Analysis
7/7/23
7 min read
Bob Angelo's 'The NFL Off-Camera' Takes Fans Beyond the Lens
Bob Angelo remembers the exact day and time Steve Sabol hired him at NFL Films. “June 6, 1975, 1:35 p.m.,’’ he said with no hesitation.
Nearly 50 years later, he also still remembers Sabol’s first words to him after he took the job. “He said, ‘Ang’, working here is like waking up in the toy department of life.’ ’’
Angelo spent 43 remarkable years in Sabol’s toy department as an Emmy-winning producer, director, writer, editor and cameraman for Films. He helped the company play a pivotal role in making the NFL the most popular sports league in America.
Angelo shot 40 Super Bowls and more than 850 NFL games. He interacted with hundreds of NFL players, coaches, executives and support personnel. He directed the first two summers of the popular Films-produced Hard Knocks series on HBO, which gave viewers an up-close-and-personal look at an NFL team during training camp.
After Angelo retired in 2018, he wanted to do two things: teach and write a book.
He taught for three semesters at the University of Delaware, where they let him design his own course on sports segment production. Next, he spent a semester teaching at his alma mater Penn State before COVID intervened.
Defeating His Toughest Opponent
He wanted to write a book about his career at Films but didn’t want it to be a memoir.
“The word memoir just sounds pompous,’’ Angelo said. “And who cares? I gave up on it several times. I literally stopped and had my finger on the delete button and was ready to get rid of the whole mess.’’
Thanks largely to encouragement from his wife Barbara and a family friend, Angelo took his finger off the delete button and finished the book.
It’s called The NFL Off-Camera and is available now in bookstores and online. True to his word, the 248-page book is not a memoir. It’s a collection of vignettes about NFL players, coaches, front-office people, broadcasters and others whom Angelo interacted with during the course of his career.
“There are about 92 stories in the book,’’ Angelo said. “The longest one is 1,200 words. Anybody with an eighth-grade education can read one of these stories in 10 minutes or less. And they’re insightful. Every one of them is based on my interaction with that person. If I didn’t have something of note to say about Bud Grant or Jim Brown or Otto Graham or any of the people that are in the book, I didn’t write it. Because you can Google that kind of info or read it on their Wikipedia page.’’
Angelo Takes an Honest Look at NFL Figures
It's actually not the first book Angelo has written. He penned one on human subjectivity many moons ago that wasn’t quite the easy read this one is.
“I was a philosophy major back at Penn State,’’ he said. “I sold 22 copies of that book worldwide, most of them in Europe. But with this, I decided to give it a shot.
“Once I decided on the short-story concept, I said, ‘I can do this.’ Because I went back through my career and thought of all the people I had interviewed or worked with or got to know on the sidelines or in their homes or in the locker rooms or outside of football, and decided I had plenty of material.
“In some cases, the stories aren’t very nice. I mean, I don’t like Sean Payton very much and made it clear why in the book.’’
In the book, Angelo describes Payton as “my least favorite person, alive or dead, in the National Football League. I can’t think of a close second.’’
Angelo was one of the best sound cameramen in the business. He had great instincts and always knew where the good sound would be.
NFL Films crews had the league’s blessing to use boom microphones in bench areas on the sidelines. But Payton often tried to intimate Films’ sound guys, including Angelo. One time, Payton and the New Orleans Saints actually sicced a policeman on Angelo as he tried to do his job.
Angelo’s favorite person was the Minnesota Vikings’ Hall of Fame defensive tackle, John Randle. Angelo and Randle are friends. He did a six-hour interview with Randle for A Football Life. Randle was one of the league’s best trash-talkers. NFL Films wired him for games five times during his career. And he never disappointed.
“Easily the most interesting and entertaining football player I’ve ever been around,’’ Angelo said. “The Vikings were playing the Packers one time, and John was going against Frank Winters, Green Bay’s center. Winters went back to the huddle early in the game and said to Brett Favre, ‘Brett, the guy is asking me how Elita and Aubrey and Alexa are doing. How does he know the names of my wife and two daughters?’ Brett looked at him and said, ‘I’d be concerned, Frank.’ ’’
Randle, who went into the Hall of Fame in 2010, had 137.5 sacks, the most ever by an interior defensive lineman.
“John told me that when you beat an offensive lineman, you take his soul,’’ Angelo said. “He said sacks were better than sex.’’
Final Shoot Was Philly Special
Angelo retired in February of 2018, right after the Philadelphia Eagles’ 41-33 win over Tom Brady’s New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis. He celebrated the night before the game with family and friends at Randle’s restaurant.
“The night of my retirement, (former NFL Films vice-president) Howard Katz came over to me and said, ‘Bob, whatever network you want to work for, whatever crew you want to be on, I can get you fixed up,’’’ Angelo said. “I said, ‘Howard, I’m done.’ He said, ‘You’re not going to shoot any more football?’ I told him no. I said, ‘What I do is hard. It’s hard work. I’m 65. I don’t want to do it anymore.’’’
Angelo has no regrets about retiring. “Zero,’’ he said. “My first (football) Sunday not shooting a game, I sat down and turned on this thing called the Red Zone channel. After about a half hour, I asked my wife, ‘Barb, do people know about this?’ She said, ‘I think so.’ I literally sat there for seven-plus hours watching the Red Zone channel. I said, ‘This is the best thing ever.’
“A few months ago, I went back over to NFL Films. Somebody in California had retired, and I had to sign a football they were giving him as a going-away gift. The guy who handles all of the equipment at Films said, ‘Are you really sure you don’t want to shoot anymore? Because you could be like a rock star. Just show up, get off the plane, go to the hotel, show up at the game, your camera will be set up and ready to go. You could shoot and then hand it back when you’re done.’
"I said, ‘No. I’ve shot a lot of games. I’m done.’’’
Check out Bob Angelo's book 'The NFL Off-Camera: An A-Z Guide to the League's Most Memorable Players and Personalities' on Amazon.
Paul Domowitch covered the Eagles and the NFL for the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer for four decades. You can follow him on Twitter at @pdomo.
