Against the Grain II
By Vaughn Wilson
Last Monday, Damar Hamlin’s unfortunate incident on national television caused us all to pause. The NFL defender for the Buffalo Bills fell out on the turf in Cincinnati after what appeared to be a normal play. It was anything but normal.
In the end, he had to be resuscitated twice before showing any signs of recovery. The NFL did what it had not done since the 1920s and 1930s in its formative years, which was cancel a game. This does not include player strike years.
It was the next to last week of the season and there was no way the game could be made up. The wild card games and playoffs were set to begin in less than two weeks and there was simply no way to reconfigure the schedule to fit the game in. Players from both the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals indicated that they had no intention of returning to the site to finish the game as it was too emotional for them.
Before the NFL made the call to cancel the game, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow and the captains from the Bengals went to the Bills locker room and sided with the Bills players in agreement that none of them wanted to go back out and play with Hamlin’s very existence in the balance. It was one of the first shows of humanity, only following the Bengals’ doctors and trainers jumping in to help the Bills doctors and trainers in caring for Hamlin.
Hamlin spent the night in the Cincinnati hospital with a tube needed to allow him to breathe. A few days later, he began to show signs of improvement. He began breathing and then his neural functions returned. By the weekend, he was up and in full recovery mode, loving on his family. He even facetimed his teammates to ensure them he was on the road to recovery.
While all of this was happening, the USA did what it does in times of tragedy. Under normal circumstances, the circus going on in the U.S. Congress to determine the Speaker of the House would have been the top story, but it was trumped by the miraculous story of the football player who had a heart to help others.
Hamlin had started a GoFundMe page to help with an annual toy drive to help kids. The effort started in 2020 with a goal of raising $2,500. When news of his incident got out, folks poured money into the fund. To date, over $8 million has been raised. Ordinary folks just sent what they could to be a part of hope, not only for the kids the fund was intended to help, but it was their way of being a part of the story and outpouring of love.
Stars began to pour into the fund. Denver Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson and wife Ciara, Robert Kraft, Tom Brady, Jim Irsay and others shot the number up in a matter of a week. The more the story got coverage, the more people donated to the cause.
More often than not, sports transcends the normal rhetoric that people engage in when things are in a normal mode. Hamlin was not a top name NFL player, but his appearance on the international stage caused folks of all colors, races and creeds to unite in being humane toward him and his cause. We see it over and over, especially in sports. While sports are just games, the effect and reach of it is far from that.
