National Sports Journalism Center

It has happened so many times in the world of sports broadcasting, it sounds naïve to even note it anymore.

But once again, a great sports journalism franchise seems poised on the brink of making a compromise to serve the gods of entertainment and profit. And no matter how many times it has happened before, it still feels crummy.

The reputation on the line this week belongs to HBO’s Hard Knocks franchise, an unscripted docu-series which turns reams of film about a pro football team’s training camp tribulations into a sports-drenched soap opera even the toughest NFL fan can find compelling.

But the team in the cross-hairs of this season’s Hard Knocks episodes is the New York Jets. And that team is dealing with a decision by its top-ranked defensive player, cornerback Darrelle Revis, to not attend training camp as a holdout — sparking pessimistic public statements by Jets owner Woody Johnson that he might not play this season at all.

Which raises an important question for HBO: How are they going to cover this?

Critics like me can only guess at the answer until the show debuts at 10 p.m. Wednesday. Citing tight deadlines and up-to-the-minute editing – a staple of the Hard Knocks series — HBO officials said they would not release a review copy of the first episode to journalists early, keeping us from previewing the show for readers.

Already, several outlets have reported that agents for Revis would not allow HBO’s cameras to attend a negotiating session they held Friday with the team’s general manager. And given Hard Knocks’ status as a partnership with NFL Films, it’s easy to imagine the pressures in place to avoid broadcasting images which might inflame or derail an already delicate situation.

As HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg has noted, a guy who isn’t around doesn’t make for particularly compelling television. But the impact of this player’s absence is due to overshadow the Jets entire season, if unresolved, and all that drama starts with training camp.

According to HBO, the Hard Knocks project has embedded a crew of 24 people from NFL Films with the team, with plans to film over 1,000 hours of footage for distillation into the various sagas to fill the month-long, five-episode series.

I grew addicted to the series last year, when it profiled the beleaguered Cincinnati Bengals, revealing how owner Mike Brown’s whims could hamstring the team and passionate coach Marvin Lewis’ uphill battle to build a spark in his organization. Remembering how the series then had to deal with a contract impasse involving Andre Smith, revealing that he wanted more cash than the player picked after him, I wonder whether we’ll see similar details uncovered in the back-and-forth over Revis.

“We are committed to being an organization that is open and accessible,” Jets chairman and CEO Johnson said in a press release for the program.  But the ongoing saga of Revis’ absence, and real-time aspect of how any portrayal could affect negotiations, may turn that optimistic prediction into something of a pipe dream.

Perhaps it’s just frustration over the ongoing impasse, but I’m increasingly inclined to believe to good folks over at Zonersports.com, who have made the case that Hard Knocks bring a jinx of its own to the teams it profiles.

The site notes that the Bengals, Baltimore Ravens, Dallas Cowboys, and Kansas City Chiefs all saw disappointing setbacks or promising seasons dashed after the series profiled their training camps in years past. Now the Jets seem poised to join that less-than-distinguished club, thanks to their Revis problem.

It all reminds me of something the great PBS historical documentarian Ken Burns said last week about his own work telling stories about sports, talking in particular about his film returning to the subject of baseball in the modern age, The Tenth Inning.

“Narrative is a way that we superimpose something that is essentially (ordered) over something that is essentially chaotic,” he said. “Narrative gives us comfort…a false sense of security, often…(because) we so want to know who should be in and who should be out; who’s bad and who’s good…(But) so much of it, we just have the accept; this is just the way it is.”

So I’m hoping the folks at Hard Knocks will embrace the chaos of the Jets’ current situation without fear or favor, giving us those great fly-on-the-wall moments which have made the series such an invaluable contribution to the sports
documentary canon.

Otherwise, it might as well just be another NFL Films promotional package.

Eric Deggans is TV and Media Critic for the St. Petersburg Times and a 1990 graduate of the Indiana University School of Journalism. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, VIBE magazine, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Sun-Times and many other publications. He also writes a blog on media, The Feed, at blogs.tampabay.com/media.