LockerRoom:I'm sure you don't care but it's getting towards the business end of the year in the old gridiron game over in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Go Bears! On the first weekend in February the Superbowl will explode.

All the other finals in the major American sports are stretched out over a series of games but the Superbowl is unique in being just one immense blowout, a truly fascinating extravaganza of hype, colour and demented commercialism.

For a sports hack with even a passing interest in American sport the Superbowl is one of the most enjoyable, if not the most enjoyable, event to cover. Part of the pleasure is the fact you get more access to the moneyed-up stars of the NFL than you do to the average player in the GAA whose manager polices the columns of the newspapers with Soviet-style paranoia.

One of the great pleasures, oddly enough, is watching the guy-on-guy movies in the privacy of your own hotel room. During Superbowl week if you are in an official media hotel there is continuous streaming of the output of NFL Films. It's enough to make you fall in love with the game you are covering.

NFL Films was the idea, born out of midlife desperation, of a guy called Ed Sabol. I had the pleasure of being introduced to himself and his son Steve once. Ed turned 90 a few weeks ago but when he was exactly half that age he was a bored-stiff overcoat salesman working out of Philly.

Ed had been a rifleman in Patton's 4th Infantry during the second World War. He is a former world record holder in the 100-metre freestyle and as a young man had appeared on Broadway. Life had petered out into a quotidian dullness, however.

He owned a 16mm Bell & Howell movie camera given to him as a wedding present by his mother-in-law. His escape and his hobby was filming practically everything that moved, especially everything that moved in the life of Steve whose school games he would record while standing on top of the chemistry building.

One day on a whim, he sold out his share of what was his father-in-law's overcoat business and set himself up as a film company. His first act was to find out how much it would cost to get the rights to film the NFL Championship game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers in 1962. $1,500 he was told. He offered $3,000 just to make sure and produced an epic called Pro Football's Longest Day.

Two years later he convinced the NFL to turn his small six-man film company into NFL Films. He nailed down a deal to shoot all of the league's games and provide all 14 franchises with highlights movies. In return, he got $ 12,000 from each team to grow the company.

As well as highlights films and a dry record they wanted him to promote the game and to preserve its history.

Ever since, the NFL has recorded its own heroes, its own secrets and its own myths. Sports Illustrated once commented that "NFL Films is perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America".

Through NFL Films a sport has created a legend for itself. The output is propaganda on one level but an invaluable record on another. Compare this to the GAA, most of whose finest moments were erased by some penny-pincher out in Montrose.

One of Ed Sabol's first and smartest acts was to hand the creative end of the business over to Steve as soon as he could. Steve Sabol inherited his father's confidence. I love the story about him as a student at Colorado College determined to make the football team despite an inhibiting lack of talent.

His strategy was a publicity campaign. He nicknamed himself Sudden Death Sabol and gave himself a new homeplace. He was Sudden Death Sabol from Coaltown, Pa. He issued T-shirts, postcards and bought ads in the local paper promoting himself.

It didn't work so the next season he changed his hometown to Possum Trot, Miss. Despite not playing a game he purchased an ad in the programme for the final game of the season. "Coach Jerry Carle congratulates Sudden Death Sabol on a fantastic season."

The next year he gained 40lbs and made the team, prompting him to buy a large ad in the local paper: "The Possum Trot Chamber of Commerce extends its wishes for a successful season to its favourite son - Sudden Death Sabol."

At the end of the year he took his modest stats, altered them favourably, and posted them out to every sports hack he could think of. He got voted onto the area all-stars team.

That sort of inventiveness runs through the best stuff which NFL Films do. As well as providing a record of the game as a social phenomenon and supplying NFL teams with footage from every conceivable angle of their own performances, NFL Films has a sure touch with mythology. Pioneers in the use of slow motion and orchestrated music, the best stuff is from the 1960s on dim-lit afternoons when great muddied, steam-breathed behemoths charge at each other with epic consequences and the footage then cuts to the sideline where the coach, miked up, in another innovation, is cussing and pacing.

Vince Lombardi, the king of coaches in the game, used to worry that NFL Films, with its access-all-areas approach was taking the mystique from the game. He was wrong. They were inventing it and retailing it.

Over the course of a Superbowl week you can sit in your hotel room and watch extraordinary films taking you behind the scenes, right behind the scenes into the dressingroom and into the lives of the participants in some of the greatest American football games ever. There are movie profiles of great heroes with extraordinary insights into their daily lives as American heroes. NFL Films can be criticised as not being journalistic and for not addressing its focus on the blemishes on the game's face but that is the job of journalism and it seldom gets done by journalists. What NFL Films provides isn't weakened by its lack of salaciousness. It's just an insight into the place of a sport within its culture.

Imagine a GAA Films. We might see Liam Griffin walking the Wexford team over the county border in 1996; we might see Loughnane and the troops on the hill in Shannon or at war with each other in one of their early morning training sessions. Perhaps we'd see Micko conducting the wire-to-wire sprints in beautiful Fitzgerald Stadium, or see down the tunnel in the 1983 football final. We'd see Ringy and Art Foley and hear their voices; we'd ride in the row boat with Mick O'Connell or drive for hours with Mickey Moran and John Morrison.

NFL Films produce well over $50 million in revenue per annum, have worked for decades with the NFL's rights holders (or media partners), have dozens and dozens of Emmys and have redefined the vernacular of the sports footage to the extent that movies like Jerry Maguire rely on NFL Films to shoot the football sequences for them.

Every year that passes in the GAA we shed a little more history of what in global terms is a unique organisation. Shouldn't we find an Ed Sabol, somebody to record everything that moves, somebody who would do so with love. It mightn't seem important now but our grandchildren would be grateful.