Shared trauma and the collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin
BY SEAN GREGORY
THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO FOR THE NFL HAD arrived. On the New Year holiday while the country was enjoying a half-century-old mass ritual known as Monday Night Football, America felt it in the pit of its stomach. It was as awful as you’d ever imagine. Worse, even.
Millions of people—including so many families, with kids taking in one last sports distraction before returning to school from winter break—were left watching Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin fighting for his life near the 50-yard line on Jan. 2. As the ambulance carted Hamlin, 24, away in Cincinnati, we all braced for the absolute worst tragedy.
All that really matters, in this moment, is Hamlin’s health. On Jan. 4, he remained in critical condition at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center after suffering cardiac arrest following what looked like a routine hit. “We are deeply moved by the prayers, kind words, and donations from fans around the country,” Hamlin’s family said in a statement. The GoFundMe that Hamlin had started back in 2020, to buy toys for children in his hometown near Pittsburgh, exceeded $6 million in donations by midday on Jan. 4; it had raised about $3,000 going into the Monday-night game.
America is football-crazed. So Hamlin’s collapse will have to force a reckoning. As we pull so hard for Hamlin’s recovery, it’s also appropriate to ask ourselves: Can we in good conscience keep embracing this game?
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN wrestling with this question for more than a decade, as science has shed light on football’s health consequences. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was once an obscure entry in medical textbooks. Now, the neurological disease associated with repeated blows to the head is well known by football fans, afflicting at least 300 former NFL players, and perhaps hundreds more. (The condition can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem). Hamlin did not suffer a head injury, but the incident showed that despite the NFL’s measures to make the game “safer”—such as harsher penalties for head-to-head contact—football remains an inherently violent pursuit that puts players at great risk.
Football’s brutality hasn’t dampened its standing as the nation’s most popular sport. The data couldn’t be clearer. The Denver Broncos, for example, sold for $4.65 billion in 2022, the richest franchise transaction in U.S. sports history. Amazon is paying the NFL around $1 billion a year to show Thursday-night football games. And according to Variety, 31 of the 35
