PROJECT SUMMARY

One-Hundred Yard Universe (OHYU) is an expansive, feature-length (approx. 100 minute) audiovisual essay that seeks to understand football’s emergence as an omnipresent component of American life and culture. We do so by focusing on the game’s lived significance for my family (co-director, Solomon Turner) across multiple generations. Combining home movies, narration and interviews with family members, and an array of remediated archival material, OHYU tracks the Turner family history alongside the parallel and intersecting ascent of the mediated National Football League (NFL). 

In the 1960s, at the same time that pro football’s popularity was on the rise, my father became a standout high school running back and a sought-after Division I recruit. But as pro football continued its transformation into the mass media spectacle it is today, my father’s star faded and eventually burnt out. He dropped out of college and was dead by his mid-thirties. Like so many others, he was unable to attain his dream and achieve the status of an NFL player. 

My own career spanned from little league in the 1990s to Division III college ball in the 2010s. During this period, the NFL – an emblem of American ingenuity and heroism through the 1970s and 80s – became a problematic and dysfunctional symbol of American power and conquest. The recognition of tackle football's links with debilitating head trauma that emerged in the early 2000s has cast the game in a new light, even though our national obsession with it remains unabated. Plagued by chronic injuries, I ended my career disillusioned with the game and dreaded the inevitable pain that came with each hit. Now that I have a son of my own, how will I respond if he wants to continue the family legacy? 

There are striking moments of synchronicity between the popularization of the NFL and football more broadly as the national pastime and the trajectory of the lives and football careers of members of the Turner family. My father, Benjamin Turner came of age in the 1960s and 70s when football was emerging as the most dynamic and compelling sport in America thanks in part to the efforts of NFL Films; an NFL subsidiary company established in 1965 during the expansion and refinement of television broadcasting during the postwar economic boom. Founded by Ed Sabol, who oversaw the company alongside his son, Steve, NFL Films has been one of the primary authors of the league’s history and engine of its mainstream success. Most importantly, the auteur-styled studio helped reframe the game as both an extension of traditional American values and an exciting television sport. The Sabols were at once self-aware propagandists and aspiring story-poets. “I’ve never considered myself a journalist,” Steve Sabol explained, “and I never will. To me we’re storytellers and advocates. I mean, where would Paul Revere be without Longfellow’s poems. Every great adventure needs its storyteller, and that’s what we are… We’re romanticists.” Applying a high aesthetic treatment, couched within the rhetoric of cinematic artfulness, to a mass cultural subject, the Sabols sought to elevate football players to the level of heroes and legends, and to portray football as a mythic, romantic spectacle. Like Monday Night Football, which launched in 1970, NFL Films’ fusion of technical innovation, art, and epic drama placed the viewer in the center of the action.

As NFL Films and Monday Night Football were adding narrative structure and cinematic style to the packaging of professional football, Benjamin’s star was rising fast as a standout running back at Henrico High School in Richmond, Virginia. He reached the peak of his football career when he moved across the country to play Division I ball for the University of New Mexico. But two years later his career ended unceremoniously. He dropped out of school and ended up back in his hometown. Thus began my father’s precipitous fall from grace. To this day, I do not know what caused him to quit football, but what I do know is that he never recovered from the loss of the sport. He died from a heart attack at the age of 35 after struggling for years with alcoholism and substance abuse. In the intervening years, the NFL rose to unimaginable heights of commercial success thanks to its synergistic relationship with network television and the promotional efforts of NFL Films.

Less than a decade after Benjamin’s death, I picked up my father’s mantle only wanting to live up to his legacy. I played from the age of 8 and through college. I was never as physically gifted as him and was not destined to fulfill the promise of making it to the NFL. During that time, from the late 1990s into the early 2010s, the NFL grew in influence and power, but lost some of its luster under the inconsistent leadership of commissioner Roger Goodell, during an unprecedented period of controversies, lawsuits, and bungled PR. In particular, Goodell’s attempt to discredit years of scientific research and suppress the truth about CTE, the neurodegenerative disorder associated with collison sports like tackle football, has had terrible consequences for thousands of men who have unwillingly sacrificed their long term cognitive wellbeing for the entertainment of millions.   

Now, in the 2020s, fears about the potential dangers of brain injuries have made it more difficult to enroll a new generation in the sport. Football has been taken off the table as an option for my son. Examining my family’s trials and conflicted history with the game alongside a much different “football family” (Ed Sabol, the founder of NFL Films, and son Steve, its creative director) and the sport of football at the macro levels (narrational and representational practices, discursive conventions, mythology, fandom, social practices of viewing, etc.) will shed light on a larger system of patriarchal masculinity, identity formation, structural inequity, and exploitation.  

Filmed in a close, intimate style, and moving between the micro/personal and macro/contextual, OHYU returns to the locations where my father and I, respectively, played football. In my case, the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester (as a member of the Pop Warner Dorchester Eagles), Deerfield Academy (a New England prep school), and Oberlin College in Ohio, where I played Division III college ball; in my father’s case, a public high school in Richmond, Virginia, and the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque).

– Solomon Turner