American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez goes too easy on the NFL

In the third episode of American Sports Story, Aaron Hernandez (Josh Rivera) — a star tight end for the Florida Gators — is presented with the John Mackey Award. At the ceremony, he’s introduced to the award’s namesake (Martin Fisher), an NFL hall of famer who, like so many players before him, was incapacitated by dementia after retiring from the game. As a caretaker helps Mackey rise from his wheelchair to pose for a photo, the camera pans slowly from his face — bearing a confused, vaguely vacant expression — up to Hernandez, whose smile shines bright with youth and promise.

Eight years later, in 2017, Aaron Hernandez would hang himself in his jail cell after being sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Odin Lloyd (J. Alex Brinson). An autopsy found that Hernandez, 27, had severe brain damage known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a condition that can result in "aggressiveness, explosiveness, impulsivity, depression, memory loss and other cognitive changes" — from repeated head trauma sustained during his college and professional football career.

Created by Stuart Zicherman (The Americans) and based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., American Sports Story (premiering Sept. 17 on FX) interrogates the preconceptions and calcified opinions about Hernandez and the crimes he committed. The bleak, relentlessly sad limited series seeks to humanize the New England Patriots’ tight end as a troubled young man struggling with a history of abuse, internalized homophobia, and athletic institutions that treated his body as a commodity. While Sports Story doesn’t absolve Hernandez of guilt — nor should it — it punts the opportunity to issue the harsh rebuke the NFL deserves for its role in the player’s downfall. 

As teens growing up in Bristol, Connecticut, Aaron and his brother, DJ (Ean Castellanos), train for football careers with their dad, Dennis (Vincent Laresca), an abusive and controlling bully who also clashes frequently with the boys’ mom, Terri (Tammy Blanchard). At his father’s insistence, Aaron plans to play for the University of Connecticut like his older brother — but after Dennis dies unexpectedly, Aaron starts entertaining offers from other eager football suitors, including Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck), the winning and charismatic coach of the Florida Gators.

Inexperienced, easily dazzled, and hungry for approval from male authority figures, Aaron is no match for the slick salesmanship and glittery, often-empty promises of of the coaches and scouts looking to lure him into their program. Nor does he benefit from the Gators’ culture of no consequences — which includes having a lawyer, Huntley Johnson (Jeffrey Nordling), on retainer to keep players’ run-ins with the law from going public.

The Hernandez saga could certainly fall under the American Crime Story banner; instead, it’s the first in a new sports-themed extension of exec producer Ryan Murphy’s American Story franchise. Perhaps the goal is to broaden the audience beyond true-crime aficionados, but for curious gridiron fans, it’s worth noting that Hernandez doesn’t get drafted by the National Football League until halfway through the 10-episode season. Zicherman spends the first four episodes examining the self-destructive cycle that begins to consume Aaron’s life: At work, he takes brutal physical (and verbal) beatings on the field, leaving him frustrated and looking for an escape. He turns to drugs and starts hanging out more with his dealer, Alexander Bradley (Roland Buck III).  

Though he’s engaged to his high school sweetheart, Shayanna (Jaylen Barron), Aaron can’t ignore his attraction to men — including Chris (Jake Cannavale), a kindhearted physical therapist. The subsequent guilt and shame over these clandestine relationships makes him push himself even harder during games, resulting in more calamitous damage to his brain and body. Sports Story presents this toxic cocktail — Hernandez’s insecurity and immaturity, drug-fueled paranoia, and devotion to an organization that wanted him on the field at any cost — as the driver of his downfall. Through it all, Rivera captures the boyish charm and goofy charisma of Hernandez's public persona, while instilling his moments of doubt and impulsive rage with unsettling force.

None of the well-known football figures involved in Hernandez’s career — including Meyer, Patriots owner Robert Kraft (Jerry Levine), and the team’s legendary head coach, Bill Belichick (Norbert Leo Butz) — come out unscathed. The NFL and college football industry are portrayed as uncompromising institutions run by wealthy men who view their players as little more than profit margins. Yazbeck gives a standout performance as Meyer, whose paternal warmth and magnetism turns to ice-cold indifference as soon as Aaron Hernandez is no longer of use to his program. The only people shown to treat Hernandez with any degree of humanity are his agent, Brian Murphy (the always-welcome Thomas Sadoski), and Patriots quarterback Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger, effectively bland).

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Sports Story is especially compelling when it focuses on the football-industrial complex itself — which it doesn’t do enough. The fourth episode gives viewers an all-too-brief glimpse into the annual NFL Scouting Combine, when representatives from all 32 teams evaluate college prospects with a series of physical and mental challenges. As a long line of shirtless players wait in line to be weighed, measured, and otherwise assessed in front of an audience, one Black athlete turns to another and scoffs, “Now I know why they call this s--- a slave auction.” It’s one of the few overt mentions of race in the NFL, and the obviously uncomfortable optics of (mostly) white owners overseeing a league of majority non-white players.

Oddly, the series also underplays the NFL’s long and contentious history with CTE. While viewers frequently see Aaron's apparent side effects of head trauma — a high-pitched ringing in his ears, moments of memory loss, blurred vision — Sports Story fails to explore the issue with any depth. At one point, a story about the NFL’s $765 million settlement with injured players in 2013 plays on a TV in a character’s hospital room, and the show only spends a few minutes on the shocking results of the neuropathological study on Hernandez's brain.

To be fair, the NFL, which did not participate in the making of Sports Story, probably won’t love this show. But for an anthology franchise that’s been so successful at excavating the larger societal and circumstantial factors behind scandalous true crimes in the past — systemic racism and sexism (The People v. O.J. Simpson), marginalization of the LGBTQ community (The Assassination of Gianni Versace), rampant and irresponsible media sensationalism in politics (Impeachment) — Sports Story takes a surprisingly equivocal approach about the League’s role in Hernandez's downward spiral.

Perhaps producers and FX didn’t want to antagonize the NFL, an entity that once got ESPN to cancel their own football-themed scripted drama because it didn't like how the players were portrayed. Or maybe the Sports Story team didn’t want to risk the appearance of showing too much sympathy for Hernandez, who remains the NFL’s most vilified and mocked player since Orenthal James Simpson. But without an incisive point of view, American Sports Story isn't much more than a well-done retelling of yet another American tragedy, this one about a broken young man surrounded by people who fail him — almost as terribly as he fails himself. Grade: B