An update we were all hoping for. ????
— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) January 5, 2023
USA Today, just after 6pm:
… Upon waking up after being sedated, Hamlin followed commands and even was able to communicate in writing. Hamlin remains in critical condition with a breathing tube, according to his doctors, who made their first public comments Thursday about his condition in a news conference held at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
“The answer is yes, Damar, you won the game of life,” Dr. Timothy Pritts said.
Hamlin’s first comments were to a nurse at his bedside, according to doctors, while his family, friends and members of the Bills organization have remained by his side since he was transported to the medical facility…
Hamlin is making substantial progress and his neurologic condition and function are intact, his doctors said.
“It’s been a long and difficult road for the last three days. He’s been very sick, and made a very remarkable recovery and improvement.” Knight said.
“He still has significant progress he needs to make, but this makes a good turning point in his ongoing care,” Pritts said…
There’s no timetable for Hamlin’s recovery, as doctors continue to take things day by day.
“What we would like to see before we upgrade him to stable condition would be breathing tube out and continuing to improving from a neurological and respiratory standpoint,” Pritts said.
Knight and Pritts hope Hamlin can return to “who he was before this happened,” but also acknowledged “it’s entirely too early” to discuss whether Hamlin can play football again.
“You lease your body out to the team”—William Rhoden, on MSNBC just now.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) January 3, 2023
Mandatory reminder: I am not a football fan, so feel free to correct any misperceptions…
Damar was so excited with this video – told me it means everything that his family cheers him on.
Prayers to him and the entire Hamlin family???? https://t.co/9a0MgPBfw7
— Jenna Cottrell (@JennaCottrell) January 3, 2023
I talked to a fan who was at the game night. Here's what he saw. https://t.co/gmtXbms56E
— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) January 3, 2023
From the New Yorker, “The Terrifying Collapse of Damar Hamlin and the Everyday Violence of Football”:
It was a normal tackle, a normal hit, a normal moment in a big football game—one of the biggest of the season, a nationally televised Monday-night matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Buffalo Bills, two of the N.F.L.’s best teams. Then Damar Hamlin, a Bills safety, twenty-four years old, stood up and fell backward, legs limp and feet splayed, his heart stopped. The team surrounded him as medical professionals performed CPR and used a defibrillator to get his heart beating again. Players cried and knelt and held hands and prayed. Finally, roughly sixteen minutes after he collapsed, Hamlin was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he remains in critical condition. The coaches met, gathered their players, and headed to the locker room.
The ethos of football is to play on. A player breaks his leg, hobbles off, and the game goes on. A player is concussed, stumbles off, and the game goes on. A player breaks his neck, is carted off, and the game goes on. Football is violent. The violence is intrinsic to the sport—a feature of it. It is part of the stakes, the thrill, the intensity, the draw. And yet there is a line, one that is almost inconceivable, even to the men who accept the risks and the fans who celebrate them for it. On Monday night, the line was crossed. It was clear from the faces of the players and the coaches: there was little thought of the game’s going on. “Immediately, my player hat went on,” Troy Vincent, the N.F.L.’s executive vice-president of football operations and a former cornerback, said to reporters after the game. “How do you resume play after you’ve seen such a traumatic event occur in front of you in real time?”…
About a decade ago, the N.F.L. came under intense scrutiny because of the devastating effects of head trauma, and there seemed to be a sea change in the way football was perceived. Youth participation dropped. There were front-page newspaper stories, lawsuits, congressional investigations, a Will Smith movie. There were also domestic-violence scandals, stories about addiction to painkillers, social-justice controversies—and yet the sport’s popularity has been almost undiminished.
If anything, football has become a more valuable television property. This season, Week One N.F.L. games averaged more than eighteen million viewers. A Thanksgiving game had forty-two million viewers. The Super Bowl can top a hundred million in the United States. NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” averaged 19.3 million viewers in 2021, nearly double the average of the top non-sports program, “N.C.I.S.” No controversy, however big, seemed big enough to threaten the N.F.L.’s place as the nation’s premier entertainment—which is why television networks and tech streaming companies are paying the league a combined hundred and thirteen billion dollars over the next ten years to air it…
… Whether fans and players want to admit it, though, part of the appeal of football remains rooted in its risks—the hectic action, the collision between awesome skill and raw force, the suspense that comes with every snap. Hamlin’s cardiac arrest has shown us again what we always should have seen, how real those risks are. After all, what he experienced wasn’t something outside the bounds of the game. He was doing what he’s done countless times, and what we’ve seen countless times, too—hoping, on some level, that nothing would go wrong, but knowing, on some level, that it could.
