Someone made the right call. The human call. The only call, really.
Instead, Monday Night Football ended in a maelstrom of agony, frustration and 1,000-yard stares. We watched as two teams locked arms in a cocoon of humanity around Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who was receiving CPR compressions after colliding with Cincinnati Bengals wideout Tee Higgins and then falling unconscious in front of a national television audience. Nearby, players and staffers cried and held each other.
We absorbed that Monday night. The brutal, awful line that finally became so clear that someone involved — maybe nearly everyone involved — understood that no game should be unstoppable. Not for our entertainment. Not for ratings and commercial sponsors. Not for the trivialities of sports betting and fantasy football. Not even for the long-embraced tradeoff that we’ve been sold for so long, that risking life and limb is simply an extension of a football contract.
For once, maybe the first time since the NFL shut down briefly in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, something else had to me more important than the product. That something was the safety of Damar Hamlin and the well-being of everyone around him. If that wasn’t more important than finishing a prime-time football game, it would validate the criticism of everyone who framed the league as a soulless money machine.
As former Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark framed it on ESPN on Monday night, “For over 100 grown adult men, who their entire lives have put on pads and understood the risk you take every time you do it, to be speechless, to be in tears, to be gathered in prayer, that tells you how significant this moment was. …
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