I’m going to steal something from the playbook of Leroy “Roy” Johnson, the main character and main antagonist of HBO’s BS High. I’m going to say that, in my non-libelous opinion, Roy Johnson is a preening maniac and nowhere near as charming as he thinks.
What I won’t say is that, in my opinion, he scammed underprivileged young men out of an education and potential athletic careers — since libel becomes an actionable claim once it’s made about criminal actions — but I will stick to the gray areas Johnson seems to adore so much and say that, at the very least, that’s just what I heard from HBO’s captivating new documentary.
Executive produced by Adam McKay (Succession, The Menu, Don’t Look Up) and directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe (Two Distant Strangers), BS High is the story of Bishop Sycamore High School, a so-called charter school that failed to either educate its players or prepare them for college athletics via the football team it was built around. Further, it is about Roy Johnson, aka the Big Bad Wolf if he were a balding, self-satisfied middle-aged man.
The well-crafted doc does its best not to make everything about Johnson, so I will make the same attempt in this review. But you have to know that’s a tall order. If the cliché is true that a story is only as good as its villain, then this story is amazing.
What can one say about Johnson as presented in this documentary? He’s occasionally charming but always with something behind his wide-eyed demeanor that reads as either neurotic, acquisitive, or both. The first time we meet him, he explains that he has studied body language in school (with no way to tell if that’s true or something he just says to confer authority upon himself), and he worries about how he’ll come off depending on the position of his hands.
“Do I look like a con artist?” he asks the directors with a smile. “I don’t wanna look like a con artist.” Later, while giving a list of his “qualities,” he explains, “I’m insecure, I’m an extremist, and I’m very resourceful.” And, as he’s just self-aware enough to know: “This is a bad combination.”
He’s a man who has ostensibly spent his entire adult life trying to profit off of others while providing nothing in return. He doesn’t see his actions in terms of “good” or “bad” but rather “legal or not.” This is not to say he doesn’t often break the law; he certainly does, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid hotel bills, parking tickets, etc. in his wake. It just means that when he isn’t outright disregarding the rules, he’s contorting them in his favor. In all, Roy Johnson is a man who has studied the topography of the law enough to ascertain the depths of its gray areas.
All of this culminates in the day his “school” plays against IMG, a Florida sports academy that houses one of the nation’s best high school football teams. Bishop Sycamore (cheekily referred to as “BS” in the doc) is trounced. It’s a 58-0 blowout that, because it was broadcast by ESPN, leaves the BS players humiliated on a national scale. From here, investigations begin and the results leave people like journalist Andrew King, Ohio student athletics investigator Ben Ferree, and Johnson’s former partner John Branham Sr. feeling annoyingly vindicated that they were right about Johnson back when no one cared to listen.
BS High transitions from comedy into tragedy when we see the toll of Johnson’s eager mendacity. He is a preposterous figure, and it’s definitely funny to watch him equivocate and half-truth his way into a bad facsimile of a justification for his actions, but then there’s the effect these lies had on his players.
Testimonials from former BS players suddenly make this an uneasy watch. Quarterback Trilian Harris was depressed to the point of suicidal ideation after not only feeling duped but having the result of this confidence trick play out on live television and, worse, Twitter. Cornerback Adrian “Pahokee” Brown Jr. feels cheated out of his football dreams and his opportunity to focus on getting into a real college. And stories like these repeat themselves until the joke has lost its punch.
Roy Johnson, in his hubris and delusion, is hilarious; what he did to these kids is not. As featured sports journalist Bomani Jones puts it, “The coach is seen as another father,” and Johnson exploits this expectation of a positive role model to the detriment of disadvantaged and vulnerable teens.
What may surprise some viewers, as it surprised people at the time, is that Johnson is a Black man. Bomani Jones makes it clear why this shouldn’t shock anyone. If there is a question of “how could he do this to his own people,” people that, for one reason or another, likely would have a hard time getting into college and especially college football, Jones posits the answer as this: “He did that to his people because that’s who you could do this to.”
What makes the documentary ultimately a devastating viewing experience is that we see how much these kids, young men aged anywhere from 18 to 20, wanted this to work out. They came to Johnson because they were love bombed and promised the world. What they got was a $12k “tuition” fee and injuries from the IMG game that may last a lifetime.
If it sounds like I’ve exhausted every narrative thread in this doc and spoiled it, please believe me when I say there’s so much more. There’s the school’s precursor, Christians of Faith Academy, that failed spectacularly before morphing into BS. There are the bizarre, occasionally disturbing anecdotes about Johnson’s actions, including the time he ran over geese for fun. And then there’s the legal fallout (or lack thereof) that Johnson faced for his actions beyond his two fake academies. There’s so much more, and it’s all packaged into a nice 97-minute runtime.
Directors Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe set out to tell a wacky story about a woefully overmatched team from a fictitious school and the con man behind it. What they got was this and also a meditation on how this was only possible because the con man knew how much import is placed on high school football in America and how much money, which students never see, can be made from someone enterprising enough to put together a robust program. Johnson’s problem was that he was foolish enough to think he could do this with only his oily smile and Grandma-why-are-your-eyes-so-big disposition.
I want to stay in a Johnsonian libel loophole, so I’ll say this: I think this documentary is amazing, necessary viewing because it is about a man who (I think) preyed on the disadvantaged remorselessly. Johnson will be (I think) silly enough to really believe all publicity is good publicity and will continue his life being (in my opinion) a tiresome, egoistical bore.
It’s just a good thing this documentary is out to warn about folks like him and the problems they represent.
BS High premieres Wednesday, August 23, 2023, at 9:00–10:40 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max.