Football games aren't mandatory: https://t.co/s39Bjl1BoJ
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) January 4, 2023
I don’t have any reason to doubt the nfl would try to pull this off but I also think a reasonable explanation might be whisper down the lane between mid level officials and espn producers into buck’s earpiece happened https://t.co/rvthYAuqWI
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) January 3, 2023
the league office is paid handsomely by ownership to not have a plan for anything but how to make money
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) January 4, 2023
A reminder: all the right wing chuds out there insinuating this is about vaccines can go f-ck themselves. https://t.co/0DXKAhhJgw
— Panda Bernstein (@J4Years) January 3, 2023
Sidebar:
The NFL arguably handled this better than UEFA. That's a very low bar, but this kind of callousness isn't just a football or American problem.
Hoping Damar can recover and thrive as well as Christian Eriksen.https://t.co/hpO9TXFqCD
— Jake McIntyre (@jakemcintyre) January 3, 2023
CaseyL
I saw that update a few hours ago, and it cheered me up immensely.
Infinite kudos and thankyous to both teams’ medical staffs, who absolutely saved Hamar’s life by quick and accurate first response.
I work for a University Medical Center, and a few of our faculty – who are healthcare providers as well as professors – travel with the Huskies every weekend throughout the season. I’m sure watching this is having a deep impact on them as well.
geg6
@CaseyL:
I saw an interview with a UPMC sports medicine doctor who has expertise with this type of injury. He was saying that adult sports is not used to dealing with this because it’s much more common in youth and adolescent sports. He says it is because adults have much more developed chest muscles, which can protect them from the blow to the chest. But it still can happen because of a particular person’s anatomy or it hits just the right but unlikely spot or at a particular point of the heartbeat. Basically, just a freak accident with no way to really prevent. He actually knew Damar from his college days at Pitt. He knows all the players from Pitt teams because UPMC/Pitt has a top notch sports medicine department.
HumboldtBlue
@CaseyL:
Defibrillators. There has been a push across athletics at every level to ensure there are defibrillators available at sporting events in the case of incidents like this where a player’s heart stops. FIFA and the European leagues quickly mandated increased medical presence and mandatory defibs at every match, and that is working its way down the ranks both in Europe and here.
MobiusKlein
Can they just call the game a Tie, and be done?
Steeplejack
Damar Hamlin’s charity drive is now over $7.6 million, so there’s that.
Barbara
@geg6: Mike Tomlin said that he’s known Damar since he was 12 years old. I sometimes forget how small the sports world can be.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Aside from basically watching someone you know die (which is what happened to Hamlin until he was revived) in front of you, I have to imagine the thought of “that could’ve been me” could have went through every player’s mind. As rare as it is, commotio cordis can happen to anyone in the right circumstances, no comorbidities required
Some people online were angry at the refs for only issuing a five minute delay, apparently thinking the worst of the officials thinking they were trying to force the teams to continue. In reality, it was likely they were just as shocked as everyone else was and defaulted to the five minute delay to buy some time to figure out a course of action, get a decision from higher up
Poe Larity
@HumboldtBlue: A friend was telling me he wants to get a defibrillator for his home after watching the game. I asked AC or DC?
He was not happy it’s a binary problem.
Ruckus
I know a man with 2 Superbowl rings, an amazing person, and he has issues from the sport of professional football. I’ve known other players over the years and every single one of them has injuries that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
And no I did not work in professional football, it was a different professional sport.
Lapassionara
I remember when Darryl Stingley was rendered a quadriplegic on the football field. He was carted off, and the game went on. This was different. Those who saw Damar Hamlin’s body saw what they thought was a dead person. The coaches and players were not going to proceed as usual. I don’t know why this response was so different than the response to the Stingley injury, but it was.
Leslie
I grew up with football, and used to enjoy watching it. I stopped after the news about CTE and how the NFL had covered it up for decades came out. The tweet in the post about them using so-called “racial IQ” to determine settlements is even more disgusting.
prostratedragon
Very good to hear that he’s conversant, and even able to write a little. Suggests that he won’t have much or any long-term neurological damage. He can take plenty of time to decide what’s next.
Geminid
@geg6: Yesterday’s Washington Post sport section had a still picture of the impact. The tackle was a little unusual in that while the Bengals player had his shoulder lowered as is typical, Hamlin was caught in an awkward tackling position, almost upright with his shoulders high. The Bengal’s shoulder hit Hamlin square in the chest.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Steeplejack:
That’s amazing. I remember reading a story the other day about Hamlin’s agent mentioning that Damar recently had told him to get sponsors to build a kids camp. With millions in donations, he said they don’t need sponsors anymore
Scout211
CNN and ESPN reporting that the NFL announced that the game will not be completed.
