(Phatforums News / PhatzRadio / LA Times) — Forget the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving or New Year’s Day. Super Bowl Sunday has replaced them all as America’s No. 1 holiday. It has become so big that the National Football League is considering giving the game its own three-day weekend.

That’s no joke. One scenario making the rounds at the league is that if the NFL gets the green light from the players to expand its regular season from 16 to 18 games, President’s Day weekend will probably become the permanent home of the Super Bowl.

“It’s going to be unbelievable,” predicted NBC Universal Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, whose network pays $660 million a year to carry the NFL’s Sunday night football package. “ I think that’s a pretty attractive idea,” echoed Sean McManus, president of CBS Sports, which shells out $650 million annually for its package of games.

Of course, the players are against expanding the schedule but if the owners are united on this then it seems likely.

At a time when most television properties are struggling in the face of massive audience fragmentation, the NFL is seeing incredible growth. Ratings were up on all five broadcast and cable networks that carry games, and this season’s Super Bowl match between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers in Dallas this Sunday is expected to top the viewership record set by last year’s Colts – Saints battle, which drew 106.5 million people and became the most-watched TV event in the United States ever, breaking the almost 30-year-old record held by the series finale of “M*A*S*H.”

It’d be easy to chalk this up solely to the love of the game, but over the last few years the popularity for the NFL in general and the Super Bowl in particular have entered another stratosphere that seemingly defies logic. The last five games have all topped more than 90 million viewers. Until 2005, only five of the previous 39 Super Bowls had surpassed that mark.

So how has the NFL turned the Super Bowl into a de facto national holiday?

Savvy marketing for starters. Over the last decade, the NFL and its TV partners have undertaken several initiatives – some noisy and others subtle – designed not only to boost the league’s fan base, but its stature in the country as well. These moves have included aggressively promoting the NFL to women, creating more big events beyond the Super Bowl and not being shy about making the watching of a football game seem like a patriotic act.

“It has been one of the most profoundly effective media and public relations events that has ever been built in the United States,” said Daniel T. Durbin, an associate professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, of the NFL’s marketing prowess.

The man in charge of making sure football remains entrenched both with viewers and in America’s conscience is a Kenyan native schooled in the United Kingdom who used to hawk tobacco and alcohol. Mark Waller, who joined the NFL in 2006 to help promote the game abroad before rising to become the league’s first chief marketing officer, calls football “America’s last great campfire.”

“Imagine you were above the United States on a Sunday, you’d see these incredible glows of stadiums,” Waller said.

Borrowing a page from the producers of the Olympics, the NFL and its TV partners have also become aggressive about discussing more than just X’s and O’s and talking about life and challenges off the field for the players and coaches and in some cases, even the cities. Last year’s Super Bowl coverage focused as much on the city of New Orleans and its struggles post-Katrina as it did on the Saints making their first-ever appearance in the big game.

The idea of hyping itself used to be foreign to the NFL and looked down upon as tacky and pushy.

“They’ve come a long way,” says Sara Levinson, who as president of NFL Properties from 1994 to 2000, oversaw marketing for the league. She recalled that while some were eager to see the NFL become more aggressive promoters, many of the league’s old guard were reluctant to think of the league as a “brand,” believing nothing promoted the NFL “better than watching a game.”

It helps to have team owners that recognize that the league is more powerful than any individual team.
“They have an appreciation for the need to grow, strengthen and elevate the NFL brand as much as their own individual teams,” said Mark Shapiro, the chief executive of Dick Clark Productions and a former executive vice president of ESPN who still has close ties to the NFL. “I really think that’s what separates it from other leagues.”

For more on how the NFL has turned the Super Bowl into America’s de facto national holiday, please see our story in Friday’s Los Angeles Times.

– Joe Flint

Photo: Dallas gets ready for the big day. Kirby Lee/Image of Sport-US Presswire.

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Hi Guys and Gals -

We are taking a one day break to enjoy our family!! Updates will happen starting Monday Morning bright and early!!! But from all of us to you – we wish you a Very Merry Christmas – may all be blessed in this enjoyable time. Be safe, stay patient if your are driving and flying, and may Santa bring you good health and presents to all…………We do have holiday music going for those who enjoy the Christmas Spirit!!!

From the Phatforums / PhatzRadio Staff –

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(Phatforums News / NORAD) — For five decades, NORAD and the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s flight, beginning precisely when Christmas Eve begins.

At 12 a.m. on Dec. 24, you can click on this link and track Santa’s journey on the NORAD Santa Tracker 2011. You can also see a video below featuring Santa’s tracks from NORAD Santa Tracker 2010.
Must Read

According to NORAD, “the tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.” The Director of Operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check the radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tradition was born.”

