Damar Hamlin’s terrifying collapse and the everyday violence of football

It was a normal tackle, a normal hit, a normal moment in a big football game, one of the biggest of the season, a nationally televised Monday night matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Buffalo Bills, two of the NFL’s best teams. Then Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old Bills safety, stood up and fell backward, his legs limp and on his feet, his heart stopped. The team surrounded him as medical professionals performed CPR and used a defibrillator to get his heart beating again. The players cried and knelt, held hands and prayed. Finally, about sixteen minutes after his fall, Hamlin was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he remains in critical condition. The coaches met, gathered the players and headed to the locker room.

The ethos of football is to play forward. The player cuts off his leg, jumps off, and the game continues. The player is concussed, stumbles and the game continues. The player breaks his neck, gets kicked out and the game continues. Football is violent. Violence is an inherent part of its sporting nature. It’s part of the stakes, the excitement, the intensity and the draw. And yet there’s a line that’s almost incomprehensible even to men who accept the risks and fans who celebrate them for it. On Monday evening, the border was crossed. It was clear from the faces of the players and coaches: they didn’t think much about the games. My player hat went off right away, Troy Vincent, the NFL’s vice president of football operations and a former cornerback, told reporters after the game. How do you keep playing after seeing such a traumatic event unfold in front of you in real time?

This question, of course, invites another: how are you ever continue playing after witnessing such a traumatic event? The most important thing right now is Hamlin’s life. Then comes the mental and emotional health of those who care about him and those who have seen him, a circle now so large that his fundraiser for a Pittsburgh-area toy drive raised more than three million dollars in one night from more than a hundred thousand donors. . And yet the games go on.

About a decade ago, the NFL came under intense scrutiny for the devastating effects of head injury, and a major shift in the perception of football seemed to be taking place. The participation of young people has decreased. There were front page stories, lawsuits, congressional investigations, a Will Smith movie. There were also domestic violence scandals, stories of painkiller addiction, social justice controversies, yet the popularity of the sport has remained almost unchanged.

If anything, soccer has become a more valuable television asset. This season, the first week of NFL games averaged more than eighteen million viewers. The Thanksgiving game had forty-two million viewers. The Super Bowl can exceed one hundred million in the United States. NBC’s Sunday Night Football averaged 19.3 million viewers in 2021, nearly double the average of its top non-sports program, NCIS No controversy, however large, seemed big enough to threaten the NFL’s status as the nations premier entertainment, which therefore, the television networks and technical streaming companies will pay the league a total of one hundred and thirteen billion dollars over the next ten years for its distribution.

Over the past ten years, the NFL has been working to make the game safer. There are new rules, new techniques, new equipment. Some of the publicity surrounding the effort is surely intended to appease jittery fans who find watching basketball or football in relative safety less morally fraught. But much of it is certainly sincere. No one in the league ever wants to see something like what happened to Hamlin on Monday night.

A change in football is possible. It has happened before. At the turn of the 20th century, players died on the football field with amazing frequency. When a Union College player died after being kicked in the head while trying to tackle a New York University player, the sport was banned. President Teddy Roosevelt was one of those who sought to save football by changing it. One of the innovations aimed at making the game less nasty was the forward pass.

But it seems unlikely to see such a radical change right now. Flag football is becoming more popular, and the NFL is part of it. (The Pro Bowl is played in flag football.) Whether fans and players want to admit it, part of football’s allure is its risk, its frenetic action, its collision of great skill and raw power, its every thrill that comes with it. snap. Hamlins cardiac arrest has shown us again what we should have seen all along, how real those risks are. After all, what he experienced wasn’t something outside the boundaries of the game. He did what he’s done countless times, and what we’ve seen countless times, also hoping on some level that nothing would go wrong, but knowing on some level that it could.