“Powerlessness can be a powerful feeling …”
On Tuesday morning, fewer than 12 hours after Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin was carted off the field to the intensive care unit of a Cincinnati hospital to fight for his life, Jeremy White, the cohost of Buffalo’s morning sports talk radio show, approached the microphone and began to try to verbalize what an entire city could not.
White is on WGR550 every morning from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and has been since the dawn of the Obama administration. He has helped steer some of the most difficult conversations the sports-minded city has had over the past two decades. He joked that callers have told him he’s like a therapist after disappointing Bills losses. But this week would require a different space in his brain. Like the time, at the beginning of the pandemic, a listener called in from his hospital bed, unsure whether he would live due to complications from the coronavirus, to warn people of the seriousness of the disease (that listener, White says, survived and thanked them recently for the catharsis of sharing his fear on the radio).
