Damar Hamlin’s Unusual Injury Isn’t Really

No Matter How Much We May Want It To Be. Football is Football, and We Like It

Damar Hamlin (didwewin.shop)

---

The road to last Monday night and Damar Hamlin’s injury is a long one. It goes through Soldier Field.

Bookies used to say that any team that visited Chicago was odds-on to win the following week because after getting beat up by the Bears, most other opponents were a relief.

dickbutkus.com

I loved that. The Bears couldn’t be depended on to play well, but they were conscientious about brutalizing and terrorizing opponents.

It was my kind of football, celebrated on the pages of Johnny Sample’s “Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer.” The New York Jets cornerback admitted, proudly, that he purposely decked receivers even after the ball had harmlessly passed by. 

He liked to send a message.

---

My appreciation for this brand of football waned one day in the 1984-1985 off-season. Bears legends Doug Plank and Mike Hartenstine were both shown on an evening news program struggling along with walkers.

“I’m not supporting a sport that tends to cripple its players,” said I, and swore off football. 

My pledge of abstinence lasted about three days. I realized that the Bears were likely to demolish anything in their path in 1985, and I climbed back on the bandwagon with the rest of the city. 

It was fun watching that team, especially the defense, one of the most adept ever at seismic hits that dislodged the ball.

Bears running back Walter Payton’s success owed a lot to how he responded to tackling. He usually dished out so much force that he broke free, or at least got a little extra yardage before he went to the ground. 

---

Last Monday, that’s what Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins did as Bills safety Hamlin tackled him. Though he didn’t get much out of it, Higgins gave the tackler more than the tackler gave him by ramming his helmet into his chest.

Of all of the millions of words thrown around about the Hamlin injury, relatively few remind us of this fact. That’s because in service to the narrative that so many people seem complicit in creating, it’s important that we believe that what happened is nobody’s fault.

That’s an underlying theme in football, going back a few decades, to when the craziness exhibited by many retired players was laughed off as anomalous, caused by bad manners or something else inherent in the persons of the players. That wasn’t true, of course. 

Many of us would eventually read a lot about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a debilitating brain disease that was responsible for ruining athletes’ lives. Football players and boxers get CTE from repeated smacks in the head.

My own reading material included books and articles by Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times.

When I finally met him, he was using crutches to help him stand on crooked legs, bent and broken decades before, during his playing days at Northwestern.

I am still dismayed that Telander had for years been one of the few sportswriters to beat the drum about players’ head trauma, especially since, according to a recent study by Boston University’s CTE Center, 99% of brains they’ve collected from dead NFL players show CTE. Former college players: 91%. High school: 21%.

Sportswriters who knock the game and its players tend to be unwelcome in clubhouses. When award-winning Tribune columnist Mike Downey left Chicago 20 years ago, he wrote a mea culpa about how he had been very suspicious of steroid abuse early on but didn’t investigate it, just for this reason. 

Doing his job would, apparently, interfere with doing his job. Nature of the beast.

It’s not just the sportswriters who sometimes shy away from the truth about sports, however. That was apparent after Hamlin collapsed as millions watched on ESPN.

On Twitter, one poster after another put up a variation on this theme: “Please don’t show the video of what happened to Damar Hamlin. Let’s all pray for him and his family right now.”

Why not show it? It’s not offensive. All one sees is a typically rough tackle, then a guy in a helmet and pads lying down on the grass.

---

Not showing it would help to perpetuate the myth that relatively recent NFL rules limiting practices like spearing have rendered a hazardous sport safe. 

The only reason for such soft-pedaling is to protect the Football Industrial Complex. Hamlin’s collapse happened on Monday Night Football, a spectacle typically witnessed by 15.3 million souls. That’s a lot.

After news of the injury hit social media, that number reached a record-breaking 23.8 million. Most of those jumping on ESPN weren’t doing it out of concern. They were like drivers gaping at a tangled collision on the other side of the highway.

We like violence in football and elsewhere. For goodness sake, millions of people now watch two guys get in a ring and kick each other in the face.

Some of us don’t admit that a lot of sports are mainly about the thrill of witnessing athletes risking bodily harm. A ticket to a NASCAR event is a seat at a prospective high-speed car wreck. Similarly, we watch many kinds of “extreme sports” mainly because they’re so scary.

