I had just finished putting my four year old son to bed. My wife was still negotiating the terms of bedtime with our six year old son. The bowl game between Penn State and Utah had finished. I was rooting for Utah which I considered the lesser of two evils. Monday Night Football started, and I wasn’t really paying enough attention to put anything else on. I didn’t and don’t care about the Bills or the Bengals, but both teams had decent records, so I figured I would leave it on until it was time to go to bed. They started showing a player stand up and collapse over and over, and I started paying closer attention. I didn’t understand why he was collapsing. I had seen the play before he collapsed, and he did not lead with his helmet or hit someone in a way that would damage his spinal cord. What was happening? My wife came into the room, and I asked her to pay attention. She said, almost immediately, “What if he went into cardiac arrest?” She has medical training and as paramedics continued “working on” the player on the field instead of loading him into the ambulance a few feet away, I wondered, with horror, is he even still alive?
I continued to watch what unfolded Monday night with Damar Hamlin until it seemed there would be no update other than “he is in critical condition.” As I went to bed, I felt the same mixture of emotions about football I experience anytime I see a player slow to get up after a play or someone carted off the field. Then I started thinking about the connection (if there is one) between football and guns in America.
We know that both football and guns CAN be dangerous. Certainly they aren’t always dangerous as there are plenty of people who have played football for many years and don’t seem to have experienced debilitating injuries just as there are plenty of people who have guns (including me) who have never shot anyone or themselves. At the same time, when they are dangerous, they are quite dangerous with horrific deaths related to CTE and horrendous mass shootings. There were so many people Monday night calling for or offering “thoughts and prayers” for Damar Hamlin that I couldn’t help but think of the litany of thoughts and prayers following mass shootings. Both football violence and gun violence are native only to America in any meaningful measure. And, with both, we seem to know better. We know that guns are not a necessity and neither are sports - certainly not professional sports. Both are, broadly speaking, forms of entertainment. I really love watching football. I have loved watching football since I was a child. I often don’t love the fact that I love watching football so much because I know about CTE, money, racism, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence - and Monday night, cardiac arrest. I’m not going to let my children play football, and yet I will watch someone else’s child play football and possibly die while playing football.
I kept thinking about two other things Monday night. There is an episode of his podcast where Malcolm Gladwell talks about a University of Pennsylvania football player dying from suicide a few years ago. The player’s brain was studied, and evidence of CTE was found. Gladwell, while speaking at an event at Penn, asked them why they still had a football team.
The most influential teacher I have ever had was a professor in college who challenged my thinking in ways I am still coming to terms with even though he died a few years ago, and it has been almost twenty years since I was his student. He would often point out that it makes no sense to pray before a football game for no one to be hurt since part of football involves a high likelihood of some form of injury, eventually.
I do pray that Damar Hamlin makes a full recovery. I pray that he walks out of the hospital like nothing happened. And, maybe I will change on this, but today I pray that he never plays football again.