Bill Arnold
@geg6:
Yeah, commotio cordis is a known way to kill someone with a single blow, and the time window in the heartbeat cycle is fixed (roughly 40 milliseconds) so when the heart is beating rapidly the time window is a larger percentage of total time. Hard blows to that area of the chest, especially without a chest protector, are a dice roll, at best (if the dice are not loaded…). 1-3 percent at 60 beats per minute.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lapassionara: The Stingley situation is one that anyone familiar with the game knows about and discounts/assumes the risk of. it is a known. This was something outside the usual realm of injuries that no one could really steel themselves against.
eclare
@Lapassionara: There was also Chucky Mullins at Ole Miss. I can’t remember what happened with the game, but it was decades ago so I assume after Chucky was carted off, the game resumed.
JMG
It’s estimated there are like 20-30 of those cases a year, which given the millions of kids who play youth sports means it really is a rare phenomenon, thankfully. The Bills and Bengals medical and training staffs were prepared for cardiac arrests, but my guess is they were prepared in the expectation of cases in the stands, not on the field. The cases of severe spinal cord injury in football are less rare, but it’s the “routine” football injuries, the kind I’ll bet every player on that field has had at least one of since they began playing the sport, that cumulatively do the most damage. Ex-pros of my age (70). or younger have a distinctive gait, like sailors off a four-year trip in a schooner on their first day ashore. Ligaments and cartilage are tough things to live without. It’s an inestimable blessing Hamlin has recovered to this point. But if he’s able, he’ll go back to playing, Count on it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@eclare:
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Lapassionara:
I remember seeing those mentioned on the r/nfl subreddit. I think none of those guys actually “died” on the field. It makes me wonder: if what had happened to Hamlin happened 50 years ago, would the game have been postponed/suspended like today, or would the game have went on because our culture was fundamentally different then?
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I still think the shock was due to the unusual nature of what happened rather than the severity of the event.
eclare
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
If this had happened fifty years ago, Damar very likely would have died on the field. As to what the NFL would have done, I don’t know. When Christian Eriksen collapsed in the soccer match, UEFA gave the players two options: come back tonight and finish or finish tomorrow. The players voted to come back that night and get it over with.
Dangerman
The game has changed since Stingley. There were headhunters back then and, yes, Jack Tatum was one. There are still ugly hits but there aren’t as many cheap shot artists. Not by a longshot.
sdhays
What the fuck?
I now see why the NFL leadership might not get why this was a big deal. I don’t regret not enjoying American football. But I wish Damar the best. He seems like a really special person.
JoyceH
If this had been small town high school football, the player would have died, just due to not having the advanced medical equipment and training. Personally, I think football is going to gradually wither away, because fewer parents will be willing to allow their kids to play.
geg6
@Barbara:
Probably from football camps. The Steelers and individual players get these kids in camps and teach them the finer points. I’m sure all the teams and many individual players do it. Often, they give “scholarships” to talented youth players, especially those who are not wealthy enough to pay. So they get to know these kids. I think he also went to Central Catholic High School on scholarship, a much better school than his hometown high school, Sto-Rox.
Roger Moore
@HumboldtBlue:
It helps immensely that defibrillators have come down radically in price. They still aren’t exactly cheap, but they’re cheap enough that just about anywhere that expects large numbers of people to be there regularly will have an automated defibrillator as part of their emergency kit.
Martin
I can’t express how much I don’t care about this story. 3 mass shootings killed 10 people yesterday. 400 people a week are still dying from covid. Those are preventable and those people didn’t ask for that outcome. Young man wants to play a risky sport? Ok. That’s his call. Why should we care?
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: And yet you try to express it.
Alison Rose
@Martin: Wow, you just straight up told everyone you’re garbage with no hesitation.
You should care because he’s a human being. He didn’t choose a career swimming with sharks or tap dancing along the edge of an active volcano. He had athletic talent, enough to become one of the relatively few who can go pro, and he wanted to play the sport he loved. Do you honestly believe someone deserves to die–or come close to it, in this case–because they chose a career path that brings some danger with it? Do you apply that metric to every other career that also carries some risk of harm?
Also, maybe your spiteful brain is incapable of caring about more than one or two things, but the rest of us can do so. We can care about people killed by assholes with guns and we can care about people dying of Covid and we can care about Ukrainians being murdered by russia and we can care about people dying in blizzards and storms and hurricanes and we can ALSO care about a young man who nearly lost his life playing a sport. If you can’t, then the problem lies with you, not that athlete and not any of us.
