An ugly but correct observation, to start: Few media events are more traumatic than seeing a person die on live television, and it happens often enough that everyone has their scarring story. Conversely, however, there is little more exhilarating than thinking you saw that horrible thing, but instead finding out that man’s life was saved, and his body fully healed. So it is with NFL safety Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills, who collapsed on the field in January of this year after what seemed like a perfectly orthodox tackle in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
As a horrified nation looked on, Hamlin got up from the hit, seemed fine for a second, and then suddenly swooned to the ground as panicked opponents shouted for the doctors. Everyone watching — and even if you weren’t watching at that moment, you began to hear about it five seconds later on social media — held their breath wondering if they were witnessing a man simply die before their eyes in the middle of a football game. When he was carted off the field, you thought two things: (1) please God, let him live; (2) he’s never coming back from this, one way or another.
He’s coming back. Hamlin has been cleared by the Bills’ doctors to resume training and rejoin offseason camp. Before anyone suggests this is merely another case of an NFL medical staff playing fast and loose with player health (see: concussions), it should be understood that what happened to Hamlin was truly a freak occurrence. Although it was often mischaracterized in media accounts, Hamlin did not suffer from a “heart attack” the way we typically think about them, as sudden-onset events that arrive . . . well, like heart attacks. He instead experienced cardiac arrest due to getting hit not just in the wrong place (the chest), but at the exact wrong time — during an impossibly brief 20-millisecond window when the heart’s valves happen to be fluttering in a certain way — that simply does not happen otherwise in any statistically relevant way. It doesn’t reflect an underlying health condition, it reflects cosmically bad luck.
But still, many of us would be forgiven for dispensing with logic and resorting to our gut feelings. I tell myself I don’t believe in luck, and then act empirically as if I do. I thought it was recklessly dangerous for Hamlin to return after his brush with death and said so to a colleague, who proceeded to refute my superstition by explaining the medical basis for his decision and then pointing out that quitting football after this would make as much rational sense as swearing off golf because you got struck by lightning on the twelfth hole.
So it’s wonderful to see a man you feared might die in front of your eyes not only alive and well, but ready to get to work. Maybe a weaker or more superstitious man would find something else to do with the rest of his life after having suffered a near-death experience. But there’s a reason Damar Hamlin is a professional athlete, and we are not; he has the God-given ability, knowledge, and drive to get back on the metaphorical horse almost immediately after it has thrown him in the hardest way. Good luck and godspeed.