How to Fit a Terrible Story Into an Agenda
Damar Hamlin's frightening injury and the rush to judgment
By now, even non-NFL fans know about the frightening medical emergency that occurred Monday night during the Bills-Bengals football game. Damar Hamlin, a safety for the Buffalo Bills, made what seemed like an ordinary play. He stood up after the whistle blew, and then collapsed. His family says he had to be resuscitated twice, once on the field and another time after he was rushed to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
This is a critical time period for Hamlin. “For the first 24 to 48 hours [doctors] are going to paralyze him, going to put him on sedatives, keep him on a ventilator to keep his body cool and gradually rewarm him,” Kettering Health Cardiologist Dr. Brian Schwartz told Dayton’s WHIO-TV.
Schwartz believes that the hit Hamlin took occurred at the exact microsecond needed to produce a worst-case scenario. In other words, it wasn’t so much the force of the hit but the location and the timing that may have contributed to Hamlin’s condition. “The blood’s not pumping and in a matter of eight to 12 seconds someone will pass out from that,” he told WHIO-TV. He added that this type of injury usually occurs in young men and particularly in baseball and hockey.
Rather than wait for this type of prudent information from medical experts, social media posters, armchair cardiologists and overreactive media personalities charged ahead with their own theories.
The fastest ones to the gates of hysteria were the members of Twitter who look for every chance to prove that “the jab” is responsible for cardiac abnormalities and “sudden death.”
Now, that’s not to say that this theory shouldn’t be investigated. After all, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA Covid-19 shots (especially in young men) has been reported by several medical journals, although until recently, some news organizations called the idea a conspiracy theory.
Still, we can’t jump to this conclusion if we don’t know anything about Hamlin’s health history. Did he have the original COVID shot as well as one or more boosters? Possibly, since the NFL was requiring players to do so, but we also need to look at any preexisting conditions Hamlin may have had (and possibly not known about). It is an interesting theory, for sure, but not one that can at this time be stated as fact.
Around the same time that Twitter was erupting with this theory, sports commentator Skip Bayless was wondering how the world could go on if the NFL didn’t continue the game after medical staff performed CPR on Hamlin while tearful players from both teams watched in despair. (The game would eventually be called off.)
Sometimes, we have to stop and think before we speak or type in the middle of a crisis. Bayless learned that the hard way, after he was reamed on Twitter and then his co-host on the show “Undisputed,” Shannon Sharpe, refused to work with him on Tuesday and railed into Bayless when he returned for Wednesday’s show.
Back to the blame game, some news outlets were quick to excoriate football in general and the NFL in particular for Hamlin’s medical crisis. “Football is a bloodsport, and enough of us are obsessed enough with it that we have made the NFL the most dominant TV show in America by miles and miles. Much of the country has ceded an entire day of the week to this league,” wrote Alex Kirshner in Slate.
Lest you think it’s just the NFL to blame, you bear some wrongdoing as well. “But football has never held up a mirror to the rest of us, to make us think about what we’re watching, more than it did on Monday,” wrote Kirshner.
Again, we know that football is a dangerous sport, and there have been very severe injuries related to it. We also know that the NFL has allowed a lot of players with unsavory reputations back on the field. The National Football League has a lot of flaws.
What we don’t know is if a seemingly routine hit on Hamlin by the Bengals’ Tee Higgins was the reason (or the sole reason) he stopped breathing. As Dr. Schwartz noted above, the hit could have happened at the most inopportune time, but he also noted that such a hit is common in sports like baseball and hockey. You don't see anyone coming after baseball as a “blood sport,” or even hockey, which sees its share of blood on the ice.
Just like “the jab” theory, the “NFL-is-bad” theory in this instance suffers from lack of sincerity. They both seem to be saying “Aha!” as though they were waiting for a tragedy to prove their cases.
Guys like Hamlin play football their whole lives; they know the risks; they’ve suffered tough injuries. A lot of them wanted to play so badly that they took the mandated Covid shots. We don’t know for sure if either of those issues is the reason Hamlin had to be resuscitated on the field on Monday. And until we get all the information, we might want to hold off on conjecture and instead focus on Hamlin’s recovery.
Hamlin seems like a mature young man who recognizes that his talents have taken him to the top of his sport. He also seems to be keenly aware of what’s most important in life: his family. As he said in a recent interview, “My mom, my dad, my little brother, like that’s pretty much my whole world, outside of any other thing going on; my life revolves around them. I don’t really do too much without my mom and dad’s opinion. Whether I take it or whether I don’t … sometimes I just want to hear it.”
His family is there for Hamlin. Let’s give them the peace they deserve and not play the blame game right now.
For a good example of level-headed reporting on this story, check out this video from News Nation: https://www.newsnationnow.com/video/damar-hamlin-three-things-doctors-say-cause-cardiac-arrest-newsnation/8275899/
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