The Best of Philly. And the Worst: In the Beginning

By Maury Z. Levy

God couldn’t be here tonight, so we’ve taken this opportunity to fill in for Him. This of course is the ultimate arrogance, presenting a list of the best and worst of anything. Who are we, you might ask, to make such judgments? Well, this list represents the input of a lot of 
people.

The job of compiling it was not unlike building the Holland Tunnel. We had our share of casualties. People washed away in a foamy sea of milkshakes. People whose 
clothes were torn to shreds by bad cleaners. People who had their ears pierced three and four times. People who had their hair cut beyond recognition.

We did all of this for you, of course. And we certainly hope you appreciate it. We’ve saved you the trouble of trying every greasy spoon in town the next time you’re in the mood for a pizza or a steak sandwich. We’d like to thank the people who make Maalox for making this all 
possible.

We’ve saved you the trouble of shopping around for clothes or standing on the wrong corner waiting for a cab. And we offer you the best place to pick up a backgammon 
game. And the best place to pick up a secretary. And a lot more.

We surely don’t expect you to agree with all of our choices. Of course you’ll have your own expert opinions on a lot of these items. And you’ll think your opinions are 
better than ours. Well, you’re certainly entitled to that. That’s why they make ice milk.

FOOD

Ice cream

Best: Bassett’s in the Reading Terminal Market has the purest flavorings and the highest butterfat content around. Great if you love ice cream. A little hairy if you’ve got a heart condition.

Worst: Greenwood Dairies on Route I just north of Penndel. Used to be a pig’s paradise. Somehow, they’ve eliminated the paradise part.

Soft pretzels

Best: Twist and Bake at 2 1/2 North 13th Street has them big and hot and fresh and cheap. Worst: Spectrum after a 76ers game. They’re small and cold and expensive. And lonely.

Steak sandwiches

Best: Pat’s in South Philly. If the peppers arc still good enough for the Mummers, then some things never change.

Worst: Pat’s in the Northeast. You can take the name out of South Philly, but the quality just doesn’t travel well. Even the bread’s soggy.

Pizza

Best: Fonzo’s at 48th and Chestnut, in the heart of ethnic West Philly. Crust is crisp and consistent. Ask Dom to give you the works. Tell him Jack McKinney sent you.

Worst: Shakey’s. Tastes like an American cheese sandwich with ketchup.

Steak

Best: Arthur’s on Walnut Street, an obvious choice that’s 
tough to top.

Worst: Emerson’s Ltd. in the Plymouth Meeting Mall. 
They’re not called limited for nothing. No matter how you 
order it, it seems to come out the same. Burned.

Chocolate cake

Best: Rindelaub’s on 18th Street. You don’t have to be Aryan to enjoy the moist sweetness of the German delight.

Worst: The Tastykake trio. It gets smaller as the prices get bigger.

Meal under $1

Best: Gino’s. If it’s good enough for the cops. . . .

Worst: Bain’s. They’ve tried to clean up their act, but it’s just not worth it.

Meal under $2

Best: Sabina’s in Port Richmond. The best Polish food around. No joke. Try the kielbasa.

Worst: Seafood Unlimited on South 20th Street. Don’t let the name fool you.

Meal over $25

Best: Le Bee Fin, the head of the class.

Worst: Cobblestones, unless you order steak.

Hoagies

Best: The unnamed luncheonette at 10th and Fitzwater. One of the few places around still using old original Italian ingredients. The ham’s enough to let you make a pig 
of yourself.

Worst: Blimpy’s. How onomatopoetic can you get?

Brunch

Best: Lautrec. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and the New York Times too.

Worst: The Marriott, where the creamed chipped beef wouldn’t exactly make you re-enlist. Orange juice is extra. So is warmth.

Cheesecake

Best: Aunt Sylvia’s, upstairs at 123 South 18th Street. It’s rich and creamy and light. A memorable experience that won’t lay on you for a week.

Worst: The yellow peril at Horn & Hardart, unless you’re 
a sawdust freak.

Candy

Best: Bayard’s on Route 70 in Cherry Hill. They roll their own, but it’s legal and fattening.

Worst: Fannie Mae, anywhere. Cheap in more ways than one. The box is tastier.

Milkshake

Best: The Cosmic Kitchen on Germantown Avenue. Only natural ingredients and fresh fruit are used. It’s called a smoothie. It’s also a cheapie.

Worst: Roy Rogers. Someone should teach them to pull 
the trigger on the mixing machines.

Coffee

Best: Taylor’s Country Store on Sansom Street. The kind you’d grind at home. And you can keep going back for 
more.

Worst: Any machine owned by ARA.

Scrapple

Best: Habersett’s, cooked at home.

Worst: Horn & Hardart again. Tastes like burned oatmeal.

