The trauma of Damar Hamlin surviving a game on the field after a tackle on Monday night: What happened when Damar and Curtis Carter collided?
“How in the world were we living in a world where a player was tragically paralyzed during a game, and minutes later, the whistles blew, and the game played on as if nothing had happened?”
My heart is with the family and teammates of Damar Hamlin. The Bills athletic trainer, Denny Kellington, made the most important play of the season when he reacted quickly and administered cardiopulmonary assist on the field at the end of the game. Something the whole country witnessed.
That’s why, as the horrific scene unfolded on Monday night – when Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed to the turf, and as tears came pouring down players’ faces as they prayed around him on bended knees – I started to feel nauseous just like my wife did that day in Buffalo years ago. Mental wounds were reopened as haunting memories came flooding back in.
During my playing days at Stanford University, my teammate and fellow running back, Kerry Carter, collided with University of Washington player Curtis Williams, who ran up to make a tackle. Curtis was paralyzed from the neck down. Players cried, prayed, then played on. Two days after his 24th birthday, which was also the day of paralysis, the man died due to problems caused by the disease. That collision still haunts my teammate to this day.
In regard to Damar’s injury, Kerry told me: “It’s going to take some time for everyone involved to come to terms with what they just experienced. It’s crazy to look back now and think that we were able to continue playing.”
The trauma is of equal importance. It is indeed real. The trauma of seeing a teammate go down. The trauma of being hit so hard you see stars and almost pass out. The trauma of seeing a kid you’re coaching go down. The trauma of seeing your own kid go down.
When Buffalo Bills tight end Damar Hamlin collapsed of cardiac arrest after making a tackle, it set off a flurry of think pieces and debates about the safety and future of football. It seems like football’s future is clear with over 100 million viewers expected to watch the Super Bowl this year. So, if a player almost dying on the field isn’t enough to stir a longer, sustained debate about safety in the sport — then, what is? The former athlete and sociologist, who quit the league after a decade of being a super fan, discuss football’s hold on the country and moral dilemma of supporting the sport.
Those coaches were cognizant of and concerned about their players’ mental health. It wasn’t worth trying to continue the game after the players looked sad and traumatised.
Bills offensive lineman Dion Dawkins told CNN, “I’m truly blessed that we didn’t have to keep playing. Athletes are often treated as superstars by the people who love them. Some people, like celebrities … but in that moment they treated us like people.”
Some people think that the players should have continued playing. You don’t have to search very long on social media to find that some people care more about their fantasy football team’s performance than the health and well-being of their fellow man. I guess that’s to be expected. That’s the way it’s always been.
The cardiac arrest that occurred during the Monday night game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals shocked and riveted America.
“My first experience playing full tackle football in pads”: A dad’s perspective on a boy’s playing experience with tackle playground football
A few hours earlier, I watched my two young sons playing tackle playground football on an unusually warm winter day. They were off from school for the New Year’s holiday.
I was talking to a dad who is similar to me in that he has an older son than my oldest. We chatted about his son’s first experience playing full tackle football in pads this fall. My son can’t hit that early. Maybe ever. I can not.
As a boy, I liked physical play and enjoyed rough stuff. I was aggressive. I was stronger than the other kids. I was quicker. I wanted to fight. I had wounds all the time, holes in my jeans, and stitches in my head. That was the kind of kid I was. I believe that kids who are drawn to the game of football end up being the best players. You have to be your best at all times in football. There is not one moment to let down. I think that is fun and exciting. It makes you feel like you’re at your best at all times.
When Did Luke Zaleski Join the Army? What Kind of Dad Does His Son Let His Son Play Football? Why Did Luke Hamlin Get What He Wanted?
I have a hard time explaining it to individuals who have not experienced it. It can feel like when I explain why I joined the military to people who weren’t in it, that it is similar to the way they are. It is very difficult to fully comprehend it all, unless you have lived it.
It is hard to fully explain why we do it, what the highs are and why we love it even though it can be dangerous. We probably would have played anyways, because we know what we know now.
