Like a bucket of movie-theater popcorn, salted and drowned in liquid butter, we know football is bad for us. Yet we’re hopelessly addicted, complicit in a barbaric sport that, in an instant Monday night, graduated from dangerous to downright terrifying when Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field after what appeared to be a routine tackle.
Players and fans were haunted by what they saw, devastated watching medics tend to Hamlin, requiring almost 10 minutes of CPR. The game was abandoned, but the NFL, as it always does, will march on, soon resuming its place atop our American entertainment hierarchy. Our viewing habits probably won’t change much, unfazed even by the specter of a seemingly healthy 24-year-old going into cardiac arrest.
While some will dismiss Monday night as an outlier, a freak accident no one could have possibly planned for or predicted, the more cynical among us would argue what happened to Hamlin was inevitable, a byproduct of a sport that, no matter how many rules we change, no matter how many concussion studies we conduct, will never be safe.
“It’s like trying to make a safe cigarette. That’s just not really how this game works. Part of why people watch is the fact that it’s not safe. That’s an element to the drama of this. The idea of sacrifice, it’s part of what draws people in,” Bomani Jones told Don Lemon during his appearance on CNN This Morning. “We feel guilty when we see things like this, so we always try ways to come around like, ‘You think they can find a way to make this safe?’ No, they can’t. That’s just not what this game is or what it’s ever going to be.”
As articulated by Jones, it’s difficult to reconcile our collective obsession with football, a violent sport that, for better or worse, has come to define our national identity. The popular ESPN personality is cognizant of that paradox, acknowledging the rollercoaster of emotions he experienced watching Paycor Stadium fall silent, a moment as surreal as any we’ve seen in professional sports.
“I kind of missed it and then once I saw that they were talking in somber tones, doing the solemn replay I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t need to watch this.’ My thought was that it was a spinal injury, that’s something that you see happen often in football,” said Jones, who returns as the host of HBO’s Game Theory, with Season 2 premiering later this month. “After they came back from a couple commercial breaks and then said that they were administering CPR, I called one of my colleagues and said, ‘Did we watch somebody die?’ Because it was so clear from the way they were treating it that it was that grave and that dire. And then I was like, they’re going to play football.”
Though the NFL took criticism for its indecisiveness amid a medical emergency, waiting over an hour to call the game, ESPN’s on-air talent, particularly Scott Van Pelt, Ryan Clark, Booger McFarland and Lisa Salters, were commended for their thoughtful and heartfelt analysis, handling difficult subject matter with grace and humility.
“I’ve watched enough of these to recognize that something was very different and the fact that Joe Buck couldn’t even figure out what to say,” said Jones. “And then it’s 10 minutes later and they’re talking about CPR. That was, for me, the moment that it became really terrifying.”
Our relationship with football will always be complicated, muddied by moral compromises and the looming threat of unconscionable danger. Monday night provided a rare look-in-the-mirror moment for an unstoppable juggernaut that usually doesn’t answer to anyone, forcing players and fans to confront the painful reality that maybe this isn’t worth it. Only time will tell if that feeling takes permanent hold or registers as little more than a passing thought.
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