Conversely, boxing declined decades ago because of brutality. Its popularity seems to be rising again, but hasn’t made a full comeback. That’s because now it isn’t violent enough to compete with mixed martial arts, in which 15 fighters have been killed since 1981. Boxing is still way ahead in the black parade, but MMA allows scarier-looking stuff, more imaginative means of attack than just punching above the belt.

The NFL probably did the right thing by postponing, then canceling, the remainder of last Monday's game. But I wouldn’t be very squeamish about it if they had made a different decision.

The players shouldn’t be expected to be, either. 

Few of them are making less than $25,000 per week, year-round, and many of them are earning far more. That’s enough to choke down their anguish and go back to work. Most of them have done it before.

Too unfeeling? Who do you think we’re dealing with, Boy Scouts? Have you ever witnessed player behavior, say, at a Bears-Packers game? 

In 2021, NFL players were assessed 2,279 yards for unnecessary roughness alone, not including fun activities like crackback blocks. Roughing the passer is a thing of the past? 2,003 yards.

Players spend their days clobbering each other – and their nights? In college, student-athletes — football and basketball — are about three times more likely to commit a campus rape as their less-athletic male counterparts. They’re also far more likely to commit other crimes, such as beating the daylights out of people.

There are nice guys, sensitive guys, playing pro football. Absolutely. But they’re probably not the kind of guys who are afraid of asking a girl for a date or cry uncontrollably at Bambi. And they’ve all seen people they know get hurt before.

In 2022, two dozen NFL players were arrested for one thing or another. In 2021, 27. One murder, one manslaughter included. They’re not a bunch of shrinking violets.

Neither are we. The postponement was really to satisfy the public consciousness, but it’s questionable that many of us really need it.

We patronize slasher movies and play spectacularly murderous video games. And real life? 

There were 1.4 million visits to emergency rooms by American assault victims in 2020. We killed 24,576 of our fellow human beings.

In the year just passed, there were 735 mass shootings. 

Those shootings struck down 3,637 people, killed and injured, none of whom we lionize nearly as much as we do the Buffalo Bills backup safety. 

Some of them were involved in charity work, too.

I hear Hamlin’s a great guy, and I’m glad he’s doing better. But what’s going on here?

If you were to suffer cardiac arrest tomorrow, facsimiles of your shirt would not be the biggest-selling garment on the Internet. And if you’re saying that kind of response reflects people’s concern for Hamlin’s condition, fine, but I’d wager that few of the people buying the jerseys or donating to his charity were previously aware of that charity. Or aware of him.

If you were to die from your cardiac arrest, would a single person who didn’t know you or one of your bereaved attend your funeral?

Many of those responding so positively to Hamlin’s plight are also responding to something else.

It isn’t player reaction. We’ve seen similar onfield circles of players praying over injured teammates before, usually after spinal injuries. Hamlin’s injury is not necessarily worse or better. It’s just cleaner.

Shocking, maybe, but no bones sticking out, no limbs at odd angles, no writhing on the turf. And lovers of football – or those who just abide it – seem to find this a natural moment to respect an injured player, and football injuries in general,  without having to reflect on why they happen. 

Because we feel guilty about that. Almost every game we watch, somebody gets hurt. And we change the channel and watch another one that turns out the same.

But what felled Hamlin looks, conveniently, like an act of God. Or a tremendous coincidence — a blow to the chest at the exact moment necessary to stop a heart in its traces.

After all, it’s happened to Little Leaguers who were too slow getting their gloves up to stop a line drive.

But it almost never happens to professional baseball players skilled at their craft. That’s the difference. This could happen any day to any professional football player because it’s that kind of game.

Canadian and Australian football seem to be those kinds of games, too. And ice hockey, professional wrestling, kickboxing and mixed martial arts. And Muay Thai, the Southeast Asian combat sport that can make MMA look like beanbag.

Hamlin’s injury wasn’t a fluke. It was different, but just a little different.

Face it. We like sports where traumatic injury is not only possible but inevitable. Common, even.

How does it feel to be a ghoul?