The condemnation was harsh and swift. On Monday night, moments after Bills safety Damar Hamlin had gone into cardiac arrest on the field in Cincinnati, loathsome hot take artist Skip Bayless tweeted his concern about … how the NFL would go about postponing one of the most crucial games of the regular season between two Super Bowl favorites.
“No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game - but how?,” wrote Bayless. “This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular-season outcome ... which suddenly seems so irrelevant.”
should Tony dungy be removed from Sunday night football?
During a time in which seemingly everybody — sportswriters, athletes, public figures, regular NFL fans — was expressing their well-wishes for Hamlin, Bayless’ tweet stuck out like rotten garbage. It was the latest insensitive remark from a callous commentator who’s made a lucrative career out of saying the outlandish.
Finally, Bayless appeared to cross the line. Hamlin, who’s 24, almost died on the field. As of Wednesday morning, he remains in critical condition.
And Bayless was talking about the playoffs. Gross.
Several high-profile athletes — Dez Bryant, Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner, Isaiah Thomas — called for Bayless to be fired. Kendrick Perkins called Bayless a “sick individual.” Even this humble blogger got involved in the action.
“I rarely advocate for media people — especially talk show hosts — to be disciplined for their opinions,” I tweeted. “But FS1 should suspend Skip Baylees for his insane tweet and not let him come back until he drops the wrestling character. It’s beyond corny at this point.”
On Tuesday, Bayless faced the music alone on his FS1 yell-fest, “Undisputed.” Shannon Sharpe, whose relationship with Bayless is reportedly at an “all-time low,” took the day off. The friction between them was evident Wednesday, when Bayless interrupted Sharpe in the middle of his heartfelt explanation about why he missed Tuesday's show.
For nearly 20 minutes Tuesday, Bayless tried to explain himself, and largely failed. Reading from a piece of paper, he said his tweet was “widely misconstrued” and “misinterpreted.”
“For the first time in the history of the NFL, my point was, it was all rendered irrelevant by what was happening on the football field in front of all those football players. They were shaken to their foundations,” he said.
Notably, Bayless never directly apologized for his disrespectful tweet.
Is this the end of his time as a well-paid carnival barker?
Bayless, who’s 71 years old, tweets into an echo chamber. He doesn’t follow a single person, and often tweets his forced takes in real time. His previous two tweets about Hamlin were banal remarks about how “players on both teams are shaken” and that he “said a prayer” for Hamlin and his family.
On Tuesday night, Bayless was right back to live-tweeting NBA action, calling out the Celtics for their embarrassing loss to the Thunder and praising Giannis Antetekounmpo for his 55-point effort.
This isn’t the worst take Bayless has ever spewed. Just a couple of years ago, Bayless mocked Dak Prescott for his public admission of depression. Five days after 9/11, he penned a column in the San Jose Mercury News lambasting athletes for failing to provide him with an escape following the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.
Yes, that actually happened. Trolls could get away with a lot more before social media, huh?
But this one hit differently. Even former Fox Sports president Scott Atkinson ripped Bayless in a now-deleted tweet. “You’ve created the worst take ever. A man could be dead you f$& king POS. You actually make me f$& king embarrassed that I helped start the network that pays you millions of f$& king dollars,” he wrote. “You truly are a worthless POS. What in the actual f$&k are you thinking?”
The venom directed towards Bayless is about his overall body of work. He’s built an entire career off of castigating others and taking cheap shots. As the saying goes, authorities didn’t actually arrest Al Capone for his brutal reign as a mob boss. They caught him for tax evasion. Bayless’ tweet about Hamlin is the sports take equivalent of that.
Bayless’ act may be over; but if that’s the case, his downfall was set in motion long before Monday night.
————————
Did Joe Buck screw up, or did the NFL?: In the moments following Hamlin’s on-field collapse, Joe Buck told “Monday Night Football” viewers that the Bills and Bengals were given a five-minute window to warm up before resuming play.
But in a midnight conference call, NFL VP of football operations Troy Vincent said it “never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play.” The ex-defensive back called the accusation “ridiculous” and “insensitive.”
ESPN defended Buck in a subsequent statement, saying there was “constant communication” between the network and league officials. Buck, who told the New York Post the whole night is a blur, repeated his report about the five-minute warmup window four separate times.
So who’s telling the truth here? It’s hard to believe that Buck went rogue and relayed faulty information about the proposed five-minute warmup window. ESPN pays the NFL $2.6 billion annually to broadcast MNF. There’s no way Buck would jeopardize that partnership by spreading innuendo about one of the most disturbing on-field moments in league history.
The NFL, after nearly one hour, eventually got the call right and suspended the game. But that doesn’t mean the league was always there.
Kudos to Ryan Clark: ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt and Ryan Clark were extraordinary in their coverage of the Hamlin story Monday night. They avoided speculation; and instead, Clark, who played 13 seasons in the NFL as a hard-hitting safety, spoke from the heart.
“So many times in this game and in our job as well, we use the clichés ‘I’m ready to die for this,’ ‘I’m willing to give my life for this,’ ‘It’s time to go to war,’ and I think sometimes we use those things so much we forget that part of living this dream is putting your life at risk,” said Clark. “Tonight, we got to see a side of football that is extremely ugly, a side of football that no one ever wants to see or never wants to admit exists.”
The whole clip is worth watching:
Hamlin’s fundraiser shows the good in people: We spend so much time criticizing others in this space, so how about some praise for humanity? Fans raised more than $4 million for Hamlin’s charity, a toy drive for underprivileged kids, in the aftermath of his health scare.
It’s apparent that Hamlin is an extraordinary individual. It’s nice to see the world repaying him for that.