The Best in the Very Nearly Worst of Times for the NFL

It was a game with no outcome that will be the one that we will all remember. On Monday night January 2, 2023, the largest viewing audience of the then-17 week old 2022 football season, some 23 million plus Americans, gathered to watch a game between the AFC East leading Buffalo Bills and the AFC Central leading Cincinnati Bengals that might decide home field for the upcoming playoffs. It is this game where Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, a 24 year-old professional athlete, got up from making a tackle and fell back to the ground unresponsive. Hamlin was quickly attended by athletic trainers and medical staffs from both teams. But the faces of the players and coaches, all of whom have seen all range of severity of injury over a lifetime of playing a physical, often violent game, were ashen and ghostly, creating an immediate fear for the life of this young man, who seconds before was the epitome of health and vigor. This was no normal football injury.

We all know now that Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field. But with it, our collective breath seemingly stopped, too. The barriers that separate competitors, fans of opposing teams locked in a contest, and coaches competing fiercely for victory, all fell away as Hamlin was loaded into an ambulance and taken to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center’s Trauma Unit.

Compassionate and heroic gestures abounded that night and in the days that followed. Citing a few of these only serves to recall the nearly limitless acts of kindness and compassion evident. The first responders on the field who saved Hamlin, especially the Bills’ assistant trainer Denny Kellington who performed CPR and compressions on Hamlin, the doctors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center who immediately reacted to the severity of Hamlin’s condition and carried him through the hours and days after, the coaches of both teams, the Bills’ Sean McDermott and Bengals Zac Taylor, who showed incredible compassion for each other that night and the days after, the fans of both teams in the stadium, who exited safely and united, and who kept vigil with one another in the days after outside the hospital prayerfully hoping for good news about Hamlin, all demonstrated how much greater sport can be when it acknowledges that it isn’t the most important thing and we share things that are much bigger.

You may find it odd that a website devoted to culture in sport thinks sport is best served when we acknowledge there are things more important than sport.

But that night, and in the days that followed, even the heart of the behemoth National Football League was evident. I will confess that I know the senior league executive, Dawn Aponte, who was on scene that evening in Cincinnati and consider her to one of the finest and most caring people working in sports. But we all won, even the NFL by not playing or making up that game, acknowledging that sport is just that, and that our care for a young man, his family, his teammates, and his city, were all of our much more pressing concerns.

Perhaps we won’t grow closer as a country because of what happened in the hours after Damar Hamlin went down. But we sure have a path to follow in getting there, shown by one act of kindness and compassion after the other and the NFL is one of the few things we watch in enough numbers to have that impact.

The best news is Damar Hamlin is home and on his way to recovery and hopefully a long-life full of meaning and that our all divisions and baser motivations haven’t yet messed up all that good feeling surrounding his amazing survival and recovery.

The feel good story is tempered slightly by any number of inconvenient or nagging details, that we still have too few trained medical professionals or life saving defibrillators at our sporting events generally, and especially in youth sports, or that Hamlin and most NFL players still don’t have multiple years of contractual protection for career ending injuries, or that the sport of pro football takes too great a toll on its players without offering enough care for them when they are done and just added games rather than reducing the number of them, and that the memories of this moment will fade over time and those problems just mentioned continue.

But for now celebrate the skill of the physicians and medical staffs. Recall the compassion of the coaches and players for one another. Note the level-headness of the league, as represented by Aponte, in stopping what was going to be its biggest game of the year without resolution. Be heartened by unity of the fans, rivals who came together, and know that the worst was averted and the best of us was visible.