Parents would sometimes ask me if I was interested in joining the military or playing football. Less of both is the case each year. And for both, I recommend talking to smart, reflective people who’ve done it – and reading. Luke Zaleski explained at least some of it in GQ, in one of the best pieces I’ve seen, headlined: “What Kind of Father Lets His Son Play Football?”
The game was supposed to be the end of an amazing week of college and pro football.
Social media gave rise to avenues of self-sadness. Hamlin was an unheralded sixth-round pick coming out of the University of Pittsburgh, near his hometown, McKees Rocks, Pa. He cracked the Bills’ starting lineup only in September, after the first-string safety Micah Hyde suffered a neck injury and had to leave the stadium in an ambulance. In 2020, Hamlin set up a GoFundMe to support a toy drive back home in McKees Rocks, and as of that Monday afternoon, just before the game, he’d raised about $2,500. We all felt helpless on Hamlin’s behalf and by Friday it had poured more than $8 million into his toy drive.
The Monday Night Football telecast was the most watched in ESPN history. People showed up to watch over 23 million people. Over 20 million people felt it. Hamlin is being recognized for his leadership. For his integrity and for being a helper. A person who runs in, when others run out. A charity started by Damar Hamlin has raised money to send toys to needy children and is on the verge of being raised over $7 million.
This was all of the reasons we watch sports. But it didn’t merely happen on the same night as Hamlin’s injury; the two events unfolded in lock step, over the same hour of real time. On social media, many fans experienced both dramas at once. I traded texts with friends about Mitchell’s big point total, and I kept on scrolling through the web and mobile devices to see what people were saying about cardiac arrhythmias. This wasn’t just any regular-season N.F.L. game either: The Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals are Super Bowl contenders, and their matchup had major playoff implications, and it was “Monday Night Football,” a multibillion-dollar American institution. Then, suddenly, by swift consensus, the game didn’t matter at all. Skip Bayless, the sports troll of the likes of Elon Musk and others, stepped up to the plate and took a jab at not postponing the game. Bayless was reprimanded by Shannon Sharpe, the ex- N.F.L. tight end that Bayless hosts Fox Sports 1’s “Undisputed,” for offending her.
In Ohio, the Cleveland-area player was scoring 71 points against the Chicago Bulls, in a different universe that only had a few TV channels. It was the highest single-game total in 17 years, and it makes Mitchell one of only seven players in N.B.A. history to top 70. Mitchell is powerful and balletic, with a 6-foot-10 wingspan that has earned him the nickname Spida; the Cavaliers, thanks in large part to him, will most likely reach the playoffs for the first time since 1998 without LeBron James on the roster. In contrast to the tableau in Cincinnati, Mitchell’s night was one of jubilation in the stands, gobsmacked teammates on the bench, and intense delirium in the commentators’ voices. After the game, Mitchell was showered with water bottles and his teammates posed for a picture with him.
The Case of Jack McMahon in the NFL: The Case Against Football In The U.S. Football Football Football Championships 1936-37, 38
Yeah. Yeah. It does not exist. That’s an oxymoron. You know, you’re swinging a bat at people. There’s no safe way to to hit somebody as hard as you can.
I can’t get something. I can’t see what’s happening. Every time I close my eyes and replays and I try watching TV and every time TV go on commercial, that’s the only thing that comes to my mind the vision of that.
McMahon says in his lawsuit that during his career he played with a broken neck and ankle, without being told by doctors or trainers.
More than a thousand former players have filed suit against the NFL over the way concussion related injuries have been handled. The NFL denies the claims.
Some people have publicly said that they’re done watching football. Who are they? What about this moment is affecting how they see their favorite game? Is it too ingrained in U.S. culture for football numbers to grow? I’m Audie Cornish and this is The Assignment.
It started out very controversial. and then it became big. It went from being just a big event to being the most important sporting event in America. And if you look at the ratings for the Joe Louis fights, beginning in 1936, 37, 38. The president is the only thing which gets a higher rating in the United States.
