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Left the Field Under His Own Power

 The meant-to-be-reassuring mantra that's the title of this post was chanted four times by Jim Nantz during the broadcast of yesterday's Bills-Patriots game. It followed the obligatory lengthy commercial breaks following an injury in an NFL game that results in a stoppage of play longer than, oh, 30 seconds.

The mantra is intended to reassure viewers that whatever bodily harm resulted in a huge man unable to regain his feet for a prolonged period was not essentially serious. "He's OK, he can walk off by himself." It's the first step on the pro football injury scale, followed by in order, going into the blue tent then the locker room, leaving the field on the cart, and finally, a life-threatening or life-altering catastrophe such as the cardiac arrest suffered by Bills safety Damar Hamlin six days earlier, in the game the Bills and Bengals never finished.

Hamlin's life was saved by the prompt actions of the Bills and Bengals' athletic training staff, team doctors, the EMTs who took him to the hospital and the staff of the University of Cincinnati medical center. These men and women, all highly trained and skilled at their professions, knew just what to do in a dire medical emergency and did it. It is thanks to them, and to his own youth and strength, that Hamlin appears to have emerged from his near-death experience in near-miraculous good condition. He isn't only alive, it looks as if he'll have a life.

It is, I believe, fair to say that everyone involved reacted well to the terrifying events of last Monday night. The Bills and Bengals did the right thing by making it clear they wouldn't play the game any further. The NFL eventually concurred in this decision with a delay of only about an hour. That's rapid response for a league that still really can't define what's a legal catch of a forward pass after a century of trying. If Buffalo fans and Roger Goodell were both in self-congratulatory mode at yesterday's game, it's hard to blame 'em.

But the universal relief and happiness over Hamlin's condition (still critical, mind you) made Nantz's injury mantra chilling, not reassuring. It made it clear that pro football, from NFL headquarters down to the most casual of fans, works on parallel tracks when it comes to the sport's undeniable risks to human health. It is well prepared to cope with the horrible disasters that are football's rare exceptions. It cannot cope at all with the lower-grade injuries and health risks which are the sport's more deadly rule.

Football is bad for you. Repetitive orthopedic injuries and surgeries do not lead to a sparkling quality of life from age 45 on. Check out the gaits of the old-timers at this summer's Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. They tend to walk like sailors their first day ashore after an eight-month trip round Cape Horn in a three-masted schooner. They don't bend from the waist too easily either.

The dangers of repeated concussions and the horrors of CTE from years of apparently routine collisions on the playing field are both well known. I'm sure the NFL would prefer neither existed, and in the case of concussions, they've tried mitigation if nothing else. But get rid of either? Nobody knows how.

It's an unusual NFL offensive lineman who can go though a career of four years or more without an orthopedic injury of some kind. But even those lucky souls leave the sport facing a significant morbidity risk. A diet akin to that of a French goose being raised for foie gras combined with a regimen of daily anaerobic exercise is a cardiologist's nightmare. The NFL doesn't even recognize this as a problem, It pays former players five years' worth of health insurance after they leave the game. After that, they're on their own. They shouldn't play golf at courses which don't have defibrillators on site.

None of what I said in those last three paragraphs is news to anyone inside or outside the NFL. Since outside some owners, nobody in the league is an actual monster, I assume they'd do something about those issues if they could think of a way to do so without, you know, stopping the game. In a thoroughly human response, the league, and the players, and the fans all choose to if not ignore, to push football's long-term high percentage risks to the backs of their minds, to be revisited in the event of catastrophe, then firmly pushed back into the dustiest attic of the cerebral cortex.

Nobody who liked watching football before going to stop watching because of those high-percentage long term risks. Nor will what happened to Damar Hamlin make anyone stop.

I say this because as he documented at length on social media, there wasn't a person in the country who enjoyed watching the Patriots and Bills play yesterday than Damar Hamlin himself.

posted by Michael Gee @ 12:07 PM