American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez Recap: Golden Ticket

According to American Sports Story, Aaron Hernandez dealt with two life-threatening vices over the course of his young life — two addictions that put his college football career in danger, that could have stopped him from ever playing for the NFL. Maybe if these two insatiable urges had been defeated, Aaron would’ve gone on to live a healthy, well-adjusted life free of shame and violence. The first is marijuana. The other is sex with men.

I’m kidding, kind of. This show isn’t in danger of going full Reefer Madness, and its depiction of Hernandez’s sexuality hasn’t crossed into homophobia. But there’s still something overly simplistic about the way the show boils down Hernandez’s baggage to just a few key themes.

“Pray the Gay Away” begins with the Florida Gators’ big 2009 BCS National Championship win against Oklahoma, a moment that solidifies Aaron’s celebrity on campus even as it exposes him to a lot of added scrutiny and pressure. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from indulging in behaviors that could get him in trouble. He’s smoking weed before every practice and getting around mandatory drug testing with a “whizzinator” — a realistic fake dick strapped to one’s leg that shoots out pre-loaded, preheated clean urine. Urban Meyer is getting increasingly frustrated with him and other players acting up, to the point that the stress and increasingly long work hours are beginning to really affect his physical health.

With time passing so quickly, the show hasn’t spent much time on Aaron’s relationships with women. Shayanna is out of the picture for the time being, but Aaron has a different girlfriend at UF, and she doesn’t love his weed habit. She’s also not aware that he’s the football player rumored to be cruising the stacks and hooking up with dudes in library bathroom stalls. Here, we see Aaron’s famous paranoia start to kick in, especially when his teammates start speculating about who the gay player could be. He lashes out aggressively at practice, especially when Meyer briefly swaps him out for freshman QB recruit Jordan Reed.

Aaron Hernandez seems intent on showing every painstaking moment when its title character could have changed and gone down a different road than the one he did. Here, writer Chelsey Lora frames Tim Tebow’s mentorship as one possible wake-up call; seeing the ways Aaron keeps failing Meyer’s tests and shirking responsibility, Tim invites him to a church service. Addressing the congregation that evening before offering Aaron some more personalized wisdom, Tim speaks about the necessity of accepting Jesus Christ into one’s life to counteract doubt and the temptation to sin.

The old Aaron might scoff at some of these ideas, but he’s currently in a place where he could actually ruin his future if he doesn’t stay on the straight and narrow. A montage depicts his temporary transformation into a good Christian boy, wiping all the gay porn from his computer and flushing his weed down the toilet. It goes without saying that these two “vices” and their effects are completely different — Aaron probably shouldn’t be doing drugs before practice, but he probably should be more honest with himself about his sexuality instead of trying to repress it — but in his mind, they’re both preventing him from being the best player he can be.

The hard work pays off, at first. The Gators have an amazing winning streak going into the SEC championship game against Alabama, which will happen once everyone gets back from Thanksgiving break. Meyer even tells Aaron he’s impressed with his growth. But Aaron’s trip home to Bristol inevitably leads to a backslide, triggered first by his anger at Jeff (cousin Tanya’s ex-husband) for trying to take his father’s place at home with Terri. When Bo later offers him a hit of a joint over at Tanya’s, the temptation to take the edge off his angst is too great.

By the time he’s back chain-smoking joints in a car with Dennis SanSoucie like the old days, Aaron has “relapsed” on both weed and men. But Dennis turns down his advances. He’s getting married to a woman he met in the Marines, just hoping to blend in without attracting attention. Aaron accuses him of trying to “look the part,” but both men are pretending.

Back on campus, Aaron vents to Tim in the chapel, admitting he messed up at home and wondering if he’s destined to sin. Perhaps Aaron’s issue is impatience with himself; he takes every setback hard, failing to really internalize Tim’s wisdom about how faith, like everything, takes practice. In fact, Tim’s effort to get Aaron to focus while simultaneously letting go of pressure accomplishes neither. After an undefeated regular season, he whiffs it at the SEC championship, ruining Tim’s chance for a national title in his senior year.

The loss also deeply affects Meyer, who has a panic attack disguised as a heart attack and realizes he needs a clean slate with new students. So when Aaron shares his intention to stick around for senior year, Meyer is no longer angry or disappointed in him; he just doesn’t have a place on the team next year. In the coach’s eyes, this decision isn’t a punishment, or even tough love. This is a mutually beneficial move: Meyer gets to start fresh, and Aaron gets to declare for the NFL draft, reaching new heights with the pros. Maybe if the Gators couldn’t set him straight, some other lucky team will. And in the meantime, Meyer will just swipe all the off-the-field stuff under the rug.

These last two episodes have crafted an interesting little mini-arc for Meyer. Tony Yazbeck plays him as a noble-minded and somewhat empathetic character, doing his best to win championships and keep everyone happy while dealing with anxiety exacerbated by constant bad publicity for his unruly surrogate sons. But he’s also complicit in the bad behavior of players like Aaron, prioritizing his own career over what’s truly best for the kids. He pretends to be a hard-ass, but doles out minimal consequences, tacitly encouraging the troublemakers to be quieter about their indiscretions instead of quitting them altogether.

“Kid’s going to end up in the Hall of Fame or prison,” Meyer remarks as Aaron accepts the John Mackey Award. It’s another eyeroll-worthy line that leans too hard into the obvious foreshadowing of Aaron’s ultimate fate. As in last week’s episodes, American Sports Story gets pretty interesting when it focuses on the way college football teams operate, zeroing in on the people (usually men) who keep this ecosystem running with as little outside scrutiny as possible. But when it spends too much time boiling down the central character’s demons to sexual preference — and an admittedly destructive weed habit — it starts to feel like an afterschool special.

• The show hasn’t forgotten about Aaron’s CTE; director Paris Barclay includes some harrowing shots from Aaron’s perspective after one tackle, with pulsating white and red flashes of light. But I do feel like the show is downplaying this a bit as a central piece of Hernandez’s story, at least at this stage.

• I did kind of laugh at Aaron just having gay porn open on his computer on the other side of the room.