Breakfast

Best: Ponzio’s on the Ellisburg Circle in Cherry Hill. Big, hot tasty portions. Quick and clean.

Worst: Dewey’s, where you’re bound to get a cold shoulder with your cold toast.

Deli

Best: The Famous at 4th and Bainbridge, where you can 
still get it while it’s hot. Fresh, not fatty. Corned beef is 
excellent. Your mouth could water driving by.

Worst: Day’s at 18th and Spruce. The cold cuts are certainly better than the 7-11. But you can’t say that for the 
price, the service and the portions.

Salad bar

Best: Wildflowers. it’s just unending. You even get assorted cheese, warm bread and tomatoes. Remember tomatoes?

Worst: Victoria Station on Route 202 in Valley Forge. It’s great if you’re a rabbit. Otherwise, the unrelenting lettuce wears a bit thin.

Cheese shop

Best: The Blueberry Barn on Main Street in Marlton, N.J. It’s hard to figure out what a place with such a selection is doing so far in the sticks, but the natives aren’t asking questions, just enjoying.

Worst: The deli counter at Pantry Pride.

Hamburgers

Best: H.A.Winston’s. Burgers with an accent (not MSG) 
of international flavor. A large menu goes well with the large portions.

Worst: Marbett’s on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden. Can you find the hidden hamburger in this sandwich?

Hot dog

Best: Deitz and Watson. Buy some and cook them at home. Those little men on the street corners are still Greek

Worst: At a Phillies’ game. They go well with a losing team.

French fries

Best: Zern’s in Gilbertsville (on Route 73 right past Boyertown). Made right in front of your eyes. Thick and rich and crisp. Served in a cone with vinegar or mayonnaise. A 
super tasty bargain.

Worst: The Paper Plate on 15th Street. A real fast food place, so fast they sometimes forget to cook them.

Crabs

Best: The Crab Shack, Wilmington. Great food. funky atmosphere.

Worst: Kelly’s on Ludlow Street. No crab like an old crab.

Onion soup

Best: Bistro Déjà Vu. Super-secret recipe. The only thing we can reveal is the Swiss cheese on top.

Worst: Pavio’s. Try to find the onions at three convenient locations.

My Life as a Jew: A Trilogy (in Three Parts)

ON SUNDAY, THE RABBI LIT UP

By Maury Z. Levy

The first time I almost died was March 23^rd, 1959, the day I put on tefillin. I came of age in an old white house on Bustleton Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, where boys were bar mitzvahed and girls were frowned upon.

“My god,” said the rabbi,” with a look on his face as if the Red Sea had just closed back up. “You can’t put on tefillin that tight. You’ll cut off the blood supply to your brain.” It wouldn’t be the last time someone would tell me that.

I was mortified. All the other boys looked at me with disdain. This is what happens, they thought, when you grow up on the gentile side of the Boulevard. My face was red, but my arm was as white as my yarmulke.

Each Sunday, for the two months prior to our right of passage, we would meet in the back of the sanctuary, sitting on folding bridge chairs, at shaky aluminum tables, eating bagels that were rubbery and cream cheese that was watery, learning the faith of our fathers.

It was the first time in my young life that I had eaten lox outside the home. In our house, lox was a delicacy, purchased only when company came, eaten only at times of celebration or sympathy. I knew full well that, if I could live through the rigors of tefillin club, we would soon be serving celebration lox, as I would become the first boy in my immediate family to become a man.

The rabbi didn’t seem to share my epicurean joy. “No, no,” he said, “holding my head in his hands. “You’re not supposed to wear it like a baseball cap. The tefillin must always be positioned in the spot that begins at your hairline, above your forehead. Now move it down below that pompadour.”

I was worried and confused. Would the rabbi notice that I had gotten some Wildroot cream oil on the back of my box?

“And your arm is all wrong,” the rabbi said, “the lowest point for tefillin begins where your biceps muscle starts to bulge. The tefillin must never pass below this point!”

Oy, how was I ever going to read from the torah if I couldn’t get some simple straps straight?

“This tefillin is too big for you,” the rabbi said, “that’s part of your problem. Where did you get tefillin so big?”

For what seemed like an hour and a half, I sat in silence. My grandfather had given me these tefillin. They had been his. He was so proud to see me have them. He said a special blessing over the blue velvet bag before he handed it to me. My grandfather was an Orthodox man. These tefillin meant the world to him.

“Who is picking you up today?” the rabbi demanded.

“My father is, rabbi,” I said with a whimper.

“You tell your father I want to see him,” the rabbi said.” With that, he walked away.

I was sick to my stomach. I couldn’t eat another bite of bagel. What if the rabbi made an example of me? What if he told my father that I couldn’t be bar mitzvahed because I couldn’t put on tefillin right? I looked at the big clock on the bema wall. My father would be here in less than ten minutes. I had to do something quickly.

