ost who tune into HBO's ''The Game of Their Lives'' tonight (10-11) will consider the story of the National Football League during the 1950s as history.
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Not Upton Bell. For him, it's all in the family album. He could pull out the scrapbooks - actually, he did for producer Rick Bernstein - but he really doesn't have to. His memory is fine, thank you. And the show really is a way of reliving his youth as the son of NFL owner/commissioner Bert Bell.
Upton Bell's commentary is heard often, but there also are great interviews and old film of stars such as Art Donovan, Chuck Bednarik, Pat Summerall, Jon Arnett, Bobby Mitchell, Hugh McElhenny, and Sam Huff. As the decade passes (and the video quality improves), you can see the NFL game of today evolving.
It was a different era. Bert Bell would visit training camps, always leaving with the reminder, ''Call me collect any time at MOhawk 4-4400.'' Those who tried the number found that Bell answered his own phone - actually working two of them - even during dinner.
''I never knew you could have dinner without two phones ringing,'' said Upton. ''And when they both rang, often it was the players on one line and the owners on the other.''
The younger Bell is zealous when it comes to educating fans and media about the role his dad played in guiding the game into its place as the TV sport of choice for the American public.
The '50s were a time of 33-man rosters, $21 season tickets, two divisions, a 12-game schedule, and one postseason game. Bert Bell would set up the entire 72-game schedule, using colored dominoes on a checkerboard in his Philadelphia row house, deliberately matching the top teams against each other early in the year so everyone would reach midseason with a chance at the title. Sound familiar?
Today the league uses computers and two men to do the same with a 240-game schedule.
''Here's a man who changed the history of pro sports,'' said Upton. ''He invented the pro draft, started the TV blackout rule, and put a sharp PR guy named Pete Rozelle in charge of an LA Rams franchise with four fractious owning partners.''
Rozelle would succeed Bell and refine and build upon the structures that had been put in place.
Young Upton, who had been the personnel man in Baltimore, was courted by Billy Sullivan and became a youthful general manager of the Patriots in 1971. His reminiscences of those tumultuous years are in the current issue of Boston magazine.
HBO co-producer Ray Didinger, a former Philadelphia sportswriter who has been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, said, ''In the '50s, you had some of the game's greatest players, but they thought of themselves as working-class guys. Their work ethic and lifestyle were almost indistinguishable from the fans who came to see them.'' Thus you had Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas putting down a tile floor in a teammate's house.
Some of the best footage of the era comes from the ''bad weather archives'' - games played in the snow and mud.
A film clip shows Bert Bell crying after the 1958 championship game in which Baltimore's Alan Ameche scored in overtime to beat the New York Giants. Why? Because he understood the significance of what had happened: The NFL game had been lifted onto the same plateau as baseball's World Series. Bell understood that, but he was dead from a heart attack 10 months later.
New commissioner Rozelle moved the league headquarters from a second-floor walkup in Philadelphia to Park Avenue in Manhattan, and the league went big-time with him.
Keeping an eye
The Patriots-Jets game did a strong 27.0 rating (56 share). Channel 4's ''5th Quarter'' followed with an equally strong 17.6 ... Fox was thrilled at NASCAR's ratings during the first half of the season but found it a double-edged sword when the autos on NBC cut into NFL audiences this fall. Nationally, Sunday's games gave Fox its best overnight NFL numbers of the season (13.0 for the full day, 16.1 for the national Rams-Falcons late game), an increase of 12 percent over the same weekend a year ago. Overall, the network pulled even with last year's numbers ... This Sunday, CBS's Gus Johnson and Brent Jones are happy to be back in Foxborough for Browns-Patriots (Channel 4, 1 p.m.). Greg Gumbel and Phil Simms follow with the call of Jets-Steelers at 4 p.m. Fox brings in Giants-Cowboys (Channel 25, 1 p.m.) with Sam Rosen and Bill Maas. The Giants players are thrilled to see the Rosen-Maas duo because the team has won 10 of its last 11 games with the tandem in the booth ... (The Bruins (tonight, Thursday) and Celtics (tomorrow, Friday) avoid head-to-heads this week. Ratings for both have been OK so far, perhaps a reflection of the World Series going into November, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and Patriots interest. But there's optimism around the FleetCenter with both teams off to a solid start. ''If we keep winning and people keep smiling, they'll be watching,'' said the Celtics' Jeff Twiss.
Striking matches
The trend toward strong early-season college basketball matchups is great for fans. ESPN has No. 22 Wake Forest vs. No. 5 Kansas at 9 tonight ... The Boston College women's basketball calendar has had tomorrow's date circled for a long time because that's when Tennessee comes to Conte Forum (NESN, 7 p.m.). Tom Larson and Sherry Levin will call the game ... CBS has a doubleheader Saturday: Duke-Michigan at 2 p.m. followed by North Carolina-Kentucky at 4 ... The No. 1 UConn women host No. 5 Louisiana Tech on ESPN at 4:30 p.m.
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