The Significance of the Insignificant: The Works of Jon Bois and the Objective Spectacle of Global Sports Entertainment
Even amongst those for whom football (soccer) remains a source of ambivalence, the news of a potential European Super League was met with widespread disdain and disgust. In an era of men’s football defined by the kind of immense wealth gaps and dubious transfer negotiations that have begun to warp the competitive nature of the top-division professional game, the only logical financial conclusion is to expand upon that and keep accelerating! Competition is bad for business and, as has been the trend for decades now, the global presence of the sport has drifted towards those formats and competitions that keep competition low and finances high. The advent of the Premier League allowed a flurry of cash to come in through broadcast rights, meaning more money for the teams that people wanted to see and helping pave way for the stabilisation of a financial establishment within English club football. It also, by design, diverted funds away from other national leagues and cemented the English league as — at least commercially — one of the most professionally-attractive league competitions in the world. The rise of superstars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo almost seem to transcend the truths of their respective personal and club performances, with both becoming the immovable poster-boys for a truly global brand of elite individualist sporting spectacle. Football — and indeed the world of global sports entertainment en masse — suddenly feels deeply impersonal. Even as the streets filled with fans protesting against the club owners who propped up the ESL against their desires and concerns, British television lined up pundits who decried the ESL one moment but then quickly began to lay a case for the necessity of Big Money in football the next, vocally helping to preserve the likes of Sky Sports as a graveyard for meaningful cultural discussion. Fans storming Old Trafford before Manchester United’s high-profile game against Liverpool were viewed with resentment by the players-turned-pundits who once adorned the red of Manchester. Alex Niven writes about “The Case of Football” in his book Folk Opposition:
It is difficult to imagine […] Rupert Murdoch having anything like the level of influence he currently enjoys in Britain were football clubs to be placed in the hands of supporters, who could hardly condone the sort of consumer exploitation Murdoch’s BskyB has exercised over fans since the Premier League’s foundation in 1992. This sort of popular confrontation of private interests would be a genuinely remarkable development in recent British political history. Since the Thatcher era, it has at times been impossible to see an end to civic enfranchisement through the expansion of private interests.
Much to the chagrin of football punditry, sports is and always has been political. It is a deeply class-oriented sports culture, as much as such discussions remain taboo in this country. And even as we gesture at progress, the fight still continues to purge the white masculinities that football and the global sports industry in general still allow to thrive. The routes through which important and worthwhile cultural discussions on the nature of football have been channelled in the past has deteriorated, leaving the mainstream discussions of events such as the aforementioned stadium occupation to be lensed through this disconnected commercial prioritisation — the importance of the game as a squarely commercial entity, and by extension, the idea of a commercial entity as somehow synonymous with fan appreciation. The ways in which we engage with sports, as well as the discussions we have about it and the way we understand statistics and variables, are set out before we’ve even had a chance to truly internalise them. Such is the hyper-commercialised nature of the sports industry that statistical elitism has reigned supreme. No pundit worth their weight in viewership revenue would dare stake the claim that stats — no matter how refined or penetrating in their objectiveness — paint a total picture of how any given match or player or team or manager will perform, yet stats are (by and large) the defining references that dictate not only the competitive performances of entities on the pitch, but also the commercial performances off it. A case can be made against certain clubs like Paris Saint-Germain for prioritising the financial rewards of star-power and capitalist prestige over footballing excellence — for while PSG have certainly dominated and monopolised the French league, and thus helped in further destabilising the French league system as a consequence, their true power lies in their ability to use the likes of Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr, Kylian Mbappe, Sergio Ramos, and Gianluigi Donnarumma (also potentially Paul Pogba if speculation is to be considered) to establish a cultural economic stasis that appears Too Big To Fail. While stats themselves possess no inherent hierarchy, there is nonetheless a hierarchical temple of statistical mapping — from GCA/90s to Instagram followers— that is driven at the pursuit of domination. It is certainly inherently uncompetitive, but is also designed to create an objective and oppressively-ordered sense of global sportsmanship.