With the courage of the damned, I got up from my bridge chair and walked to the front of the shull. I had to find the rabbi. He had to give me a break. As I approached the bema, I smelled something strange. It smelled like my Aunt Anna when she was nervous. It smelled like smoke. And so it was. When I got to the back of the bema, there was the rabbi, dragging on a Lucky Strike.

Quickly, my jaw dropped. You weren’t allowed to smoke in shull.

“What are you doing here?” the rabbi said, as he tried to cuff the butt in his hand. I couldn’t speak. The words just didn’t come. I had caught the rabbi committing a sin. What would Moses do?   

The Last Steve Carlton Story

By Maury Z. Levy

THERE WAS NO REAL SENSE in splitting hairs over it. The decision to get rid of the moustache was made by a very distinguished committee. Danny Ozark, the new 
manager of the Phillies, told him he’d rather see him without it. He told him this to his face. He said he just didn’t 
care for moustaches on ballplayers but that, of course, he wouldn’t demand that he shave. It’s hard to demand anything from the best pitcher in baseball, from the man who was voted the professional athlete of the year, from a guy who makes $165,000 to start. You can only suggest.

This is what Paul Owens, the second member of the 
three-man committee for the resolution of the moustache, did in his office at Veterans Stadium while he was packing 
up to go to spring training. Owens is the general manager of the team. Last year he was field manager for a while too, after they finally got rid of the Italian guy. Owens is looking over a pile of publicity pictures to help decide what will be used in this year’s yearbook. There are some with the moustache and some without. He separates them 
into two piles.

“I think we’ll be safest going with these,” he said, holding up the clean-shaven shots. “Now don’t quote me on that. I mean, he doesn’t know about this yet. He’s still 
got the moustache, you know.”

The third and deciding vote came from a 46-year-old 
schoolteacher from Buena Park, California. Larue Harcourt is president of the Athletes Financial Services Inc., a company of some 35 highly trained professionals who help make such momentous decisions. Larue Harcourt would 
like to see him take off the moustache because at this very 
moment he is working on getting him lined up with a big 
sponsor to do a shaving commercial. The marketing men 
have decided that people prefer to buy shave cream and 
razors from people who shave their whole face. There 
are just a couple inches more credibility in it.

The selling of Steve Carlton will call for a flawless product. There’ll be no trouble selling him locally. But the national picture is too fuzzy. Joe Namath could have a 
moustache because he’s a bachelor who plays for a winning team. On those counts, Carlton has two strikes 
against him.

The only one who had no real say in the moustache matter was Steve Carlton himself, in spite of the fact 
that it was his lip. But Carlton really didn’t care that much. “I don’t like to think about those things,” he said. “I just 
want to go out there and pitch and win. The moustache is only a distraction. I hate distractions. I can always grow a moustache. I can’t always win 30 games.”

Last year, Steve Carlton won 27 games for the Phillies, which came out to almost half of what the whole team won. It is indeed something to win 27 games for a team 
that ends up in dead last place with the worst record in baseball. Steve Carlton came out of last season like a perfectly cut 27-carat diamond in a setting of zircon 
baguettes.

He won the Cy Young Award, which meant he was the 
best pitcher in the league. And he won the Hickok Belt, which meant he was the best athlete in the country. He became quite an item. This shy guy who’d spent the first 
six years of his major league career in St. Louis, piling up 
a not-so-overwhelming 77-62 record, needed only a few weeks after his trade to Philadelphia to show that he was 
going to be the biggest thing to hit this town since Robin 
Roberts.

Jimmy Stewart: The Interview

AMERICA’S FAVORITE ACTOR TALKS CANDIDLY ABOUT KNOCKING HOLLYWOOD ON ITS EAR AND GARBO ON HER ASS

He is silver now, but no less golden. At 78, James Maitland Stewart looks back fondly on a career of some 80 feature movies. He’s played cowboys and con­gressmen, baseball players and bandleaders, ranchers and runamucks. And through it all, this Princeton graduate who stumbled into Hollywood by way of summer stock has had a special air of innocence and elegance that has made him, without a doubt, America’s favorite actor.

His craft, most often seen on the late show in recent years, is now being preserved for the ages on home video. MCA, which released the long-awaited Hitchcock series a while back, just came out with five more Stewart classics: The Glenn Miller Story, The Rare Breed, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73 and Thunder Bay.

As Stewart relaxed in a comfortable armchair in his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by almost as many awards as memories, editor Maury Z. Levy talked with him about his life and loves, his tapes and times.

LEVY: You, quite obviously, have a VCR in your home. Do you use it a lot for taping?