JCJ
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): No need to wonder. When I was a kid we were watching a Bears – Lions game when one of the players collapsed and died on the field. The game was completed. I had to look up when it was – 1971, and the player was Chuck Hughes.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: I dislike the fact that this turns into a breaking news story against the backdrop a host of societal problems that do affect normal people. None of us are going to be harmed in an NFL game. Lots of us are going to be harmed by various causes that we could be focusing the media on.
It’s not that I don’t care about the player and don’t wish him all the best in his recovery. I do care that this is a top news story when it absolutely should not be one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Not everyone is is as “rational” and data driven as you are. You are just going to have to accept that humans are going to be human. You do remind me why utilitarians never got invited to a lot of parties back in the 19th Century.
piratedan
@Martin: I kind of get the idea that the media is using this as a distraction about what is going on in DC, as he recovers, I expect the focus to turn to the extreme weather that is going on across the country…. ANYTHING to distract from what is taking place with the GOP.
eclare
@Martin: Gee my mom had a cardiac arrest thirty years ago while sitting on a couch and reading, guess she deserved it? Was her cardiac arrest “normal” enough to meet your qualifications? People have these events all the time, greater awareness is important as are AED’s and people knowing CPR. Nicole Wallace, IIRC, it was some news host, said she was inspired to take a CPR class by what happened.
Jeezus. I guess only certain deaths/accidents are worthy of your (scarce) compassion.
Alison Rose
@Martin:
Except just a few minutes ago, you said:
That’s some major league backpedaling there.
And it’s a news story because it fucking happened on live TV with millions of people watching, and because everyone, including that man’s teammates and family, thought he had died in front of all of our eyes. And because it shines yet another light on how these guys are used by the executives, who display about the same amount of care for them as you did in your initial comment.
Jackie
@Alison Rose: Thank goodness as of this time it’s reported he should make a full recovery. A lot of fans – both old and new – are celebrating.
kindness
Tough crowd. I still enjoy watching football. I also appreciate the additional safety that has been incorporated into the game.
Martin
@Alison Rose: I do care that he’s a human being. I don’t care that it’s a media story. I don’t know why his life is more important and more deserving of media attention than the 120 people who died in car accidents yesterday or the 120 people who died from gun violence yesterday or the 60 people who died of covid yesterday. Why don’t their lives care? Because they aspired to be a mom or a judge rather than an NFL player?
This blog complains bitterly about how shitty the US media is at prioritizing actual news, until we want them to TMZ something in sports or entertainment. Is it a tragedy that the NFL is this dangerous? Yeah. Ok, so ban it. Regulate it. Don’t sit here and tell me that the NFL is some sacred institution that is worth preserving your entertainment over this guys health, and then tell me that *I’m* the shitty person. Oh, this shocking thing happened! JFC, we just spent the last 5 years covering CTE, and did nothing. Nothing about this is shocking. Nobody gives a shit about this kid until he’s witnessed being harmed. Until that moment, his health was of nobody’s concern. We only react this way because witnessing him being harmed forces us to come to terms that we never gave a shit about his health provided it happened quietly, off screen, where we wouldn’t need to own the fact that he nearly lost his life for our entertainment. I don’t think it should be national news just because 20 million people suddenly feel guilty about something. Why weren’t you feeling guilty before?
I’m not the monster here.
And let me be clear, I don’t think any less of anyone here about this. I used to watch the NFL as well, and then I figured out what my contribution to this situation was. And there’s a shit-ton of other places where I haven’t figured that out yet. I sure as shit aren’t better than anyone else. But Hamlin is ultimately an employee who got injured at work. And yeah, that’s a fucking problem but we don’t dare treat it like a problem because it would hurt this thing we value. It’s no different than the ground worker who got sucked into an aircraft engine the other day. Nobody gives a shit what his hopes and dreams were, how hard he worked to make money for his family, etc. But we treat it *very* differently. And we shouldn’t. I’m not saying to not cover this, but a bit of balance would be appreciated. This is just bread and circuses, both the NFL and the media response to his incident.
But nothing will change. And our concern about his wellbeing isn’t a substitute for that. I’m glad he’s doing well. I spent a month last year helping my dad through his heart attack. I know how hard that recovery is. I wish him the best. But show me some action, spare me the outpouring of concern. If we care about this, fix it. If we don’t fix it, then we don’t care.
James E Powell
@Barbara:
And how young the kids are when they are first identified as professional prospects.
LeftCoastYankee
I was watching the early part of the game (before THIS injury), and within a few plays a player was helped off to check a head injury and another was checked for a leg injury, this was right after the announcers explained the star tackle for one of the teams was out after blowing both his ACL and MCL last week. I turned it off and missed this even worse injury.
