For 24 years HBO has picked a random team to follow during NFL training camp, giving us a near-live documentary on rookies, veterans, stars, GMs and coaches gearing up for a new season. It’s a late-summer staple. A glorious tradition for millions of guys that signals one thing: football starts soon.
It’s also a fascinating study in what we watch and why, because here are a bunch of things about the show that you’d think would tank our interest, but doesn’t:
The games don’t matter. Your favorite team is rarely featured. The stars of the show are often not the stars on the team. And you’re watching practice, which most of us would never bother to do in person or otherwise.
And yet, the show is a two-decades running juggernaut that most guys who love football watch year-after-year.
Why?
At first glance, you could say that the behind-the-scenes stuff is cool and the facilities are cool and seeing the personal lives of NFL players and teams is cool, but that’s not it.
The real reason dudes tune in is this:
Hard Knocks gives us ex-high school athletes or college athletes or fraternity athletes or current pick-up-playing guys a peak into something we secretly crave:
To be back in a locker room every day with our buddies.
Yes, the football on Hard Knocks is fun. And yes, Liev Schreiber’s voice is legendary. And yes, we get an early glimpse of a rookie who might be good or a QB on a new team or a coach who makes you want to head butt a cinder block (Dan Campbell) but what we REALLY love is this:
The dudes screwing around on the field and in the locker room. The shit talking. The jokes. The pranks. The stupid conversations. The great conversations. Time with our boys.
It’s the oldest cliche in sports journalism, but ask a retired pro athlete what he misses most about playing and 99.9999% of the time he’s going to say “the guys in the locker room”.
Here’s a fact: Millions of guys who thrive in that environment are now stuck in an HR-dominated corporate world and feel like they’re suffocating. Sad, but true.
Entire hit shows (The Office) and movies (Office Space) hammer home how soul sucking and brain draining and deadening most offices can be. For competitive, outgoing guys, modern office cultures are often the total opposite of being on a sports team. Sanitized. Stale. Soft.
Compare that to hitting the weight room every day with music pumping. The workouts. The film room. The meals. The motivation. The no-bullshit, say-anything atmosphere. The constant physical and mental competition to be better.
Hard Knocks gives a lot of cubicle dudes and desk guys and work-from-home zoom zombies a glimpse into the time of their lives when they may have had the most pure fun.
Family, fatherhood, friends, it’s all awesome as you get older, but deep down we’d all like to recapture times when we were part of a team as well.
Some find it with BJJ, others CrossFit or triathlons or golf or whatever else tries to fill that void for you.
But nothing beats that feeling of fighting for greatness with your squad. Of testing yourself daily against your peers. Of ball busting and ripping on dudes you’d go to battle for. Of belonging.
That’s what many men over forty crave today.
And that’s what Hard Knocks really delivers.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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Check out my latest books at jonfinkel.com
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