Jon Bois Keeps Finding Beauty in Miserable Sports Teams

For the most part, the thing that attracted us to the Vikings was that there are more stories contained within that franchise than Alex and I have ever seen in any other sports franchise, ever. That includes the Yankees, the 49ers, anyone you want to name. If the Mariners are sort of the protagonist of their sport and the Falcons are the clowns and court jesters, the Vikings are the storytellers. We refer to the Vikings in the script as the great American storytellers. Their stories are primarily about football, but they tug on so many threads about what America is and what it’s become, for better or for worse. They’re just so unique in that way.

Okay, so it wasn’t like you were looking at a white board full of other teams and going, “Buffalo Sabres? Washington Wizards?” You knew you wanted to do the Vikings.

Yeah, for sure. It actually came to us in the middle of producing the Falcons doc a couple years ago. We got to that fateful 1998 (NFC Championship) game and were like, ‘We’ve got to talk about these Vikings someday.’ It was just a matter of when. We were not picking teams out of a hat. This one was kind of destined for us.

What is your favorite thing that you learned about the Vikings that you didn’t know before starting all this research?

Oh man, there are so many. There were a lot of details I uncovered about their legendary coach, Bud Grant. In the national media, there’s the NFL Films version of Bud Grant, which is this stoic, legendary coach who was very stern-faced. You know, people describe him as authoritarian or whatever. But I found that wasn’t really the case. He was a guy who was not a disciplinarian. He had a very dry sense of humor. On his off days, for fun, he’d go out and get a live turkey and bring it into the office. He’d put it in the bathroom and just leave, so people would get scared whenever they walked in. He loved practical jokes. That’s kind of a side of him that—as a Minnesota outsider—I never really saw.

That stuff could be interesting for people who don’t know who Bud Grant is in the first place. A lot of football people do, and he’s kind of a deity in Minnesota. We’re very excited to do his story justice. Pete Carroll was actually one of the names in the running to succeed him in 1984, I believe. Carroll, at that time, would have been very young. But he would have been way better than the coach they ended up with, who is possibly the worst coach of all time.

I want to do a bit of psychoanalyzing here if that’s okay. Jon, why are you so attracted to misery? What draws you to these teams that have sucked for their entire history?

I think I interpret something different from misery. I think the overbearing image of teams like the Mariners and Falcons and Vikings is that they are cursed, or haunted. The thing is, any team can win a Super Bowl! Most teams have won a Super Bowl! That doesn’t really make you special. It feels great to win one, as somebody who’s been a Chiefs fan my whole life, I saw them win their first title after the 2019 season. It was an amazing experience, but it wasn’t the best thing about being a Chiefs fan, by far. The Vikings have obviously had a lot of excruciating defeats. But what attracts somebody like me to sports are the fascinating people. It’s not a spreadsheet or whatever. I want to get to know these people and the amazing stories they lived through. That, to me, is much more interesting.

Right, the victories don’t mean as much if you don’t also have some horribleness.

I think that varies from person to person. There’s no one type of being a fan that’s better or worse than any other kind. For instance, I’m one of the most loathsome types of NBA fans, which is the total bandwagoner. Whoever has the cool guys is the team I’m rooting for this year. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate a team or determine what makes you happy and what doesn’t. The storytelling power of a team is what really draws me into them. Based on the reactions (we get), a lot of people have a similar way of thinking about it.

When you’re making these documentaries that really drill into the minute details of sports franchises, how much responsibility do you feel toward the fans to tell the story of their beloved team “the right way?” There’s a lot of people who really care! Does the weight of that ever get to you?

This one definitely felt a little heavier than it had before. Obviously, the Mariners have a very, very diehard fan base. They care about their history, and so do Falcons fans, but Vikings fans have this tradition of building and curating lore in a way that other fan bases really just don’t. We knew that if we got something wrong, we would hear about it. We’ve been very meticulous about our fact checking and everything.

I think a lot of fans will ask why we didn’t talk about this player or that player. We tried to answer that by sort of owning our status as outsiders. We’re fans of other teams. We definitely want to do right by Vikings fans and we hope they really enjoy it. From the outside looking in, this is what y’all appear to be. But at the same time, we want to be clear about who we are and aren’t. We know that if we asked Vikings fans to tell this story, it’d end up a little differently than how we’re going to tell it.