Football is a fucking meat grinder, which passes off a parade of weekly medical traumas as “parity” and “competitiveness” and “next man up teamwork”. This is not a redeemable/reformable enterprise.
Tradition, community spirit, blah blah blah. This isn’t the only way to experience those things.
scav
It’s not exactly that these “all lives are to be publicly and universally morned by everyone equally” outbursts arise in the nightly Ukraine threads either.
Geminid
@Martin: This is not a “top news story.” Today’s Richmond newspaper had nothing on it outside of the sports section. Yesterday there was a column about it by their columnist at the bottom of the front page because their Pulitzer Prize winning columnist decided to write about it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin:
No one ever thinks they are the monster.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good lord
Rudi
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Hughes
piratedan
@Geminid: guess it depends on what you’re watching…. MSNBC spent additional time on it last night and its naturally looming large on ESPN and on sportsball sites on the web.
Mike E
Whatever reforms that were initially promised or sort of rolled out by the league seem to have been largely abandoned as of late… I agree that the product has spun away from any semblance of control by the NFL, now that ratings are up.
@Martin: I have an XL jersey if you need to cover your exposed backfield, there
Geminid
@piratedan: I would expect for this to be heavily covered by sports media. I was talking *news* story.
I don’t watch cable news, Was it a top story on MSNBC, or just another story?
piratedan
@Geminid: the item that followed the House votes, before the weather story… so it does have some cache out there in the media, call it human interest because of the shared experience of Live TV.
Leslie
It’s a story because it’s a feel-good story. A young man appeared to die in front of millions of people, and now he’s not dead, and it seems he’s going to be okay.
Are other stories more “worthy”? Sure, if the only metric of worthiness is how many people are negatively impacted by a given issue. But all the serious news stories are also grim and depressing and stressful.
Human beings have not evolved to handle a constant influx of negativity. And 99% of what makes the news is negative, because otherwise it wouldn’t be news.
Stories like this are a brief respite from all that. They give us something to celebrate. They are good for our psyches and our spirits.
That doesn’t mean we don’t care about CTE or gun violence or Covid or Ukraine. It means we’re human, and need the uplift and encouragement of moments like these to strengthen us for all the other issues that deserve our attention, all the other battles we need to fight.
If you’re not wired that way, fine, whatever. But most of us are.
ian
@Omnes Omnibus: I have it on my siblings word that I am in fact the monster.
Alison Rose
@Martin: NO ONE, literally no one, has said his life is “more important” than anyone else’s. That is something you are choosing to read into the coverage. And by doing so, what you are saying is that his life is LESS important than everyone else’s. Mass shootings do get covered in the news, and if they happened on live TV, they’d probably get even more, because that adds an extra layer of horror. Do you remember the reporter who was shot during live coverage? I remember, because she had the exact same name as me, and everyone thought they had to point that out, like I wasn’t already unsettled by it. That incident got a ton of coverage because of the nature of how it happened, the same way that shootings at schools do, or when Gabby Giffords was shot. If this athlete had had this happen during a practice or playing a pick-up game in a bye week or something, it would have gotten less coverage.
But none of this matters. The point is that while you act all superior, you are denigrating this man’s life because his manner of death doesn’t meet your sadness criteria, and that is repugnant.
No one here has said the NFL is sacred and we can’t do anything to it. Many here have pointed out, not just in this case but others, that the league is full of money-grubbing suit-jacketed shitweasels who use the bodies of mostly Black and brown men to line their own pockets. Similar to how many of us watched the World Cup while also talking about how fucked up FIFA is.
And fuck off with “no one cared about this guy until this happened.” Many people, on this blog and elsewhere, have talked a lot about the damage the league is doing to players. But you’re demanding that we show the same level of care about a wide abstract as we are about a narrow specific. Were YOU crying an Alice-in-Wonderland amount of tears about pandemics before Covid? I’m gonna fucking bet not.
And stop fucking thinking you can read everyone’s mind here. You cannot, although you clearly think you’re lightyears better than us, no matter how you try to spin it. I rarely watch American football, but ever since the problems with CTE and other issues were brought into the sunlight some years ago, I have always struggled with it when I do watch, knowing what these guys are potentially being subjected to. I want the league to do right by them, to figure out how to make this game, and all sports, safer for the players, and I absolutely would say that if it’s impossible to do that, then maybe it’s a sport that we need to let go of. But it’s overly simplistic to think that can happen easily when so many very rich people don’t want it to. And when a lot of people in this country don’t really give a shit about a player who gets hurt.
