He worked for the company that owned radio station WHAT, and one day the station’s announcer fell sick, so Facenda stepped in. Now his son Jack is fighting to reclaim it. The complete Pro Football Hall of Fame class of 2020 was unveiled on Saturday, one day before Super Bowl LIV. My kids aren’t going to know as much about who this person was in these photos,” he says. But he had a feeling about football. The black-and-white box meant more than easy entertainment, then. The first time it spoke, during the phone call to the Hall of Fame, everything turned out fine: The Hall invited Jack and his children to accept the honor on his father’s behalf. That’s a real tough guy fellas !! If you're a human and see this, please ignore it. “He was the dean of broadcasters,” says Gerry Wilkinson, who now runs Broadcast Pioneers, a preservation society for Philadelphia’s television history. His father had been dead nearly two decades, and yet here he was, selling soup. The booming baritone of John Facenda, legendary Philadelphia newscaster and signature of NFL Films, has popped up selling everything from Campbell’s chili to video games. That voice meant a lot to various corporations — credibility, recognition, commodity — but to Jack it meant much more. A game ball from the 1977 Super Bowl. It wouldn’t be anything if they didn’t write the scripts. Cameras showed close-ups of players’ faces: the swollen eye, the newly crooked nose. They are the most unique mime artists to grace this Earth. Since 1974, Road To The Super Bowl is the longest running and most-honored sports special (35 years, 28 Emmys). It turned out to be a very expensive pair. The voice spoke to him through a telephone. The bar’s owner, keen to use his television to bring in business, had invited Sabol to show off some of his spectacular football highlight footage. “That’s not the way my father would have done it, and I’d prefer a handshake and a man-to-man understanding.”. But now the “Golden Mile” is a traffic nightmare, men don’t wear hats, and the San Marco has become the world’s classiest KFC. During his tenure, the league introduced free agency and the expansion of the league from 28 to 32 teams. In the coming years, Jack would be summoned again and again to protect the Facenda legacy, as his father’s voice cropped up posthumously selling Chunky Chili, and then later a video game, and eventually who knew what. He has acknowledged as much: “There will never be another voice like his,” Sabol said of Facenda back in 1984. Founder Ed Sabol is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2011. But none of the papers capture John Facenda’s real gift: the voice. I can tell you 2 things about Dick that most people don’t know !Number 1, He played his HS ball at Crane Tech. Polamalu was also selected to eight Pro Bowls and was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 2010. “You don’t need to put my dad’s voice in there just for the hell of it.”, The Sabols’ NFL Films headquarters, a new 200,000-square-foot structure, stands about 25 minutes east of Philadelphia, in Mount Laurel. He never left the state ! “I guess a hundred years ago you’d go down and slap Steve across the face and challenge him to a duel. He didn’t allow anybody to take advantage of him, even if it cost him his job. Who else could narrate the immortal deeds of men like Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas and Mean Joe Greene? Jack stared at the television. There’s a certain ownership a boy feels for his father, a certain greedy love, a certain bottomless capacity for attention and time, and perhaps even more so if the son knows his father largely in reproduced form. Steve Hutchinson played guard for the Seattle Seahawks, Minnesota Vikings and Tennessee Titans. Lucille Ball. Through the cigarette smoke, he saw what was a novelty for a bar: a television. And it was astonishing: slow-motion violence, players crashing and trampling, the high spiral of the ball dropping through snow into the waiting hands of a receiver. … Yeah, my father was there, but it was really their scripts.”, In July of last year, Jack Facenda’s attorney filed suit against the NFL and NFL Films in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. You heard me—it took them nearly 50 years after he fed his first footage into his 16 mm camera to put Ed Sabol into the Hall of Fame. in Chicago, His collage ball at Ill. and his Pro Ball with the Bears. “People can be unthinking. Facenda was the archetypal Philadelphia star, and he felt a responsibility to shine. But Facenda’s face and voice became so ubiquitous that Philadelphians waited to hear his sign-off — “Have a nice night tonight and a good day tomorrow. Young was the general manager of the New York Giants from 1979-1997. To see the full size images, you need to enable javascript in your browser.