by Barry Sanders’ retirement from the NFL in 1999 still stings. Jim Brown and Michael Jordan at least pivoted to new pursuits (acting and, in MJ’s case, baseball for a time) and with their legacies secure. Sanders was 31, had no rings and was about a season away from becoming the NFL’s all-time rushing leader when he went to London to escape the press and faxed a farewell letter to his hometown newspaper. home on the eve of Detroit Lions training camp. . “Until yesterday,” one fan snorted at the time, “OJ was my least favorite running back, but he only stabbed two people in the back.”
It took Detroit hitting rock bottom again and again and other star players walking away from the NFL in their prime (including Calvin Johnson) for fans to appreciate Sanders’ brave call. It is the motivation behind his early retirement that has long been so puzzling. A new Amazon Prime documentary called Bye Bye Barry seeks greater clarity, but in the end it is understandable.
Of course, there were bound to be challenges in building a film project around Sanders, one of the most understated superstars you’ll ever meet. He wasn’t so much wary of the media as embarrassed by his celebrity status and eager to disappear from view whenever the spotlight became too intense. “Some things are just unnecessary,” Sanders said after taking a leave of absence at ESPN after being selected third in the 1989 NFL draft, between Deion Sanders at No. 5 and top pick Troy Aikman. “I’m not trying to downplay what you guys do, but you have to respect my judgment and my way of being as a person.”
Since then, Sanders, 55, has become a tender figure who is not so serious today. But Bye Bye doesn’t exactly prepare you for the kind of deep introspection that Jordan and Brown show in their docs, a real demerit for an NFL Films team that rarely has to worry about access. (Disclosure: I was a college intern at NFL Films during the 2001 season.) During the documentary’s 90-minute run, producers interrogate Sanders under the lights of the Fox Theatre, fly back to London with him and his children, but don’t really get much out of it.
Worse yet, directors Paul Monusky, Micaela Powers and Angela Torma had a winning primer in Sanders’ 2003 autobiography Now You See Me, which delves into her regrets, her loneliness and her true feelings toward her father, William. “Sometimes I wondered if he would ever become the son he thought he should be,” he writes. “One of the worst moments came shortly before the NFL draft deadline, when Dad cornered me and berated me for even considering staying at Oklahoma State for my senior year.”
Without much deep introspection of its theme song, Bye Bye relies on NFL Films’ familiar bag of tricks of soaring musical numbers, celebrity interviews (Jeff Daniels, Eminem) and archival reels – the star of the show by default. Poetry in motion It’s a phrase that’s used ad nauseam in sports, but in Sanders’ case, it really applies. Even now he remains something the game has never seen: a 5-foot-8 Houdini with his own ability to move chains, an escape artist with a talent for evading would-be tacklers before turning on his thrusters. (Think of Lamar Jackson on his best day against the Cincinnati Bengals – just further unstoppable in the rush.) Sanders’ ability to run in circles behind the line of scrimmage, going 30 yards only to gain three, also made him the king of negative carries.
Like the genius painter or composer, Sanders was much better at letting the work speak than at explaining the strokes. It’s no coincidence that Bye Bye falls on Thanksgiving week, a football holiday that Sanders defined with his ritual carving of my damn Chicago Bears. (“I hope he doesn’t leave before we can give him the turkey leg,” blurted Fox’s John Madden, Thanksgiving host extraordinaire, as the clock ticked down on a three-touchdown masterpiece in 1997 that led to Sanders to second place on the list). career list.) In Sanders’ day, when a running back was the cornerstone of the team, not cannon fodder, he was head and shoulders above the rest.
At the end of the 1998 season, Sanders was just 1,458 yards shy of breaking the all-time rushing record—light work for a man who just a year after becoming the third running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. . “You see the love for the game in Barry’s eyes, in his performance and in the way he carries himself off the field,” said Walter Payton, the Bears god who knocked Brown out of Mount Rush-More of the NFL. “Even if you cheered for Barry’s team, you always respected him as a player.”
Looking back, Sanders’ retirement shouldn’t have surprised anyone in light of how often he had shied away from the spotlight in the past, stopping short of snatching a high school rushing record or stopping the massive attention that descended on him when he claimed the 1988 Heisman Trophy at Oklahoma State. “Finally a boy won the prize. [based] just pure skill,” Aikman said after UCLA’s charming offense failed to put the quarterback over the top.
“I thought we were going to go head-to-head for many more years,” says Cowboys great Emmitt Smith in a Bye Bye exclusive, recalling Dallas’ crushing loss to Detroit in the divisional round of the 1992 playoffs. Smith ending up surpassing Payton in total rushing yards never sat well with people outside of Dallas. Sanders worked hard for a decade on some truly putrid Lions teams to produce his numbers, while Smith had five more years and a host of All-Star teammates to help him. In Bye Bye, even Sanders laments how far he could have gone with a stronger supporting cast, but he stops short of subjecting the Lions management to another round of withering criticism from his book. As time has passed and emotions have cooled, Sanders’ retirement seems more like the last chess move, with temporary glory sacrificed for his long-term well-being.
Regarding the question, What was Sanders thinking?, the film is happy to leave the task of shedding light on that matter to longtime blockers Kevin Glover, Lomas Brown, Herman Moore and legendary Lions coach Wayne Fontes. In his story, what affected Sanders most was seeing them and other key teammates leave for greener pastures and two more Lions on stretchers toward disability retirement. (The artificial turf field inside the deteriorating Pontiac Silverdome should have been justification enough to call time.) But I suspect Sanders also felt giddy at the prospect of surpassing Payton the same year Payton announced irreversible bile duct cancer. , which killed him three months after Sanders’ retirement announcement. If only someone had probed Sanders about all of this in the document, especially now that he’s no longer dodging anyone.
Bye Bye is part of a broader strategy by the NFL to extend its television dominance into the world of streaming and engage the many younger viewers there; ironic, given that NFL Films practically invented the behind-the-scenes sports documentary. But to stand out in a new era where documentaries are designed to be as riveting as scripted dramas, well, it’s going to take more than the typical effort that hooked NFL fans watching on ESPN Classic. This documentary doesn’t just seem like a facsimile of one of those old PR jobs—the last thing Sanders would want for himself. The entire production feels a little rushed and overheated.
Sanders has never been a more ripe target for the difficult questions that arose after his sudden retirement. It’s a shame that Bye Bye lets Houdini escape again under the same old shroud.
