Thursday, August 30, 2007

Hard Knocks

After a six-year hiatus, HBO's excellent Hard Knocks series has returned to television this season. For the uninitiated, Hard Knocks is a behind-the-scenes look at life in training camp for a professional football team. This season's subject is the Kansas City Chiefs. Previous subjects included the Baltimore Ravens and the Dallas Cowboys.

Even though I'm not a fan of the Chiefs, I find the subject matter so compelling that I watch religiously each week as the drama unfolds. The series does an excellent job of showing the human side of life in professional sports; particularly for those sacrificing their bodies for the dream of making a professional football roster. In addition, viewers get a peek at the work that goes into preparing to compete in a sixty minute NFL contest. If you've ever wondered what meetings are like, what the coaches and player personnel men think, how practices are conducted, what players do while not practicing at training camp, and what professional football players are really like as people, then this series is for you.

I can also heartily recommend Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today's NFL, by John Feinstein. It is a book that covers much of the same material broached by Hard Knocks, except it extends through the entire length of a season. Even though the book chronicles the hated Baltimore Ravens (well, hated by me - a Browns fan - anyway), it is excellent reading.

If you're fan of the NFL, you need to spend time with this excellent material. You'll see the game in a way you may not have considered previously.

1 comment:

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