The 1999 NFL retirement of Barry Sanders was still wise. At least with their legacies safe, Jim Brown and Michael Jordan turned their attention to other endeavors (acting and, in MJ’s case, baseball for a spell). On the eve of the Detroit Lions’ training camp, Sanders, 31, ringless, and just one season away from becoming the NFL’s all-time rushing leader, scuttled off to London to avoid the reporters. He faxed a farewell message to his hometown newspaper. At the time, one fan sneered, “OJ was my least favorite runner until yesterday, 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 Prime Video 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.
Worse, directors Paul Monusky, Micaela Powers and Angela Torma had a winning playbook in Sanders’s 2003 autobiography Now You See Me – which digs into his regrets, his loneliness and his true feelings about his father, William. “I sometimes wondered if I was ever quite the son he thought I should be,” he writes. “One of the worst moments came shortly before the NFL draft deadline, when Daddy cornered me and cussed me out for even considering staying at Oklahoma State for my senior year.”
Without much in the way of deep introspection from their titular subject, Bye Bye pulls from the familiar NFL Films trick bag of soaring musical numbers, celebrity interviews (Jeff Daniels, Eminem) and archival reels – the star of the show by default. Poetry in motion is a phrase that’s used to exhaustion in sports – but in Sanders’s case, it genuinely applies. Even now he remains like nothing the game has ever seen – a 5ft 8in Houdini with his own knack for moving the chains, an escape artist with a flair for evading would-be tacklers before turning on the jets. (Think Lamar Jackson on his best day against the Cincinnati Bengals – only more unstoppable on the run.) Sanders’s knack for running circles behind the line of scrimmage, legging out 30 yards just to gain three, made him the king of negative carries, too.
Like the genius painter or composer, Sanders was far better at letting the work speak than explaining the strokes. It’s no coincidence that Bye Bye drops the week of Thanksgiving, a football holiday Sanders defined with his ritual carving of my accursed Chicago Bears. (“I hope he doesn’t leave before we can give him the turkey leg,” Fox’s John Madden, Thanksgiving Day host extraordinaire, cracked as the clock ticked down on a three-touchdown masterpiece in 1997 that moved Sanders into second place on the all-time rush list.) In Sanders’s day – when a running back was a team cornerstone, not cannon fodder – he stood head and shoulders above the rest.