It logically follows then that entertainment and art geared towards the spectacle of sport can at times feel like nothing but cold simulacra, detached from the true spirit of the games themselves. Amazon’s All Or Nothing series aims at providing a behind-the-scenes experience of professional sports teams during a particular campaign — it covers a range of sports but its immediate reference point for me is in the English game: Manchester City’s title-winning 2017–18 season under Pep Guardiola and Tottenham Hotspur’s 2019–20 season that saw the departure of Mauricio Pochettino (now PSG manager) for Jose Mourinho. The series itself offers little insight beyond some manicured backroom theatrics which feel more performed than genuine, like discount engineered voyeurism, as well as being a largely impersonal account of pre- and post-match dramatics. This is after all a multi-billion pound industry where performances of identity off-the-pitch often cost as much as those on it, as well as the simple fact that Amazon have now purchased (as is seemingly their raison d’etre) the broadcasting rights for Premier League matches. Much like their Prime features for movies and television shows, their broadcasts come with an interactive menu of live statistics to aid in the spectacle. At times it can feel that, wherever you observe it, the nature of sports engagement is an aggressively polished experience — one deliberately devoid of personality and independent interpretation lest it conceptually gesture outside of the established brand narrative.
In steps Jon Bois: a home-schooled college dropout from Kentucky who became an editor and eventually creative director at Vox-owned sports network SB Nation. As simplistic as it may be to begin by introducing Bois as a “home-schooled college dropout”, such a statement does in truth speak to an important aspect of the visual work for which he has become renowned. In an article for Vice, Bois writes about his experience of home-schooling compared to that of traditional institutional education:
While I was homeschooled, I treasured that freedom from authority. On one occasion, my mom had taken me to a museum, and I was free to browse wherever I wanted. A class of public school kids on a field trip were shepherded to an exhibit I was looking at, and when I didn’t move with the crowd, a chaperone figure snapped at me. “Get moving!”
I looked at her for a moment and said, simply, “No.”
The key to maintaining an order of power is to keep those who you rule over ignorant of their position, and if possible, to normalise coercive control so as to have it be perceived as the natural order of things. For a fair few of us who grew up in institutional education, it is not until after we have moved out of it that we are able to not only just pinpoint where the institution has failed us but also how it has moulded our past and present personhood. But for people like Bois, who has formative experiences outside of these institutions, there is more than the suggestion of a solidified nonchalance towards the influences of authority which has informed both the creative work he has produced and his personal mode of sports appreciation. His early contributions to SB Nation include attempts to manipulate the Madden video game series to his speculative will. He would then go on to produce a short video series titled Pretty Good: dedicated to understanding the oft-overlooked oddities of sporting folklore, from the exposure of fringe wonders like baseball pitcher Koo Dae-Sung to a now legendary examination of a bodybuilding forum torn to shreds by the inability for certain members to conceptualise how many days fit into a week. The standards of online content suggest that such works would sit well in the supremacy of the algorithm — and indeed they do — yet Bois’ work does not entirely succumb to the pitfalls of strategic clickbait formalities. There is an attitude to the works of Bois that straddles the line between philosophical scrutiny and breezy honesty — an attitude built upon a genuine inquisitiveness and a spirit of documentarian craftmanship that appears focused entirely on expression, and certainly less so on the lure of revenue.
So what does Jon Bois, an American sports journalist, have to do with football/soccer? Well — nothing really. Bois has acknowledged numerous times his emotional distance to the so-called Beautiful Game, including a brief episode of YouTube series Fumble Dimension entitled “Our quest to either fix or ruin soccer” where he and colleague Kofie Yeboah attempt to master the Football Manager games. Likewise, I have little interest in a lot of the sports that Bois himself holds dear — not out of outright spite or prejudice, but purely out of the same implicit cultural detachment that Bois likely possesses when staring at a football pitch. That Bois’ conceptual reach is not confined by the sport itself speaks to a particular spirit that he allows his works to channel — a truly investigative mode of sports critique and examination that is rooted not in the lofty expectations or star-struck hierarchies of global sports entertainment, but on the dual thematic/formal neural tangents and eccentricities that define the subjective experience of sports. In 2017, Bois began a longform fiction project known as 17776 — a grand speculative work of sporting multimedia where sentient manmade satellites look down upon a near-godlike humanity of the future as they play out a likewise godlike form of American football with a play area that stretches out for miles and miles, across state boundaries, and over the mountains and the canyons. Comparisons have been made to Don DeLillo which — as intriguing a comparison as this may be — at least insinuates a certain clear creative direction to Bois’ work: something deeply critical, explorative, and particularly tongue-in-cheek around the presence of technology and our shifting relationships to modes of media consumption. It should not then be at all hyperbolic to approach Bois as a filmmaker and artist who is acutely suspect of the character of institutions and the structures that uphold them.