It was 1958 when the governments of Canada and the U.S. created NORAD, and at that time the new command tackled the tradition of tracking Santa each Christmas.

“Since that time,” the agency says, “NORAD men, women, family and friends have selflessly volunteered their time to personally respond to phone calls and emails from children all around the world. In addition, we now track Santa using the Internet. Millions of people who want to know Santa’s whereabouts now visit the NORAD Tracks Santa website.”

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(PhatzRadio/ Phatforums Blog) – Hi to all, I’m sure you know this is the 4th of July weekend and we have a special music block made up for this incredible three day weekend. As usual, on Monday, AD Sportsland will not be broadcasting and the Staff will be home celebrating our Nation’s Birthday.

So, please sit back and relax to our smooth blend of Lite Rock and Jazz. Also, on this special day – we want to convey our heartfelt thanks to the Men and Women of the Military. Because of your sacrifice, our freedoms, national beliefs, and safety are secure!!

For those who plan to celebrate, please be safe with the fireworks – drink responsibly and of course – Enjoy!!!!

From everyone here: Happy Fourth of July!!!!!

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(PhatzRadio) – It’s the Memorial Day Weekend Music Blast!! During this holiday weekend, PhatzRadio will be playing not be doing our normal broadcast of Track Talk and AD Sportsland. Instead, we will be playing some of the best Lite Rock, Jazz, and Old Time favorites like no one less.

From our happy PhatzRadio staff to you: Happy Memorial Day! Please drive safe. For those people handling fireworks and manning the grills all across America, please be safe. For those who enjoy the holiday with “spirits”, enjoy them responsible and do not drink and drive.

Last but not least, to those Men and Women of our Armed Forces who protect our freedom and are in harms way – Thank You!

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(PhatzRadio) – It’s the best Sports program on the internet. We developed it because of true fans who just want the
facts and want the ability to say what they feel!! AD Sportsland brings all of that together in one hour!

Alex is a Sports Fanatic that loves all types of things. Basketball, Football (well, the NY Jets – we will not hold it against him), Baseball, Soccer, Hockey, and NASCAR. He also will update you on some of our new programming areas – Track Talk, Field View and Pit Stop.

Of course, he will keep you updated on our incredible music blocks. DJ LI has been building huge “mood” music blocks like The Beatles, The Police, Paul Simon and more.

Please feel free to submit feedback, ideas, or questions by hitting the contact page. PhatzRadio – the new voice in Sports Talk!!!!

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(PhatzRadio) – There will continual updates on the NCAA Women’s Final Game. Please review our sister site, www.phatzradio.com for updates, pictures, and tweets from CBS, ESPN, CBC Sports, Reuters, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated and our up to the minute scoreboard powered by SportzNetwork!! Just pull down the ticker and and look for College BB – up to the minute info.

It’s just another way that PhatzRadio is leading the way in Sports Information from all over the world. Our radio station is also playing the best in Lite Rock with DJ LI – listen in all weekend!

Complete TV Coverage –

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LOS ANGELES — Aaron Brink, aka adult performer Dick Delaware, knocked out Larry Robertson in 55 seconds on Saturday night at Rage in the Cage 150 at the Wild Horse Pass Casino in Chandler, Ariz.

In a dominant performance, Brink (24-20) peppered Robertson (6-1) with jabs before flooring him with a left upper cut and finishing him with another punch on the ground before the referee waived off the contest.

“The crowd went totally silent. Everyone expected me to lose to this guy,” Brink told XBIZ.

Robertson did not land a single strike on Brink in suffering his first defeat.

Brink’s victory set up a fight on April 16 with Dan Severn, one of the pioneers of MMA who has returned to competition in the Arizona-based Rage in the Cage promotion. The surprising matchup was announced in the ring Saturday immediately after the fight. Severn was among the original UFC competitors in the early to mid-1990s.

“The crowd came unglued when they heard that,” Brink said. “It’s a major blessing. My fingers are crossed that Severn doesn’t pull out of this and we get to do this.”

Brink recently played Electro in Vivid’s upcoming “Spider-man XXX” parody. The Huntington Beach, Calif., native has fought professionally since 2000 and performed in his adult movies since 2002. Currently, he is one of the leading heavyweight contenders in Antigua Pictures’ MMA-porn series “Battle Bang,”

Brink immediately returned to training on Sunday. His camp is Team Spine Crank in Tempe, Ariz.

Pictured: Brink and UFC middleweight champ Anderson Silva.

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(PhatzRadio) – There will continual updates on the NCAA Men’s Tournament. Please review our sister site, www.phatzradio.com for updates, pictures, and tweets from CBS, ESPN, CBC Sports, Reuters, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated and our up to the minute scoreboard powered by SportzNetwork!! Just pull down the ticker and and look for College BB – up to the minute info.

