Damar Hamlin is 24 years old. He’s in his second year in the league after playing at Pitt, choosing to stay close to his community. In 2021, he was drafted to the Buffalo Bills in the sixth round. Two seasons later, found himself replacing Bills star safety Micah Hyde for the majority of the season.
If the power of prayer, manifestation, whatever, is real, Damar Hamlin has a world of time left to play at the highest level.
In the second drive of last night’s Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Hamlin collided with Tee Higgins on a hard but routine hit. He sprang up, but immediately collapsed. As the Bills later released in a PR statement, he suffered cardiac arrest on the field and was resuscitated. He received CPR for roughly nine minutes and was transported to UCMC, where staff intubated him to support his breathing. He is in critical condition.
The Bills returned to Western New York early on Jan. 3, with some remaining at the hospital alongside Hamlin’s family. At the time of this writing, the league confirmed Bills-Bengals will not resume this week, nor is there any word on how the Bills will complete their regular season schedule.
When an entire country’s pastime is a glorified gladiator fight, an uncomfortable truth resides below the surface. Beyond the spectacle, beyond the playoff implications and storylines and stars, there’s an inherent fear we dismiss for our own pleasure. Anyone playing this game incurs a higher risk of life-changing, life-threatening injury.
And yet, it’s hard to watch a man nearly die on live television. It’s the risk we take watching, playing… loving this sport, all made real.
We should know better than to throw money at football or elevate it, but we can’t get away. There are sociological roots to our connection to “sport” and “play” as means of expression not dissimilar to art or music. Of course, there’s something to be said about football’s outright barbarism, as opposed to the arts, but in a society where everything we love is commodified, the cruelty in other things is just unseen. Sports are one of many modes of fulfillment; we are attracted to fulfillment and identity like moths to flame.
Football’s relation to capitalism, of course, muddies the purity of “sport” by adding a bottom line. There’s an insatiable demand for football, and America has built an empire around it. Entrepreneurial vultures, under the guise of organizing leagues, recognized they could meet this demand for entertainment — and for fans’ appetite for identity — through a supply of a violent game. They know they hold the key to the layperson’s sense of joy and fulfillment, and they’re making money off of it.
This is part of why the NFL was so unprepared to stop Bills-Bengals for a man dying on the job. You have media partners to consider, fans, sponsors who (under less serious injury conditions) want the game played, event managers… to name a few. There’s the scheduling consideration, on both the logistics side and the losing-money side. The league, organizations and players — the latter of whom understand the risks far more acutely — had to work in congress, which they don’t often do well.
Still, the 50-plus minutes it took to work out those logistics to postpone the game felt like hell on earth. They felt more arduous knowing the powers that be originally offered the teams a five-minute warmup period after they witnessed the absolute worst of what can happen in their line of work. Only when Sean McDermott, Zac Taylor and both teams’ player reps stepped in, did the league understand the gravity of what happened.
I understand that there’s no “right” way to handle a crisis of this magnitude aired on live television. All things considered, most parties did the best they could. What matters now, though, is how the league responds from here. They must prepare a more thorough player emergency protocol — one that, perhaps naïvely, I thought the league had.
Get on the phones more quickly. Ensure each stadium has appropriate emergency responses. Consult with the players’ association (who, for their faults, bang the drum for player safety effectively) to build a better protocol. Though the Hamlin hit was routine, there are so many more dangerous plays in football that could lead to similar. These are not low-probability events in a game of this danger and magnitude, and league authorities must treat them as such.
Of course, that means acknowledging the game is dangerous, which the league may simply never do.
Many of you familiar with me know I bristle at some of the fan culture surrounding the Bills. Not all hardcore Bills fans are members of the Bills Mafia, and I’ve said as much publicly.
Regardless, any fan from here knows Buffalo and Western New York needed reprieve. In the last nine months, my community has seen a white supremacist shooter ravage the only grocery store in predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhood. The region endured two record-setting blizzards in a month.
While those events are so different in nature — propelled largely by our city government’s failure to protect the vulnerable — the community looks to football for release. The Bills are a unifier here more than anything else I’ve seen. They transcend race, class and all means of boundaries. I’ve never seen anything like it.
In other words, the Bills are an escape for this area. Reality found its way into Buffalo’s one escape valve.
I don’t know where I go from here as a football fan. Where the hell is there to go?
No, of course this shit isn’t about me. I don’t know Damar Hamlin. My tertiary pain watching on television pales in comparison to what his family and teammates saw happen live.
Still, more than I ever have, I don’t know how to reckon with this time bomb that I love.
The league is repeatedly showing its ass. Even now, league reps are refuting ESPN’s real-time reporting on the proposed five-minute delay. They’re denying what we all saw in real time. Yes, the league fails so often, whether it’s abusers in the league or injuries far less severe than Hamlin’s, but this feels like a new low. I fear there won’t be real change, even in the wake of death.
I grieve for Buffalo. Not this toxic-positive version of Buffalo that some people in the Buffalo suburbs believe in. Rather, I’m sad for the communities still reeling from the months of hell they’ve experienced, who’ve lost loved ones and neighbors. For those of us looking inward at the problems in our region, but now don’t have football as an escape, either.
I’m questioning my relationship to this thing I love. This violent, terrible, awful thing that’s given me joy and some of my greatest friendships. We break bread over sanctioned violence, with the shared, tacit understanding from our favorite players that we have this identity as fans at the cost of their health and well-being.
And last, but absolutely not least, I’m at a loss for Damar Hamlin. While I don’t give credence to every Twitter MD, I do know Hamlin has a long way toward recovery. He’s twenty-fucking-four. He has a life ahead of him. I don’t know how anyone looks at football the same way if he doesn’t make it.
If this is the cost of the game, I’m not sure if football is worth it anymore.