American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez
During his three seasons in New England, Aaron Hernandez found the end zone eighteen times and recorded close to two thousand yards in pass receptions. Earlier in his career, Hernandez was a first team All American and was part of the Florida Gators team which clinched a National Title. However among all his achievements and the career numbers he managed to acheieve, history will be kind enough to talk about only one. The slaying of Odin Lloyd. In the documentary “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” the viewer watches how an NFL player Aaron Hernandez told his empire to the ground. Numerous documentaries were created to find out what possessed Hernandez to murder someone. One cannot even comprehend what goes through the mind of a man who has everything money, fame, the opportunities, and a great life ahead. All he wanted to do is play in the NFL. And what did he get?
This series is based on the Wondery and Boston Globe podcast “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc’” but at no time has Hernandez’s story in the past been acted out. This time, actors have come up to play Hernandez’s character and there are quite a few including the likes of Hernandez’s coaches Urban Meyer and Bill Belichick. These faces are funny if not just roundly so and are pretty much annoying.
When Belichick is seen singing Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”, it’s hard to feel compassionate about Hernandez’s circumstances. Fortunately, American Sports Story’s directors don’t overuse brilliant appearances by Gornowski and Brady.
‘The Trouble with American Sports’ presents a picture of an athlete who, one might speculate, managed to pursue his career on multiple injuries possibly unrevealed brain injury. At the same time, he was attempting to mask his essence to the audience who belonged to the outraged and dominated masculinity culture. In introduction parts, Hernandez’s deceased parents and siblings claimed him as Gay, the first authors of the American Sports Story, and his close relatives who absconded to the United States. Dennis junior, Dennis Hernandez’s father, is painted as a physically agitated father who ridicules Hernandez and his elder brother whenever his junior son fails to win any contest. But though terrified by his father, Hernandez also admires him. There is only one dream which should not be spoken of the NFL, a league which is reputedly, ‘owned and misery of numerous other busy days’. There are real “men” in the NFL as Hernandez’s father refered, where men is grit with ome kind of respect and gentry.
Hernandez often had internal conflicts as to his father’s manly wishes, since he could not survive in a masculine image and also be true to who he was to the core.
Another overarching element of ‘American Sports Story’ revolves around the whole background of the institutions that enabled Hernandez to be growing up thinking he was above the law. There is little doubt about the fact that his fights with CTE and his sexual orientation conflicts are due to his fear and a questionable will power. The University of Florida, The NFL, and New England Patriots can all be said to share some blame on the character that Hernandez had eventually become. The centerpiece of ‘American Sports Story’ is not so much the question of why a player, who had all the money and fame that one could get, transformed to a cold blooded murderer but, what provoked him to do that.
It is due to Rivera’s coverage of the wretched vulnerability of such a famous athlete and being the complete anti type of such a character. Rivera’s Hernandez has to be the strongest selling point in the film, ‘American Sports Story’ as she attributes different characteristics which Hernandez may or may not have possessed. Apart from the lead performance, the series women have a far better view than compared to the many popular faces.
Shayanna Jenkins, whom Hernandez had been engaged to (Jaylen Barron), his mother Terri (Tammy Blanchard) and his cousin Tanya Singleton (Lindsay Mendez) who all are left with the aftermath of his arrest and the questions surround their identities in the penultimate episode, “What’s Left Behind”. Her particular character, Barron, is in an awkward position: even though she is just Hernandez’s fiancée, she needs to make a choice whether to stick with Hernandez or walk away just like most people have.
Despite the fact that “American Sports Story” has very good drama moments to leverage on, it does not reach the standard of a Lifetime story the villainous father, the missing mother, friends that helped him toward drugs. Such events, even as the TV version of them likely happened in real life, all too many other events, unfortunately, feel like performed just to clear a checklist. Did Hernandez get sexual relations with guys in the course of his stay in Florida? Perhaps. Was he experiencing suicidal thoughts in several other instances in his life? There’s no measure for that. What is supposed to be the highlights of entire the series, Hernandez’s romance with Odin Lloyd and his following murder, turn out to be greatest let downs.
Hernandez was definitely a murderer, maybe even a couple of times, but the series wanted to answer a different question too who did it? Who killed Aaron Hernandez? Was it the University of Florida that let him off the hook for a series of offenses for which he faced no consequences? Was it the New England Patriots who accepted him knowing that he was a troubled youth, but they did not give him the resources he needed? Or was it his upbringing? The truth is it was probably several factors rather than any single particular one. Rivera effectively weaves different shades of Hernandez. Still, much of what is here is either the repetition of what other documentaries have covered or what is so faint that it deserves to lay within a 10 episode miniseries. Not to say, inappropriate and distracting casting decisions of many famous faces spoils the story. At last, “American Sports Story” concerns itself with entertaining storytelling about how a contemporary professional athlete flirted with disaster. Maybe the entertainment part is what they are going to focus on in the next season because this one is bad.
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