STEWART: Well, um, actually, no. You see, so many of the old movies I’m interested in are on so damn late at  night, and I just can’t keep awake anymore. But taping them from television—I just don’t find that a good thing to do. Especially, you know, if it’s a picture that I’m in. I just find the quality so gull-darn awful. The movie’s scratchy, the sound is bad. That’s why I think this new idea of prerecorded home video is so great. They go and do the taping and the cassette work at the studio, and they do it directly from the film master. I’ve seen some of the stuff and it’s absolutely crystal clear, and the sound is great.

LEVY: And that’s why you’ve let them release so many of your films on home video.

STEWART: Yes, well, that’s right. They just make the whole thing so, well, so attractive. Also, you don’t have to wait until two in the morning to see it. You can just invite people in whenever you want. Throw a little party, you know, and still get to bed at a respectable hour.

LEVY: But will this mean the end of movie theaters?

STEWART: I’ll tell you something there. For some of them, it might not be such a bad idea. Now I’m talking about those little 300-seat houses with the bad projection and the bad sound. I think it’s very disturbing what they let these things get down to. But I do hear that some folks are building bigger and better picture houses. I know there are several being built right here in Los Angeles. And, in other places around this great country, they’re reopening some grand old houses that have been closed for a long time. The owners were smart enough not to have them torn down, because they just had a feeling that the movie audience that used to be would come back.

LEVY: And will they?

STEWART: I think so. I think we might see a nice mix. People will watch the videocassettes one or maybe two nights a

The Sex Chapter

[From the book Gym Psych: the Insider's Guide to Health Clubs, by Maury Z. Levy and Jay Shafran (Fawcett Columbine, 1986)]

They used to call it the broad jump. In 1968, at the Olympics in Mexico City, U.S. jumper Bob Beamon shattered the existing world record with a leap of twenty-nine feet two and one-half inches. Some seventeen years later, the rest of the world is still trying to come close. What was Beamon’s secret? How did he prepare himself the night before the big jump? With sex. Beamon had intercourse the night before. Hell, he screwed his brains out. He was very cool about the whole thing. Afterward, he admitted the sex, and his only comment was, “What do I do now?” Oh, a cigarette usually does the trick, Bob.

There’s always been some mystery, if not confusion,
about sex and sports. Different athletes handled it in
different ways. Muhammad Ali always stayed celibate for
six weeks before a fight. Did it help? Ali thought so. And
it’s hard to argue with his record. But for those of you,
men and women alike, who are more concerned fighting
the battle of the bulge than the heavyweight champ­ionship, there are some things you should know about
sex and athletics.

Sex isn’t all that taxing. Intercourse, even at its most
passionate, burns up about 250 calories an hour. And
unless you’re going for a world record in the sack, it’s
unlikely that you’ll lose more than twenty-five calories,
since the average lovemaking session lasts about five
minutes. (Did you ever wonder who times these things?
And where do they hide?)

To put those twenty-five calories into a gym perspec­tive, you’ll burn off about twice that in your preworkout
warm-up and stretch. For those of you not yet in the gym,
it takes about twenty-five calories to walk up a flight of
stairs. So if your bedroom is on the second floor, you’re
burning just as much energy going as you are coming. So
to speak.

Some athletes fear that sex will ruin their con­centration. Actually, just the opposite might be true. Sex,
like exercise, is a good way of venting stress—of losing a
lot of pent-up negative energy.

You have to know something about how the body works
to understand this. The adrenaline flow, the heightened
blood pressure—the same biological process that gets you
pumped up for sports—also gets you pumped up for sex.

This is where the brain comes in. The brain plays traffic
cop. Once the juices start to flow, the brain sends them to
the areas involved in the specific activity. And since the
body can only concentrate fully on one stimulus at a time,
you’re unlikely to see a man get an erection doing a bench
press.

This bodily flow of one-way traffic also explains why
after what seems like an exhausting workout, most people
still have lots of energy for sex. In fact, while getting those
juices flowing without draining the vital organs, the
workout now becomes a very interesting and very
effective form of foreplay. And there is data, dating back to
Kinsey, that shows the sex drive and sexual frequency of
an athlete exceeds those of the general population.

Lately, there’s been some speculation about internal
stimuli. You might have picked up on this if you watched
the Olympic marathon. Some of the runners interviewed
talked about a mysterious “natural high” that comes over
them at a certain point in the race. Some said it was like a
cocaine high—you just sort of float along, aware of things
outside your body, but

Andrea Mitchell: A Nose for News, a Face for Radio

By Maury Z. Levy

The other reporters, the ones without the pencils in their hands, the ones without the questions in their heads,were gobbling up the $100-a-plate meal like it was real food. Andrea Mitchell, who was covering this Democratic dinner for both KYW radio and KYW television, was the only one not eating. It’s not that she wasn’t hungry. It’s just that she’s a 
stickler for facts. And she just won’t
swallow a lie, even the smallest one.

