thelesterlee
24-year-old defensive back, Damar Hamlin, is fighting for his life right now and it’s impossible not to immediately feel yucky about being a football fan when you see a young man on death’s doorstep following a pretty routine play that happens 100 times a game.
With about 6 minutes left in the first quarter, Damar Hamlin collapsed after attempting to tackle Tee Higgins.
Remember folks, when you see NFL players like Damar Hamlin suddenly collapse, it’s rude to ask if they’re vaxxed or not. It’s only appropriate to ask people such question when they’re wanting to go to a bar, restaurant or funeral. pic.twitter.com/lHZTJqzffI
— govt.exe is corrupt (@govt_corrupt) January 3, 2023
Horrifying.
Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest and needed to be revived on the field before being rushed to the hospital where he remains in critical condition. The Bill/Bengals game was postponed because both teams decided they were done playing when the NFL 1000% would’ve been okay with the game continuing after a quick 5-minute break.
But I don’t want to sit here and write an article about how the NFL doesn’t really care about player safety. We all know this. I don’t want to use this near tragedy to get brownie points from like-minded people who all understand the obvious.
It feels almost impossible to comment on what happened Monday night without feeling disingenuous or self-serving. We all want likes and retweets and even something as simple as saying ‘thoughts and prayers to Damar Hamlin’ can be interpreted as someone trying to get phone notifications by saying the correct ‘classy’ thing.
Of course, that’s better than the alternative where people use this as their chance to blame Covid-19 vaccines or whatever evil right-wing lazy conspiracies these people gobble up and regurgitate for the sole purpose of agitating ‘liberals’ or hoping to become the next Alex Jones.
There are also people who love the NFL and don’t want to have any sort of conversation about Damar Hamlin with their excuse being ‘these players know the risk’.
We’ve heard that all season long as Tua Tagovailoa has gotten his brains dribbled up and down the field every week coming in and out of concussion protocol but who cares because Tua ‘knows the risk’ of playing in the NFL.
Do these players actually understand the risk? Sure, they know they could suffer a brutal injury that could potentially affect their future. They vaguely understand the consequences of CTE—despite it frequently being a punchline whenever a player tweets a stupid opinion or an excuse when a player hits a man, woman or child.
But most of the players in the league understand this above all else: playing this game allows them to gain exorbitant wealth that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise and I’m sure they all feel like they will be one of the guys who make it out of the NFL without suffering any real injuries.
At the end of the day, we are all exploiting these young men for our own personal gain. Whether we’re attempting to grow our own brands or win a fantasy football league or get rich off a gambling slip or get drunk at the bar with the crew on Sundays—we treat these players like marks and after a Damar Hamlin-Esque event occurs, we all rush to either wash our hands of the blood or double and triple-down.
I mean shit, even I’m exploiting this dude. I don’t want to write about players almost dying on the field but his name is trending and I run a sports website that could use a few extra views so I’m riding a wave for my own gain.
But this is the NFL, man. Players slamming their skulls into each other’s skulls and us all just pretending these players are protected or compensated well enough to make us feel better about how unprotected they are.
This all sucks and we’re all going to act as if what happened to Damar Hamlin is some isolated incident that could never happen again and we’ll argue with Cowboys fans and make fun of Russell Wilson and life will go on without the NFL ever having to address how dangerous their game is. Yay…
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