Salute to dream team who saved Hamlin’s life
NEW YORK — We know all the things the National Football league cannot do, sometimes magnificently, starting here: It can’t stop being a violent sport, one whose aftershocks are felt for players long after they’ve left the field of play. I can remember once being with Joe Namath at his summer football camp, long before he had his knees replaced, and watched the amazingly painful sight of him just trying to walk down a flight of stairs.
A friend of mine, a former player, says that he wakes up, every single morning, and does a memory check on himself, as if he is living with some ticking clock, or ticking bomb, waiting for the day when his memory starts to disappear like water circling a drain.
“I can’t remember the fourth quarter of the biggest game I ever played,” he told me one time.
They can’t change the violence, because they know how well violence sells, what an integral element it is for the most popular sport the country has ever had, with fans and television viewers and video-game players and gamblers, the whole package.
So we know what the league is. We absolutely know what it cannot do, and there is enough evidence on that to last a lifetime.
But here is what the league and the people working for it in Cincinnati the other night could do:
They could save the life of a young man named Damar Hamlin.
Hamlin was not involved in the most violent hit you will ever see in a violent sport. He still nearly died because of it while playing Monday Night Football when he was not breathing because he had suffered cardiac arrest.
It was at that moment, after a scene as troubling and terrible as any we have ever seen on a football field — without any of us knowing it at the time — that Damar Hamlin was about to become one of the great sports stories of all time.
There had only been one other time in the history of the NFL when a player died during a game. It happened 50 years ago in Detroit, with a Lions receiver named Chuck Hughes, whose heart stopped and did not start up again. My wife was at that game as a little girl with her father. They had driven up from Perrysburg, Ohio because her father was a Lions fan.
I asked her the other night when she found out that Hughes had died.
“We heard it on the radio on the way home,” she said.
This was different. This was national television, and quickly, because everything happens in the blink of an eye in the modern world, you felt as if the whole world had watched Hamlin get up after his hit on Tee Higgins and then almost immediately fall over, as if he’d been shot.
And just as quickly after it happened, just by the reaction of the players and coaches on the field, the looks on some of their faces, the ambulance being on the field, there was no question how dire Hamlin’s circumstances were. And what happened next with medical personnel wasn’t the kind of rehearsal conducted leaguewide all the time, in the case of a terrible moment like this. This was life and death.
The people treating Hamlin then began the process of saving his life, in those first moments when Hamlin suddenly and unexpectedly became famous, just not in a way he ever could have anticipated when he came into the league from the University of Pittsburgh.
There are over two-dozen trainers, doctors, specialists who are on-site for
NFL games. A SWAT team of them. And in those first moments, after there was no pulse for Hamlin, after he had stopped breathing, you felt as if all of them had come running toward the young man lying motionless in the middle of Paycor Stadium.
CPR was administered on the field, because lack of oxygen can be catastrophic in a situation like Hamlin’s and could have made him a victim of brain damage not caused by a hard hit. They used an automated external defibrillator (AED). A breathing tube was inserted before the ambulance left the stadium. Neither the Bills nor Bengals were a dream team now. The medical professionals were.
The story isn’t what the league was considering about continuing the game in those first terrible moments, in real time, not knowing whether Hamlin was going to live or die. The story is about medical personnel and trainers who were great when they needed to be great, when the consequences of being anything less, even for a few seconds, could have resulted in the kind of tragedy that pro football has not had during a game in 50 years.
Those people were the league on Monday night. We hear all the time about “The Shield” with the NFL. Those people Monday night, doing their jobs, saving a life, they were the shield, not protecting all the players. Just the one.