Why old school isn't in session

Sporting News, The, July 23, 2001 by Fritz Quindt

How old school is the NFL? Let's see. At ESPN Classic--that retirement home for all good sports and sports fans--NFL Films is equivalent to daily bread. Why, its programming plays almost as often as SportsCentury.

But NFL Films ain't the same as the (genuflect) National Football League. Though NBA, major league baseball, NCAA and NHL games air in their original network form, pro football on ESPN Classic always is presented with orchestra and haughty narration. Wouldn't you loooove to glimpse NFL broadcasts from the We-Didn't-Have-A-VCR-And-Neither-Did-Anyone-Else-On-Our-Block Era? Sorry.

"This dates back to Pete Rozelle," says Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films. "He felt if you replayed games they'd end up like just another boxing match, and that would erode the TV ratings."

Rozelle rightfully admired cinema au Sabol, the depth of celluloid and storytelling, with none of the perceived warts of live telecasts. Lately, NFL Films used film stock and radio calls to "recreate" one-hour "broadcasts" of Super Bowl I and the Chargers-Dolphins playoff from the 1981 season. Perfect margarine ... but it's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Bringing authentic NFL butter to market has been a slippery slope, though. Both CBS and NBC televised the first Super Bowl. Archeologists have unearthed mere minutes of CBS' video and none of NBC's. SB 2 is gone; the master tapes are presumed destroyed. Ditto Super Bowl 4. Had those survived, there was conflict over who owned rebroadcast rights, anyway.

This just in: Rights were resolved in the 1998 TV contract; videotapes of the preponderance of games after the NFL and AFL merged in 1970 are sitting in a warehouse in Fort Wayne, N.J., and Sabol divulged, "You know, the NFL is going to start its own channel."

Really. "We're discussing it internally, and it's not imminent,' says John Collins, NFL senior vice-president for entertainment/programming/marketing. "But it's a nobrainer. Eventually you'll see old game broadcasts. They're part of the golden goose."

Sabol says he's ambivalent about golden-oldie reruns: "I get a phone call a month from someone who wants to see a whole broadcast, and sometimes we make it available. Know what they say? `I couldn't sit through the whole thing.'"

OK. So how to explain the boom of bootleg NFL broadcasts on eBay?

Get a copy from Year 1 of Monday Night Football. There's Howard Cosell opening the show, interviewing Len Dawson and Johnny Unitas on the field, and players standing at attention between members of a band during the national anthem.

Beg/borrow/steal a tape of NBC's Super Bowl 3. See Curt Gowdy working sans script, cuneiform graphics and especially the old 60-second cigarette commercials(!).

Not the stuff of ESPN Classic, but classic stuff.