“You didn’t like your chicken cordon bleu?” the waiter asked as he lifted her still full plate from the table.

“This,” she said, “is not cordon 
bleu. This is an inedible lump of chicken on a slice of canned ham camouflaged with cold gravy.”

Anyway, she was too busy running the dinner to eat. She picked up a copy of the program and skimmed down to the end. Teddy Kennedy wasn’t scheduled to speak until 9:15, which probably meant he wouldn’t get on until at least 10:15.

“No way,” Andi Mitchell said. “If 
he doesn’t get on by 9, I’ve got to let 
the film crew go. And we’re not going to have anything for the 11 o’clock 
news.”

She pushed her way up to the head 
table on the very large Civic Center 
floor. On the stage, at the right, the 
entertainment was going full blast. Some people in costumes were singing selections from The King and I, which seemed appropriate enough. She shoved her way down the 
crowded front aisle, the one that was full of security guards. One of the guards told her to stop and go the other way. She ignored him. The next 
guard grabbed her by the arm and 
told her a little less gently. “Mr. Camiel,” he said, “doesn’t want anybody in this aisle. You’ll have to go back to the press table. You’ll have to 
go the other way.”

She looked him dead in the eyes. “No,” she said, “I’m going this way.”

Before push got to shove, Bill Green
jumped down from the head table 
and called the goons off. He asked Andi Mitchell what the matter was. She told him about her deadline. “You people do this thing,” she said, “for the publicity. What good is it if 
you don’t get any?”

“I know it’s asinine, Andi,” he said. “But there’s nothing I can do 
about it.”

“Sure you can,” she said, “go tell 
your buddy Camiel he’s screwing up 
my television feed. Go tell him people won’t even know Teddy Kennedy was in town tonight if he doesn’t get this thing moving.”

Bill Green shrugged his shoulders and said he would try. He went over to Pete Camiel, the city’s Democratic 
boss, and started talking. First Camiel was shaking his head “no.” Then Green pointed to Andi Mitchell down there in the front row, where she shouldn’t have been, and Camiel stopped shaking. He quickly started talking to some other people at the table, including Teddy Kennedy. And then, when the music stopped, Pete Camiel went up to the podium to make an announcement. Andi Mitchell signaled her film crew. “I think we’ve got it,” she said.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Pete Camiel said, “there has been a change in the program. As you know, Senator Kennedy was scheduled to be our final speaker. But the Senator has 
just informed me that he has another commitment tonight. And so, we are changing the program to make him
our first speaker.”

The crowd cheered. Andi Mitchell smiled. Teddy Kennedy didn’t have 


Jessica Savitch: ‘Please Don’t Send Me Panties!’

 

By Maury Z. Levy

Saturday is pink, which is only fitting. She is standing there in the middle of the newsroom, Jessica Savitch, somewhere in between Orien Reid and Al Meltzer, and she is flashing her panties.

Maybe this is not the most professional thing to do. Mort Crim doesn’t go around showing his jockey shorts in public. But then Jessica Savitch is still pretty young, 26, and pretty green—they fix that up with makeup.

The panties are a gift from an admirer in Allentown. There are a lot of them, admirers. There is even a whole Jessica Savitch fan club, people who do nothing but live for weekends at 6:00 and 11:00 on Channel 3 to watch her anchor the local news, people who sit there all week through four newscasts a day hoping to catch a glimpse of her reporting on a fire.

It has become a cult, almost. Jessica Savitch, in about a year and a half here, has probably gained the biggest following of any local female television person since Pixanne left. She did leave, didn’t she? Or maybe she’s doing Gene London’s show.

Anyway, she is holding up the panties, the different-colored ones that came in the plain brown wrapper, she is holding them up, all seven pair of 
them, and reading off the days of the week embroidered on them, which she already knew by heart. Don’t let that blonde hair fool you.

There is a card, a big one, that came with the gift. The guy from Allentown paid two and a half bucks for it. It’s your basic Hallmark foldout, but he’s written his own messages on it in pencil: “How would you like to spend a weekend at a ski resort with me? I love you much. I am very interested in marrying you.”

The panties were nothing new. They send her gifts all the time, these people. One Christmas, some guy sent her five $100 bills and didn’t bother to sign the card. “I’ve enjoyed you all year,” he wrote, “and I just wanted to thank you. Please buy something nice 
for yourself.” Jessica Savitch gave the money to charity.

She says she doesn’t understand a lot of this, how she has become the sex symbol of the ’70s to a lot of people in Cherry Hill and Chestnut Hill and at least one guy from Allentown. She appreciates it and she resents it. Jessica Savitch, who has a very pretty face, is not just another pretty face. In 
fact, she’d even give you an argument on the pretty part.

