The Trailer For ESPN’s XFL Documentary is Here, And It Looks Amazing

The Rock, Jesse Ventura and He Hate Me all make cameos in this ’30 For 30′ teaser.

At perhaps the height of its reach across all media, Vince McMahon’s WWE — WWF at the time — created its own American football league, the XFL. The eight teams and two divisions of the XFL only lasted one full season, but in that time more than enough drama for a documentary treatment went down. So naturally ESPN’s 30 for 30 has done just that. The trailer for This Was the XFL was released Sunday, and we can’t wait to see it.

The big names involved are all there in the trailer — The Rock (still with hair, his star only beginning to go supernova), He Hate Me, and of course, Vince McMahon himself. 

ESPN’s web page for This Was the XFL summarizes the doc as a “bold challenge, a fearless experiment and ultimately, a spectacular failure.” 

The film was directed by Charlie Ebersol, son of XFL co-founder Dick Ebersol. In a director’s statement the younger Ebersol writes that he’d wanted to tell the story for years “but the scale scared me.”

“In fact,” continued Ebersol, “I have never been more intimidated than in the very moment I was sitting behind the camera interviewing my dad and Vince.”

That’s easy to believe. But Charlie Ebersol says he hopes he has captured “a fraction of the hilarious, raucous, painful, griping, and insightful roller coaster ride that was the XFL.”

We have little doubt that he did just that. This Was the XFL premieres on February 2, 2017, on ESPN.  

h/t USA Today