Football and the Violence We Love

Nine days before the most terrifying moment in recent sports memory, I was a father taking my six-year-old son to his first NFL game. It was Christmas Eve. This was his early Christmas present. We were way up in the 300 level to watch our Minnesota Vikings play the New York Giants, but Lincoln couldn’t have cared less. He sang along to the “Skol, Vikings” song. He shouted at first downs. He learned the proper way to open peanut shells. He chose his very own Viktor the Viking stuffed animal. He danced the Griddy, star wide receiver Justin Jefferson’s touchdown dance that’s wildly popular among the elementary-school set.

© Hector Acevedo/ZUMA Press Wire

On a Monday night nine days later, I was putting Lincoln to bed. I checked my phone for the score of the much-anticipated matchup between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals. Instead, I saw tragedy: Damar Hamlin – a Buffalo Bills player from my hometown of Pittsburgh, who attended the same university as my parents – had gone into cardiac arrest after what appeared to be a routine hit to the chest. Medical staff revived him with CPR. Players cried on the field. As I tucked my son into bed, Hamlin’s mother was rushing from her seat in the stadium to her own son’s side. An ambulance rushed him to a nearby Level I trauma center, where he was intubated, sedated and clinging to life.

It was a shocking scene: The urgency of medical staff, the emotions of players, the disbelief of fans.

But we should not think for a moment that it was a surprise.

Shocking and tragic things have happened to NFL players before, though we’ve never witnessed something quite like this, where a player fought for his life on the field where he was playing moments before. When something terrifying happens in football – the suicide of a player like Junior Seau after a career filled with hits to the head, or the multiple concussions Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa sustained this season, including one where he appeared to have a “fencing response,” where his arms flexed awkwardly in front of his face for several seconds – America immediately makes calls for reform. We chastise the NFL for its checkered record with player safety. We pledge we’ll stop watching football. We claim to truly care for the human being wearing that uniform. We tweet about how horrified we are at football’s violence and the NFL’s money-at-all-costs machine.

But we aren’t being fully authentic in our outrage, are we? The next weekend, players play, fans watch, commercials air, and reform ends up only happening at the margins – tweaks to the rules, improved equipment, better concussion protocols, but nothing that ruins the sanctity of our brutal, beautiful national sport.

Football’s violence always stays. Because that violence is what we love about football.

We talk about finding a solution to the player safety problems that plague football, but we don’t really want a solution. Because the only real solution is to stop playing football.

And that’s the last thing we want.

Football’s violence is not a bug of the game; it’s a central feature, the reason we watch. It is the sport our nation has long called on to turn boys into men, and what better way to create a red-blooded American man than by teaching boys to conquer their fear of grievous bodily injury and to endure physical pain? Sure, we love nothing more than the acrobatic catch by a wide receiver that shows athletic feats we cannot comprehend, like the catch-of-the-century Justin Jefferson made earlier this season against Hamlin’s Buffalo Bills. What makes football’s athleticism so breathtaking, though, is that we know the potential for body-wrecking violence is always right around the corner. Jefferson may have caught that ball, but a defender like Hamlin – he was a few steps away from Jefferson on that catch – may have punished him a millisecond later with a bone-crunching, brain-rattling hit. Aaron Judge hitting a towering home run is a stunning thing to watch, but it’s not as if someone is trying to knock him off his feet as he swings.

We know football players risk their health each time they take the field. Players know it too, whether it’s broken bones or torn ligaments or long-term, life-threatening injuries to the brain. We hear stories about the Dave Duersons and the Mike Websters, the Aaron Hernandezes and the Demaryius Thomases, who die young and tragically and are posthumously diagnosed with the debilitating brain disease known as CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). We rarely hear the stories of the high school players or college players whose brains and bodies have been wrecked by football, people like Zac Easter, a twenty-four-year-old from rural Iowa who died by suicide in 2015 after playing football through high school, and who left behind a remarkable diary detailing his struggles with CTE.