In 1982, Duk-koo Kim, a boxer from Korea, was killed when he was hit in the ring by Ray Mancini, in a fight for the title. And the other was a fight between the heavyweight champion of the world, Larry Holmes, and a gentleman named Tex Cobb. And the fight was so incredibly one sided. And Cobb, got… just looked like a mess, a big, bloody mess. And the referee didn’t stop the fight. It was so controversial, Howard Cosell quit the newspapers. The boxing commentator on ABC Sports would no longer describe it as a barbaric sport. Two events happened a couple of months apart. The broadcast popularity of boxing in the United States never recovered.
The boxer went the other way. The people who really wanted to view the violence would have to pay $100 per view. You know, millions of people paying $100 is more money than Muhammad Ali could ever dreamed of having made, but it just lost out in popular culture in that way.
For a sport to really be very important in American popular culture. It needs to be pervasive. It’s important to hear about it on the radio. You need to be able to watch it live on regular broadcast channels, and you need to be able to read about it in the newspaper regularly. And once you start moving to to really subscription and pay per view models, that kind of popular culture pervasiveness is going to shrink by a lot.
A lot of people point to football being particularly made for television. So, they say the greatest game ever played is this 1958 game between the New York Giants and the Colts for the championship that went into overtime. And they say it’s really made for television because of what the camera can capture. The field lines are used to figure it out. Each player can be seen. It’s pretty intuitive and easy to understand. The drama and suspense are there. It’s a fast moving and violent game.
Michael Socolow says football has been presented with some of the same issues that hurt boxing. There are long term health problems for players.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/6dce907e-5c3d-4943-95e9-afa301616229
When I was a kid, I knew I was going to play football, but I didn’t. When I played the New York Giants tight-end, Nate Jackson, played the NFL and played with the Players Club
And so in that context, the shock of seeing a player down, seeing CPR administered on the field, seeing the players distraught faces, the expression of that national shock makes a lot more sense.
I thought that I could not continue to be a fan if I knew what was going on to so many players.
Wait, there’s more. He is a sociologist at the University of London, who studies sports, masculinity and violence against women.
I was a huge New York Giants fan growing up from about the age of like seven. I was a stats kid kind of growing up like I was the kid who was reading the sports section of the newspaper. You know, cover to cover from the time I was like eight years old.
But at the start of the 2022-2023 football season, he stopped watching football. We found this essay he wrote for The Guardian, where he wrote that he couldn’t unsee the harm it causes.
So I did play football. I played in the NFL for six years. I now host a radio show in Denver. And I’ve also written a couple of books about my experience playing in the NFL, as well as a bunch of articles and pieces like the one that we’re talking about today.
His show is called The Players Club, and Jackson, who had been a former tight end for the Denver Broncos, says he didn’t contemplate his relationship to pain and violence until an injury ended his career in 2009. But Nate still loves the game. He’s drawn to it the same way he was when he was a kid and his parents wouldn’t allow him to play.
The teachers were worried about the game being violent. They wouldn’t let me actually put on a helmet and put on shoulder pads until I got to high school. That’s what they said. And I think silently they were hoping that I would forget about it. I would move on from that dream. I didn’t. So as soon as I got to high school, I signed up and started playing football.
It’s possible that someone planted the seeds in your head for a long time before you got involved with the sport that it looks a little violent and may be a bad idea.
How does that form a culture of devotion? And by devotion I mean playing through injuries, gritting teeth through the pain, not acknowledging what it…maybe, the medication you need to get through those injuries. What point in your life do you think something that you have described in high school becomes something that is more than just a thing and is detrimental to your health and body?
It’s not. It’s not until you’re done. It’s not. It’s not for you to know. You walk away from the sport that you realize it can be a detriment in the real world because ignoring pain is a virtue. In football. The guys who can ignore the pain the best make it the furthest. Certainly, every time you get hit with somebody running full speed wearing a hard plastic helmet with metal on it, that’s going to hurt the very first day, it hurts. But you have to decide, is that going to stop me or am I going to overcome that? When it comes to making it to the top of football, ignoring pain is the way to go.
