After drawing widespread scrutiny for his controversial tweet in the aftermath of Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s frightening injury during Monday Night Football, Fox Sports host Skip Bayless addressed the situation on Tuesday morning.
Hamlin, 24, collapsed on the field during the first quarter of the game after making a tackle on Bengals receiver Tee Higgins. He was taken away in an ambulance after medical personnel administered CPR to him on the field and brought to University of Cincinnati Medical hospital, where he remains in critical condition. The game was temporarily suspended before the NFL ultimately decided to postpone the contest.
Speaking on Undisputed, and without co-host Shannon Sharpe who was not on the show for undisclosed reasons, Bayless delivered an opening monologue about the scene involving Hamlin, who suffered a cardiac arrest and remains in critical condition as of Tuesday morning. Though Bayless said he apologized for planning to weave some usual sports discussion into the show, he did not directly apologize for his tweet.
“I apologize for what we’re going to set out to do here today if it offends anyone because we’re gonna try to do the show pretty much as we usually do the show. I’ll admit up front, I’m still shook up by what happened last night to Damar Hamlin,” Bayless began. “In fact, I’m still wrecked. In fact, I’m not sure I’m capable of doing this show today. After barely sleeping on it last night, I decided to give it a try.
“We wrestled through much of the night whether to even do a show today because it felt like in our mind we almost can’t win with this,” he added. “Because the last thing we want to try to do is come off as insensitive to what this young man is going through in a life-or-death situation… As this show goes on, we’re going to try and talk about a little bit of sports, but we’re going to continue to talk about what happened to this young man last night and try to sort back through it with help from you and the audience.”
Bayless ended his statement by announcing that Sharpe wasn’t on the show Tuesday, but that he “looked forward to seeing him tomorrow.”
Bayless’s remarks come after he sent an ill-timed tweet out on Monday evening, questioning how the league could postpone the game between two AFC contenders. At the time, the game had been suspended following Hamlin’s injury, and the two teams had retreated to their respective locker rooms.
“No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game - but how? This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular-season outcome … which suddenly seems so irrelevant,” Bayless wrote.
About an hour later, Bayless attempted to clarify the tweet, writing that the priority should be Hamlin’s health over everything else.
“Nothing is more important than that young man’s health. That was the point of my last tweet,” said Bayless. “I’m sorry if that was misunderstood but his health is all that matters. Again, everything else is irrelevant. I prayed for him & will continue to.”
He addressed the tweet as the segment went along, but stopped short of apologizing for the message, which he said was “widely misconstrued.”
“And then came my third tweet, which I believe was widely misconstrued, misinterpreted,” Bayless said, per Awful Announcing. “I don’t follow what’s happening on Twitter, I just tweet. But my boss here at Fox called and said, ‘Hey, people are really reacting strongly to your tweet, maybe you should clarify.’ Which I immediately did.”
“I made the point that this late in the season, with a game of this magnitude, it’s very difficult to postpone it, yet the end of my tweet was, all of which suddenly seems so irrelevant. For the first time in the history of the NFL, my point was, it was all rendered irrelevant by what was happening on the football field in front of all those football players… they were shaken to their foundations.”