Bois is perhaps best known for his feature-length sports documentaries, which play out upon a digital landscape where its only inhabitants are multicoloured graphs, newspaper cuttings, and the frozen pixel-built images of folks who in Bois’ eyes are the true sporting greats. In terms of influences, Bois often refers to the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes for — amongst undoubtedly many nostalgic reasons — its ability to balance the subversive, the pertinent, and the hilarious. That much is certainly apparent through his narration alone. There is also much to be said of his work as this abstractly assembled portfolio of ideas: like a search engine result’s page, an untidy desk, or a great coffee mug-stained map. The History of the Seattle Mariners — a nearly four-hour rundown of, well, the history of the Seattle Mariners — stands as most people’s entry point into Bois’ developing filmography. But for me, the film which most immediately embodies a sense of pure Bois-ism is 2019’s The Bob Emergency. He asks a simple question — whatever happened to the Bobs of sport? Not the Bobby’s or the Roberts. Not even the Bobb’s and definitely not the the Robs. Just the Bobs. It is, for most of us, a whimsical throwaway shower-thought that Bois simply cannot allow himself to dismiss, turning this shower-thought into a fecund base from which a mode of fascinatingly interrogative and formally resplendent inquiry can emerge and grow. That simple question brings us to the stories of such figures as Bob Pereyra, street luge pioneer, and Bob Probert, one of the NHL’s most infamous goons — but also to Bob Beamon, whose long jump effort in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics is explored and expressed by Bois in what is perhaps the most simplistically eloquent and moving depictions of achievement I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. I so want to break it down, piece-by-piece, but to do so feels like a great disservice to what both Beamon achieved and to how Bois himself articulates it. It’s the kind of “content” that the likes of ESPN and NBCSN would relegate — if considered at all — to the untouched shallows of their viewing platforms, to be debuted in some 1AM four-minute comic interlude and assembled from the scraps in the basement of formal familiarity, and yet it expresses the kind of candid curious passion that the major commercial services could only dream of meaningfully channelling.
This emphasis on strange and often scoffed-at inquiries is not merely an example of incidental political emergence — Bois is an historically political inquirer. In his video “Randall Cunningham Seizes the Means of Production” — if the title isn’t evocative enough on its own — he interrogates how one example of glorious unsportsmanlike play was born out of a year defined by striking players, manipulative owners, and nationwide cultural/political divides. At one point, he helps elaborate the difference between the stances of pro-unionism and anti-unionism by elaborating on the core values of pro-union beliefs, compared to that of anti-union beliefs which — in the words of Bois — simply means “you’re an asshole”. In Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, Bois and co-creator Felix Biederman chart out the history of MMA and how the socio-political circumstances of the 90s and onwards — including America’s presence as a global economic force and its effects on the substance of American masculinities — have helped accelerate the popularity of MMA. These works are admirable in their own right as showcases of sporting examination that are explicitly connected to a material grassroots reality — unlike that of mainstream discussions, which sadly are lacking in this regard or are at best simplified into a superficial sentiment so as to be devoid of any truly radical potency. But alas, there is only so much potency that one gets from these more politically-evident works — and as contradictory as it may seem to suggest, Bois is at his most outwardly radical (and, by consequence, most captivating) when he allows his formal and intellectually-tangential curiosities to take over. Bois’ worlds are all built upon the same plane — a heavily customised Google Earth map. His earlier work from Pretty Good wonders across the globe’s awkward polygonal surface as if Bois were a digital demi-god surveying the land generated before him. His stories play out on warped digital streets plastered by scraps of newspaper headlines and chromatic statistical grids, as if Demi-God Bois were some conspiracy nut sticking post-it notes on a planetary pinboard. That these trees and buildings all look like tangled graphical meshes may itself be extrinsic, but undoubtedly it lends a vital visual suggestion towards some conceptual importance — to contrast with that of the polished representational strictness afforded to the mainstream platforms of sport’s media. It is also present in Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, where a more literal approach is performed in that the documentary’s investigative aims are clearly transnational, but the full potential of what the format brings is somewhat limited even if its visual layouts and the way it navigates across its canvas in swoops and pans is just as elegant and eye-catching as anything Bois has ever produced. Instead, I insist that we look towards Bois and Rubinstein’s The History of the Seattle Mariners, Bois’ lesser-discussed entry The Search for the Saddest Punt in the World, and — of course — The Bob Emergency. If Fighting in the Age of Loneliness is Bois expounding theory, then these three films demonstrate the praxis.