“I’m a very flawed person,” she says. “I’ve got this lisp. People in television are not supposed to have a lisp. I have a very square jaw and my 
skin breaks out terribly and my hair 
just never lies flat and my front tooth 
is chipped.” She forgot to mention that her legs are skinny, which is why she never wears dresses.

But somehow the way it all falls together is enough to knock you over.

She didn’t always look this good.
She used to purposely tone down her 
act, because if she came on too much like the blonde bombshell, people would only talk. They’d say she got 
her job by flicking her eyelashes or dating the program director. The raps are nothing new. She’s got a lot of things going against anybody recognizing the real talents she has—the brains, the imagination, the drive, the on-camera presence in a medium that has been dominated by men.

“I had no one to emulate,” she 
says. “Who did I have to try to be 
like? Walter Cronkite? John Facenda?

The Real Super Bowl Winner: The NFL Films Story

At 1:00, the Earth moved. The 
Denver Broncos’ offensive line came running out of a now tiny 
tunnel onto a freshly painted field. They were big and tough and hard. From the floor of the 
stadium, almost at eye level, they looked like giants, except for the uniforms. By now, still two hours away 
from kick off, the warm California sun sat like a burnt orange on the rim 
of the Rose Bowl. Dan Reeves, the coach of the team that would lose the 
second half of this crucial game, stepped onto the crew-cut sod, shaded his 
eyes and squinted badly. “Damn,” he muttered, “I should have brought sunglasses.” He looked into the camera of 
the man standing next to him. “This 
sun,” he winced, “is really wicked, 
isn’t it, Phil?”

Phil Tuckett, who headed up the 
60-person field crew for NFL Films, 
gave Reeves a soft smile. Tuckett knew 
all about the sun. Not because he’d 
played a couple of years as a receiver 
for the San Diego Chargers, but because yesterday, while the rest of the 
press did research from the long end of 
a cocktail glass at one of the 800 pre-
Super Bowl parties that dotted the city 
of almost angels, Phil Tuckett was here in Pasadena. Here in an almost empty arena, with a 
handful of security guards and the guy who would play 
Mickey Mouse at half time; here to check out the light, 
to get a fix on the sun; here to ready his camera positions, his filters and his game face.

The next morning, the day of Super Bowl Ex-Ex­Eye, while the Broncos and Giants still slept, Phil 
Tuckett held a team meeting at his hotel. While the 
crew members ate meat and potatoes and apple crepes, 
he told them, “Don’t let anything or anyone get in 
your way today. I want each one of you to shoot this 
game like you’re the only camera we have.” It was an inspiring breakfast. Vince Lombardi would have been 
proud. Except for the apple crepes.

At the stadium, the members of the NFL Films team 
played one of their best games ever. They shot the faces 
of the players and the soul of the game. They got the 
shots you never saw on TV. Lawrence Taylor in street 
clothes and sunglasses, checking out the manicure of 
the grass. Phil Simms working on a secret snap with 
Bart Oates. Phil McConkey psyching himself up.

Once the game started, they stayed as close to the action as George Martin was to John Elway. They didn’t 
take up permanent positions like the network did. 
They got down and dirty in the trenches. They ran, they scrambled, they shot, they won. And when it was 
over, while the Giants still celebrated a few feet away, 
and while the Broncos, their bags packed, their heads 
down, slowly walked out to their chartered bus, a couple of couriers from NFL Films quickly packed up 
some 200 rolls of film for the police escort to the airport. They would hand-carry the footage from LAX to 
Mt. Laurel, NJ, where it would be processed and 
edited into what would become the biggest-selling instant video in the history of sport.

The groundwork for all this had started weeks 
before. By the Monday morning after the conference 
championship games, it was in full gear. Steve Sabol, 
who now runs the company his father, Big Ed, started 
in the ’60s, answered his phone in New Jersey not with 
hello, just a simple “I don’t have any tickets.” As Sabol, a cinematic and marketing genius who’s led his 
company to 33 Emmys, sat at his editing table snipping 
together the great plays and big blunders that would 
make up the beginning of this tape, he talked about the 
reality of it all. A former self-promoted football star at 
tiny Colorado College, this kid from Philadelphia—
who until he got married a few years ago, had an electric chair in his living room—doesn’t so much talk as 
he booms. “The Giants will kill,” Sabol said. “And 
that’ll be good for the history of the game, for the 
glory days of the NFL.” Not to mention a golden 
chance to pluck the giant New York market.

