Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse reminds us of the human toll of professional football

Americans consider themselves innocents. Pure, noble, removed from the degraded world outside our borders, both physical and mental.

True, that pose takes considerable effort to maintain: our own brutal history must be whitewashed, ignored or suppressed. Teachers squelched, books banned, libraries purged. Faith-fueled prudes, at least when it comes to the conduct of others, we simply banish entire realms of human behavior, and if those outside of our beloved norms are not guilty of crimes, then crimes are imagined for them.

This leads to lives of constant surprises, as the white-hot fervor of our imagined purity hits the cold waters of reality. We are continually indignant, aghast, vibrating with shock when forced to confront the obvious.

Take Monday night. As you no doubt know by now, during a game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals, 24-year-old Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after an ordinary tackle, nearly dead on the field, as medical technicians struggled to get his heart started.

Fans wept, prayed. Pundits cogitated, then delivered the awful news.

“Football is a violent sport,” revealed a headline in the Times of Northwest Indiana. “And we love it.”

True enough. And sincere, like the prayers after mass shootings, the pious noise that masks our inability to change in any substantial way.

Even concern about violence on the field misses the point. Football players don’t die on the field; they die off it. The average life expectancy of an American man is 79, if he’s white; 68, if he’s Black. If he played in the NFL, however, that falls to 59.6 years, according to a Harvard study of thousands of players over decades. Most of those ex-football players die from heart disease, at a rate 2.4 times that of Major League Baseball players, who as a group live seven years longer.

The researchers behind the study point out that football is “a safer sport now” than it was in era when the athletes it studied were active, and you do have to give the NFL points for trying, albeit grudgingly.

“The rules only soften the most glaring viciousness,” my colleague Rick Telander wrote, in a thoughtful reflection. comparing football to war — both are meat grinders young men eagerly throw their bodies into. “And the rules only have been tightened because of all the demented, damaged old players lurching about and the younger ones committing suicide (also from the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that affected their elders). This became embarrassing to the powers that be.”

Not too embarrassing, though. Yes, the NFL canceled Monday night’s game. But play will continue, after the requisite obscuring fog of thoughts and prayers.

I didn’t watch Monday night’s game because I never watch football — OK, one game a year, maybe, usually the Super Bowl — and should confess that. Nothing is easier than to dismiss the unshared passions of others. But an outsider’s perspective can be useful.

Consider the damage football does. Not last Monday night, but in general. Consider how it deforms college life, the tail that wags the dog in school after school. Consider the high school players who are hurt, or squander valuable years chasing an impossible dream. Imagine if the time spent playing football were spent learning carpentry.

Consider football as a time sink. Forty-eight of the most popular TV programs in 2021 were football games. Do the math. The average football game takes about 3 hours, and is watched, according to the NFL, by 17 million viewers. That’s 51 million hours spent watching any given football game. A year is 8,760 hours, so the average lifetime (about 80 years) is 700,800 hours.

Which means every football game broadcast on television flushes away the equivalent of 72 human lifetimes. That’s a lot.

True, they’re doing something they love, something offering them drama and apparently meaning. Football isn’t just entertainment; it’s religion. Fans could turn around and say that a man whose read “War and Peace,” twice, shouldn’t lecture anybody about wasting time. To each his own, but to me, sports are the same thing happening over and over.

Enough. Damar Hamlin seems a fine young man, popular among friends and fans. I hope he has a full recovery. But given what a marvelous individual he is, do we not owe it to him to pause and ask what his health and possibly his life, not to forget the health and lives of so many others to come, were sacrificed for?

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