It wouldn’t be unreasonable to approach American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez with a degree of trepidation. After all, the FX series is a true crime drama, and it’s executive produced by Ryan Murphy (among others). Considering Murphy’s other new true crime show, it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if this show, about football player turned convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, also leans toward the thriller. But somehow, American Sports Story gets a lot of things right. One scene in the first episode came as a shock, turning many football fans to an image of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen: “That’s Steve Addazio!” A Florida Gators assistant coach drives up in a sedan to pitch Hernandez — a sought-after recruit at Connecticut, seven years before he murdered Odin Lloyd — on playing college ball at Florida. Scott Ruggles, who plays Addazio, looks so much like the coach that he’s eccentric. This is only the first indication that the choice of the series, among other decisions, was right.
Ruggles is just one of many American Sports Story cast members to serve as a dead ringer for their character. Former Hamilton stage actor Josh Rivera is a very convincing Hernandez. The most impressive part is Tony Yazbek as Urban Meyer, Hernandez’s national championship-winning coach at Florida and a man widely believed to have run a program that was out of control and did not demand accountability from his players. I’m a college football writer and podcaster, and the moment that led me to how realistic this show is was a wide shot of Yazbek, playing Meyer, wearing the same oversized long-sleeve shirt and sweatpants that Meyer typically wore to Florida practices in the 2000s Twenty.
That’s the enduring strength of this season of American Sports Story. It feels exactly like the world it drops you into, not just in its casting but in its depiction of places from dreary New England suburbs to the ballparks of the Southeastern Conference to the National Football League. The story takes its cues from its source, the 2018 Boston Globe podcast, Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. Most of the events depicted in the show are supported by a huge history of reporting on Hernandez, and the show’s main twist is that it takes for granted that Hernandez was a closeted gay man whose sexuality severely affected his relationships. The record generally supports that as well, although Hernandez never confirmed it before he died by suicide in prison in 2017, at age 27.
American Sports Story breaks no new ground in our understanding of Hernandez, the star tight end for the New England Patriots who murdered teammate Odin Lloyd in what the show portrays (along with factual evidence) as a furious but planned execution. There’s not much to know about the man whose murder trial was one of the most public of its decade and who died without much elaboration on his crime. This may have been because Hernandez, after being acquitted in a separate murder case, was still trying to overturn his conviction for Lloyd’s murder when he ended his life.
The show does not enter the killer’s mind. But it paints a useful – if incomplete and sometimes ambiguous – picture of the places the killer inhabited when he took a darker turn. American Sports Story inspires sympathy for Hernandez without offering sympathy, and it does so by showing his world as it was. Or, at least, it offers a plausible explanation for Hernandez’s surroundings as he heads toward the end. The film traces his life chronologically from when he was approximately 17 years old, showing the ways in which Hernandez’s support systems coddled and tortured him. The series can’t tell us why Hernandez killed Lloyd, but it can pull some punches at various people and institutions that may have changed his path at one time or another.
As a teenager, Hernandez is a high-ranking recruit, but he’s also a kid who was never good enough for his abusive, jerk father, Dennis (Vincent Laresca). He is a victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of his uncle. His mother, Terri (Tammy Blanchard), is a victim of his father’s abuse and is also a bad mother. The family wants Hernandez to follow in the footsteps of his father and older brother and play as a tight end at the University of Connecticut, and that’s exactly the plan — until Florida steps in. And in another great bit of college football realism, the show suggests that UConn’s head coach will punish Hernandez’s less-talented brother after his younger brother backs out of his commitment to the school.
The show’s depiction of the college recruiting process is strong and specific, right down to naming the most popular website of the era for ranking high school players nationwide. (Yes, it was Rivals.) Once Hernandez arrives in Florida, the show delves into the athletic department’s lax approach to players in trouble. Hernandez briefly detains a bartender, but a coordinator arrives to keep him out of trouble and urges him to channel his aggression into games against the University of Georgia.
Hernandez is a good player at Florida, a bona fide star by the end of his time there, and the Patriots take him in the NFL draft. There, American Sports Story shows the ways in which the league sets it up for success and failure. He takes a trip to the NFL’s rookie symposium, where he receives a health warning about all the ways the league’s players can lose their money and their careers. He joins a Patriots locker room that is believed to have a strong culture, led by Tom Brady (Ross Gergel). He signs with an agent who represents him well and provides him with solid training facilities and a trainer who becomes Hernandez’s sexual contact.
However, Hernandez also deals with the risks of the NFL. An ankle injury leads to an addiction to painkillers as he tries to get back on the field. Repeated blows to the head add up. Hernandez becomes cold and distant towards his fiancée Shayanna Jenkins (Jaelyn Barron). When Hernandez asks Patriots coach Bill Belichick (Norbert Leo Butz) to trade him to another team so Hernandez can be away from a former friend who now wants to kill him or take his money, Belichick, true to real life, refuses.
For Hernandez, the mood that was always short became even shorter as his life deteriorated. By the time Lloyd is killed at a construction site, you feel as if you have a good window into his descent. Later, a prison guard hits Hernandez in the head with a baton while breaking up a fight, and the slow-motion effect is reminiscent of all the hits Hernandez took to the head as a player.
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The show wants you to be aware of how many things happened against Hernandez before he did evil. In the service of this goal, writing is sometimes a bit cheap. For example, the show really wants to highlight how big Hernandez was in college, as part of an attempt to highlight how damaging the spotlight can be to his development. After Florida won the national championship, a crowd of cameras on the field surrounded only Hernandez, which was strange for a tight end where he was third on the team in receiving. In another scene, Hernandez receives a spontaneous round of applause from a group of students walking across campus, seemingly overwhelmed by the fame of their classmate and tight end. (Tim Tebow may have gotten this treatment in Gainesville. It seems doubtful that Hernandez did.)
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Later, police came to Hernandez’s home to respond to a domestic disturbance in which Jenkins threatened. The police leave without incident, however, one of them jokes with Hernandez as she leaves that he is a member of her fantasy football team. In a different scene, a group of Patriots players’ girlfriends and wives talk in relatable terms about marrying their wealthy partners, while realizing that those players are likely to cheat on them with hot young women — a cliche so easy it seems to do a disservice to the players and their wives. In many ways, the NFL is truly a big, greedy machine, but in service of getting to that point, the show also underplays the extent to which Hernandez’s offense has shaken people in the sport. For example, an American sports story depicts Belichick as having given a brief statement about the murder in which he said he would never speak about it again. In fact, the stubborn Belichick held a long, in-depth press conference after Hernandez’s arrest.
The series doesn’t need to work as hard as it does to show how an NFL career can fall apart so badly. Hernandez’s resume speaks for itself, and college football and the NFL have enough stakes that most people watching the show will get the message on their own. Near the end of the series, viewers see a group of real-life media commentators commenting on Hernandez’s diagnosis that he has high-risk chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his brain. Some express more grief for Hernandez than others. Belichick, his most recent coach, has little interest in talking about Hernandez’s mind at all. (For that matter, the show’s on the money.) FX took creative license, but the systems it faithfully displayed were risky enough.
