PHILADELPHIA — As Damar Hamlin lay dying on the field Monday night, then as he lay fighting for life in the hospital this past week, we experienced a range of emotions. Fear. Sympathy. Hope.
Shame? Yes, shame. At least, a little. A wonderful young man nearly died for our ... entertainment?
It’s a dilemma.
Should we watch this Sunday? Questionable. Will we watch this Sunday? Yes.
Will we cringe a little more when we see a hellacious hit? Sure.
But we will watch. We can’t help it. Maybe we’ll even watch a little more closely. This is not our finest selves.
We sanction, with our interest, the violence inherent in football, especially football played in the NFL, its highest and most terrifying level. It is bloodsport, gladiatorial, thrilling because of both its beauty and its brutality.
Hamlin is a safety for the Buffalo Bills. He chose this career. In the course of his duty, he collided, chest to shoulder, with onrushing Bengals receiver Tee Higgins. Hamlin’s heart, beating strong in his 24-year-old chest moments before, went into cardiac arrest. He collapsed.
He survived only because, in just 10 seconds, medial staff knelt at his side as he stopped breathing to deliver those lovely, three-letter acronyms, CPR and AED. Today, it appears, he’s on his way to being OK; he flexed for his teammates on a Zoom call Friday.
But is football OK? Is it OK to enjoy it?
The play in question was clean. The play in question was typical. The outcome was unusual, but perhaps not as unusual as we think. In a league known best for concussions (and concussion cover-ups), players suffer injuries to internal organs, too.
The Eagles on Wednesday activated the practice window for safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson. He hasn’t played since Nov. 27, when he suffered a lacerated kidney. In 2015, Colts star quarterback Andrew Luck and Chargers star receiver Keenan Allen suffered lacerated kidneys in consecutive weeks. Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith and Cowboys tight end Jason Witten each suffered a lacerated spleen, in 2014 and 2018, respectively.
No NFL player has died from an internal organ injury since Detroit Lions receiver Chuck Hughes, in 1971, but the threat remains. James Bradberry, a cornerback in his seventh season, said every player knows they could be the next Damar Hamlin, and yes, it will cross his mind before the Eagles’ finale Sunday against the Giants.
“I just try not to think about it,” Bradberry said. “Especially right before I step on the field.”
The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, which tracks injuries in all sports, reports zero deaths from traumatic organ injuries in 2019 or 2021.
The center reports four deaths in 2021 and three in 2019, all as a result of brain injuries, and all at the high school level (they found none in 2020, in part because of how the COVID pandemic limited participation in football).
The center cites combined estimates from various sources that indicate more than 4 million people play football every year in the United States. Literally, football deaths in circumstances similar to Hamlin’s are less than one in a million.
That doesn’t make me feel any better.
How about you?
Rarer and rarer
Improvements in equipment, rules changes, improved recognition and reporting of incidents, and an emphasis on coaching safer techniques have combined to cut the number of traumatic fatalities in football in half in the last five years (2017-21) compared with the previous five.
That doesn’t mean players don’t still get hurt.
We know that brain injuries can result in irreversible lifelong consequences, and that even minor brain injuries often have a cumulative effect. Are internal organs — kidneys, livers, hearts — subject to long-term effects from long-term abuse?
No one seems to know. The center’s director of its cardiac division, Jonathan A. Drezner out of the University of Washington, declined to comment.
Bradberry figures all of it takes a toll. He doesn’t ask for our sympathy now; after all, every player understands the risks. He asks for our empathy later.
“Maybe you could appreciate us more when we get out of the NFL,” Bradberry said. “You know, a couple of days before Hamlin got hurt, a former NFL player died.”
Uche Nwaneri, a guard for the Jaguars from 2007 to 2013, died of heart failure Friday in Louisiana. He was 38.
Violent intent
Tee Higgins didn’t mean to hurt Damar Hamlin, but, without question, some football players tackle with malice.
Some are overt, like current Eagles defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh and hellbent Raiders and Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict. Fined 15 times, Burfict lost more than $5 million in fines and suspensions, the last one a helmet-to-helmet hit on Colts tight end Jack Doyle that cost Burfict the last 12 games of the 2019 season, made him untouchable, and effectively ended his NFL career.
Between massive fines, crippling suspensions, and more penal penalties, the days of the headhunter are over. But football can still be intentionally cruel. These days, the subtleties of the cruelties are devilish and succinct.
Consider the hit that injured Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and forced him to miss the last two games. As Bears defensive end Trevis Gipson tackles Hurts, Gipson raises his arms to ensure that every ounce of his 263 pounds drives Hurts’ right shoulder into the ground. Hurts has a sprained shoulder.
The play was entirely legal, and not even particularly dirty. It’s just that, no matter how well-conditioned, well-padded, or well-protected, the human body can only withstand so much force before it starts to rupture, fracture, and disintegrate.
Me, too
If you smell some hypocrisy here, your nose isn’t hallucinating.
I profit from my coverage of football over the last three decades. There is plenty of room in sportswriting to avoid promoting a game that I know to be the most horrific team sport in American history. But wouldn’t that be like a crime reporter refusing to cover murder and rape?
There is no avoidance of injury for NFL players besides escape. Jim Brown and Barry Sanders, the two best running backs in history, retired at the ages of 30 and 31, respectively. Lesser stars — receivers Calvin Johnson and Al Toon, running backs Robert Smith and Tiki Barber, linebacker Patrick Willis — all left the NFL with legacy left to be written.
The violence of football always will be its essence, its core. It is not for the faint of heart to play or to watch.
Every player, from high school on, understands this. But for many fans and reporters, the helmeted and uniformed objects of their admiration and interest are little more than video game characters. They often do not see human beings, complex and fragile, encased in the colors of their tribe.
Damar Hamlin might change that for some, at least temporarily. But he won’t change it for anybody fully invested in professional football.
We celebrate plenty of things we know to be unhealthy and decadent. Playing football is unhealthy. Enjoying it is decadent. It is who we are.
Will the Hamlin tragedy — and it is a tragedy, even though he lived — will make the NFL less popular? Hardly.
It’s more likely that it will make it more so.
It will make the games must-see TV.
