The Unexpected Beauty of Jon Bois’ Documentaries

BY CYRUS BERGER

over the Grand Canyon. What do these athletes have in common? Only that each athlete Bois focuses on is named Bob. Bois tells viewers that the number of athletes named Bob has dropped off sharply from its previous highs, so he has created a documentary as a tribute to the many Bobs in sports throughout history. The surprising approach and subject matter of this documentary is representative of what makes Bois such a special filmmaker, and why he is able to find so many fascinating, moving stories in the world of sports.

IN HIS TWO-PART documentary The Bob Emergency , the sportswriter and documentary filmmaker Jon Bois tells a variety of fascinating, but seemingly disconnected sports stories, ranging from a man’s quest to break the long-jump record to the career of one of the NHL’s most notorious fighters to an X-games skater dangerously attempting a trick

Bois, a sportswriter for SB Nation, has gained popularity by making sports documentaries on Youtube with a unique style, full of fascinating graphs, Google Maps visuals, and smooth jazz.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bois’s work, I would recommend checking out “2220,” “Pretty Good: Lonnie Smith,” “The History of the Seattle Mariners,” or “Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb.” All are available for free on Youtube and, because of their entertaining style and their focus on the human side of sports, are compelling even if you don’t care about sports–as I didn’t when I first watched them. I thought I wasn’t interested in sports, besides a passing affection for my long-suffering local baseball team, the Seattle Mariners. But watching Bois’s videos changed that. Bois unveils the beauty behind sports. He looks past the surface-level wins and losses to find stories of improbable achievements and deeply human struggles.

Bois rarely focuses on obvious champions. His subjects in his shorter works include his “favorite worst baseball player,” the constant struggles of the Cleveland Browns, and one video which is simply titled “NO!!!!!!” about an incredible football play with a painful ending worthy of that title. His longer, multipart documentaries similarly focus on less-celebrated teams and players, like the Atlanta Falcons and their infamous Super Bowl loss to the Patriots (coached by Bill Belichik ‘75). In order to tell these often-overlooked stories of struggle, defeat, and unrecognition, Bois uses an unconventional visual style and takes full advantage of the structure of free internet release. Bois’s first standout quality as a filmmaker is his choice of stories, and the details he discovers about them. For ex - ample, relatively few people would recognize the name Dave Stieb. He was a very strong pitcher in the 1980s, but his team, the Toronto Blue Jays, struggled for most of his career. However, Bois and his co-creator Alex Rubenstein saw enough potential in Stieb’s story to devote a four-part documentary to it. Bois finds a series of incredible, statistically improbable stories about Stieb: how he became an MLB-caliber pitcher despite never pitching before college, how he struggled to gain any Cy Young award votes despite being clearly among the best pitchers in the MLB, and, most notably, how he repeatedly came within a few outs of pitching a no-hit game–a rare feat achieved only around 300 times across the hundreds of thousands of games in MLB history–before seeing each of those no-hitters interrupted in heartbreaking fashion. Bois combines these details, which show incredible achievement that could easily go overlooked, to create a portrait of a man who struggled to beat obstacles he couldn’t overcome and grew as a person through these struggles.

Bois identifies this deeply human story by focusing on someone others might overlook, an approach reflected throughout his work. Bois looks at fascinating players like Lonnie Smith, whose career was marked by cocaine, mascot brawls, historic seasons, and near murder–I would summarize Bois’s video on him here, but there are too many twists to even try. He also carefully identifies statistical anomalies in relatively obscure games revolving around relatively obscure players, like Steve Jeltz’s remarkable performance in a 1989 Phillies-Pirates game. Perhaps no work better shows the subjects that interest Bois than his and Rubenstein’s six-part documentary on the Seattle Mariners. The Mariners have arguably the least success of any current MLB team, having never even played in the World Series. When Bois released his documentary in 2020, the Mariners were in the middle of the longest playoff drought in American sports at the time. However, Bois identifies the Mariners as fascinating “protagonists” who achieve beautiful moments of success–a record-tying 116-win season in 2001, a historically great late-90s lineup, the incredible careers of beloved players like Ichiro Suzuki and Ken Griffey, Jr., and a thrilling 1995 playoff run–even amid all this mediocrity.

Bois is consistently able to find a fascinating story in an overlooked competitor. This is because he sees beauty not just in success, but in the human stories of people trying to achieve something. To bring these stories to life, Bois uses a distinct audiovisual style that’s simultaneously unconventional for sports documentaries and perfect for the stories he tells. In “Pretty Good,” a series of short documentaries, he tells his stories primarily by moving through Google Earth satellite views of key locations, overlaid with images of newspaper headlines. Sometimes he pulls in a live-action visual aid, like a nightmarish fake board game to represent the hellish 1904 Olympic Marathon or a set of toy soldiers acting out the absurdity of the most lopsided loss in college football history. In his later videos, Bois tends to structure all the visuals around different charts. These charts convey information both effectively and creatively–for instance, he graphed the Falcons wins under .500 to look like a bird–but the graphics tend to be simple and flat rather than the fancy, elaborate graphics of a sports talk show. Bois’s visuals are also soundtracked by distinctive jazz music. This unique approach is perfect for Bois. The simple visuals are designed to direct attention to the story, with flat graphs keeping the viewer’s focus on the statistically remarkable data and what it shows about the subjects. The Google Earth images, meanwhile, place the viewer in a very specific place and time. Furthermore, the lo-fi idiosyncrasies of Bois’s visual style compliment the underrecognized stories he focuses on.

However, perhaps the most important strategy that allows Bois to do justice to these stories, and to make documentaries in an unconventional way, is his releasing his work for free on Youtube. This strategy is tied to Bois’ status working for sports blogging network SB Nation. In terms of funding and employment, Bois comes from the world of internet sports writing, rather than documentary filmmaking, which allows him to create unique films that can find their own audience online. His videos are completely in his own style, and the stories are the stories he finds interesting rather than the stories that people would already be interested in. Furthermore, his release strategy and simple visuals combine to give his videos a very personal feel. Unfortunately, this does also mean his films and style aren’t always recognized in discussions of documentary filmmaking. While the New York Times recognized his Mariners series as some of the best TV of

2020, and the Seattle Film Critics Society named that same series as the best documentary feature of the year, Bois has still only gained limited recognition as a great, innovative filmmaker. But his style is incredibly effective, and he’s taken advantage of free internet release in a way few filmmakers have been able to. Jon Bois’ documentaries tell sports stories in a way nobody else can, using his own filmmaking strategy to find compelling human stories that he shares with an audience who he trusts to find whatever he’s focusing on interesting.

At the end of The Bob Emergency , Bois reflects on how all the fascinating players he has focused on are connected by only their name. He says, “People are full of wonder. No matter how you study our history, you will always, always find it.” This is a thesis statement for his entire body of work. He finds that wonder with sports and Google Earth, but his work proves that it can be found anywhere if you look closely enough.