Quotes from Steve Sabol

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

I think in the NFL knowledge is power, and you try to get the knowledge by whatever means.

My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers - they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.

All this technology has not changed the way NFL Films does business and our process. Yes, with one touch of a button now you reach millions of people but it is still the same approach that my father and I started out with.

If you can show something as complicated as two people falling in love with just music and camera angles, well, just think about what you can do with football.

I was kicked out of school one year for streaking.

There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans, and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there, got food poisoning, and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.

I've been very lucky in the freedom that I've been given. Every artist needs two types of freedom: You need the freedom to - the freedom to come up with an idea or treatment - and then you need the other half of the freedom, and that's freedom from - somebody saying, 'This is great. This is how I want you to do it.'

Lombardi, a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow and November mud... He remains for many the heart of pro football, pumping hard right now.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's not being noticed.

I always was fascinated by neat nicknames.

My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers - they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.

To me, football is very personal. Even as a kid, I looked at football in dramaturgical terms. It wasn't the score that interested me, it was the struggle.

NFL Films has had one continuous, creative vision for 47 years. These are timeless things; timeless stories that we capture just like people go back and read Greek mythology.

My father always used to say 'treat everyone as a gentleman; not because they are, but because you are.'