Each of these three films take place on Bois’ aforementioned custom Google Earth — but where his previous efforts have utilised the software in a fairly literal sense, here Bois invites us into planets that consist only of his digital machinations. There is nothing over their artificial horizons but an infinite blank colour-field, and the centre of all life and intrigue is centered on a singular confined expanse. This is no longer a pre-generated universe over which Bois can explore and modify, this is a universe of his own creation — and the only things to exist on this imaginary plane is the odd imaginings of Bois himself. He exists within a canon of filmmakers who — in their creative pursuits — manifest abstract digital planes as infinite playgrounds built as personal expressive spaces of reflection, refraction, and intellectual play. It’s an approach that fits into the act of recycling and repurposing prebuilt non-physical spaces to fit one’s own creative needs and desires — right now, I’m reminded of elements within Kurt Walker’s s01e03, the music of James Ferraro, or (perhaps provocatively) the skill of speedrunning. For Bois, Google Earth is the obvious template — but this repurposing also operates in the realm of the streaming platform and the mass-access nature of content-driven sports spectatorship. The History of the Seattle Mariners sets itself up as a simplistic chronology, a record of the highs and lows of one of the MLB’s strangest franchises, but such is the depth of Bois and Rubinstein’s inquiry that as they dug deeper the more absurd the reality of this team’s existence became. A simple rendering of a team’s history from great feats (tying the record for most wins in a single MLB season with 116 in 2001) to immediate lows (never reaching the playoffs again since) is one thing, but these are all just narrative referents for Bois and Rubinstein — the real meat is in the individual cogs and units: the emergence of one Ichiro Suzuki, players blowing balls across foul lines, the pranks of Larry Andersen, falling ceiling tiles derailing an entire season, and how all of this was kickstarted by some guy who just wanted to watch Seattle burn (literally). It’s certainly a testament to a stranger-than-fiction ethos, but also perfectly placates to a notion of chronological accounting that is gleefully removed from conventional practice. The Search for the Saddest Punt in the World is built upon a similar traditional application — create a hypothesis and begin to rummage through stats and figures until one can render a conclusion. The issue here is that your hypothesis generally has to have some quantitively-referable basis to begin with, as does your methodology. Bois, however, does not give a shit. There is no quantifiable measure for “saddest”, and even after pouring through the metrics — graphs displayed almost like fuzzy galaxies of stars — Bois admits that his self-fashioned “Surrender Index” still feels imperfect. It’s revealed by the end that, according to his Surrender Index, the supposedly statistically-“saddest” punts were actually the catalysts for some of the most spectacular moments in their respective team’s history. Stats, in their purest form, do not tell a full picture — and no manner of numbers and formulas can ever really substitute the sheer raw power of the “human factor” as a referent. And as conflicting as that may seem, it appears that Bois’ digital landscapes — this artificial rendering of their creator’s own mental processes — are more openly accepting and contemplative of sport’s human core than any of the predetermined statistical certainties and grandiose narratives presented by big-screen sports theatrics. The Bob Emergency is the culmination of this.