It’s just another way that PhatzRadio is leading the way in Sports Information from all over the world. Our radio station is also playing the best in Lite Rock with DJ LI – listen in all weekend!

Complete TV Coverage –

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Steve and Ed Sabol, the father and son team who created the legendary NFL Films, before the 1991 Super Bowl.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* Ed Sabol loved filming his only son, Steve, playing pee-wee and high school football
* Big Ed bid on 1962 NFL championship, intending to bring Hollywood feel to highlight film
* From there, NFL Films was born, using new techniques to give players god-like qualities
* On Saturday, Hall of Fame selectors will vote on Ed and 14 other candidates

(CNN) — When Steve Sabol was a fourth-grader, he loved two things: football and the movies. Well, three things: football, movies — and football.

Steve, the only son of Ed Sabol, hereafter called Big Ed, played on a team of 70-pounders in southern New Jersey in the 1950s. Big Ed, using a Bell and Howell film camera, skipped out of work and shot the games, sometimes from the roof of the school. When Big Ed was done selling overcoats for the day, the Sabol family often had the other kids on the team over for apple cider and Mom’s cookies — and a private screening.

Big Ed would set up the projector and the phonograph and revel in the exploits of the little lads in their leather shoulder pads. John Philip Sousa or Stan Kenton and Woody Herman would provide the soundtrack.

“My dad, he loved to make movies, and in football he found the perfect subject,” Steve said.

As Steve grew older and became a decent high school player, Ed kept at it, capturing every snap, tackle and touchdown on film. Years later, the boys on the film were replaced by men named Hornung and Kramer and Lombardi and Bradshaw and Swann.

For in the Sabol house, the vision of NFL Films was born to a disgruntled salesman who thought football movies were fun to watch, but …

“I knew I could do better,” Ed said.

Ed Sabol is 94 now, retired and living in Arizona. His creative mind is as fertile as ever, says his son, who took over NFL Films in 1987. The elder Sabol is on the ballot for Saturday’s Pro Football Hall of Fame as a contributor. Most of the men who have been inducted as contributors were coaches who changed the game or were past commissioners.

On Saturday, voters will select five men from the 15 finalists. Big Ed is the only non-player on the final ballot.

Sports Illustrated: See the final candidates

It’s time for him to be celebrated, many NFL observers say. After all, NFL Films changed the way the league was viewed, not just by fans but by all Americans.

“Every other major sports league is envious of the National Football League because it has NFL Films to document their history and grow the game,” said Ira Kaufman of the Tampa Tribune, a Hall of Fame voter who will make the case for Big Ed on Saturday. “You’ll always have your rabid fans, but NFL Films made it easier for the casual fan to grasp pro football and embrace it.”

We took what every fan felt about the game and added music and sound, and we magnified and we glorified and we put it on a movie screen.
–Steve Sabol, NFL Films

RELATED TOPICS

* NFL Films Inc.
* NFL Football
* Super Bowl

In the early ’60s, the NFL was far from the most popular sports league in America. Baseball and the glamorous New York Yankees were king. College football was more popular than pro football.

Ed Sabol was selling coats. He hated it. He didn’t hate the coats; they were “very high quality,” but he wanted to do something else. He saw in the paper that the rights to film the 1962 NFL Championship were up for bid. Why not take a shot, he thought. I can do better, and if not, I’ll find someone who can help me do it.

So he bid $5,000, Steve says, and during a three-martini lunch (that turned into four) won over the commissioner of the NFL, Pete Rozelle.

Big Ed, who loved the films of director John Ford and the musicals of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, set out to marry the drama of the game to stirring music that elevated the men of the NFL to mythic proportions.

But that very first game was a near disaster for Big Ed, his son and the others who helped shoot it. For starters, it was brutally cold. Cameras broke. Film cracked. Lenses froze.

“My dad was so upset, he spent the whole second half in the (bathroom),” Steve said.

Big Ed says he just wanted to get away.

“At that particular moment, I was not interested in doing another game nor concerned about the future,” he said. “I just wanted to get out of the stadium, get home and warm up.”

But weeks later, when the film, entitled “The NFL’s Longest Day,” was developed and edited, league officials loved it. And soon America would come to love the short films, too.

Big Ed calls that first film his favorite and points to the end scene as something that set his group apart. The last shot is of the empty stadium after the game. Wind blows newspapers and programs around the lonely goal posts.

“I had a saying that I always told all of our cameramen: ‘Finish like a pro,’ ” he said, “and this cameraman got this memorable shot because he finished like a pro.”

Big Ed encouraged his crew to take risks (Steve’s words) though the father says: “In my eyes, they were not risks; rather (it was) doing film the way I felt it should be done.”

He chose employees for their passion, creativity and love of the game. It made his company legendary.

