Left to right, former sprinter Ben Johnson, actor Shamier Anderson and actor, comedian and writer Anthony Q. Farrell at the offices of New Metric Media in Toronto on Thursday.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Comedy is tragedy plus time, the adage goes.
But, as the 40th anniversary of the 1988 Seoul Games approaches, are Canadians really ready to laugh at the 9.79 seconds that broke the country’s heart?
Ben Johnson is, at least. “To me, it’s like a comedy,” the now 64-year-old former sprinter says of the story of his rise and fall, with a smile both big and nervous.
The Jamaican-Canadian sports hero turned villain is taking part in interviews about the wild, wacky and often downright hilarious TV series Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story in the downtown Toronto offices of New Metric Media, the production company behind Letterkenny and other notable Canadian TV comedies such as Children Ruin Everything, Bria Mack Gets a Life and Shoresy.
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Johnson’s trajectory has hitherto been framed as tragedy: He won gold for Canada and set a world record in 100 metres in 1988, but, within days, was stripped of his medal after traces of a performance-enhancing drug were found in his urine.
What’s so funny about that? For Johnson, there’s an absurd comedy to being singled out in what is now widely described as the “dirtiest race in history” – in which only one of the top five finishers ended their careers without testing positive at one point.
Anthony Q. Farrell is the showrunner and executive producer of satirical docudrama miniseries Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
“Why did they choose me or pick me to be the villain of what everybody else was doing?” says Johnson, who went from GOAT to scapegoat for doping in sport in record time.
Hate the Player, which premieres its first two episodes on GameTV on March 26 (streaming the next day on Paramount+), answers that question in the form of a mockumentary – one creator Anthony Q. Farrell knows well, having written for the American version of The Office.
Johnson (played by Scarborough, Ont., native Shamier Anderson) is interviewed about his life – and the unreliable narrator’s recollections are then dramatized in outrageous, liberty-taking manner that’s part Key and Peele sketch comedy, part Drunk History.
His future coach and father figure Charlie Francis (Orphan Black’s Kristian Bruun), for instance, is shown calling the cops to a park in Scarborough in order to discover the fastest Black men in the neighbourhood for his track program.
Then, there’s the depiction of rival Carl Lewis (played by Andrew Bachelor) through Johnson’s eyes: As a short king with a massive Yankee ego and tiny testicles – seen getting jabbed in the bottom by dozens of needles in a “Team USA Secret Science Lab.”
Every few scenes in Hate the Player, a lawyer named Walter played by The Kids in the Hall’s Mark McKinney pops up on screen to issue legal disclaimers about the unverifiability of what viewers are seeing – and to coach Johnson on how to tell his version of the story without getting sued.
“Remember what we talked about?” he says. “Fictionalize, have fun – change their names, flip the gender, change their race.”
During interviews with Johnson, Farrell and Anderson, New Metric Media CEO Mark Montefiore plays a similar role – listening in from across the room and interjecting when someone strays into dangerous legal territory.
When Johnson starts talking about one of the individuals who inspired the composite character of Spike Fairweather – a competitor who is shown spiking Johnson’s beer, at the behest of a shadowy cabal, to sabotage the Canadian’s urine test – Montefiore jumps in: “We won’t say the name there!”
The spark for Hate the Player came when Montefiore read a series of 2018 Toronto Star articles by journalist Mary Ormsby that eventually turned into her 2024 book, World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson.
Ormsby had uncovered certain aspects of the Johnson story that were funny weird, rather than funny ha-ha – like a lack of due process at the Olympics and unsigned handwritten alterations on his drug-test analysis.
Sensing potential in revisiting Johnson’s story, Montefiore quickly met with the ex-runner through Ormsby and snapped up his life rights.
But after taking pitches for a more traditional biopic for a couple years, Montefiore felt he’d hit a dead end dramatically.
Former Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won gold for Canada and set a 100-metre world record in 1988, but was later stripped of his medal after traces of a performance-enhancing drug were found in his urine.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
That’s when he had the real lightbulb moment: What if the story of Johnson – whose postscandal life includes doing TV ads for an energy drink called Cheetah (“I Cheetah all the time!”) – could be told through comedy?
He immediately phoned up Farrell – who had moved back from the United States to Toronto in 2017 to raise his family – to ask if there might be an I, Tonya take on the tale.
