John Facenda
Facenda’s voice \"turned every game into Waterloo and every player into an epic hero,\" Richard Cohen once wrote in The Atlantic. — www.inquirer.com
Born August 13, 1913, in Portsmouth, Virginia, was NFL Films "Voice of God," John Facenda. The son of Italian immigrants got into broadcasting and sports event announcing, becoming a fixture in the Philadelphia area. His famous voice was marketed Nationally when he became the narrator of NFL Films and the Football Follies videos. The story goes that while sitting in a bar discussing how interesting the slow-motion game sequences of NFL films were to another bar patron, he was overheard talking by another customer in the establishment, Ed Sabol, the founder of NFL Films. That was in 1965, and after reading script after script, Facenda continued on as the voice of NFL Films until he died in 1984.