No longer were football movies just a series of real-time shots of players running past would-be tacklers. The Sabols slowed it down, using multiple cameras to capture the action in the trenches and the big hits people hadn’t seen before. They showed us the faces behind the masks, Kaufman says.

It took a few years, though, of learning through experimentation.

“We had to figure out what the hell we were doing,” Steve said. “The company was sustained by my dad’s personality. We were all a bunch of young kids trying to figure out how to make movies. Thank God there was one veteran (among the five staff members), a director named Dan Endy.”

Another innovation was to give voice to the game, putting microphones on the players and coaches.

One of the first coaches to wear a mic was one of the greatest of all time, Vince Lombardi. But the first time they wired up the legendary Green Bay Packers boss at a game in Minneapolis, they captured more than his gravelly tone, Steve says. The radio also picked up a nearby cab dispatcher.

“You’d hear Lombardi say, ‘What the hell is going on out here?’ Then you’d hear someone say, ‘We have a woman out here with a kid and a shopping cart; is there someone who can pick her up?’ ”

YouTube: NFL Films tribute to Vince Lombardi

But winning over Lombardi — getting him to let them follow him into meeting rooms and onto the practice field — was a boon. Other coaches like Hank Stram followed.

By Super Bowl IV, the operation was humming, and the dialogue the Chiefs coach carried through the game and film enamored an audience that had no idea a football team could, in the words of Stram, “matriculate the ball down the field.”

Hollywood also took notice of the cinematic innovations.

”NFL highlight reels had a real impact on how movies get made, particularly montages,” two-time Academy Award winning director Ron Howard told the New York Times in 2000. ”Lots of different images. Images on images. Using the slow-motion, combined with the live action. The hard-hitting sound effects, juxtaposed against incredible music, powerful music, creating a really emotional experience for the viewer.”

Steve Sabol likes to recount how the late, great Sam Peckinpah told a Hollywood trade magazine that the epic climactic scene in “The Wild Bunch” was inspired by a football movie that used cameras ringing the action, shooting at different speeds with different perspectives.

Ron Shelton, who has directed five sports movies, said Hollywood could get away with things in those kind of films of the ’40s and ’50s that it can’t anymore.

“Once it was available on television, filmmakers had to step up their games, and the Sabols came along and said, ‘We’re going to put the bar way up here,’ ” said Shelton, who grew up loving the Los Angeles Rams. “They have great attention to every detail — to the lenses, to the speed (of the film), to the technical ability to follow a runner.”

if you watch a football movie like “Rudy” or “Brian’s Song” or even “We Are Marshall,” you’ll notice touches of NFL Films: the close-ups of the tight spiral of a pass, for example, or the key moments unfolding slowly.

The man who wanted to bring a Hollywood feel to football films ended up having an impact on Hollywood.

“We took what every fan felt about the game and added music and sound, and we magnified, and we glorified, and we put it on a movie screen,” Steve said.

“We distilled what they love about the game: the fierce physical nature, the competition, the history and the traditions, and also the humor.

“We gave it a mythology.”

Steve points to the film “They Call It Pro Football” as the movie that really elevated NFL players to divine status. It was also the debut of announcer John Facenda, whose rich, firm voice led to the nickname “The Voice of God.”

YouTube: “They Call It Pro Football”

Facenda was not a sportscaster, and the NFL owners wanted a more well-known personality like Curt Gowdy or Chris Schenkel, but Big Ed insisted that it didn’t matter that Facenda knew little about the game. Once again, Big Ed had to persuade the league to take a chance.

And when Facenda read one of the first lines of the film: “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun,” the father and son knew they were right.

One hundred Emmys later, NFL Films still finds ways to be innovative. Fancy new technology helps, but for Big Ed and Steve, it was always about finding the right people who were willing to take chances.

NFL Films has grown from a recently retired coat salesman and his kid showing movies at Kiwanis Clubs or bar mitzvahs to a company with more than 300 employees and revenue of tens of millions, with programs on six networks.

Proponents of Big Ed’s Hall bid insist that you can’t tell the history of the NFL without including Ed Sabol and NFL Films.

Yet their place in the Hall of Fame is not a sure thing, because there are a lot of great players on the ballot and on future ballots.

“I’m a little concerned that a lot of voters won’t cast a vote for any contributor with the argument that there’s a backlog of players who deserve to get in,” Kaufman said. “I’m not buying that argument. I think Sabol’s overdue.

“He’s a towering figure in this league. Let’s do this now.”

Big Ed plays down the idea of being in the Hall. He’s enjoying retirement in Scottsdale, fully satisfied with a career of bringing the drama of Sunday’s gladiators to America’s TV screens.

If he wants to reflect on it all, he’ll have no problem. It’s all there on film.

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