“If it’s a good game,” he said, “we could sell 
300,000 cassettes in two months.” Last year, when the 
Bears won, NFL Films put together the first of these 
instant videos. In the stores little more than two weeks 
after the contest, it was a wonderfully done tape that 
ran just under an hour—a game-by-game recounting 
of the championship season, sprinkled with key player 
profiles and topped off with the Super Bowl blowout 
itself. The tape, at $19.95, sold close to 130,000 copies, 
most of them in football-rabid Chicago, where many 
video stores couldn’t keep it in stock

This year, tapes would be made for both the winning 
and losing teams. “We can only hope,” Sabol grinned, 
”that the losing team suffers defeat with honor. They 
get blown out, we get screwed.”

The names for this year’s tapes had been figured out 
before the conference finals. The Giants tape was 
originally slugged One Giant Step. Sabol, a serious 
student of the old days of Hollywood, didn’t think 
that had enough drama, so he changed it to Giants 
Among Men. (The Denver tape would be called Mile 
High Champions. Had the Redskins made it, the tape 
was Warpath. Had the Browns gotten in, the title was 
Return to Glory.)

These tapes wouldn’t have the fleeting glitz of The Super Bowl Shuffle, last year’s music video of the 
Bears done by another company. “We’re not in the 
music video business,” Sabol says. “We want this to 
be a collector’s item. Fathers will want to save this to 
show their sons. That’s why we go back to the old style 
—a championship built game by game, brick by brick. 
We’ll add in flashbacks on the Giants of the ’50s. We’ll 
even go back to 1934, back to the glory days of Bronko 
Nagurski. This will be an historical document.”

Even with the history, the track record and the nationally consuming interest in the Super Bowl, Sabol 
and NFL Films Video chief David Grossman have had 
to work hard to get certain stores to stock up. “Video 
stores still don’t understand sports tapes,” Sabol says. 
” ‘Oh, why would that sell, it’s already been on TV.’ 
Jerks. But if I came in with a tape of two albino hairdressers and a Tijuana donkey, they’d order a thousand on the spot. It might be a losing battle, but we’ve 
got to fight it.”

To help win, he brought in some big guns, including Pat Summerall, the most trusted play-by-play man in 
America, to do the voice over. Video could be the 
future of his business and Sabol knows it. That’s why he’s building a whole warehouse for it, along with a $10 
million video/audio postproduction 
facility for everything from TV commercials to, yes, rock videos. The company has come a long way.

It all started when Ed Sabol, then 
head of a Philadelphia clothes company, bought himself a Bell and Howell 
movie camera to chronicle the early 
career of his high-school hotshot son. 
Steve Sabol was then a star running 
back at Haverford Prep on the Main Line. Big Ed used to stand on the 
sidelines and shoot him. When the cheerleaders kept getting in front of 
him, Big Ed, who always seems to get 
his way, talked the school into building 
a press box and camera position at the 
top of the stands. There, he could get a 
better angle and pursue his hobby in 
peace. The hobby would eventually turn 
into a multimillion-dollar business.

Big Ed got pretty polished with the 
camera. He also got to know the NFL big shots. In 1962, with young Steve off 
to college, he made them a proposition. 
He bid $5,000 for the rights to shoot the NFL championship game. That was twice as much as they paid the year 
before, but Big Ed always did things in a big way. Instead of the standard one 
view from the press box, he hired a half-
dozen free-lancers to get the game from
every angle. The result was a critical, if 
not financial, success. He continued the 
deal the next year and, by 1964, talked 
the league into buying his little film 
company to shoot the championship 
game as well as individual team 
highlights. That’s when Steve Sabol was 
in one of his several senior years at Colorado College. He gave up the grandeur that was anonymity to join his father in what was now the family business. Today, NFL Films, a wholly owned subsidiary of the league, has a few hundred 
employees, an annual operation budget of $15 million and makes big bucks.

A major reason for the success is the 
approach. It’s in-your-face journalism. 
The cameramen work their butts and 
knees off—whatever it takes to get the 
right angle. A lot of the film is shot in slow-motion and super-slow-motion, not 
so much for sport but for cinematic texture. Each film is edited and scored like a major Hollywood production. Cameramen edit, editors shoot, everybody 
gets dirty. It’s a tough job, but NFL Films does it like no one else.

In Mt. Laurel, Dave Plaut, the 
award-winning director of last year’s Super tape, sits for hours and days in a darkened room going over dozens of

cassettes, carefully piecing together the Giants’ season. Plaut runs each play 
over and over, making sure the engineer 
has perfectly synced the music with the
footage, making sure the last thud of 
the drum hits exactly when Lawrence 
Taylor sacks the quarterback.

Across the hall, Bob Smith, another 
former footballer, is performing the 
same surgery with the Denver season. He’ll take time out from editing only to fly to Pasadena to be one of the 12 cameramen on the crew. He’ll work the sidelines near Phil Tuckett.

