CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This still feels like a national invitation to playing hooky. Thursday night football? Why not! Late enough in the week to get a head start on the weekend, which is essentially the strategy of every college student in the United States at one time or another.
Early enough in the weekend where it’s a genuine kick start on full football weekends.
“Here’s what my vision of heaven on earth would be,” Steve Sabol said a few years back, at a Super Bowl in San Diego that, in itself, was a pretty good marriage and a pretty good predictor of the heaven/earth partnership. “Pro football six days a week. Leave Saturdays for the colleges, that’s fine. Give me Monday and Thursday. Tuesday and Friday. There’s a pretty big appetite out there. The NFL could sustain it.”
Sabol and his father, Ed, were responsible for feeding so much of that appetite, for keeping football addicts glued to their television screens for the better part of 50 years. The family business, NFL Films, was one of the igniters for what became the football century and what has become a second one. And that will only grow.
Last night’s Giants-Panthers game was the first NFL game contested since Sabol passed away from brain cancer at the age of 69 on Tuesday, and in a way it’s right that the Giants were a part of that. Ed Sabol’s first important assignment for his burgeoning company was filming the 1962 NFL Championship Game, played at a bitterly cold Yankee Stadium.
“We knew we might have something,” Ed once said, “if we could keep the lenses from breaking since it was so cold.”
They had something all right. They had the Football Follies and John Facenda, they had super-slow motion, they produced the video for Howard Cosell’s famous Monday night halftime highlights at a time when that was the only way you were going to see out-of-town highlights.
They had this immortal poem, memorized by so many of a football generation raised on these films, even if you didn’t happen to root for the Oakland Raiders:
The autumn wind is a pirate
Blustering in from sea
With a rollicking song he sweeps along
Swaggering boisterously …
His face is weatherbeaten
He wears a hooded sash
With a silver hat about his head
And a bristling black mustache …
The best part about NFL Fims, which came to be embodied by Steve Sabol’s ubiquitous presence on so many of the specials, was that it was obvious if you were a football fan that it was operated by football fans, by people who cared every bit as much about the game as you did. And cared about it passionately.
“What I like,” Sabol said in San Diego, “is when people tell me, ‘I know my team won the Super Bowl. But I don’t feel like they’ve ***really*** won it until I see it through the lens of NFL Films. That’s when it’s real to me.’ ”
That may be the greatest legacy of all. In every place where there are people gathered who care about football, one of the things that binds them together — regardless of rooting affiliation — is NFL Films. Don’t think so? Next time you’re in a bar, in a quiet moment, start humming the famous anthem …
Bum ba-da bum, ba-da-bum bum-bum-bum bum ba-da bum, ba-da bum bum bum bum …
… and see how long it takes to gather a chorus to join in. Five seconds? Ten?
So yes, it was right that the Giants should play this first game after Steve’s passing, and even more so that the game be played on a Thursday, a non-traditional night, one of the six on which Steve Sabol would heartily have approved of.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com