We talk about finding a solution to the player safety problems that plague football, but we don’t really want a solution.

The most visible tolls of football are the stingers and the bruises and the broken bones, badges of courage for a football warrior. And yet still we watch, because the worst tolls the sport takes on players – brain issues stemming from concussions or a lifetime buildup of subconcussive hits – typically happen years or decades after their playing careers are over. It certainly doesn’t happen in real time, on national television, like what we saw with Hamlin. As terrifying as what happened to Hamlin is, it was a freak incident, something we rarely if ever see on a football field. What’s more terrifying is the banal injuries, the hits to the head we witness every play, knowing that later in life some of these players’ brains will pay the price for our fandom, for our obsession with football.

As of this writing, Damar Hamlin is alive. After days of uncertainty whether he’d live or die, he’s showing signs of progress. He is no longer unconscious. Doctors have said his neurological condition appears intact. He initially communicated through writing, a trach tube still in his throat, and according to reports, he asked doctors in writing who won the game. His breathing tube was removed overnight Friday, his team announced, and Hamlin spoke to his family and doctors, then FaceTimed the team, saying, “Love you boys.” If he survives and thrives, whether playing football again or not, it will be called a miracle, and it may be just that: a nation of football players and football fans, united in prayer for a 24-year-old and his family.

But the bigger miracle may be that we haven’t seen an NFL player die on the field of play since 1971, when Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions collapsed and died during a game.

I’ve long assumed it’s not a matter of if but of when we witness a football player die on the field. I remember when Antonio Brown was brutally hit in the head during a playoff game in 2016. Just days before, I’d spent hours with Zac Easter’s family in their living room in the immediate aftermath of his suicide, so the risks of football were fresh in my mind. When Brown was splayed on the turf that evening, I remember thinking: This is it, the moment we expected would come. I bet I’ve had that same feeling watching football at least a dozen times since then.

Maybe that’s what it takes for America to reevaluate our relationship with this sport: an in-your-face, can’t-deny-it instance of the sport’s brutality.

I doubt it.

Whether Damar Hamlin lives or dies – and please, please, please may he live and thrive, which certainly sounds like it may be the case – Americans are still going to play football. We’re still going to watch football. We’ve long since determined that the moral tradeoffs of this sport – the excitement and brotherhood and ferocity and machismo, in exchange for the health and safety of our boys and young men – is worth it. We say we shouldn’t wrap our boys in bubble wrap, because there are lessons to be learned from putting your physical safety on the line and learning physical toughness. As old-fashioned as it may sound, I believe there’s plenty of truth in that.

Over the past week, as I’ve heard the outpouring of feelings about how we must care for Damar Hamlin as a human being, not just as a football player, I of course agreed. How could you not feel the depths of sorrow for this young man, his family, his teammates?

I also thought that we, the football-watching public, are a bunch of hypocrites.

We say we care about players’ humanity, then we complain about them not helping our fantasy football teams. We believe the NFL when it says the health and welfare of players is paramount, then we hear the announcers Monday night tell us players had five minutes to warm up before continuing play after Hamlin was taken away in an ambulance. (The game ended up being postponed and later cancelled.) We say we care about our children’s well-being more than anything, then we put helmets and pads on elementary-aged kids and send them onto the field, despite increasing evidence that it’s not the big concussions that are most problematic to the brain – it’s prolonged exposure to hundreds of smaller subconcussive hits over years or decades that most likely leads to CTE.

I love football. I have tickets to this weekend’s Vikings playoff game. I’m planning a dudes’ weekend where a bunch of grown men will sit around an AirBnB, drink beer, and watch playoff games.

I bought my six-year-old a sweatshirt of Justin Jefferson doing the Griddy. But he will never be allowed to play competitive football. No way. I’ve made my moral tradeoff. I may not love to admit it, but I’m a hypocrite too.