A dull-grey landscape. Smooth jazz is playing (Bois’ favourite zone-out genre). Somewhere among the dull-grey is a shape — a baseball card, adorned with the close-up image of Bob Hamelin who Bois jokingly/affectionately describes as looking like “a dad from 1976 who was trying to shoo a bird out of his garage” and “a competitive putt-putt golfer”; that “applying any measure of coolness to Bob Hamelin was absolutely hopeless, it was like trying to hang your jacket on a waterfall: nothing stuck.” There, in that grey space, he exists amongst a small collection of other cards — handsome photogenic players in photogenic poses, desperate reinterpretations of Bob Hamelin that try-and-fail to turn him into a sporting spectacle — but his eyes behind classically-geeky spectacles stare back at us in baby-faced nonchalant silence. He’s holding up a board beneath him reading “Bob Hamelin”, but it’s half-blocked out by the banner at the bottom of the card that also reads “Bob Hamelin”. Suddenly, more Bob’s appear. Soon there are many Bobs, and soon there are few. All these Bobs are then piled high into a great dark-grey bar-chart mountain range, sitting beneath a deep-black sky littered with polka-dot white stars. Mundane but punctuated; ordinary but obvious; indifferent and yet blunt. Such is the greyscale, such is the smooth jazz, such is Bob, and such is the reasoning for Bois’ study. There is majesty and magic to be found within those worlds we see as ordinary — indeed, in the very nature of The Ordinary itself — and Bois is not willing to let it sit in silence.
There is no great cultural impetus for this inquiry to even exist, and yet it does. Why? Well, who cares? Bois’ power as a sports documentarian comes squarely from a place of genuine digressive intrigue, one that feels untethered to a notion of what counts as sensible punditry and imposed ideas of what is/is not worth investigating. One constructed only by the logic of feeling and fascination — an appreciation of sports and sporting triumph that extracts good-faith humour and inquisitiveness from the simplicity and humility of personal experience and not from authority and shallow sensibilities. Soon, Bois is scheduled to release his next work — The History of the Atlanta Falcons — and any implication of a neat chronology seems destined to be challenged once again. Its trailer starts off not with any explicit detail about the Falcons themselves, but about the American political climate under which the 2017 Super Bowl was charged. One team, our chosen Falcons, against the disgusting sporting embodiment of the Trump era itself: Tom Brady and his Patriots. Every time I finish one of Bois’ films, I cannot help but return to my sporting referent — that of football — and examine the odd and special moments that captured my fascination the most, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem to others or indeed to the pundits over at Sky Sports. In my search for the best team to ever get relegated from the Premier League, I remembered a Middlesbrough side from 1996/1997 who — despite two cup finals and a Player of the Season on their side — found themselves dropping into the First Division. I can remember thinking what magical qualities of failure must Herman Hreiðarsson have possessed in order to, despite a respectable number of top-flight appearances, end up relegated with all five Premier League teams he ever played for. Another constant source of fascination for me is how a team like MK Dons came to be and how, even with the bizarre and senseless circumstances around its formation, it may just be the perfect twisted cultural symbol for the town that is Milton Keynes. I doubt Bois will venture into the world of football anytime soon, but I’m sure he knows — as with American football, as with baseball, as with hockey and the MMA and street luge — that there is always a powerbase to subvert and minnows in need of a story. Of course, this strain of logic has wider implications beyond the realm of sports — such are the obvious benefits of keeping an open and critically-minded approach to things — but sometimes there really is nothing more important in the world than that which means something to you. Bois, aside from simply providing a refreshingly earnest curiosity to the world of sports media, helps us frame the conventionally insignificant as actually far more significant than that which is dictated to us upon high. PSG, Rupert Murdoch, the New England Patriots, and ESPN may all want to bolster a narrative of objective profiteering pageantry, but I’m only here for Jon Bois — who just wants to shit on Tex Schramm and the Dallas Cowboys.
Links to the works of Jon Bois:
