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Reflections of a Weak Society?
Monday night, with a little over five minutes remaining in the 1st Quarter of the Bills-Bengals game, Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest. He was attended by both teams’ trainers and EMTs and was transported to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center where he remains in critical condition.
The overwhelming opinion of the media and everyone connected with the game is that it could not continue and the the NFL suspended play.
Is it a sign of respect or sign of weakness?
On March 22, 1989, Steve Tuttle of the St. Louis Blues and Uwe Krupp of the Buffalo Sabres crashed into the nets and, in a freak accident, one of Tuttle’s skates cut open the neck of Sabres’ goal tender Clint Malarchuk, severing his carotid artery and partially cutting his jugular vein. Malarchuck lost a liter and half of blood. The Blues resurfaced the ice and the game was finished.
In 1940, Cincinnati Reds backup catcher Willard Herschberger committed suicide in the team’s hotel in Boston. (I wrote about his story here.) After a team meeting the Reds played the next day and completed the road trip to Brooklyn to take on the Dodgers.
The only player to die on the field during a National Football League game was Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions. With 1:02 left in an October 1971 game at Tiger Stadium vs the Chicago Bears, the 28-year-old wide receiver collapsed on his way back to the huddle. He was pronounced dead at Henry Ford Hospital.
Were we tougher back then or were we just terrible people?
Published in General
I’m far from a fan of Skip Bayless, but he is being roasted for this tweet amid calls for him to be kicked off his popular sports show.
I call that doing your job by having an opinion. But the players and sensitivity police in the media want him gone.
During one of Sunday’s games, why did a healthy football player, Damar Hamlin, collapse right after tackling a member of the other team?
He was not the man being tackled. (The Gateway Pundit had a video blip of the play that was involved right before this player collapsed.)
Prior to 2021, 29 athletes a year died “unexpectedly.” According to statistician Ed Dowd, currently we are lucky if we get thru one single month without at least 29 athletes dying “unexpectedly.”
Airline pilots are collapsing in the cockpit and so far no airliner has crashed. This has been an extreme bit of good fortune as sometimes these pilots who are collapsing unexpectedly have done so as they approach the runways. It has also been a stroke of luck that alert and competent co pilots were able to successfully take over.
The statistics involving pilot fatalities are extremely worrisome as well. In 2020, just over one hundred US airline pilots died. (This was the height of the COV pandemic.)
But in 2021, almost 1100 airline pilots died.
Neither football players or airline pilots consume fentanyl right before being involved in their life’s work. So the argument that these deaths are due to some type of drug epidemic is not a decent one.
So what experimental vaccine program came about during FY 2021 that had never occurred before?
And why did my local grammar school put up a defib machine in Spring 2022, on an outside wall where students and parents could access it? This happened right before the vaxxes were made available for children.
I read a headline saying that his partner refused to appear with him on today’s show. Whatever that show is.
Troy Aikman had to walk back His “take the dresses off” comment concerning roughing the passer penalties.
We are weak.
Definitely tougher back then.
I found the reactions on social media to be rather weird. Lots of scolding about what you can or can’t say about the incident. And five times the amount of scolding if you post a video of the incident, because apparently that’s “insensitive,” even though it was on live TV for all to see. I’m not sure why “thou shalt not watch him collapse” is such a serious commandment.
On the positive side, it’s nice to see that an entire nation can come together over an incident like this, even if it is to yell at each other about what’s acceptable to say or do or think about it. Who says we no longer have any unity?
If he’d been pronounced dead, I could have seen stopping the game. That his heart was restarted and he was taken away by ambulance doesn’t seem like a halt-worthy event. Tragic, sure, but not dead. A lot of games continue on after an injury. I guess the question is, how serious an injury requires game-stoppage? Is there a chart to consult?
Not sure about this one. Didn’t watch the game and am not a football fan.
But JY lost a dear friend five years ago whose office was next door to his.
Lots of CPR and difib (don’t know how to spell it) waiting for the ambulance. Friend died about an hour later at the hospital.
No way anyone was going back to work after that.
I don’t think it’s weakness. It was shock. This was not an ordinary sports injury, but a player suffering a cardiac arrest in front of a stunned world.
Having an ambulance on the field and having CPR performed on him for 9 minutes before placing him in the ambulance ? No way should the game have resumed. They are not gladiators in ancient Rome.
Different question is whether the game can be completed now. Both teams are already in the playoffs, although one or the other may have had home field advantage on the line, I don’t know. Logistics can be a challenge this late in the season.
The modern equivalent.
Bread and Circuses . . .
Welfare and Football . . .
In a very similar incident to last night, Chris Pronger of the St. Louis Blues was hit in the chest by a slap shot in a NHL game against the Detroit Redwings in 1998. He fell to the ice, got back up, and then collapsed. The medical staff indicated that Pronger was unconscious for about 30 seconds and had a very weak heartbeat. They think the force of the puck temporarily created an irregular heartbeat. He was taken off the ice to a waiting ambulance to a hospital in Detroit where later tests indicated everything was fine. The game continued after Pronger left the ice, and another Blues player served the penalty that Pronger had incurred right before the incident.
What annoyed me the most about the media coverage last night (including FOX News) was how long it went on and on without any new information. Speculation is worthless and a waste of time. Do a news break, state what is known, and then go back to regular programming. If I was a player on the field or personally knew Damar Hamlin, I might be upset, but watching a bunch of grown men in the media get overly emotional for hours was embarrassing. Say a prayer and get back to work.
I’m afraid I can’t quite bring myself to believe that whether or not a football game (FCS) is postponed or not is some sort of definitive commentary on society’s strength and robustness. Quite a few more consequential things going on, it looks like to me.
When your entire team is doing this, resuming the game would not occur on a so-called level playing field.
Nine minutes is a really long time to perform CPR. A brain suffers damage after only one minute without oxygen. While CPR moves oxygen to the brain, its not ideal.
My mom died of a heart attack and the thought of what happened to this young man has troubled me all day long. If a public display of prayer and postponement of a game means we are a weak society, then I’m all for it.
Re 1100 airline pilot fatalities. I checked and looked for the original article. Here is what it now says:
We initially published this report after trusted sources, including a doctor and various members of the Airline Pilot Association (ALPA), sent us information showing the substantial increase in deaths in 2021. We felt it was important to get this type of information out to the public to keep with our pledge to inform the public with the best information we have.…
kely not accurate. As such, we have asked ALPA members to provide us with a complete data set. We have now received the original publications from 2021, 2020 and 2019 and are compiling the data and analyzing. At first pass, the data shows no significant increase from 2020 to 2021. We have not looked at 2019 in full yet. While this data does not show a significant increase of deaths, it also shows that the vaccines did not reduce deaths either.
(Emphasis theirs)
Crikies. Stop it with the rumor and innuendo already.
I’m a little mixed on this. When I first heard I thought they could have continued playing. But when I saw the event and the shock and tears across all the players, I can see how the players didn’t want to play any further. Rough football players were on their knees praying and in tears. The way this unfolded I think it became impossible to continue.
At one time the NFL was played by the roughest, toughest Men. They loved America and celebrated Her. They also volunteered to go to war for Her.
Now, the NFL is being infiltrated by pansies, kneelers, and chicks by force to take down the Men’s Only club.
It most definitely is a commentary on Our society’s strength and robustness and it is showing just how weak We are becoming.
Yeah, it’s not even a close call. Professional football requires focus. Playing that game with the players in the emotional state they were in after watching 9 minutes of CPR, there’s no way they could have played an effective game (on either team). Other players would have gotten hurt, perhaps seriously.
