Cocaine Quarterback review – true crime shouldn’t be this entertaining

It’s right to be sceptical of college footballer turned drug kingpin Owen Hanson sharing his own story from prison. But huge characters join in to tell a wild, droll tale with the ultimate endingDressed in a khaki jumpsuit, his face red in a way that suggests recent tears, Owen Hanson describes his life behind bars. On his first day in prison, another inmate gave him a weapon – a “bonecrusher” – and told him to keep it on him at all times. “I’m some fucking surfer kid from Redondo Beach and you’re telling me I have to go to war?!” Hanson says, shakily.This is one of many moments in the first episode of Cocaine Quarterback that makes me deeply sceptical. The three-part docuseries – released under the Prime Video Sports umbrella – tells the story of a college footballer from California turned drug kingpin, but part one feels more like The Owen Hanson Story, as presented by Owen Hanson. Central to the tale is his father’s alcoholism, his parents’ divorce, and his first, faltering forays into pill-smuggling, when he rolled up a bag of steroids in Tijuana and stuffed it down the back of his underwear (“not inside the hole,” he elucidates, “[but] in the crack”). The steroids were for his own use. But soon he would be hawking them to his fellow footballers at the University of Southern California, a place conjured up here via exuberant archive footage of players flinging themselves through the air and marching bands. Before long, Hanson was dealing harder drugs – and working with one of the world’s most dangerous organised crime groups, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. He had, says Alex Cody Foster – the co-author of his memoir – “the hustle mindset”. More than once it is said that he could have been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company had he put his mind to it. Continue reading...

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