The deal called for him and Steve to run it. Ed was president until 1987, when Steve, who had the titles creative director and co-founder, succeeded him.

“I may have started it, but he has been the engineer behind it,” Ed Sabol said of his son in a 2008 interview. “He comes up with these great ideas and is a great student of the game.”

Of the sports Emmy Awards won by NFL Films â€" 107, including two this year -- Steve Sabol was cited by name on more than a third.

The films have impressed Hollywood. The director Ron Howard said in an interview with The New York Times in 2000 that NFL Films highlight reels had had a real impact on how movies are made, “particularly montages.” The director Sam Peckinpah once told Steve Sabol that he got the idea for the classic slow-motion gunfight scene in the 1969 movie “The Wild Bunch” after watching a Super Bowl highlights film Mr. Sabol had made.

NFL Films was not the first company to make game films, but its innovations are widely considered to have elevated the genre. Mr. Sabol put more cameras on the field than others had done and used them to provide new perspectives. One, called “the mole,” was a hand-held camera that roamed the sideline in search of spectacular close-ups. He used different speeds in different cameras.

He used film, not tape, for greater clarity. He interspersed the smacks and whistles with the sounds of a 60-piece orchestra playing Tchaikovsky. He highlighted emotional themes like comebacks and underdogs. He persuaded players and coaches to wear microphones. He made some of the first funny films of players' “bloopers.” And he wrote scripts, often rhyming ones.