At last, America’s Team stars on HBO’s Hard Knocks, but could we have more football in this football show?
At last, America’s Team stars on HBO’s Hard Knocks, but could we have more football in this football show?
W hen I heard HBO was doing a season of Hard Knocks about the midseason fortunes of the Indianapolis Colts, I thought no show could be more directly targeted at me. I’m not excitable about many things, but as Rich Lowry (a partisan of the rival Tennessee Titans) can attest, I’m fairly excitable about my Colts. I’ve been rooting for them since 1976 (longer than any current team member has been alive), and cheering on the blue and white is almost the only aspect of my life that hasn’t changed since then. Every Sunday in the fall, the strange and unwelcome persona known in my household as “football dad” reappears.
So I hang on every minute of Hard Knocks In Season: The Indianapolis Colts, but I wish it were better. As with Friday Night Lights, a football show that contained almost no football, I was hungry for more X’s and O’s, but instead I got images of the players buying breakfast for schoolchildren or listening to the motivational speeches of their coach, Frank Reich, who talks like the posters you used to see in your high-school guidance counselor’s office.
Coach gets the series going by beating into a coma a metaphor about how succeeding in football is like climbing a mountain. He’s got a slide of a mountain illustrated with what he calls “the key checkpoints.” Checkpoint one: “Dominate division.” So, win football games. Checkpoint two: “turnover margin.” Which is something you do in order to win football games, so it should probably be below “dominate division.” Checkpoint three: “adversity/prosperity.” One must be defeated and the other will result? Okay. Checkpoint four is “winners win,” suggesting we’re on Mount Tautology. And checkpoint five is “playoff distinctions,” which means . . . keep winning in the playoff, I guess. Does any of this really need to be stated? No football player wakes up in the morning thinking, “One thing I know for sure is: You can turn over the ball as much as you want, no way will it make a difference.”
I think — I know — there is a lot more to football coaching than, “Men, I want you to go out there and play better than the other guys.” Which makes Hard Knocks a course in frustration. We understand coaching to be absolutely pivotal because the same head coaches (Bill Belichick, Andy Reid, John Harbaugh, Mike Tomlin, Mike McCarthy) are in the playoffs year after year after year, despite the sport’s insane level of personnel turnover. But Reich can’t allow HBO to actually see what he’s doing with the Xs and the Os because then other teams would see it too. So all we get is trips up and down Platitude Peak.
“We gotta fight every week, man, every week. It’s hard to win in the NFL, it’s hard” — superstar running back and MVP candidate Jonathan Taylor.
“December’s here. December’s here” — Reich, in December.
“The finished product was on Sunday. After you put the work in in the offseason and during the week. When we walked out on that field on Sunday, I just felt connected to everybody on that team” — Hall of Famer Bruce Smith, Reich’s friend and former Buffalo Bills teammate.
“So we were kinda all in it together, for better or for worse” — Steve Tasker, another of Reich’s former teammates.
Even Polonius didn’t manage to string together as many banalities. Clichés drag sports into vapidity and dullness, which is why it’s impossible to pay attention for more than ten seconds at the end of a football game when one of the winning players offers a post-game interview.
And yet football is a really exciting sport: high-speed, full-contact chess. Why clog up the documentary with scenes of people being boring? Far better are the jubilantly unscripted moments: “This my s***!” cries linebacker Darius “Maniac” Leonard on a live mic, during a game against Tampa Bay, after he forces a fumble by punching the ball out of a runner’s arms. Leonard adds, more reflectively, that “Usually I talk s***” to the opposing quarterback in such a situation, but this time he simply walked by the player without saying anything, because that player was Tom Brady. “I couldn’t do it,” he says. Brady has been winning Super Bowls since Leonard was six years old, and the level of respect he has earned is unique. Moments such as this one, which genuinely reveals what goes on in a player’s mind, are what the documentary needs more of. They don’t necessarily have to take place on the field; cornerback Xavier Rhodes, whose daughter Jersey is born (via induced labor, during the Colts’ bye week), is adorable when he strolls into an American Girl store with his four-year-old daughter and exclaims, “This is a great experience. I ain’t gonna lie.”
Yet Hard Knocks mostly alternates between rehashing greeting-card affirmations and working to clean up the overall impression of pro football players, who as a group tend to be defined (perhaps unfairly) by the worst deeds committed by some of them. The Colts are shown diving into community service, cameras rolling, in scene after scene. It’s hard to say how much of this is for show, but it doesn’t really matter. Football players are great entertainers, they pay huge amounts in taxes, and hence they already “give back” plenty regardless of whether they spend the occasional hour hanging out with little kids.
Pushing the community-service theme, the narrator incorrectly, indeed absurdly, dubs the Walter Payton Man of the Year trophy “football’s most prestigious award.” The most ardent football fan you’ll meet would have difficulty telling you who won it last year, or any year. We watch the Colts’ nominee, star cornerback Kenny Moore II, being told he is a finalist for the award, and the reaction is notably less muted than the one evinced by football players in the process of receiving, say, the Vince Lombardi trophy.
I don’t doubt that Moore, who comes across as modest and smiles disarmingly, is a good guy; he spends Thanksgiving with the family of a little boy named Mason Garvey who died of cancer after Moore forged a mentorship with him, and the warmth and devotion on both sides is plain to see. Moore grew up with six sisters and describes Mason as the little brother he never had.
Touching as those scenes are, however, the series would be better if it reserved as much time for celebrating the princely aspects of the players’ lives. What can it be like to be a 26-year-old decamillionaire? Where are everybody’s hot cars and palatial estates? The tight shots of people in their kitchens seem more designed to conceal than reveal, and sticking to that approach is why the series feels more like publicity than documentary.