Trigger warning: The opening paragraph of this story recounts a story of death.
“Come. Help. It’s dad. He’s not breathing.”
The terrified, frantic tone in my mother-in-law’s voice is locked in a part of my brain. A breathless sing-song of shock and fear. I vividly recollect every second of fumbling for my phone to plead with 911 to arrive as quickly as possible. Trying to convince myself and my four-year-old daughter as we sat on the front porch with the sun rising that things were going to be okay.
“Mommy was a police officer. Your aunt is a nurse. They know how to help granddaddy, and the ambulance is on the way.”
I’ve lost people before. We all have, but this was the first with immediacy. The grief destroys you, but being right there when everything happened is what left every single one of us in a daze that lasted hours.
“We never had breakfast,” my daughter said, pulling gently on my shirt with her tiny hand. It was noon, and we’d been awake since 4:42 am. Waiting for the EMTs to arrive made minutes feel like an eternity, but it had been two hours since the coroner left, and it may as well have been a blink of the eye.
This is what has been going through my mind since Monday Night Football. The immediacy of the event. The shock, confusion, helplessness, and how all-consuming it is to witness a medical emergency like that. Unless it’s something you experience with regularity it leaves you unable to think of anything else. These were NFL players — they’re accustomed to broken bones, torn ligaments, cuts, and scrapes — not a 24-year-old coworker, a brother, going into cardiac arrest.
Nothing but Damar Hamlin’s health was the focus. Nothing else should have been. ESPN, particularly Booger McFarland, Scott Van Pelt, and Ryan Clark, handled the broadcast and its aftermath with the gravitas and grace it deserved — which was less about any masterful ability as sports analysts, and more their humanity shining through during one of the darkest incidents to happen on an NFL field.
There’s no “right” way to tell anyone how to process something like Hamlin’s medical emergency, but the NFL unquestionably dealt with it the wrong way. Someone in a position of power was so unprepared for something like this happening that they sent a message to the teams for the players to warm up and prepare to resume the game. If it wasn’t for coaches stepping in and stopping this ludicrous request, we really may have seen athletes in shock, unable to think about playing football — but being forced to do so anyway.
They’re humans.
The NFL is claiming they never told anyone to resume the game. There are ample reports indicating that someone told the teams the game would resume. That message was conveyed to the coaches and players, and at this point nobody inside the league is going to own up to making such a stupid request. The NFL can be monumentally dumb, and make decisions that are so stupid they defy belief — but even with a propensity to view the NFL with the most cynical eye, I truly can’t imagine someone being so callous as to make the call for play to resume after Hamlin’s incident, while players were visibly distraught on the sidelines.
Guidelines exist for moments like this. They’re written at times removed from crisis so when something does happen there’s a guiding light that can cut through the darkness and provide a path forward for people who are dealing with shock. The NFL has plenty of these, with the most common and benign being how a game should be suspended in the event of lightning.
What last night showed is how the league has a woeful crisis gap for any on-field incident that’s more serious than an orthopedic injury. The NFL prides itself on being pedantic when it comes to sock design, signage dimension and what color visors players can put on their helmets — but the same level of care and focus evaporates when there’s a medical emergency. The world saw how unprepared one of the largest sports leagues in the world was, and the medical emergency became an embarrassment.
We need the NFL to be human.
It’s the most basic bar this league needs to clear. We need more people in decision-making positions to simply act with care and empathy. There has to be someone watching who sees something like last night and say “football isn’t important — we’ll figure it out later.” That’s it. We don’t need it to be this difficult. However, time and time again when the NFL is called to have a modicum of understanding they find a way to choose to callousness.
The league’s marketing ethos revolves around portraying the NFL’s players as superheroes. They’re draped in gladiatorial imagery, vaunted for “sacrificing their bodies for the game,” and this veneer too often causes us to remove humanity from the game of football in service of the most pointless stuff. Who cares what Monday night does to playoff seeding, or who gets home field advantage? Certainly not those with the most skin in the game, as Stefon Diggs desperately pleaded with Cincinnati police to let him into the hospital so he could be closer to Hamlin.
They’re humans. Some of the most athletically gifted humans on the planet whose physical gifts are able to fill us with awe and shape the entire complexion of a year based on their performance, but they’re still human. They bleed like us, grieve like us, and struggle with the same mental anguish every single one of us does in a moment of crisis. We must never, ever forget this as we pray for Damar Hamlin to have a speedy recovery. For his family and loved ones to find comfort and be free of distress today. While we also say “never again” to the NFL, and ask for more from an organization that we invest so much time, energy, and effort into.
We should never have to watch as a confused league forgets about the wellbeing of its own players in service of keeping the schedule neat and tidy. That’s what happened on Monday night, and even if it wasn’t because of true evil — it was a lack of care. We deserve better, all of us.
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