Barry Sanders’s 1999 NFL retirement still smarts. Jim Brown and Michael Jordan at least pivoted toward new pursuits (acting and, in MJ’s case, baseball for a while) and with their legacies secure. Sanders was 31, ringless and a season or so shy of becoming the NFL’s all-time rushing leader when he spun away to London to escape the press, faxing a goodbye letter to his home town newspaper on the eve of the Detroit Lions’ training camp. “Until yesterday,” one supporter huffed at the time, “OJ was my least favorite runner, but he only stabbed two people in the back.”
It’s taken Detroit hitting rock bottom time and again and other star players walking away from the NFL in their primes – Calvin Johnson, not least – for fans to appreciate Sanders’s lionhearted call. It’s the motivation behind his early retirement that’s long been so mystifying. A new Amazon Prime documentary called Bye Bye Barry aims for more clarity, but comes up grasping in the end.
Of course there were bound to be challenges in building a film project around Sanders, one of the most understated superstars you’ll ever encounter. He wasn’t so much wary of the media as embarrassed by his celebrity status and keen to drop out of sight any time the spotlight became too intense. “Some things are just unnecessary,” Sanders said after going awol on 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 the way I am as a person.”
Since then the 55-year-old Sanders has rounded into a cuddly figure who isn’t quite so serious these days. But Bye Bye doesn’t exactly set him up for the kind of profound introspection that Jordan and Brown showcase in their docs – a real demerit for an NFL Films crew that rarely has to worry about access. (Disclosure: I was a college intern at NFL Films during the 2001 season.) Over the course of the doc’s 90-minute runtime, producers interrogate Sanders under the Fox Theatre lights, fly back to London with him and his sons – but don’t really pull much out of him.