Photo: Eric Liebowitz/FX
Every February at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, scouts, managers, and coaches spend a whole week putting college football players through rigorous testing, assessing their physical and mental fortitude in preparation for the NFL Draft a couple months away. This is the NFL Scouting Combine — a bizarre tradition, in many ways, but a crucial one. In a way, it’s the ideal setting for an episode of a show called American Sports Story. I’d watch a whole documentary about it.
“Birthday Money” is my favorite episode of Aaron Hernandez yet, partly because it uses the title character as a sort of audience surrogate experiencing the confusing, high-stress pre-draft process. After a disturbing flashback opening — more on that later — the episode launches right into a montage of various agents wining and dining Aaron and his brother, all insisting that he can go wherever he wants. Aaron is very susceptible to people buttering him up, but it’s obvious he needs someone who can tell it to him straight. Enter the unassuming Brian Murphy (Thomas Sadoski), who warns Aaron that his first-round talent won’t make up for certain “off-the-field concerns.”
Forget the first round — if Aaron wants to be chosen at all, he’ll need to make a great impression at the Scouting Combine. But before the episode gets to that big event, it takes time to build some mystique. Prior to facing the intense reality of the showcase, Aaron trains for four weeks with the agency in Laguna Hills, California, with D.J. along for moral support. Training entails re-watching clips of interceptions and incomplete passes from his last three years of college football, taking accountability for his errors and becoming more “coachable.” It also means sitting through long interviews and answering ridiculous questions designed to rile him up, like “Are you in a gang?” and “Do you fuck cows?”
The actual event, when it arrives, is no less silly, though almost everyone involved treats it with grave seriousness. “I know why they call this shit a slave auction,” one player remarks, and there is something dehumanizing about the way players are dressed down and poked and prodded while medical professionals and sports professionals mingle and gawk. These evaluations aren’t uniformly perfect predictors, of course; plenty of studies have questioned the reliability of using 40-yard dash times to determine professional success, for example, and mental evaluations like the Wonderlic test Aaron fails aren’t always useful. Still, Aaron’s score does point to his social immaturity, and data does suggest that players who score below the mean are twice as likely to be arrested.
With his mixed results, a lot rides on Aaron’s big interview. At first, he nails it, answering questions with warmth and humor but also taking his interviewers seriously. He even cites Tim Tebow’s influence in helping him find a new path with Christianity, responsible for his getting clean. Aaron only stumbles when his father comes up in conversation. Just saying he wants to honor his dad summons a hallucination of Dennis Hernandez, calling him the slurs you’d expect and saying, “You disgust me.” It leaves Aaron looking a bit emotionally unstable, and his fate going forward is unclear.
Beyond the football stuff, there are two focuses here on a character level. Obviously, the first is Aaron’s sexuality, which remains a central piece of his struggle. “Birthday Money” introduces a new love interest for him, a composite character named Chris (played by Jake Cannavale, son of Bobby) who’s a physical therapist at Murphy’s agency. On his first meeting with Aaron, Chris says he moved here from Hartford but stayed in California because “people are just more chill,” hinting that he and Aaron are on the same page.
You can see where this is going from the moment Chris first appears: multiple erotic stretching scenes where Aaron gets uncomfortable and embarrassed by his self-evident arousal. During the showcase, Chris sets him at ease, visiting him in his room and initiating a kiss (then more) after Aaron vents about the pressure he’s under.
There’s something a little odd about inserting a composite character in this role. But I’m even more mixed on the first scene of the episode, a flashback to D.J. almost walking in on his brother being molested by their uncle Bobby on his sixth birthday. We know from the Boston Globe’s reporting that the real D.J. says Hernandez was molested as a young boy, but the person responsible has never been identified. Here, the script by Ryan Farley and Chelsey Lora seemingly borrows their real late uncle Robert Valentine’s name and turns him into a pedophile, including inventing an arrest for exposing himself on a school bus. I’d love to be proven wrong here — maybe Ryan Murphy has access to some court records I don’t — but it sure feels gross.
Even aside from the veracity of the scene, its placement in the episode just feels off, veering close to framing the assault as an origin story for Aaron’s queerness. Hernandez has actually made that same association himself, according to the Globe reporting, but the show doesn’t seem interested in interrogating it or at least showing Aaron vocalize that flawed way of thinking about sexuality (yet). When his trauma later comes up in a fight with D.J. — Aaron flashes back and screams that D.J. was supposed to look out for him but didn’t — it’s hard to know what the episode wants us to glean from the moment. We haven’t seen Aaron lash out at his brother out of any resentment from the molestation before. The episode also doesn’t dive deep into D.J.’s perspective, leaving it somewhat ambiguous what he thinks and if he even recognizes what Aaron is referring to. Does he feel guilty about what happened and prefer to just live in denial? Is he covering up something he knows is true when he tells Murphy they were never close with uncle Bobby?
While training in Laguna, Aaron and D.J. are in a pretty good place, running plays together and really reconnecting as brothers. (“Dad would be proud,” D.J. tells him, exactly what Aaron has always wanted to hear.) But their dynamic gets dicey again as D.J.’s professional jealousy rears its head. He’s hoping Murphy can help him find a gig as a practice squad quarterback, but the best Murphy can come up with is a spot on the coaching staff for a team in Berlin. It’s hard not to feel for the guy when he points out the gap in career options between himself and his brother — and the irony of D.J.’s spotless record making no difference.
He gets even pettier about it once the draft has begun, during the same fight where the molestation implicitly comes up. D.J. is so clearly coming from a place of envy — “It should’ve been me” really lays it all out there — but it’s true that Aaron has no appreciation for the leniency he has been afforded. Yes, he was passed over in the first three rounds and might be passed over altogether, which sucks. But he’s misguided in lashing out and blaming D.J. and Murphy when he knows he only has himself to blame. Even now, very few people are convinced that Aaron is truly ready for this.
As always, Aaron escapes the career-ending consequences he fears, this time thanks to Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and owner Robert Kraft’s mistaken belief that drafting him is all upside and little risk. The “Gladiator” podcast emphasizes the tragedy of this decision: Keeping Aaron close to negative influences at home is possibly the worst choice for him when he might benefit most from a reset. But “Birthday Money” ends on an upswing, with D.J. hearing Aaron’s name on TV and losing his shit, yelling the news to Terri and bolting outside to meet Aaron sprinting over from his cousin’s place. The joy of watching them set aside their baggage and embrace in the street, one brother feeling genuinely happy for the other, is downright infectious.
In a show that proceeds through Aaron’s life so sequentially, ditching characters as they lose relevance, it’s helpful to have a core relationship to invest in and return to throughout all ten episodes. There are elements of this brotherly relationship that still aren’t fully fleshed out, but the resentment mixed with love and camaraderie make it the most believable character dynamic in this show — and make this installment the strongest yet, despite any questions its raises.
The End Zone
• The show never shows any breakup with Aaron’s college girlfriend, but it also never really treated her as a meaningful character in the first place. In this episode, he runs into Shayanna at the grocery store, setting them up to get back together.
• NFL Europe was dissolved in 2007, so what German team was Murphy suggesting for D.J.?
• Nice to get a little follow-up on where Tim and Maurkice ended up, considering they’ve understandably disappeared from the show by now, and I liked seeing Aaron’s excitement for his friends. At this point, I’m pretty sold on Josh Andrés Rivera’s performance, especially in the moments when you see his sweet, youthful side.