My 94-year-old mother died in a car crash last year (August 2021). I though I was handling it pretty well. But I know that on (at least!) two occasions in the week or so following the accident, I ran red lights while driving. Not blasting through without stopping, fortunately. I did a stop-and-go at one, caught myself partway through the intersection. In the other, there was a left turn lane and signal, I was waiting to go straight. When the left turn went green, I went straight. Fortunately no cross traffic in either case. But I was not focused, and I was lucky.
I’m aware of only none other time in my 40-plus years of driving that I’ve run a red light. That was a few blocks from work at an intersection where I had to make a Right-on-Red every day [and I don’t do rolling right on red – I come to a complete stop], to the point that after a few years working there I thought of that intersection as a stop sign instead of a red light. One day I had an appointment that required me to go left instead of right. I stopped at the intersection, looked both ways, then made my left turn. As I was halfway through the turn I realized what I’d done.
I really don’t see how that is controversial (and like you, I am not one to go out of my way to defend Bayless). He didn’t even say you shouldn’t call the game, he just questioned the logistics.
Yeah, once you knew he survived, then why not win one for the Gipper (or something like that)? Yes, the man’s life is more important than the game, but whether you play or not won’t change what happened.
Years ago I was at a Jet game when Dennis Byrd had his neck broken. After a long delay they got his paralyzed body onto a backboard and the game continued. Once you realized how serious the situation was, you felt horrible, but playing out the game was not disrespectful in any way. These guys love football and probably wouldn’t want their teammates to miss the game because of them.
I don’t have much of a problem with the Skip Bayless tweet.
But there was some clown who worked for some local ESPN sports-talk station who tweeted out that they had to get the game going right away because he had a four-way parley that depended on it. That guy needs a 2×4 upside the head.
Hearing all of these ESPN people talk about prayer, I started to wonder why they don’t stop and just do that. Turns out one guy did.
He was the one making the tackle, but the runner lowered his shoulder and Hamlin received a solid blow to the chest. I don’t know what actually happened, but are we really going to look at every heart condition and say, “See, it was the vaccine!” Let’s wait and find out more.
Yeah, I think this was the difference here. Unlike Pronger, Hamlin actually had CPR performed.
There’s also the 2020 incident in the NHL where St. Louis was at Anaheim. In the 1st period, Jay Bouwmeester of the Blues finished his shift and went to the bench. As he was sitting there, he suddenly keeled over. He had gone into cardiac arrest and was immediately treated by the medical staff (a defib was used) and taken to the hospital. The game was suspended and resumed the next time the Blues went to Anaheim. (Unlike Pronger, Bouwmeester has a pacemaker implanted and had to retire.)
Probably a combination of this being a different time and different circumstances in these cases. We’ve also learned a lot more about how these instances affect the teammates, etc.
ETA: Pronger tweeted this earlier today:
(Deleted).
I’m with Her
And until his recent retirement, Anthony Fauci, along with Rochelle Wolensky, were urging us to continue with the COV vax program since it is proven to be safe and effective.
Yeah, I thought Skip was just thinking out loud, working through the arguments each way. Unfortunately, he did his thinking on Twitter.
It’s happened before. Commotio cordis. Note that the story is eight years old. It is very rare, and usually happens to adolescents. A story I read somewhere said the average age is 14.7. Having a defibrillator on hand would seem to be wise, because minutes count.
That wasn’t a particularly violent collision, but you never know.
Actually, there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. There’s more to this than just postponing a game.
That is not true. Today’s football players are some of the greatest athletes that have ever lived. They are also very, very valuable in a tens-of-billions of dollars a year business. They play twice as many games as the old times did and they do it against bigger and stronger and faster opponents with very little padding. Nobody wants to see anybody get hurt and nobody wants to see the anything damage the image of the NFL. They stop games for lightning and reschedule them for blizzards. It is a long season and skipping a game is not a big deal.
This is pretty ridiculous. This wasn’t someone breaking a bone or tearing a ligament and being hauled off for treatment. A teammate almost dies on the field in front of you, gets CPR for 9 minutes, and you’re expected to play the game like nothing happened?
C’mon, man.