For one short-lived season in 2001, the XFL graced TV screens with its brash brand of football, marked by outsize personalities, tawdry titillation — and what ended up being lousy play. The pro football league’s viewership quickly fell off a cliff, and the XFL became a costly embarrassment for its owners, NBC and WWE (then the WWF), and one of TV’s most spectacular failures.
But for one day in January, many hallmarks of the league — the ‘He Hate Me’ jerseys, the black footballs and scandalous cheerleader uniforms — will be resurrected in a pop-up XFL Hall of Fame in New York.
The temporary exhibit is being curated by the people behind ESPN Films’ upcoming “30 for 30” documentary “This Was the XFL” (premiering Feb. 2), which explores all that went wrong with the sports experiment, delves into the central friendship of NBC’s Dick Ebersol and WWE’s Vince McMahon, and attempts to rewrite the league’s legacy.
“It felt that people for the most part really fundamentally didn’t understand the XFL,” director Charlie Ebersol tells The Post. “Yeah, it failed on paper, but everything about its technology is now commonplace in the NFL and all the other professional sports.
“There’s this massive fan base of people that are obsessed with the XFL and what it was about,” Ebersol (who is Dick’s son) adds. “There hasn’t been [an outlet for that fandom]. There are big Facebook fan groups. You go to a WWE event and you see He Hate Me jerseys and T-shirts from the XFL and Memphis Maniax shirts.”
The free exhibit, which will be open to the public on Jan. 14 at Cooper Union in the East Village, will feature team helmets and jerseys (like that iconic He Hate Me jersey worn by Rod Smart), the trademark black footballs, championship trophies, as well as surprise appearances by XFL stars.
The pioneering technology that turned out to be the true legacy of the league will also be displayed, like the Bubba Cam — the Steadicam that put a helmet-wearing cameraman on the playing field — and the SkyCam, which was invented for the XFL and still used today.
And of course, the famously risqué cheerleaders will be represented, with never-seen original sketches of the uniform designs and behind-the-scenes video of their infamous Playboy ad and high jinks-filled cheerleader tryouts.
Ebersol said he and his team discovered the artifacts — many of which had been gathering dust since the league’s demise 15 years ago — in the process of making the documentary.
“As we would interview people they would say things like, ‘I have the championship trophy sitting in my living room.’ One of the cheerleaders said, ‘I still have my outfit.’ The WWE has an archivist so they have a lot of stuff,” he says. “Some technology we’re still tracking down because the companies don’t exist anymore. The company that created SkyCam for the XFL got bought, but the original cameras are somewhere.”