IF AMERICA IS SO GREAT, WHY DO WE JEOPARDIZE LIVES ON FOOTBALL FIELDS?
Our nation sees itself as a global powerhouse, but when Damar Hamlin fights for his life after another collision in another fraught NFL season of endless injury scares, the world thinks we’re deranged
We live in the only world country, remember, where the predominant sport is predicated on violence. American football is not soccer, as Lionel Messi so exquisitely educated us last month. Nothing is remotely beautiful about our pastime, which is only a recent phenomenon, borne of a need to be savage and dangerous and aerodynamic and sexy — and gambling-friendly, from the serious bettors to office fantasy players — after baseball’s slower, smarter rhythms ruled for decades.
The rest of Planet Earth thinks we’re mentally disturbed, wedded to a sick religion. Those detractors were almost proven deadly right on Monday night, a fatality avoided only when Damar Hamlin’s heartbeat was restored twice, first on the field and then in a hospital. For now, we wait and pray and donate millions to his foundation. Positive signs were reported overnight by a friend, who said Hamlin’s oxygen levels had improved. Soon enough, we’ll return to our TV devices and stadium seats, back for more brutality and bloodlust. What this habit says about us is not admirable or healthy.
It’s kind of warped, actually.
America likes to think of itself as the global powerhouse, more humane than Russia and China. So why do we allow football to be our blind spot, our cult obsession, our inescapable guilty pleasure, our multiple-times-weekly horror movie? Nothing is wrong with self-examination after such a jarring moment, on the second night of a new year, when introspection is raw and revealing. The pro and college games continue to dominate our every breath and twitch, designed-for-broadcast-screen spectacles that blow away all other entertainment forms by various industry metrics. We watch knowing full well that collisions will happen. Too many psychos actually hope for collisions and stretchers and, inevitably, get their wish.
But we keep watching anyway, which counters what is progressive about 21st-century life in this republic. People take pride in being woke, whatever that means, yet they abandon all common sense and logical precaution and plan schedules around barbaric contests funded by media enablers that have committed more than $130 billion to the NFL, a colossus that generates about $20 billion a year. If opioids are a national epidemic, football isn’t far behind as a societal toxin. We’ll continue to tune in by the tens of millions, more when Super Bowl Sunday arrives next month.
Why?
Why can’t we pull away as Hamlin fights for his life in an intensive-care unit? He suffered cardiac arrest after one such collision, routine by football standards but leading to his terrifying collapse nonetheless, the fall that left him limp and a mortified audience numb. Anyone who has been watching this death sport in recent months couldn’t have been shocked. Tua Tagovailoa’s concussion ordeal was initially underplayed before growing into a week-to-week crisis, another indictment of the league’s short-shrifting of brain trauma. Last weekend, as Nick Foles convulsed in agony after his rib cage was all but ripped apart, Kayvon Thibodeaux celebrated the hit with a snow-angel party. This on the same day when Josh Sweat tried to make a headfirst tackle and wound up motionless, face down on the turf for several minutes, before he was carted away. Every week, every game, something distressing happens that makes us cringe, wince, shriek or want to hurl. Why subject ourselves to hell? Why subject players to peril? Does football fulfill some sort of masochistic urge? The shrinks are about to give up on America.
Are you still wondering why Gisele Bundchen divorced Tom Brady, the greatest of all quarterbacks? “This is a very violent sport, and I have my children and I would like him to be more present,” she said as the papers were signed last fall. Were you listening when Kelly Stafford, wife of the reigning Super Bowl-champion QB, urged her husband to consider retirement during a concussion-marred season? “Would I give it up in a heartbeat? One thousand percent. I'd give up the football, the money, the fame, everything. I don't need that,” she said on her podcast, for Matthew’s ears. “I just need the man I fell in love with to be the same man for my kids and the life that we are going to live.”
So when Hamlin was surrounded by medical personnel who administered CPR to jumpstart his heart — as weeping Buffalo Bills teammates joined the Cincinnati Bengals and petrified fans in what felt like a funeral-in-progress — wasn’t this an expected function of a maniacal, merciless pursuit? The NFL sells pain and calamity. Why would anyone be stunned? I believe ESPN’s play-by-play man, Joe Buck, when he says the league told the teams they had five minutes to warm up as Hamlin’s life hung in the balance. No one buys into the “Next Man Up” mentality more than commissioner Roger Goodell and the 32 team owners, who want their well-compensated help to keep playing and the show to go on. The NFL denied any appearance of preparing to restart the game, but Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow began to warm up. He didn’t do so of his own volition.
