Podcast Review: “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.” Falls Short of a First Down

As a casual American football fan, at best, I had only passing familiarity with former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez.  My recollection of the controversy that permeated his life, including a 2015 conviction for second-degree murder for the 2013 killing of Odin Lloyd in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, or the news of Hernandez’s suicide in prison in 2017, just five days after he was acquitted of charges that he also killed Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, was foggy at best.  Thus, when I first heard a teaser for Wondery, Inc.’s Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., a six-episode podcast hosted by veteran Boston Globe reporter Bob Hohler that tracks the Globe‘s “Spotlight” investigative team’s six-part report on Hernandez’s life and death, I was instantly drawn to it.  Gladiator promised a tragic human-interest story, a bit of true crime, and some reporting on our still-developing scientific understanding of the overlap between longterm brain health and professional contact sports.  My wife and I listened to the entire series on our drive from Nashville to the Florida Gulf coast this past weekend, and you can listen to the first episode, “Hail Mary,” here:

Unfortunately, I come away from the listening experience feeling slightly deceived and largely unsatisfied.

There is little dispute that Aaron Hernandez lived a troubled existence, and Gladiator does a good job of introducing the listener to various facets of his life to give context to that characterization.  This aspect of the podcast is especially helpful for people like me, whose favorite sport is not American football, and we dedicate the overwhelming majority of our attention to another sport, its teams, its players, and the key narratives and stories of each.  The internal and external forces at work in Hernandez’s life, taken with the absence of leadership and important developmental lessons that might otherwise have been learned under different circumstances, probably would have left anyone with more questions than answers about who they are or what choices they should make at critical junctures along their trajectory.

For example, Hernandez’s larger-than-life father berated and doled out beatings to his son more than he ever gave approval.  Then, Hernandez’s father died when the former Patriots tight end was young, leaving a vacuum of wisdom and mentorship from a father figure who was, even on his best day, highly imperfect.  Hernandez’s sexual relationship with Dennis SanSoucie, the quarterback of his Bristol High School football team, and unexplored allegations of sexual abuse that came to light only when Hernandez was facing murder charges as an adult, undoubtedly saddled him with fear, confusion, and shame as he grew up.  This was likely especially true both on the football field and in the locker room–a sports culture ostensibly riddled with so-called toxic masculinity–and in his home, where his homophobic father criticized everything from the way his son stood to the way he talked to ensure that his son didn’t “turn gay” later in life.  Hernandez’s premature entry into the University of Florida–a scheme concocted by his high school principal and then-Gators Head Coach Urban Meyer–and premature entry into the NFL draft before finishing college perhaps robbed him of the sense of accomplishment that comes only with seeing something through to the end, and the maturity and wisdom that accompany such achievements.  Hernandez’s gang affiliations (which he initially denied, but which records later confirmed) may also have led him to make poor choices in some areas of his life that he would not otherwise have made.  It all portended, at best, a mixed bag for chances at success in life.

And it was all compounded by something we learned about Hernandez only after he committed suicide:  he suffered from the worst case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (“CTE”) that researchers at Boston University had ever seen in a young person.  CTE is a disease of the brain that can only be diagnosed after someone dies and is associated with repeated physical contact to the head.  The podcast thus also rightly raises concern about the relationship between the profit motives in professional sports and the longterm health of the players in professional leagues, exploring everything from CTE in contact sports to opioid addiction.

But which of these things made Aaron Hernandez a convicted killer who later took his own life?  Or was it something else?  Answering those questions is Gladiator‘s raison d’être.

And that leads me to my first criticism:  Bob Hohler, a member of the Globe‘s “Spotlight” investigations team, tells podcast listeners that he’s just a sports reporter, and that this isn’t the type of story he typically covers.  When I first heard that, I thought to myself, maybe in not so many words, “well, that must mean that whatever I’m about to hear is authentic!”  However, Hohler joined the Globe in the mid-1980s as a political reporter, and even worked a stint in its Washington bureau.  Today, he is an investigative reporter who writes exactly this kind of story–in-depth, “enterprise” reporting that challenges the power structures in our society–and sports reporting is just sort of icing on the cake of his journalism career.  That is, in addition to all of his other professional roles at the Globe, he just happened to be the Boston daily’s Red Sox beat writer in 2004, the year they overcame a three-games-to-none deficit in the pennant race against their arch-rival New York Yankees and swept the National League champion St. Louis Cardinals in four games played over five nights, thereby winning the World Series after an 86-year championship drought and breaking the Curse of the Babe.  (Good work, if you can get it.)

Given that Hohler isn’t just some mild-mannered Clark-Kent of a sports reporter who lucked into a really complex assignment about a complicated public figure–a somewhat simple, if curious, deception–my second criticism of Gladiator is that it assumed the truth of the answers it provides to the questions above.  The very title of the podcast, Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., betrays the purpose of the report:  the wholesale condemnation of the professionalization of American football, and all the consequences of commodification of the adult human body that come with it.  Hohler and the Globe lay blame for nearly everything that went wrong with Aaron Hernandez’s life at the feet of the National Football League.  The NFL does some shady things, some of which I am on the record criticizing, but, according to Gladiator, without the NFL and its contracts, which pay twenty-somethings hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to play a child’s game, people like Hernandez would not start playing contact football as eight-year-old children, starting the clock on CTE at an early age, or playing through injuries that do longterm damage to other parts of their bodies, for fear that another player will take their spot on the roster.  In addition, without the NFL and the success stories it creates, the influencers around individual players, like their fathers, teachers, and coaches, wouldn’t whisk them haphazardly through life’s more crucial developmental stages.  That is, the purpose of Gladiator is to explore, in greater depth than daily journalism allows, the life of one excessively controversial figure, and then to generalize from that singular experience in a way that allows the reporter to condemn the entire system, proverbially throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But if Hernandez’s story proved the point, rather than being a peculiar and isolated tragedy, we would see far more killings and drug addiction among NFL players than we do.  If the NFL really had as much power as Gladiator insinuates, there might be little market for the NFL because nobody in their right mind would want to play professional football.  The trend of telling stories in pursuit of political and social justice, through the lens of sport, has become obnoxiously pervasive, and Gladiator is another data point in the trend.  Moreover, this approach to telling the story magnifies the otherwise innocuous deceit about Hohler being a lowly sports beat writer.

