Football fans tape a sign to a fence during a vigil outside the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin lies in critical condition, in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Jan. 3.MEGAN JELINGER/Reuters
When 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on live television on Monday night, you were struck by a few things.
How tenuous life is. How removed most of us are from the most frightening parts of it. And how ready the NFL was for this to happen.
Hamlin’s catastrophic injury occurred after what looked like an average football play. He absorbed a collision in the process of making a tackle. He popped back to his feet. But after a couple of beats, Hamlin fell backward like a plank, unconscious before he hit the ground.
This sort of thing could happen in other sports, but the reaction might not have been the same. Elsewhere, there might have been confusion and panic. In the NFL, people reacted with practised professionalism. This extended from the field to the sideline into the stands and out to the country at large.
Hamlin was surrounded by emergency personnel immediately. Teammates and opponents knew to form a prayerful circle around him. Broadcasters knew the mournful tone to take.
The coaches knew to meet up and agree that the game could no longer be played. The talking heads back in studio knew to begin speaking about this as a great, shared tragedy. Politicians knew to begin empathizing immediately.
“We are all Buffalo Bills fans tonight,” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy said on Twitter.
Everyone understood instinctively what needed to be said – we’re going to get through this together.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Hamlin remained sedated in a Cincinnati hospital. The Bills said in a statement that his heartbeat was restored on the field by medical personnel. His prognosis remains unclear. But football knows what to do next.
Twenty years ago, hits such as the one Hamlin took were the raw material of the NFL. Its business was mining those masculine virtues of violence – toughness, controlled aggression, the ability to absorb punishment. The league refined them, packaged them weekly, and then reprocessed them for use as part of its film empire.
That attitude shifted during the concussion crisis. It’s no longer cool to talk about a guy getting his bell rung. Actually, you can’t say the words “bell” and “rung” in the same sentence any more.
What’s changed other than that? Nothing. People still watch the NFL for its gladiatorial qualities. Some days, it looks like Cirque du Soleil out there, with guys getting pinwheeled in the air and knocked flat, then jumping back up.
Every once in a while one of them is taken to the blue tent to make sure he knows who the president is, and then sent back out there.
For a while, there was a feeble conversation about how to stop the worst injuries, but that didn’t last long.
Someone once asked Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre how to reduce head injuries in football. His first suggestion? “Treatment,” which won’t reduce anything. His second? “The only other option is not to play.”
The NFL cannot end or effectively reduce the violence. So what it learned to do was repackage its violence problem, turning it into a kind of backward solution to itself.
It changed the language. Broadcasters stopped saying things like “ka-POW!” when a guy is nearly decapitated coming over the middle. Now they say, “You just hope he’s okay after a play like that” instead. Coaches and players followed suit.
Nowadays, all we hear about is conditioning and prevention. In its sneaky way, no entity has embraced the wellness trend more effectively than football, a sport designed to make you extremely unwell.
The NFL also changed the tone. Instead of grizzled warriors doing battle like Vikings, football players became upstanding young men really clued in to the world around them (i.e. they understand the risks and have signed waivers to that effect).
The real trick is keeping the human toll hidden. You don’t want to see the worst of it on television, and you’d prefer that most of it happen later, once careers are over.
Hamlin isn’t the first NFL player to go into cardiac arrest at far too young an age. He’s just the first to do it where everyone could see it.
These changes happened over years, gradually softening football’s jagged edges until they were shiny and smooth. It’s no longer a sport of brutes. It’s an empathetic, thinking man’s game (that just happens to feature frequent, high-speed, head-to-head contact).
On Monday night, we witnessed football’s renewed power now that it understands its place in the American consciousness. It’s no longer a game that divides cities in friendly competition. In 2022, the NFL is a national prayer circle. It’s the place Americans go to feel connected to each other.
To fulfill that new mandate, the NFL requires tragedy as well as triumph. This isn’t to suggest that anyone wants anyone else to get hurt. But it’s in the nature of the game that people will be injured, sometimes critically.
The old NFL told them to get up and keep going. When they couldn’t, it told them to retire. When they sued, it denied the league had anything to do with ruining their health.
The new NFL is ready for things to go wrong. When they do, this league links arms with America and helps them grieve pre-emptively. It feels everyone’s pain, maybe because it caused it.
Twenty years ago, we’d already be talking about when the Cincinnati-Buffalo game gets replayed. Today, the league can’t even think about football at a time like this.
“The NFL has made no decision regarding the possible resumption of the game at a later date,” the league said on Tuesday.
You could say the NFL 2.0 has its priorities pointed a little closer to true north. That is one effect of the forces acting on it over the past few years.
But it’s also true that football will continue to maim people, and nobody wants to talk about that any more. It’s too much of a downer.
What they’d rather do is come together – red state and blue state, conservative and liberal, Trumpists and coastal elites – to wish a speedy recovery to all the maimed. America gets to enjoy a rare moment of national consensus, and the NFL gets to talk about something else.