“Immediately, my player hat went on,” insisted Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president for football operations and a former defensive back. “How do you resume play after you’ve seen such a traumatic event occur in front of you in real time? … Five-minute warm-up never crossed my mind, personally. And I was the one communicating with the Commissioner. We never, frankly, it never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play. That’s ridiculous. That’s insensitive. And that’s not a place that we should ever be in.”
Yet the league hadn’t announced, as of late Wednesday morning, what should be apparent: A postponed game must be canceled. The Bills and Bengals are traumatized and aren’t ready to play this Sunday, much less mentally positioned to wedge in a game sometime next week when both are due to begin the postseason the following weekend. How callous is Goodell to think three games in roughly a week’s time would be possible? He should be trying to allay fears about injuries, but an additional game only would further endanger players. Who really cares about playoff seeding at this point? As I wrote the other night, the 13-3 Bills can be the No. 2 AFC seed and the 12-4 Bengals the No. 3 seed, assuming both win this Sunday. From my view, I wouldn’t be opposed to canceling the playoffs altogether — imagine, no Super Bowl! — as anguish, alarm and dread grip players throughout the league. That won’t happen, given the lost billions. But a pregnant pause would do America and its favorite sport a godly amount of good.
“CPR, I mean, that's when it gets real,” a normally fearless Aaron Rodgers said. “They're fighting to save this guy's life not in the locker room or at the hospital, like, on the field. I can't even imagine what that would be like to go through. … Whether you’re currently playing or done playing, you’re shook by this because you don’t think you’d ever see something like this on the field. It’s bad enough when you see a guy gets carted off, right? That messes with you. Or when you see a guy take a really bad concussive shot, and you’re like, Man, I don’t want that to be me. Am I going to have my cognitive function when I’m 50, 60? What kind of risk am I really setting myself up for. This kid’s 24 years old, right? This really, it f—ed me up.”
Said Bills left tackle Dion Dawkins, one of the few Buffalo players up to speaking publicly, on ESPN: “We are vulnerable humans. Our brother is fighting, and we have taken off all of that armor and we're just being human. ... We're uniting with just positive vibes and just positive spirits and positive prayer. We're all human and we try to be our best all we possibly can. And at the end of the day, we are humans, and we have families, and we care and we cry and we're vulnerable and we have emotion and we feel the same pain that the regular person feels.”
The football machine is conditioned to carry on anyway. When kickoff nears, humans morph into robots. It’s grim. It’s sad. Tweeted Ryan Clark, the ESPN analyst and former NFL defensive back: “We use these cliches. ‘Going to war,’ ‘willing to die,’ ‘give it all.’ That’s all talk. It’s a game. A game! You never suit up & think you’re not going to make it home.”
Damar Hamlin hasn’t made it home yet. Who knows when he will? If he will? Should he pull through, his career as a professional safety is finished, a catastrophic blow to a 24-year-old who overcame a gangs-and-crime-infested neighborhood outside Pittsburgh — murdered friends, a father imprisoned for drug-dealing — to make the big time. “We are just going to continue to pray, and I know he is in great hands with the medical team he has here. They have been doing a tremendous job,” said Hamlin’s uncle, Dorrian Glenn, in an ESPN interview outside the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. “I know he's still here, I know he's fighting. We appreciate all the prayers and support we have been getting from people all over — not just the country, but the world. ... It really means a difference for my family to see that, and I know it'll mean a difference to Damar when he sees that.”
For all the plaudits about ESPN’s coverage — Buck and Troy Aikman did distinguish themselves in the main booth with poise — I was taken aback by the reactions of some commentators, who all but melted into overemotional saccharine. Football is no different than a war. It should be covered as such. I also was alarmed by the flurry of house ads, as I pointed out in my previous column, that celebrated the NFL and urged fans to buy team merchandise and streaming subscriptions — all as Hamlin either lay still or was being whisked to the hospital. The network was not totally prepared, a stunning failure when football is an exercise in brutishness.
You are pardoned for detecting that the league and its media partners are disingenuous, to a degree, in the aftermath of an existential crisis. All this talk about love and humanity — shouldn’t we also be talking about the health and safety of young men and the absurdity of football? “Last night was supposed to be a great night for the NFL and a great showcase for our hometown. Instead, the human side of our sport became paramount ... and in that moment, humanity and love rose to the forefront," Bengals president Mike Brown said Tuesday. “As medical personnel undertook extraordinary measures, both teams demonstrated respect and compassion while fans in the stadium and people around the country bolstered the support for Damar and love for each other. The Bengals are thankful for the love and compassion shown by all. Praying for Damar.”
Love is sweet. It unites a divided land, if only temporarily. But why does it take a tragedy to confirm what we should grasp every time we indulge in a football game? This is a wretched and macabre experience, an American lie exposed only when a player is close to death.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.