The NFL game Monday was suspended not long after Bills safety Damar Hamlin went down after making a tackle on Bengals receiver Tee Higgins.
The tackle by Hamlin in the first quarter was rugged, but we see dozens as hard or harder in every NFL game. What we don’t see is a player stand up, as Hamlin did, and then collapse to the field, motionless. We don’t see first responders administer CPR, as they did for Hamlin.
And it’s rare to see any player taken away in an ambulance.
As I write this, Hamlin is in critical condition at a hospital not far from Paycor Stadium in Cincinnati. The question is, of course, how critical is he? Will he survive? And, if he does, will he be OK?
The collision between the safety and the receiver was one in which Hamlin seemed to take the greater blow to his head and chest. Did that cause his collapse? Who can tell? Who knows anything for sure right now?
But one thing this event did, even as fans sat in silence, then slowly trickled out of the stadium in stunned sadness and disbelief, was remind us of how violent the game of football, at the elite level, truly is.
Maybe we don’t see it all the time. The TV cameras are great at turning away, cutting to commercials, moving cheerily along, with an analyst later reporting that a player was ‘‘injured,’’ likely ‘‘done for the game.’’ The injury could be a twisted ankle, a bruised shoulder. Or it could be a compound fracture, a mutilated knee, a concussion severe enough to cause dementia 30 years down the road.
I remember seeing Lions receiver Chuck Hughes lying dead on the field in a game against the Bears in 1971. I was certain he had been killed, maybe by the biggest headhunter of all, Bears middle linebacker Dick Butkus, who was one of the first to notice Hughes down and motionless.
But Butkus had nothing to do with Hughes’ death. It was caused by a heart attack. To date, Hughes is the only player to die on an NFL field. And, tellingly, that game more than a half-century ago continued to the end.
This one in Cincinnati did not. Thank God. It’s for sure the players wouldn’t have gone back on the field, even if somebody had declared that, like the circus the NFL often is likened to, ‘‘The show must go on.’’
In a way, the whole nation paused as the game was suspended. TV networks that have little to do with sports, such as CNN and Fox News, abruptly switched their programming to the unfolding tragedy. What we experienced was maybe, just maybe, a serious collective re-examination — just for a spell, while time was dangling with portent — of our love for violence and the willful damaging of other men.
Earlier in the game, Bills cornerback Taron Johnson had gone down with an apparent head injury. After he was attended to by trainers, he made it off the field under his own power. No big deal. Who knows what unseen damage was done? He didn’t stay down. That’s all that gets anybody’s attention.
I stop and rewind and pause many plays in every game that I watch on TV because I notice the momentary head-on collisions, the blurred helmet-to-helmet blows, that happen all the time. They do. Constantly. The players are like two rams, sometimes three, butting for control, for status. And it’s not taught. Some athletes will do it instinctively.
It’s that primitive. Low man wins. Most brutal man wins. Axioms. The league knows it. Anybody with anything to do with the game knows it.
The rules only soften the most glaring viciousness. And the rules only have been tightened because of all the demented, damaged old players lurching about and the younger ones committing suicide (also from the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that affected their elders). This became embarrassing to the powers that be.
Football is its own game, an American game, perfect for a country with more guns than people. Football has rules that keep it on the edge of the uncivilized, jousting with the limits of human size, speed, musculature and aggression.
It’s a wonderful game. But something inside it is horrible. Young men play it, want to play it, just as they sign up for war, do so many things that risk injury and death. Myself, I loved playing football.
You’re strong. You’re full of juice. You’re immortal, baby.
Until you’re not.