You know, like YOU said you didn’t at first.
HumboldtBlue
@Geminid:
It was a story that was followed and updated across national media platforms. That’s due to the popularity of the NFL and the fact that it’s reality TV with actual consequences.
The game, for better or worse, is very much a strong thread in the fabric of our society, and it crosses several other threads — entertainment, sport and athletics, business, celebrity, money, lots of money.
The local headlines may not have been front-paging it, as you point out — other than the Pulitzer winning columnist — but it was a top story on social media and every major platform. It crosses over with soccer and athletics in Europe, and it touches human emotions everywhere.
A young, earnest, hard-working, decent, engaging, talented local kid suffers tragedy and the community — magnified by the immense gravity of the NFL — responds. In this case, nationally and internationally.
That’s a media buffet of clicks and links and views.
Geminid
@piratedan: Sure, there is a lot of interest. To the extent there is, general news sites are right to respond to it.
Citizen Alan
@eclare: I was at that game. Play did resume. Of course, no one at the game knew the seriousness of Mullins injury (it left him quadraplegic and he died from complications just a few years later) until after the game. I suspect the reaction might have been different if they’d had to do CPR on him in hte middle of the field,
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The whole thing sounds bit like the phenomena of soccer players dying of heart attacks.
https://youtu.be/upch33dRZnQ
Omnes Omnibus
@ian: Sure, and we all see it too. But do you?
ian
@Omnes Omnibus: Alas, my head is too far up my own rectum for that.
Martin
@Geminid: This has been above the fold at CNN for 3 straight days. It’s been above the fold at NYT for 3 straight days. It’s been above the fold at WaPo for 3 straight days. The only thing MSNBC has cut from House coverage for is this story – not Ukraine, not storms in CA or the rest of the country, or the family of 8 killed in Utah.
Don’t tell me it’s not a top news story.
ColoradoGuy
Not a sports watcher … of any sport … but EIGHT MINUTES of CPR must have felt like an eternity to the players, the coaches, the broadcasters, and TV audience. We all know that more than a few minutes of CPR can be a death sentence, or lead to life-long disability … a living death.
Seeing it all live, with no delay, is going to traumatize people. Movies are all pretend, with distorted time scales and amped-up sound. Disasters in real life are slower and more frightening, since you have time, as a spectator, participant, or victim (I have been in all three roles), to reflect on it as it happens.
Some people overload mentally and go into auto-minimize mode, and others freeze and don’t react at all. And Covid has traumatized the entire world, so all of our reactions are off. The only way to offset the sense of horror is to consciously be a little kinder to each other, and reach out a little more. Just a little bit. That’s all.
David 📢 Speaker 📢 Koch☑️
Suddenly I’m getting thirsty for a can of Monster Energy
Alison Rose
@Martin: Okay, I’ve found a solution: Why don’t you go visit his family and the team and explain to them that he’s not worthy of coverage or concern and that every other news story is more important and deserves 99% of airtime and ink, so you’re going to ask every news channel and paper to stop covering it or at least have the DECENCY to put it on page D12 or something, so that all these other more deserving stories can be bumped up a few inches.
Look, I’m in California and I don’t give a single waterlogged fuck if storm news isn’t getting stronger national coverage. I’m sure as shit not gonna be like “Um, excuse me, I know this guy almost died on live TV, but like, a tree fell down in the mountains over here, where’s our above-the-fold attention” or something. And shootings, Covid, Ukraine, the House…they ARE ALL GETTING COVERAGE. Good lord.
Also, it’s really rich for you to chastise us about not caring about the dangers of the sport until now (based on facts not in evidence) and not having spent all of our waking hours rending our garments about CTE while saying in the same breath that you don’t give a shit about this story and want it to go away. “YOU all haven’t given a shit about football players’ lives until now, unlike ME, who still doesn’t give a shit!”
Yutsano
@Alison Rose: I don’t know if this was mere indulgence or just curiosity, so I looked up the eight who died in Utah. Yeah it sounds like the dad couldn’t handle the divorce. It’s definitely a tragedy, but how this warrants a level of national scrutiny is beyond me. It’s not like there’s a policy discussion that could have changed this in time. I think the real reason the Hamlin story has legs is it’s a freak accident that millions of people in the US witnessed. A murder-suicide in rural Utah won’t ever have a reach like that.
Msb
I stopped watching football after I saw a player break his neck making a perfectly legit tackle (in 1997). Football is a game, permeated by the word “play”. I don’t speak for anyone but me, but it’s immoral to derive entertainment from a sport that cripples and kills the participants. So I stopped watching.
