After Damar Hamlin's collapse, just about everyone involved responded to it by thinking about the player rather than the game. That’s progress, writes williamfleitch
Surprisingly, only one man has ever died on the field during an NFL game. I didn’t know that morbid fact until Monday night, when I looked it up after Buffalo Bills safetycollapsed in terrifying fashion during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals. The Bills said overnight that Hamlin had suffered cardiac arrest on the field before his heartbeat was restored; he remains in critical condition at a Cincinnati hospital.
The man who died was Chuck Hughes, a 28-year-old wide receiver for the Detroit Lions who had a heart attack while running back to the huddle during a would-be game-winning drive in 1971. He collapsed to the ground and was tended to, of all people, by Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, one of the most vicious players in NFL history.
It is instructive — to understand the nature of football, the way its players and fans and executives respond to the potential mortal peril of its inherently violent nature — to learn how the teams and the league handled Hughes’s death when it happened: They kept playing. They not only kept playing, it’s clear from, but it didn’t even occur to anyone to stop. “We thought we had him when we got it [his heart] going again,” said the team doctor, who had rushed on the field to revive Hughes.
That’s what NFL culture was and for the most part still is. And that’s why Monday night actually represented some progress. What felt different this time, different than what we’ve been trained and accustomed to see in the NFL over several decades? Everybody — well,— stopped, took a step back, and thought about something other than football. The players, visibly stricken at watching one of their own being given CPR on the field, knelt and prayed as the ambulance took Hamlin off the field.
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