Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin is breathing on his own and football fans are breathing a sigh of relief. The broader public, hanging on the story of a player needing nine minutes of CPR on the field just to avoid death, are breathing a sigh of relief. At the NFL offices on Park Avenue in New York, league officials are also breathing a sigh of relief but perhaps not for the same reasons as everyone else.
Commissioner Roger Goodell’s NFL is an economic leviathan, by far the most popular sports league in the United States. This is measured in television ratings, social media interactions, betting and in the murky, depersonalized world of fantasy sports. Yet for all its popularity as perhaps the last gasp of a uniting, monocultural force in the United States, football also exists on a rickety foundation.
This is a sport that fits hand in glove with a nation awash in violence. It proudly presents a brutal, three-hour, highly commodified spectacle for popular consumption. The players have their faces and bodies hidden under a mountain of equipment and a helmet. The league delivers — with the tagline “football is family” — an image of violence without consequence, or at least violence suffered by largely anonymous, overwhelmingly Black athletes who sacrifice their bodies and minds week after week.
