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.
Interpretation
Football is like a theatrical performance, blending strategy and artistry.
In this quote, Steve Sabol likens football to a theatrical spectacle, emphasizing the blend of strategy, artistry, and narrative that defines the game. He highlights how the presentation of football through film, narration, and music transforms the sport into an emotionally resonant performance that captivates audiences, much like a film or live theatre does.
In practice
During a sports documentary screening, one might quote Steve Sabol to emphasize the artistry of sports.
I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn't even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game.
I write a lot of songs people don't hear. I really just enjoy the process. I finish 'em all. I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between the bad ones and the good ones.
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
I value the people who are willing to make themselves vulnerable and share work that is sensitive and maybe even hard to sing sometimes. Because that's the music that provides the most solace and solidarity to the world.
They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.
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