The Best Part of Being Sick

As an adult sick days suck. It's not even nice to get a day off of work, and being home is no fun. But as a kid, sick days were joyous. No school, and you could lay in bed watching TV. You could watch shows you had never seen before (remember, we didn't have DVRs back then), if a aired weekdays at 10am, you never ever saw it. I remember watching Press Your Luck on sick days. And I remember, once we got cable, watching ESPN. This was in the early days when monster truck shows and CBA replays littered the airwaves. ESPN also aired classic NFL Films Presents. The man behind those shows (which continue to this day, a great piece on John Amos, the actor, aired recently) is Steve Sabol, who started the company with his father, took over and then hosted the shows until an illness forced him out of that duty two years ago. Steve Sabol died this week.
Sabol played an essential role in the NFL's popularity with NFL Films. It was a great showcase for the game and for the players, as they pioneered the now common practice of miking up players and coaches during games. The music, of course, the music. He used to bring in an actual orchestra to NFL Films to record the music. The voice-overs from John Facenda. All that stuff made NFL Films great and Steve Sabol a legend.

Here is my favorite NFL Films segment: a poetic recap of the 1968 New York Jets Super Bowl championship season. It was called "Joe and the Magic Bean" and it was voiced by Sterling Holloway, who was also the voiced of Winnie the Pooh.

If you prefer a more serious approach. Here is Orson Welles's narration of the same clip: