Last year, as you may recall, ESPN aired a documentary series called The Last Dance. It was a critical and commercial success, spurring a resurgence of interest in Michael Jordan’s time with the Chicago Bulls and earning excellent ratings for ESPN along the way. All of which serves as a prelude to noting that ambitious sports documentaries may well have received a boost from the success of The Last Dance — which is not terribly surprising, and which bodes well for other rarefied sporting achievements.
For example: is there a sports-world equivalent to the EGOT? For football players, it might well be winning the Heisman Trophy and then going on to be enshrined in the sport’s Hall of Fame. Only nine players have pulled off this feat, making it a very exclusive club. And a forthcoming documentary series is set to explore the lives of the men who have accomplished this.
Writing at Sportico, Jacob Feldman has more details about this project. Heading its development is one of the nine “H2H” players, 1987 Heisman winner Tim Brown. (The other eight? Earl Campbell, Roger Staubach, OJ Simpson, Doak Walker, Marcus Allen, Paul Hornung, Tony Dorsett, and Barry Sanders.) Feldman also notes that that group of nine will likely soon become 10, assuming Charles Woodson is elected to the Hall of Fame this year.
In a statement about the project, Brown alluded to speaking with some of the other athletes who would be at the center of it. “Upon talking with guys like Marcus Allen, Barry Sanders and others, we felt if we found a way to tell this story about our on-field legacies, we could create meaningful ways to leave a legacy off the field,” he said.
The article noes that the documentary is expected to go into production this spring and debut in 2022. Given the athletes at the center of it — and the presence of Simpson on that list — it’ll be especially interesting to see how the project handles its subjects’ post-NFL lives. It certainly seems ready to spark conversation.
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