The teams have finished warming up 
now. Most of the 102,000 fans are in their seats and NFL Films is ready to roll. “We don’t do a lot of game planning,” Phil Tuckett says as Neil Diamond gets ready for the national anthem. “Most of this is unspoken, we’ve done it so often. Every member of the crew is so well-versed. Each has shot 
every angle and done every job. We’re like a repertory company doing Shakespeare. One night you’re King Lear, the 
next night you’re the ghost.”

Tuckett is talking louder now as the 
Beach Boys begin to play. “We’re not

like the TV guys,” he yells. “There’s no 
director in our ear telling us what to do. 
For us, that just gets in the way of spontaneity. We get the great shots because 
we’re always thinking like the coach has to think. What will they throw at us 
next? What could go wrong on a play? You learn to anticipate anything. As a 
player, I always felt like the game was in 
slow-motion. That’s why we shoot it 
that way. We wanted to find a way to 
re-create the feeling of the field—the romance, the adventure. And that’s why we shoot film instead of tape. Tape has immediacy. Film has texture. It gives us 
the perspective of history. It makes everything look more heroic and larger than life. We think that’s special.”

Three-and-a-half hours later, the last 
whistle blown, the last Gatorade poured, Phil Simms, the most valuable 
player of this game, is running off the 
field at the highest moment of his life so 
far. In the chaos, he spots an NFL 
Films camera and stops—stops dead to 
do a special little segment that only NFL Films will capture.

“How the hell did you do that?” one 
of the network guys asks Phil Tuckett 
later on. Tuckett gives him one of his 
soft smiles. “You know us,” he says. “If 
we didn’t get it, it didn’t happen.”

_____________

Copyright 2012 Maury Z. Levy. All rights reserved.

Mother’s Day

You want heroes? I’ve got mothers.

The last time I saw Lincoln was a dozen years before. I had sat on this high school stage with 406 kids whose mothers thought they were smarter than me. They won the awards and the prizes and the scholarships. I got nothing.

“You know,” my mother said, shaking her fist in my face, “you should have won every award up there. You’re smarter than all those kids combined. You just don’t apply yourself, young man.” It was when my mother called me “young man” that I knew I was in big trouble.

I would, out of fear, eventually learn to apply myself. I would become a writer and I would go to work for the city’s magazine, and I would win some awards. First some local ones and then some national ones. Big awards with crystal trophies and lots of money. Now, my mother would be proud.

“The University of Missouri?” she said. “That’s who gave you an award? Do you know anybody who goes to the University of Missouri? I don’t even know where it is.”

Luckily, she had heard of Lincoln High. When Lincoln asked me to be in their Hall of Fame, I made sure my mother had a front row seat. And there I was, resplendent in my return, with a whole auditorium full of kids waiting to cheer me on. Oh, sure, there were other inductees. Some science nerd who invented a new Petri dish. Or something. And a guy who had a regular role on television. If you could call a soap opera television.

They introduced us one by one. As we each rose, the principal read a long list of our achievements. I stood up straight, smiled at the big crowd and looked down at the first row. My wife was beaming. My sister was smiling. But I couldn’t see my mother. All the flashbulbs were in my eyes.

When it was over, I walked down to where she was sitting. “So, mom,” I said, “what do you think now?”

“Very nice,” she said, dismissing me. “Listen, can you introduce me to the TV star? He’s on my story.”

We went back up on stage. I introduced her to the TV star. It made her day.

Meanwhile, others were congratulating me. Old teachers and counselors. People who truly looked proud. And then I saw him. Walking right at me. A little Jewish man with glasses. “Maury,” he said, “I’m Nate Weiss. I always knew you’d make it big.”

Before I could even answer, my mother turned around and yelled at him. “Nate Weiss, you son of a bitch!”

What you need to know about Nate Weiss is that he was boys’ vice principal when I was there. In 12^th grade, just a couple of month short of graduation, he tried to kick me out of school because he saw me in the lunchroom with a copy of Playboy. I told him that, as editor of the yearbook, I had it on hand because of the design. There was no way he was buying that.

Within minutes, he had my mother in his office. He threw the magazine down in front of her. “Do you know where your son gets this smut?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I buy it for him at the newsstand in front of Horn & Hardart. Do you have a problem with that? Last time I heard, this was still a free country.”

Weiss could say nothing. He just growled and asked us to leave his office. And, now, he was congratulating me.

It took three of us to hold my mother back.  “Mom,” I said, “forget about it. We won. I’m in the Hall of Fame and he’s still a grumpy old man.” As we pulled her off the stage, she managed to get in one more volley. “He wants to shake your hand?” she yelled. “Tell him he can kiss my ass.”

You want heroes? I’ve got mothers.

______________________

Copyright 2011 Maury Z. Levy. All rights reserved