In September 2008, the Kansas City Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard smashed helmet-first into the knee of Tom Brady as the New England Patriots quarterback heaved a long pass down the field. The collision, which did not draw a penalty, reduced Brady to a writhing heap and sidelined him for the rest of the season with a torn ACL. But most striking to the reigning league MVP was what came next. “They play the game without you,” he told Sports Illustrated. “You’re like, ‘Wow. That’s really what it’s like.’”
The NFL manages its inherent brutality with constant reassurances that it’s very much on top of the situation – when a man goes down, the medical team descends to whisk him into a tent or the stadium bowels for an X-ray or painkiller jab. The next man steps in. The game goes on.
It could have happened again on Monday night in Cincinnati. About nine minutes in, the Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin dropped to the turf after a textbook tackle and didn’t get back up. The Bills medical team rushed on to the field to administer CPR and paddle-start Hamlin’s heart. All the while their efforts to revive the 24-year-old were shrouded in a prayer circle composed of virtually the entire Bills team.
Players looked inconsolably frightened, justifiably so. Hamlin hadn’t torn a hamstring or experienced “concussion-like symptoms”. He had reportedly gone into cardiac arrest and was taken via ambulance to the nearest trauma center.
There was little reason to suspect this primetime NFL game with critical playoff implications wouldn’t go on – not with ESPN filibustering through the pregnant pause and some Cincinnati players warming up on the sidelines. But ultimately, after an hour, came word writ large on the stadium video board: “The game has been postponed for the evening.”
What makes this such a frontier moment in sports is that everyone – from players to NFL referees to the sellout crowd at the Bengals’ Paycor Stadium – seemed to agree it was the right call. If anyone figured to disagree, it would be the entitled fans, too many of whom act as if their ticket or TV patronage means the players must do their bidding – otherwise teams risk a meltdown on the scale of the 2004 “Malice in the Palace” NBA melee.
Instead, when the commissioner, Roger Goodell, announced that the NFL was postponing the Bills-Bengals game with support from the NFL Players association, a curious thing happened. Fans on both sides beat a path from the stadium to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center – where Hamlin, in critical condition, was being treated in intensive care. (Hamlin’s family has since added that he suffered lung damage after being resuscitated twice.) They lit candles and hung Bills flags to show their support.
Hamlin isn’t a Brady-level superstar. He’s a second-year, sixth-round draft choice who was emerging as a force on the field and a pillar in the Buffalo community. Before the Bengals game, an online fundraiser for a toy drive he had organized struggled to raise $2,500; after his accident, the tally is now over $6m.
Perhaps fans are more educated now, no longer naive about football’s brutality and its long-term impacts. They’re less inclined to dismiss players as bags of meat meant to bang into one another for entertainment’s sake, and more likely now to recognize them as people with families and mortgages and about three years on average to exploit their pro football careers. And they appreciate how badly the game takes care of players when it’s done with them.
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Typically, pro football stops for nothing – not 26-year-old Howard Glenn breaking his neck during a game in 1960; not 28-year-old Chuck Hughes collapsing on the field in 1971. In both cases, the players later died – but the teams played on.
The NFL played through the bombing of Pearl Harbor, following the assassination of John F Kennedy and would have kicked off after 9/11 if players and coaches hadn’t threatened to forfeit. This season alone has seen Indianapolis’s Nick Foles and Miami’s Tua Tagovailoa leveled by gruesome on-field injuries – a broken rib and at least two concussions, respectively – but nothing that led to calls to cancel their games (eerily, both of Tagovailoa’s health scares happened while playing against the Bills and the Bengals).
But Monday night was different. The players demonstrated their power in numbers by appealing to coaches to postpone this huge game, ultimately forcing the NFL’s hand well before the league had formulated a clear rescheduling plan. ESPN showed remarkable restraint by not replaying Hamlin’s collision, and not getting impatient about resuming the game. Overall, the sports media has respected the moment. Only Fox Sports’ Skip Bayless, the commentariat’s chief troll, had the temerity to bemoan the postponed game’s effect on the playoff picture. He was immediately ratioed by concerned spectators and sports heroes – not least his Pro Football Hall of Fame co-host Shannon Sharpe, who reportedly skipped Tuesday’s taping of their morning sports debate show in protest. By not continuing, the Bills-Bengals game charted a new course in sports – one that finally draws a hard line.
Hopefully we’re past the days when nothing short of a death could stop a game. A 1996 opening day baseball game was postponed after the 51-year-old umpire John McSherry succumbed to a heart attack after seven pitches. When the 23-year-old Loyola Marymount star Hank Gathers collapsed on court in 1990, the game and tournament were suspended within minutes of him being rushed to the hospital, where he died.
During a 1998 NHL playoff game, the St Louis Blues defenseman Chris Pronger dropped to the ice unconscious after taking a slapshot to the chest that jolted his heart out of rhythm. That moment, strangely similar to the one on Monday night, didn’t stop the game from unfolding. And in time Pronger fully recovered and resumed his career. On Twitter, he said he hoped Hamlin “can have the same outcome that I was fortunate to have with my incident”.
Eighteen months ago, the Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen buckled on the Euro 2020 pitch after going into cardiac arrest while leading Denmark against Finland. Afterward, Uefa officials faced intense questions over the decision to play on. “They should have tried to work out a different scenario and show a little compassion but they didn’t,” the former Denmark standout Peter Schmeichel told BBC Radio 5 Live.
Intractable safety hazards, inclement weather, labor strife, a global pandemic – these had been the established threats to games we love, and even so they never seemed ominous enough to stop a game in progress. The more the players play on, the more sports feel like one big auto race – rife with big crashes and existential danger, and yet safe in the knowledge that the race will finish even if all the competitors don’t. Until Monday, compassion rarely came into it.