Nevertheless, thank God Hamlin will survive. I think his actual question, when he awoke, was “Did we win?”
post is correct that the NFL acted more humanely than UEFA did when Eriksen collapsed. The Danish coach and players later admitted they were in no condition to decide what to do, much less resume the game, after Eriksen was taken to hospital. Even the Finnish team, which won the resumed game, later said they regretted the decision. It was the first game with fans in the stands since COVID, and it was crushing to see all that joy and anticipation converted to shock and grief.
Nice story, however: in the horrible period when everyone was waiting to hear whether Eriksen was alive, the Finnish fans started yelling, “Christian!” The Danes bellowed back, “Eriksen!” And both side did the call and response for awhile.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I think I get your point. People die needlessly every day and we don’t do much if anything about it. Now a number of them don’t take as good care of themselves as they should but still they die and we do little about it. Football knows it’s a dangerous sport and it often seems they don’t care about it either. But here we see a guy get caught out with a very specific injury that took a lot of things lining up just right to happen. And medics were able to resuscitate him and the hospital knows what to do. And yes he was technically dead for a short time. Many humans get technically dead every day and get revived and go on to live another day, while many people in life don’t get that lucky. For some it’s their own fault, for some it is life. I’ve had a heart attack and didn’t know it, a doctor that saw a cardiogram some time, maybe years later didn’t see it, but the cardiologist did see it. I’m obviously not dead but I easily could be. I’ve been hit head on by a truck, but fortunately I was already laying on the ground for about 3 seconds from another accident and I walked away with very minor issues. I could have easily died on either of these days. We often do not get to control enough of life to make it extremely less likely that we will not grow old to learn to live with aging out. It’s when we get there, dead, because of stupid or hate or whatever and because of nothing we did or didn’t do wrong, like being born looking a certain way, rather than the “right” way.
I actually agree with you, and I can’t remember your age to tell you that other than reckless stupidity from something like covid, that is hopefully a once in a lifetime event, but likely not, we have gotten better. Certainly not as better as we should be, but I was born before a vaccine for polio existed and I personally knew/know 4 people who had it, at least 2 of which are dead. And I know that because there are just 2 people currently living in iron lungs and neither of them are the moms of my friends. One I know and see most days is my age and lives in a wheelchair in the apartment complex I live in. The other I went to school with but I haven’t seen her since 1977. I know that too many people die needlessly because we often do not live smart and we often do not care for the people that have a tough time caring for themselves, let alone others.
I’ve seen cops stop and harass a single black woman walking down the street, I’ve seen a lot of people who live on the street because they have no place else to live. I’ve seen people die, and yes I’ve gone to hospitals and funerals for people that participated in the professional sport I worked in.
I get where you are coming from and I agree with you. Humans often only give a shit about their own life, not what happens to people who entertain them, or people that don’t look like them or aren’t related to them. I think part of the issue is that we humans sometimes/often go almost insane worrying about things we can’t change and then stop trying to change the world at all. But in my almost 3/4 of a century I’ve seen the world, or at least parts of it get a lot better and one of those parts is this country. Sure we can do better, when in the history of the world has that not been true? And the major roadblock to getting better still is humans. For example take our current house majority. Please.
I’m not sure I can actually agree with your final sentence though. We can’t fix all the humans, and it is especially difficult to fix the truly self broken humans, which describes our conservative house members, among many others.
Raven
On my way to the airport! Go Dawgs!!!
JMG
@Raven: Good luck.
raven
“Whether fans and players want to admit it, though, part of the appeal of football remains rooted in its risks”
Duh
raven
@JMG: Thanks!!
Betty
A former Cleveland player gave an extended rant on a related problem that gets too little attention which is the difficulty of getting adequate compensation from the league either in pensions or disability coverage. Payments have recently been reduced significantly. If we accept that these guys are putting their health at risk, they should be compensated when their health is ruined.
Bupalos
I’m not going to argue about the “inherent violence” angle to NFL critiques, but this particular incident had very littke to do with football and in fact comotio cordis is more related to sports or activites like baseball where a smaller area of force is involved. Where it is still freakishly rare. As a softball coach in ohio we have mandatory training on precisely this, and I would hope no one would want softball curtailed or the ball squishified.
Honestly there’s a higher chance of this happening in many other walks of life. This looks like a normal tackle but go frame by frame and you’ll see it’s a freaky combination of max force, spread arms, an oddly angled shoulder pad edge likely making the initial delivery of force a very small area …it’s about like driving down the highway and having something come off the truck in front of you, go through your windshield, and hit you in the temple.
Again, not a defense of football which does indeed often destroy bodies and minds in a chronic way. But this ain’t it.