You have fans who are invested in their team, right? They know everything about them. They buy tickets, they buy jerseys and they spend their weekends watching. But they also spend time during the week paying attention to it. They escape from their everyday lives into sport. And I think it’s a lot easier to do that to justify doing that, hen you feel that the athletes who you’re watching are equally or are actually much more invested in the game and they’re willing to fight through pain and they’re willing to play through it because the stakes to them are so almost life and death that they’re willing to risk injury. I believe that if it wasn’t for the fact that athletes took it seriously and were willing to pay the price for it, fans would think that football is life or death, that it’s what they’re watching.
And Nate, I wonder if you down on the field ever looked up at that crowd screaming and had a question for them, you know, about what they were enjoying in a moment when you and others on the field are experiencing pain.
No because I understood it. I was once a fan of the 49ers and I wanted them to do everything in their power to win the game. When the 49ers faced the choice of whether to have surgery on his hand or not and end his season, safety, Ronald Lott chose to cut off his fingers in order to keep playing. That’s how crucial it was to him. As a fan who had devoted my free hours and my dreams to this team, it made me think of what I wouldn’t give up to be on the field with him. But there is a definitely a separation. When you become a professional, you’re no longer a fan. The fans who watch the players play have a different view of pain than the players.
You’re making my…You’re making the points that I would love to make, Right? I was a fan when you said I’m a fan. The reason that I didn’t watch the game anymore was the way that the players are treated as commodities and only valuable to the team, and this is why I can’t watch sports anymore. And really what I mean by this is ownership. Sometimes, managers and coaches as well. But really for ownership to keep the business of football going. When people get injured in their second year and are never to play again, they are discarded from the sport, even though they don’t have any scars to show from it.
It’s what I was saying is it’s rare that a fan has a moral conflict with it so much that he walks away or she walks away from the game because it draws everyone in. The NFL broadcast do a really good job of not lingering on the consequences of the violence. Someone is laying on the field. They’re going to make a commercial quickly. Now, sometimes they can’t escape it like what happened with Damar Hamlin, but it’s very rare that somebody almost dies on an NFL football field. We’ve seen many injuries, such as broken neck, and we’ve also seen other injuries. The game goes on. The game always goes on.
The game goes on. The game came to a halt because the players and the coaches decided they didn’t want to play anymore. We hold this case like a freak case, and it was where we could not avoid seeing the harmful events that happen on our tv screens. They were able to cut away the commercial for that, but still, they wanted the money making machine to keep turning, even with that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/6dce907e-5c3d-4943-95e9-afa301616229
What’s a turning point moment for a person who leaves fandom after you leave the game? (An interview with Daniel Sailofsky)
I don’t think it’s a turning point moment. In the last few weeks, the conversation has not been the same. Absolutely. But this injury is so completely unusual and such a freak sort of timing injury that you’re not going to see it again or not very often.
So people can kind of compartmentalize. Yes, they can say this isn’t part of the brain injury question or they they can take it out of that column and move forward.
So, here’s where I get to talk to you, Daniel Sailofsky, a little bit about what you’ve learned as you’ve started to pull away from the sport, Right? He’s saying that once you’re on the field it’s different, like you’re no longer a fan. It’s different after you leave the game. What are the tipping points for a person who leaves fandom?
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/6dce907e-5c3d-4943-95e9-afa301616229
Football as a violent sport: A tipping point for those interested in football and other violence-induced injuries in sports (extended version)
I actually do have like a very clear tipping point in my mind, which is…I’m currently writing a book about violence and harm in sports. Head injury and concussions in football and ice hockey were some of the things that were researched, as was rugby and boxing. There are different pieces about early research by Dr. Omalu. The one that was played by Will Smith in that like kind of not so great movie, but important movie, but not such a great movie. But that guy.