Wondery, Inc. took a similar approach to telling another story a few years ago.  In the Dr. Death podcast, veteran independent health and science reporter Laura Beil regales listeners with the horrors of the infamous orthopedic surgeon Dr. Christopher Duntsch, the first physician in American history to be criminally prosecuted following a series of grossly botched procedures on elderly patients.  As with Gladiator‘s tagline, Wondery’s description of Dr. Death betrays its purpose:  “We’re at our most vulnerable when we go to our doctors.  We trust the person at the other end of that scalpel.  We trust the hospital.  We trust the system. . . . DR. DEATH is about a medical system that failed to protect these patients at every possible turn.”  (Emphasis added.)

But Dr. Death wasn’t about “the system.”  It was a story about one really bad doctor who lacked the capacity to recognize when he was making mistakes, much less to seek guidance to improve, and the lax regulatory authority in one jurisdiction where hospital systems that had granted Dr. Duntsch operating privileges allowed him to resign with his reputation intact without firing him after receiving complaints about him.  If Dr. Duntsch really was the rule as Dr. Death sought to portray, and not the exception, then humanity would be in far greater trouble than the evidence bears, just as if Aaron Hernandez really was the rule as Gladiator sought to portray, and not an extreme outlier, then football players would be in far greater trouble than the overwhelming evidence to the contrary shows.  Simply put, most surgeons aren’t so bad at their jobs that they permanently maim people, most physician oversight boards aren’t so lackadaisical that bad actors go unpunished, and most football players do not kill other people or themselves (and it’s also debatable whether or not most professional athletes in contact sports ever develop CTE–we don’t have enough data yet to know).  Dr. Death and Gladiator are both interesting enough stories in and of themselves without overwrought apocalyptic undertones.

Next, I take issue with an aspect of Gladiator that seems to be a rising trend in podcasts:  Hohler and company could not avoid the temptation to tell what is called a “process story.”  There is an entire episode of this podcast dedicated to Hohler talking with another journalist about how he and the “Spotlight” team went about reporting the story:

If you aren’t an actual or aspiring journalist, or a real nerd about the media business, these kinds of stories do little more than provide a reporter with an avenue to aggrandize themselves, making themselves a part of the story when they really aren’t part of it at all.  If you are an actual or aspiring journalist, the process story gives little or no information about the craft of journalism that you can’t obtain by calling or emailing Bob Hohler.  Process stories do, however, preemptively answer those questions in a format accessible to everyone–a podcast episode–without tying up the Hohlers of the world on their office phones when they publish a widely circulated story, taking them away from their other duties.  To that end, I don’t begrudge Gladiator for reducing Hohler’s transaction costs.  I just don’t like process stories, and they add nothing of substance of a story for the benefit of the lay consumer.

Finally, a criticism that follows from the process story:  Gladiator boasts hundreds of pages of records and hundreds of hours of recorded jail calls obtained by the “Spotlight” team, but Hohler tells the entire “story” in just six short episodes.  Let me acknowledge here the hard work of the “Spotlight” team to winnow down this volume of information into highly digestible print and audio formats.  It must have taken hundreds of hours to pull off this production, and the people behind it are to be applauded for their efforts.  That said, with that much information, it seems like there are so many more stories that could have been told, but weren’t.  Listeners can access the obtained records and recorded calls on the Globe‘s website, but these data are only slightly curated on that platform, leaving people who aren’t familiar with navigating records troves to guess at what matters.

There are probably any one of a hundred reasons why the Globe didn’t go to the additional effort, and very few of them involve hiding the ball from the public.  It’s more likely that Hohler and others working on this project had other obligations, and they already told what they thought “the story” was in the podcast episodes and written stories.  But, unlike print, where word counts are defined by column inches on a page, and page counts are determined by advertising revenues, the podcast medium allows a reporter to tell more of these stories.  Just ask Sarah Koenig, whose work on the highly popular true-crime podcast Serial did more for podcasting’s popularity than any other reporter.  Ask Rabia Chaudry, Susan Simpson, and Colin Miller, three lawyers who picked up where Serial Season One left off and gave lawyerly perspectives on the procedural and evidentiary aspects of Adnan Syed’s case in the Undisclosed podcast, after Koenig had done all she could do as a journalist.  Gladiator thus seems like an unsatisfying missed opportunity in some respects.  I hope Hohler and his colleagues consider recording future episodes that delve deeper into Hernandez’s issues.

None of this criticism is meant to justify what Aaron Hernandez did (or didn’t do), or to let the NFL off the hook where it bears responsibility for creating perverse incentives.  I certainly encourage anyone reading my blog to give Gladiator‘s first six episodes at least three hours of your time, if you like listening to podcasts.  All I am saying is that, just like we should with television or print media, we should approach podcasts with a healthy dose of skepticism, particularly with regard to whatever motives may be behind a story being told or the method in which it is told.

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