His cardiac arrest on the field was an unprecedented horror, the kind the NFL could do little to prevent.
His cardiac arrest on the field was an unprecedented horror, the kind the NFL could do little to prevent.
W hat happened to Damar Hamlin during last night’s Monday Night Football game was horrific. It is also, from everything that we know, impossible to use as a basis from which to draw any broader conclusions. In the entire history of the NFL — as well as in the entire history of college football — no player has ever had a cardiac arrest on the field. That has happened in basketball: In 1990, Hank Gathers died during the semi-finals of the 1990 WCC tournament. It has happened twice in soccer in just the last decade: In 2021, Christian Eriksen collapsed after suffering a cardiac arrest during the European Championships, and, in 2012, during a game in the English Premier League, Fabrice Muamba’s heart stopped for 78 minutes before he was eventually revived. But it has never happened in football. By all accounts, this was a freak occurrence, of the type that happens from time to time in an imperfect world.
In his newsletter today, Jim Geraghty writes that Hamlin’s collapse left “the entire league shaken and wondering how best to keep players safe while maintaining the sport’s popularity.” Football is, indeed, a violent game, and there are, indeed, some lingering problems associated with that violence. Concussions remain an issue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) remains an issue, and, relative to, say, baseball, football players suffer a high number of dramatic injuries each year. But cardiac arrests are not among those injuries, and they have never been among them — even in the bad old days. Irrespective of whether Damar Hamlin’s collapse was caused by an unknown preexisting heart condition, was the first incidence of commotio cordis ever recorded in football, or was a freak occurrence related to nothing discrete, the NFL will no more be able to prevent the next one than the NCAA was able to save Hank Gathers or FIFA was able to forestall what happened to Christian Eriksen and Fabrice Muamba. Hamlin collapsed after making what, by the NFL’s standards, represented a relatively innocuous tackle.
Nor, contrary to the grotesque insinuations of figures such as Charlie Kirk and Alex Berenson, is there any evidence whatsoever that Hamlin’s collapse was related to his having received the Covid-19 vaccine. It is unclear whether Hamlin had been vaccinated, but, even if he had, the notion that we have seen a dramatic uptick in vaccinated athletes “dropping suddenly” — as Kirk claimed on Twitter — is nonsense. At some point over the last few years, some figures within the United States — most of them on the political right, a few of them on the political left — have transmuted their entirely reasonable opposition to vaccine mandates (the case for which is even stronger when the vaccine is experimental) into the baseless claim that the Covid-19 vaccines that were developed in 2021 are, at best, useless and, at worst, actively lethal. The result of this approach has been a repeated, reflexive, and utterly irresponsible attempt to link any unexpected or ostensibly unusual death to the vaccine, regardless of the facts, evidence, context, or science.
Keenly aware of their own mortality — and primed from birth to look for patterns — human beings do not like to be told that, sometimes, bad things happen for no comprehensible reason. But, well: Sometimes, bad things happen for no comprehensible reason. This was a tragedy, not a crime, and, presuming competitive sports will continue to be a part of our culture, we will see more such tragedies in the future. Certainly, football’s extraordinary commercial popularity has created an incentive structure in football that makes it a particularly attractive proposition to athletic young men and, in turn, makes reforms more difficult to achieve than the sport’s harshest critics would like. But if that incentive structure were to disappear tomorrow, the underlying urge would remain. From the dawn of time, ambitious young men have been attracted to high-octane, competitive endeavors, and they have willingly accepted the risks that those endeavors carry. In its early form, football was an amateur endeavor, played as a college hobby by men who came from wealthy, well-established families and had lucrative careers in business ahead of them. Relative to today’s game, it was also extremely dangerous. Players lined up to participate, nevertheless.
They will next week, too.