As Charlie notes, I have little patience for the people whose reaction to Damar Hamlin’s collapse was to move from “some things are more important than games” (which is true and obvious) to “the games don’t matter,” a posture born largely of the self-pleasuring need to arrogate the moral high ground. I have long argued that games, entertainment, and art matter quite a bit, especially to people who make careers out of them, but more broadly to the deep and abiding human needs they meet. It was Earl Warren who once said, “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.” On the home page today, Samuel Gregg cites a fine example, in a piece on cricket legend Donald Bradman: “In 1986, when former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser visited Nelson Mandela, a cricket fanatic, in the South African prison where Mandela was being held, Mandela’s first question to Fraser was: ‘Tell me Mr. Fraser, is Donald Bradman still alive?’”
Left-wingers on Twitter have jumped on me on several occasions for arguing this point in the aftermath of this or that tragedy intersecting with the worlds of sports and entertainment. I will refer back again to what I wrote two days after September 11, in briefly suspending my then-weekly baseball column after terrorists destroyed my office:
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