Montefiore was referring to a 2017 dark comedy about the figure skater Tonya Harding – whose own fall from grace occurred after the 1994 attack on her rival, Nancy Kerrigan.
That movie is part of a constellation of recent American pop-culture reconsiderations of late-20th-century tabloid scandals – from the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair to the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee sex tape.
These have proved popular, mainly as miniseries, but the legally skittish and creatively conservative Canadian TV industry hadn’t yet given the genre a spin.
While Farrell was immediately intrigued by Montefiore’s pitch, his wife warned him not to write a Ben Johnson comedy; he had to sell her on the idea first – which he eventually did by banging out a pitch document just for her in the basement.
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The Canadian-Caribbean community, the TV writer explains, is very protective of Johnson. “When it all went down, it felt like he was the fall guy,” says Farrell, whose family is from Saint Kitts, and whose in-laws are from Jamaica and Barbados.
“Whenever I talk to people, especially if they’re from the islands, they’ll say: ‘You doing a show about Ben? Don’t forget, he was Canadian when he left and Jamaican when he came home.’”
That part of Johnson’s story – the not-so-subtle racism he encountered joining his mother Gloria in Canada from Jamaica as a young Black teenager with an accent, and how quickly the white establishment in this country who held him up as a model minority cut him loose with holier-than-thou hand-wringing – is mined for both unlikely jokes as well as emotional impact by Farrell.
The show was not originally comedic when Anderson first agreed to play Johnson. “Ben has always been a hero of mine,” says the actor, whose Hollywood credits include John Wick: Chapter 4 to Apple TV’s Invasion. “They had me at Ben Johnson.”
Scarborough, Ont., native Shamier Anderson plays Ben Johnson in the show.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
But the evolution away from drama only made Anderson more committed to Hate the Player – he’s an executive producer – even though he had less experience in comedy.
“That’s when I leaned in 100 per cent,” says the actor, whose Jamaican mom would send him voice memos to help him nail the patois.
“Most biopics, specifically with Black individuals, you know, they don’t necessarily come from a positive light; it’s usually darker, sadder most of the time.”
While Anderson proves a natural at comedy, it no doubt helps that he’s surrounded on screen by genre veterans such as Karen Robinson (Schitt’s Creek), who plays Johnson’s beloved mother Gloria, and Ennis Esmer (Children Ruin Everything), cast as the notorious steroid-administrating doctor Jamie Astaphan.
Then, in an unusual convention for TV, there’s also an ensemble of eight actors who play close to 70 other roles with no regards to gender or race of the real figures they represent.
Farrell, who came to television from theatre and sketch comedy, describes these “BJ Players” and their ridiculous wigs and moustaches as a way of tapping into Toronto’s talent for sketch comedy – and also create a bigger world on a Canadian budget.
It also, conveniently, syncs up with the fictional lawyer Walter’s advice to Johnson to “mix it up” while telling his story in order to not get sued.
That character was not in the first drafts, but came out of the actual process of Farrell having his work lawyered. “Some of what the lawyers said to us has gone right into the script,” he says.
Johnson provided feedback on the scripts, too – but asked for comparatively few changes. Farrell says the athlete was more protective of others than himself – asking, for instance, to alter one scene in which his late much-loved coach Charlie was drunk, because he only ever drank Coca-Cola.
Farrell welcomed Johnson’s presence on the set as well – and was always happy to hear the sprinter laughing during shooting. “It was confirmation that we were doing the right thing,” he says.
Between all the exaggerated elements of the show, Johnson certainly gets his point of view across.
‘I’d do it again’: Ben Johnson has no remorse and is not done trying to clear his name
At a fictionalized version of the early-1990s Dubin Inquiry into drug use in sport, for instance, Anderson’s version of Johnson gets to deliver a stirring speech about how, despite his flaws and failures of those of his age of racing, doors were opened in Canada for future track stars such as Donovan Bailey and Andre De Grasse.
To which the judge responds: He’s never heard of those people – because it’s 1991.
Johnson never comes across as a hero – but he does come across as a human.
Canada’s most (in)famous athlete says he’s pleased with the show. He’s been approached by others over the years to tell his story on film or TV, he says – but nothing ever came to fruition.
“Now they’re going to know the truth and the real story of Ben Johnson,” Johnson says.
Put an asterisk next to that.