The nature of the sports documentary business is that you’re never going to get everyone to sit down for an interview.
Sometimes it’s about money. Sometimes people just don’t want to talk. And if all the money in the world existed for John Henion, director of Netflix’s Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young, he would have loved to get both Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush, the USC stars on the other side of Young’s signature Rose Bowl moment. Instead, he settled for just Leinart, now a Big Noon Kickoff analyst.
But the person Henion wanted most wasn’t a rival player. It was Young’s own father.
Henion discussed the making of the documentary, which Awful Announcing’s Michael Grant called a missed opportunity that raises more questions than it answers, on a recent episode of The Press Box with The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis and Joel Anderson, the latter of whom played a prominent role narrating and scene-setting the film as a die-hard Texas Longhorns fan and Fort Worth, Texas native.
“The list of people that I didn’t get, first, is his dad,” Henion said. “I talked to Vince and his wife and his sisters and everybody, and we tried to track him down. We even hired a private eye at one point to try to find him, but we just couldn’t find him and connect with him. Because I really wanted to sort of lean into that father-son narrative as much as possible and peel back the layer, but we never did, and to this day I’ve never been in contact with [Vince’s father]. We had to give that up and go in a different direction.”
“Beyond that, I think Andy Reid would’ve been a really interesting perspective,” the director added.
The father search, in the end, went nowhere, despite Henion talking to Vince, his wife, and his sisters, and despite hiring a private eye specifically to find him. Vince Young Sr. remains, to this day, someone the documentary crew never once got on the phone.
But, according to Texas Monthly’s own account of the film, Young did eventually get an answer, just not from Fisher, and not from anyone Henion could track down on his behalf. After leaving rehab, Young visited his father in person and asked him why he’d left. His father’s answer, as Young recalls it in the documentary, is that the streets had simply been better than being with his family.
“I get it,” Young says now. “I forgave him and moved on.”