We love
giving ourselves pats on the back, and there have been plenty of those in the
wake of the heart attack suffered by the Buffalo Bills’ 24-year-old defensive
back Damar Hamlin during that game in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago.
Rightfully, the main kudos went to
the medical personnel who were Johnny-on-the-spot to render aid to the young
man. National Football League games are superbly set up for that sort of thing
and the response was excellent. If someone is to have a heart attack an NFL
field is the perfect place for it. I can think of nowhere else save a hospital
ER where help would be so close and effective.
The NFL
itself came out looking well, if only because it did the obvious things that
were appropriate in that sort of situation. The game at hand was cancelled,
albeit after a bit of dithering, and no play-over that would have knocked the
rest of the schedule on its ear was mandated. The league loves complexity so
some “maybe” scenarios involving neutral-field playoff games were tossed in,
but if we’re lucky they’ll be avoided.
We fans
received plaudits for not demanding that the show go on regardless. At the
stadium respect was shown for the occasion and concern for the victim’s
condition was then and later manifested abundantly. As it turned out Hamlin was
a community-minded person whose toys-for-kids project was buoyed by an
outpouring of funds as he recovered.
At the
risk of spoiling the party, though, I think it should be pointed out that the
main lesson apparently drawn from the episode was the wrong one. In classic overstatement, the Arizona
Republic declared in a headline it engendered “A Seminal Moment” for how we
regard sports, but in fact sudden death or catastrophic injury remain rare on
our big-time fields of play, struck-by-lightning occurrences that happen once every
several generations.
Indeed,
one reasonably might ask if Hamlin’s heart attack should be blamed on football.
The tackle that preceded it was unremarkable and would have gone unremarked if
not for its result. One interpretation was that it involved a sharp blow to the
chest that upset his heart’s cycle, but an underlying condition might have been
involved that further investigation could uncover. If someone suffers a heart
attack on the tennis court should it be counted as a tennis injury?
Only
twice have big-league American athletes died as an immediate result of a
playing-field injury, and neither involved football: Ray Chapman of the
Cleveland Indians succumbed after having been hit on the head by a pitch in a
1920 baseball game and Bill Masterton of the Minnesota North Stars after
striking his head on the ice following a check in a 1968 hockey game. Chuck
Hughes of the Detroit Lions suffered a fatal heart attack in a 1971 NFL game
after a play in which he wasn’t involved.
His death later was ascribed to an advanced case of arteriosclerosis.
Football
is a dangerous sport but ranks well behind others as an immediate cause of
death. Besides boxing, which aims to injure, in most risk are thoroughbred-racing jockeys, who are killed at
a rate of more than one a year and whose serious-injury stats are cataclysmic.
When the great jockey Laffit Pincay retired after a suffering a broken neck in
a spill, it was reported he’d sustained 11 broken collar bones, 10 broken ribs,
two spinal fractures, two punctured lungs and two broken thumbs, among other
things, in a 30-plus-year career.
The real
danger in football isn’t in any “big bang” but in the sometimes-muted bang,
bang, bang of everyday play, in practice sessions as well as in games. That the
effects of such injuries were cumulative and often delayed long was suspected and
finally made clear as a result of 2005 and 2006 papers by Dr. Bennet Omalu, then
of the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, coroners’ office. Following examinations
of the premature deaths of Pittsburgh Steelers’ players Mike Webster and Terry
Long, he found evidence of a protein buildup in their brains called Chronic
Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, similar to that of much-older victims of
Alzheimer’s Disease. In sports the condition formerly had been associated
mainly with boxers.
Subsequent autopsies of the brains of more
than 200 former footballers by Boston University showed the disease to be
common among that group. One recent study showed that ex-NFLers in their 50s
were 10 times more likely to be diagnosed with dementia than men in the general
population.
The crunch
and grind of football, plus the explosion in the body weights of many of the
men who compete at its highest level, have had other unfortunate, long-term
results. Present and former NFL players have been shown to have 3.5 times more
Parkinson’s disease, three times the rate of arthritis and 2.5 times more
cardiac disease than other men. Opioid addiction, stemming from years of
gulping pain killers to cope with football’s ordinary bruises and sprains, is frequent
among the recently retired. Visit any NFL locker room after a game and you’ll
see men creeping around like those 30 years older.
After an
initial period of denial the NFL has recognized those truths and acted on them.
On the gridiron it has improved helmet design, instituted concussion protocols
and made it easier for injured players to seek their own medical diagnoses and treatment.
It’s reportedly paid out more than $1 billion in additional benefits to
ex-players coping with their game’s ravages.
None of
that, however, changes the fact that football is a gladiatorial sport, one that
should come with a warning label. Players should play, and we should watch,
with that in mind.
