One night, the NFL machine was forced into a halt due to the severity of Damar’s injury.
Someone answered the call. The human call. The only real call.
The show was stopped when it was important, and only the compassionate decision made sense.
Monday Night Football ended in a whirlwind of frustration, pain, and 1,000-yard stares. As we watched, two teams locked hands around Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamelin, who was being given CPR after colliding with Tee Higgins, a Cincinnati Bengals wideout. Then, he fell unconscious before a national television audience. Nearby, staffers and players cried together. Others pulled at their clothing and jerseys, or just put their faces in their hands and melted.
In a league that has come to stretch the boundaries of what we accept as normal and part of the gladiator sport, this moment was something different than anything we’ve seen in the social media age of the NFL. The league’s facade of security crumbled, exposing the truth behind its inexplicable existence. Is A line. A brutal, awful line. It was just as horrible as we thought it would be.
As witnesses, that’s what Monday night represented to us. Something different. A significant inflection point for the NFL, when all the talk about players putting their lives on the line suddenly coalesced into a collective image that won’t soon be forgotten. One that underscored what we’ve learned in so many ways over so many decades: That inside this vicious form of entertainment, every hit carries an inherent danger of changing someone’s life forever. Or, it can be stopped altogether.
Monday night, we absorbed it all. The brutal, awful line that finally became so clear that someone involved — maybe nearly everyone involved — understood that no game should be unstoppable. Not for our entertainment. Not for ratings or commercial sponsors. It’s not for fantasy football or sports betting. Not even for the long-embraced tradeoff that we’ve been sold for so long, that risking life and limb is simply an extension of a football contract.
We’ve always known there is such a thing as too far, even in the NFL. What we didn’t know is what it would look like or how it would make us feel. When we wake up Tuesday, we won’t be able to say that anymore. Instead, players will understand that it is like losing your sense of invincibility and resilience. Fans will know it feels like staring at an image and begging for a player to simply move, anything that returns the moment back to the warped relief of the phrase “he has feeling in his extremities.”
Perhaps most important, the NFL will know what it’s like to have every part of the machine simply refuse to respond in the face of a nightmare. That night, the league was able to take a look at players who weren’t going to play again. These were coaches who had never planned to coach. Fans and journalists who — for the most part — refused to engage in absurd rationalizations about what a cancellation could mean for logistics or playoff implications.
Perhaps for the first time in years, the NFL was temporarily shut down following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But something more was needed than the product. Damar Hamlin’s safety was paramount, as well as the well-being and happiness of all those around him. If that wasn’t more important than finishing a prime-time football game, it would validate the criticism of everyone who framed the league as a soulless money machine.
We laughed when ESPN suggested that play would continue after a five-minute warmup. It made no sense. The grief and backlash after hearing it — Everything That made sense. The NFL has denied knowing where that suggestion came from, but it certainly didn’t end up on the broadcast from nowhere. The moment will not be resolved for a league reputation that has been plagued by conspiracy theorists and skeptics.
The most important thing is that the machine has stopped. Someone recognized the line. When that happened, we were able turn our attention to Hamlin. This was the place it belonged since the moment Hamlin collapsed from cardiac arrest.
As former Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark framed it on ESPN on Monday night, “For over 100 grown adult men, who their entire lives have put on pads and understood the risk you take every time you do it, to be speechless, to be in tears, to be gathered in prayer, that tells you how significant this moment was. …
“In truth, if the NFL cares about the players, this is the first time I believe the NFL truly had to care about the players’ emotional and mental health as well. This is the first time we got to watch those emotions, we got to watch that type of thought process right in front of us.”
It was long expected that this lesson would be taught. As we could have imagined, the price of learning it was just as devastating as we expected. Damar Hamlin is currently fighting for his life in hospital. The moment that could have changed his life forever is etched in our collective memory.
This was the most terrible way to learn where the NFL’s line between entertainment and humanity gets drawn. It’s not even worth the risk.