The Superbowl is a very profitable event, as well as the NFL. A lot of people are tied to that machine. Television networks are connected to that machine. That’s another reason why I think that it won’t go anywhere soon.
So that’s my point. That’s taking boxing down to only the violence, Right? That’s not the beautiful science, could football be turned into a violent sport for people who like that aspect of it? Because that is the path I saw with boxing, right? It is not maintained its status in the culture and the elements of it that people really enjoy have migrated to another, more violent sport that takes even less care of the people who participate in it.
I think it’s baked into our society. It’s not just fighting each other. There are a lot of strategies that Daniel fell in love with that make people very, very interested. It is a ballet of sorts. People don’t think about how violent the game is, but the very athletic moves you make to avoid being hit, are some of the reasons people like football. Sometimes the most exciting moments of football are avoided at the cost of violence. And I think—
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/6dce907e-5c3d-4943-95e9-afa301616229
“It’s a mystery”: an ex-football fan’s opinion of the cultural “soccerty”
I’m just saying there was a world where there were entertainments that seemed so baked into our culture. Nothing could ever replace them. And then things kind of did.
I’d say that’s me. but I would say that’s true also of a lot of cultural practices in general, like just because something has existed. I think we both agree that football will not end anytime soon, because it is so baked into the culture and using it as a main justification. It’s one thing if it’s baked into the culture. It’s a different question if it should exist. There’s all sorts of behavior that people might enjoy that we do not allow them to do because of the risks and the harms associated with it.
Daniel, It sounds like you’re about to have a lonely existence as an ex-football fan. I think you had a big social life built around this. Right?
I did. I still have a social life built around a lot of sports and a lot of sports fandom so that I’m okay with. I have moved and I don’t live in the same city as I used to. But look, I watch a lot of other things I watch mens and womens basketball…
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/6dce907e-5c3d-4943-95e9-afa301616229
Keeping Football Going: Telling Your Fan about Football and How You Are Going to Love Your Player, and What You’re Doing About It
If he is going to be a lonely person, then what do you think about people telling you not to? Maybe I’m done with this thing and I can’t unsee some things.
I think there are a couple. Not a lot. Football isn’t going away. It’s very lucrative. It’s, you know, in a world where television is dying. Football is keeping it going.
I would agree with you. I think it’s important to note that it will continue to exist, but it isn’t a reason that it should keep going.
Nate Jackson, what’s your message to fans who might be listening to this conversation and who might be in various kind of states of debate with themselves?
My message to fans would be that your favorite football players are human beings and when they get hurt, they might disappear from the field. You might not see them again, but they have a long road to recovery That’s that’s painful, that’s fraught with a lot of mental illness, depression, lack of self-worth, confusion about where they land in society. And so my message to fans would be, if you’re going to love the player, you have to love the person behind the helmet. If you’re going to love the team, you have to love the men who make up that team and lay themselves on the line for your team to win. And I think more fans are kind of discovering that as we get more access to these players in their lives. I do believe they’re more humanized. We have a long way to go, so that’s the message I would give to fans.
Daniel Selassie was a sports sociologist. He’s a lecturer at Middlesex University London, and Jackson is the author of “Slow Getting Up: a Story of NFL’s Survival From the Bottom of the Pile.” You can hear him on the fan sports radio in Denver.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/6dce907e-5c3d-4943-95e9-afa301616229
The Assignment Podcast: The Higgs Boson in the Quest for Higher Derivatives and Excitations of the Atomic Electroweak Symmetry
That’s it for this episode of The Assignment. New episodes drop every Thursday. If you get your podcasts, please listen and follow. Please take some time and leave a rating and a review if you like the show.
CNN Audio is the producer of The Assignment. Madeleine Thompson is one of the producers. Our associate producers are Isoke Samuel, Alison Park and Sonia Htoon. Our senior producers are Haley Thomas and Matt Martinez. Rina Palta is our editor. David Schulman is the audio engineer who mixes in sound design. Dan is the technical director. Abbie Fentress Swanson is our executive producer and special thanks to Katie Hinman. Thank you for listening.