Tell Me a Story
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02 · The carriers

Who kept saying it

The same three beats. Different clothes. The line mutates as it travels: a fact, the facts, I'll, I will, remember, believe.

  1. breath
  2. hand
  3. ink
  4. print
  5. recording
  6. screen

Unmarkedcirculating

Tell me the facts and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

No speaker. No nation. No date. This is how the line often arrives.

Native American proverbfrom at least 2011

Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

Toastmasters, pedagogy sites, storyteller blogs. No named nation, language, speaker, or ethnographic collection has been found for this triad.

Ancient proverbcirculating honorific

Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy, among others. Ancient is a feeling, not a witness.

Indian proverbparallel folk label

Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

Same years as the Native American label. Same absence of a source. A different costume for the same gap.

Ed Sabol, as remembered by his son26 January 2004

Tell me a fact and I'll learn. Tell me a truth and I'll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

Steve Sabol, on CBS / 60 Minutes II, “NFL Films, Inc.” by Rebecca Leung. Ed is present, laughing: “That's pretty good. I'm glad I said that.” Documented family use. Not a coining document. Coinage remains open.

A later carrier, on film

Ed sold overcoats and wanted movies. A wedding-present camera. A son who left school to film a championship. They gave a sport a mythology it did not have. This profile was shot early in 2012, before Steve died that September.

The line was not a motto on the wall. It was the cut. Film, not tape. One camera on every play in slow motion. Sound taken from coaches who had not asked to be heard. A Philadelphia newsman they called the voice of God. Steve kept the bloody hands, the cleat marks, the sun through the stadium. All art is selected detail, he said. They were historians, he said, and storytellers, and mythmakers.

Play

CBS News · Jeff Glor profile of Steve Sabol · 2013

Their door

Late in the piece a colleague tries the mantra and changes it: remember, not believe. Your heart, not my heart.

Two weathers of light meeting in a room of film

He did not say this

Capture someone’s heart
and you capture their mind.

The triad is the line they lived by.

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