Failure Is Not an Option: Sport Documentary and the Politics of Redemption

With the growth of sport documentary, the biographical profile has become an increasingly prevalent form of meaning making around sport. This essay develops a critical approach to the genre by engaging two examples produced by ESPN Films that profile a failed National Football League (NFL) player: The Best There Never Was and The Marinovich Project. It engages Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” and adapts it to racialized, hyper-masculine sport as a possible strategy for resistance. In doing so, it considers how the production of popular history through sporting “failures” can challenge dominant ideas about the NFL and its sociopolitical implications.