This has been arguably the darkest, most difficult week that football has experienced in the history of the sport.
The horrifying events of Damar Hamlin collapsing on the field in the first quarter of Monday night’s game has forced us into a state of reflection, confusion, and prayer. Personally, I had zero intention of writing about football this week. All of it seemed completely insignificant and insensitive to carry on about the latest happenings of the Minnesota Vikings while a 24-year-old man was fighting for his life at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. But the miraculous news of Hamlin’s improvements on Thursday morning opened the door for my attempt at a larger discussion. And the updates got even better Friday morning!
We’ve all seen excruciatingly gruesome injuries while tuning in to our beloved game. But nothing has ever come close to this. The images of Hamlin’s teammates in the immediate aftermath will assuredly stick with a lot of us for the rest of our lives. For decades we’ve carried this fear of witnessing someone die while living out their dream in the NFL, but experiencing the trauma of Monday night was something that none of us could have prepared ourselves for.
Like all of us, I’ve spent the week trying to process Damar Hamlin and the game of football as a whole. In my humble opinion, nothing brings people of all different backgrounds, ages, races, and political beliefs together more than this game. And the NFL is the vehicle responsible for these grandiose weekly congregations. We are a football-crazed society, and this game teaches us so many invaluable lessons. But Monday’s terrifying scene unexpectedly reminded us of how truly dangerous this love affair can be.
My football journey began at nine years old. I played the game from third grade until my senior year of high school. I loved every single second that I had playing on the gridiron, and I still periodically have dreams about my playing days with my best friends. As a senior in high school, I was an insanely thin 140-lb. kid who was fortunate enough to play wide receiver, cornerback, and return punts for a fairly successful program in the Twin Cities. But due to my diminutive frame, I played the game a certain way — with terror.
This was a regular occurrence for a vast majority of my receptions at wideout: Once I realized that a hit from a heat-sinking missel of a safety was about to take a place, I instead opted to hit the deck like a 1950s duck-and-cover drill. The thought of getting rocked by dudes that were much stronger and bigger never really appealed to me. Truth be told, the terror I played with wasn’t from the physical pain of getting hit. I was simply terrified of a hit that would result in me getting injured, thus preventing me from playing this game that I love so much.
The long and short of it is that this is a game where 11 guys are chasing a single person with the ball in his hands and trying to cause violent harm to them. And, like many of you, I witnessed some pretty scary stuff playing this game. Our senior year, we were playing Cretin-Derham Hall to close out the regular season. The game was televised on Fox Sports North, and the winner would be crowned the Suburban East Conference champion. One of my best friends (still to this day) was our starting fullback, as well as the heart and soul of our team. We lost to the Raiders at the University of St. Thomas that particular night, but it wasn’t until the busses arrived back at our school where things took a turn for the worse. My friend’s eyes looked like he had just gotten back from Spring Break with Cheech and Chong. He had difficulties walking, speaking, and being in rooms with light. He had played the entire game and his concussion wasn’t detected until an hour after the game. He still doesn’t remember going to the hospital that night.
Once I became a varsity football coach three years later, my perspective on the violence of the game remained. I wasn’t too far removed from the mindset that I possessed as a player, but I was no longer responsible for just me. I had 16-, 17-, and 18-year-old kids that I tried to protect from the cruelty of this game. The safety of our kids was always at the forefront of my mind, and I was probably a bit overcautious with my approach to injuries throughout my seven years as a coach. If one of my receivers showed any signs of a limp or was on the receiving end of a big hit towards the head and/or neck area, more often than not I was on the headset asking the head coach if the kid needed to be looked at. And you won’t catch me apologizing for operating with an abundance of caution during my time on the sideline.
The protective instincts that I had for my receivers as their coach were triggered once Joe Buck mentioned multiple times on the broadcast that the league was giving the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals “five minutes to get ready to go back to playing” after Hamlin collapsed. Admittedly, I’m someone who doesn’t respond well to horrific injuries. It brought me to tears when Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffered his leg injury in the 2013 NCAA Final Four. And I was already in tears after watching Hamlin and the reactions of his teammates on Monday night.
I was truly offended after hearing on the broadcast that the league wanted to resume play after Hamlin collapsed. Thankfully, Bengals head coach Zac Taylor and Bills head coach Sean McDermott took matters into their own hands and ultimately decided that there would be no more football played that night.
Unfortunately for the Vikings and their fans, Hamlin’s life-and-death battle on the playing field hits close to home. Back in July of 2001, Vikings offensive tackle Korey Stringer died of heatstroke that he suffered during training camp. After Stringer’s death, the Vikings returned to practice the following day. Twenty-one years later and that decision to resume practice less than 24 hours later still feels incredibly wrong.
Football is a game. An entertaining distraction for the masses. We can’t lose our moral compass and forget that these are sons, fathers, brothers, uncles, grandsons, cousins, nephews, and friends who are risking their lives to play a horrifically violent game.
So how do we move forward as consumers of this game?
A big first step would be to how we respond to injuries in the moment. When the stakes are high, sports fans in this country have a tendency of losing their collective moral compass in the immediate aftermath of a critical injury. For example, in 2019, Toronto Raptors fans initially cheered when it became clear that Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant couldn’t walk after tearing his Achilles in the second quarter of Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Those Raptors fans cheered because they knew their chances of winning the championship increased significantly if Durant couldn’t play. Just like in October of 2017 inside U.S. Bank Stadium. Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was carted off the field after breaking his collarbone, and it sounded like fans were reacting to the Vikings scoring a touchdown in that moment.
Hopefully, the horror we all experienced together on Monday night will force fans to think twice before celebrating an injury to someone on an opposing team or, even worse, cheering when the player you just so happen to be going against in fantasy football that particular week goes down.
For a game as violent as football, an uptick in humanity has been much needed across the board. And we all have a role to play in it. Vikings defensive tackle and former teammate of Damar Hamlin, Harrison Phillips, stepped up and donated food on consecutive nights for all the nurses and doctors on the ICU floor of UC Medical Center. Vikings edge rusher Patrick Jones II was teammates with Hamlin at the University of Pittsburgh. Matt Daniels, Minnesota’s special teams coordinator, lost his father earlier this year. His father also went into cardiac arrest, and Daniels mentioned that he sought therapy as a coping mechanism.
Watching the football world come together as one in support of Damar Hamlin has been nothing short of beautiful. And the power of prayer and positivity has never shined brighter than it has over the past few days with Hamlin’s incredible progress. I’m confident that football fans around the globe will look back on this week and remember how we joined together and did our absolute best to turn the most dire of negatives into an overwhelmingly joyous positive.
And from this moment on, hopefully the game will be in a much better place because of it.
Keep fighting, Damar. We’ll be cheering you on every step of the way as you embark on making a full recovery.