{"id":593932,"date":"2023-01-04T09:49:46","date_gmt":"2023-01-04T15:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/04\/nfl-players-are-human\/"},"modified":"2023-01-04T09:49:46","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T15:49:46","slug":"nfl-players-are-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/04\/nfl-players-are-human\/","title":{"rendered":"NFL players are human"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trigger warning: The opening paragraph of this story recounts a story of death.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCome. Help. It\u2019s dad. He\u2019s not breathing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The terrified, frantic tone in my mother-in-law\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMommy was a police officer. Your aunt is a nurse. They know how to help granddaddy, and the ambulance is on the way.\u201d <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve lost people before. We all have, but this was the first with immediacy. The grief destroys you, but being right there<\/em> when everything happened is what left every single one of us in a daze that lasted hours. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe never had breakfast,\u201d my daughter said, pulling gently on my shirt with her tiny hand. It was noon, and we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\n

This is what has been going through my mind since Monday Night Football<\/em>. The immediacy of the event. The shock, confusion, helplessness, and how all-consuming it is to witness a medical emergency like that. Unless it\u2019s something you experience with regularity it leaves you unable to think of anything else. These were NFL players \u2014 they\u2019re accustomed to broken bones, torn ligaments, cuts, and scrapes \u2014 not a 24-year-old coworker, a brother, going into cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n

Nothing but Damar Hamlin\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no \u201cright\u201d way to tell anyone how to process something like Hamlin\u2019s 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\u2019t for coaches stepping in and stopping this ludicrous request, we really may have seen athletes in shock, unable to think about playing football \u2014 but being forced to do so anyway.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re humans.<\/p>\n

The NFL is claiming they never told anyone to resume the game<\/a>. There are ample reports indicating that someone<\/em> 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 \u2014 but even with a propensity to view the NFL with the most cynical eye, I truly can\u2019t imagine someone being so callous as to make the call for play to resume after Hamlin\u2019s incident, while players were visibly distraught on the sidelines.<\/p>\n

Guidelines exist for moments like this. They\u2019re written at times removed from crisis so when something does happen there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

What last night showed is how the league has a woeful crisis gap for any on-field incident that\u2019s 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 \u2014 but the same level of care and focus evaporates when there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We need the NFL to be human. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 \u201cfootball isn\u2019t important \u2014 we\u2019ll figure it out later.\u201d That\u2019s it. We don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The league\u2019s marketing ethos revolves around portraying the NFL\u2019s players as superheroes. They\u2019re draped in gladiatorial imagery, vaunted for \u201csacrificing their bodies for the game,\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re 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\u2019re 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 \u201cnever again\u201d to the NFL, and ask for more from an organization that we invest so much time, energy, and effort into.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s what happened on Monday night, and even if it wasn\u2019t because of true evil \u2014 it was a lack of care. We deserve better, all of us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a> James Dator<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trigger warning: The opening paragraph of this story recounts a story of death. \u201cCome. Help. It\u2019s dad. He\u2019s not breathing.\u201d The terrified, frantic tone in my mother-in-law\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":593933,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3790,568,3555],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-593932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"category-human","9":"category-players"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}