Geminid
@Martin: Well, I have not seen the NYT this week, or the Washington Post since Tuesday. I very much doubt the story was above the fold for three days though. Wednesday was the first day most newspapers reported it because it happened Monday night, and the Richmond paper had a column at the bottom of the page Wednesday and nothing at all on the front page Thursday. They generally track the Washigton Post in coverage.
Bupalos
@kindness: I’m going to go out on a weird limb and say that Hamlin was actually lucky this happened on an NFL field than say a HS basball field- where it is more likely and he almost certainly would have died.
I’m glad this story is getting so much attention, I wish more of it was focussed on the overwhelming likelihood that this was commotio cordis, something not really any more related to football than, say, construction work. I wish more of the story was about AED’s in schools and workplaces. It’s kind of wrong for this to become a “violence of football” story.
Geminid
@Geminid: Now I see that I did buy Wednesday’s Washington Post. The Hamlin story made the front page, but it was below the fold, next to an article on swastika graffiti found in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
Bupalos
@Geminid: if folks are suggesting that Martin is wrong that the media coverage is WAY out of proportion to the relative importance of the event…. I don’t know what to say. It’s obviously primarily based on the spectacle and “this happened on live tv” angle, and secondarily on the “football is violent” angle. Neither of those angles lend themselves to good journalism here in my opinion. Good coverage might explore the psychological effect of this kind of mass-witnessed trauma (which we’ve seen a bit of). It would definitely emphasize exploring what this actually was (comotio cordis) and how a gold-standard medical response was required to prevent death. And how this isn’t particularly related to football more than soccer or baseball or a host of regular jobs.
It would also be great with about 90% less references to divine intervention. Or maybe those should be delivered with big-lie-styke disclaimers about the false claim that prayers to Jesus can heal people.
Bupalos
@Leslie: the Hamlin story wasn’t really “feel-good” until this morning. I think the citicism of the size of this story mostly covers time where it was rather sickening and horrifying.
Geminid
@Bupalos: The good coverage that you speak of was preety much the basis of the stories I read, and these were in sports sections of newspapers. I did not notice the citing of divine intervention you describe in reporting. Sure, the many calls for prayer were reported on, and I guess some find this objectionable. I don’t pray myself, but it is a fact that many people do in these situations, and reporting on these facts does not endorse or elevate prayer, and I have no problem with it
I guess I’m non-religious but not anti-religious.
Bupalos
@Geminid: I’m more or less joking about the prayer thing, but it does tend to take up a few lines that would be better spent IMO on the specifics of the medical response or the importance of aed’s. But I do think that reinforcing divine intervention via neutral reporting shares some uncomfortable space with reporting on election denialism. It’s just that the culture is still so wildly tilted towards the supernatural that that’s how it has to be
I mean, reporting that some dude in New Jersey stated that the election was rigged doesn’t endorse that view, but it does elevate it, and we’ve decided it deserves a disclaimer. I’m not sure how the equally disproven claim that some being that is influenced by prayer determines outcomes is really much different.
Tazj
@Bupalos: I can tell you that in the Buffalo area that is happening. There are stories on the local tv news about an overwhelming number of people signing up for CPR and first aid courses. They spoke to a fire chief at a volunteer fire company about it. I also saw a mother interviewed whose daughter died after collapsing at a high school soccer game. She has made it her mission since 2009 to make sure schools provide CPR courses and have an AED available.
Of course, being Buffalo the Damar Hamlin story is given a lot of coverage. However, the news anchors are also pointing out that in addition to his charity, there are others in need in the area. One family recently lost 5 very young children in a house fire and their mom is still in intensive care. There are people still needing help from the blizzard, either for funeral costs or other necessities. The news is also doing stories on those who lost loved ones to the blizzard.
I understand people’s frustrations but there are important stories being told, from Hamlin’s life outside of football to where you can take a CPR course.
Bill Arnold
@Alison Rose:
You are being pretty loathsomely judgmental there. IMO.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: I worked with a dude who was a linebacker in NFL for 3 or 4 years. Huge dude. Very nice man. He was about 10 years on from his time in NFL (mid 30s) and he had to wear special orthopedic shoes & moved like a much older man.
Paul in KY
@Martin: I feel terribly about the poor devil who was sucked into the engine. Worse than what happened to Mr. Hamlin.
Paul in KY
@Yutsano: That murder/suicide is much sadder than what happened to Mr. Hamlin. Unfortunately, much more common here in the Land of The Gun.
Those poor kids. Doomed to have a selfish, murdering, weirdo, loser-failure for a dad.
Paul in KY
@Raven: Go Frogs! Wife is from Fort Worth.