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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
When it comes to suspending/delaying the season: police officers and firefighters lose fellow workers from time to time. Do they take a week off to get their heads together? Now of course football is nowhere near as important as public safety. It is nowhere near as dangerous either.
In my son’s little league, an optional gear was an undershirt with padding over the heart. They called it a heart guard, I think. I bought it, but my son never felt comfortable with it, so he never used it. Frankly, I doubt that little pad of foam would have done anything.
Okay. I don’t watch sports*, so I’m going from accumulated impressions.
Look at this terrifying display of huwite power supremacism. Dominant posture, hand on head to demonstrate elevated status, toxic stoicism, uncovered head to challenge God, skin not tattew’d up to preserve unbroken huwiteness…
Yes, that’s what’s expected. I’m sitting here amongst my coworkers in their cubicles. If one happens to (God forbid) have a heart attack and die, yes I expect that we’d all get back to work once she was taken away by the ambulance. The show must go on. Life must go on.
Now of course, if “going on” means that that the sick person doesn’t get adequate treatment, then we stop the show temporarily to provide treatment. Then the show starts up again.
Yes this can be a traumatic thing for bystanders. Is going home and doing nothing better for them than staying and continuing to do their work? How far out does it go? I’m sure players on other teams knew this guy and knew of the incident – should their games have been halted too?
To answer the OP:
We are obviously being pansified.
I do not view this as an example of a pansy response. It may well get that way, but so far fair dinkum.
I’ve read several replies on this thread recounting that exact event happening to several on here and they said people were sent home for the day. There were no other games going on, it was Monday night football.
If the game has playoff implications, it must be played.
The pressure that a minority on social media creates combined with an aging society more focused on safety has lead us here.
That said I thought some great things came out of it. It was great seeing all the players kneeling in prayer around him. His small charity got an influx of several million dollars.
It’s a business. If this thinking applies, then we’re falling victim to in-front-of-our-noses-ism. (Believe it or not that is not an official term and I’m pretty sure this is the coining). Wouldn’t the same thinking apply to off-field or before-game incidents? What about family members of players? After all it’s just a game and life is real. Well, if this were some pickup game on the street then it makes zero difference to anyone if the game gets completed, but this game is different. It does matter financially and emotionally to many people; it has broader impact, no matter what we think of professional sporting and its role in our culture. Does that preclude a player’s injury from mattering too? No.
I’d say that that if it’s not one or the other, then the game should go on, but if somehow it’s mutually exclusive then obviously the player’s life should come first. No one is expecting Damar Hamlin to get back in the game, but once he’s received the possible treatment then there should still be a game.
Right, because the world will stop turning without millionaire grab-ass.
No, because the sports books will stop turning without results.
I’m for stopping a boxing match if one of the boxers dies but I’ll let the MMA people decide for themselves.
I’ll answer because I agree with Jimmy on his point. Your point is provocative and a nonsequitur. This is about reaction to an accident, not tolerance for and structural enabling of intentional attempted maiming. Two waaay different things.
Having family that worked on Wall Street, I can remember more than once when people came home talking about a guy who died at his desk. Of course, those weren’t 24 year olds. Life is hard. Bad things will happen, but we can’t just stop everything because of it.
Ed G., somebody made a similar point about noses-ism regarding high school sports deaths compared to Monday Night Football (get well soon) grievousness. There’s nothing hypocritical about it, and a term less saucy than virtue-signalling is appropriate for the basic phenomenon. Like Adam Smith’s 100,000 Chinamen being wiped out by a calamity vs the spectre of one’s own little finger being lopped off at dawn, it is entirely reasonable for people to repspond to a combination of not only severity, but also proximity — even virtual (if not virtuous) proximity.
We are not expected to react to news over there as powerfully as we react to the same news over here.
I don’t know about the whole damned league taking a week, but I certainly respect the two teams taking some time, and the league calling the game right where it is. Auto racing and rain, etc. Bullishly playing on is not the only intelligent way to proceed. Our insurance policies refuse to pay up for various “acts of God”; certainly our ballgames are not immune to calamity.
Don’t bet the farm on grab-ass.
Oh ok, so that’s the way it is then. My mistake. No sense in discussing different responses or general principles which might be involved because some people went home in few instances and since there were no other games happening at the time.
Came in to work one day to see the World Trade Center towers collapsing on the break room TV.
Traumatic. I didn’t go home for the day, even though I just watched 3,000 people die. It was hard to focus on work, but I worked anyway.
Maybe it’s just in my nature, and work is a nice diversion from reality’s frequent harshness. I really wonder how many players WANT to play but their team owners are trying to show how sensitive and respectful they are by cancelling “work” for that week.
Recall that for some time we thought that up to 50K might have been killed.
Well, of course life goes on. No one is going to spend the rest of their life in bed. But as someone married to someone who experienced exactly what you described (someone having a fatal heart attack in the office next door), I’m glad everyone didn’t go back to work. My husband and another guy followed the ambulance to the hospital, and were there with the wife when the news came that her husband had passed. Some people stayed at work awaiting news; some went home.
For everyone to have continued working would have been cavalier at best, cheapening a good man’s life. And a Dikensonial level of behavior on the part of the company.
What was the price for everyone knocking off early that day? A few saws didn’t get shipped? A few people in receivables were late getting records updated? All so the company would maybe make a few extra bucks?
I am the last person in the world who thinks that people should be babied, and when I heard about “counselors being available after DJT’s election” I rolled my eyes as hard as anyone. I don’t encourage wallowing in my own children. There’s trauma, and there’s “trauma”. I don’t watch football and didn’t see what happened, but by all descriptions it sounds pretty traumatic.
I’m really not commenting on the appropriateness of an emotional reaction. I’m commenting on whether we should let those emotional reactions govern conduct related to institutions and duties when they have broader impacts and when we’re talking about indirect people. So too is my point that off field incidents can be just as traumatic for the players involved, I’m not positing some butterfly flapping it’s wings over there causing a tornado over here. This is neither 100,000 Chinese nor our own little finger.
I disagree. Jimmy’s comment begins, “…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.”
Don Cherry famously equated fighting in hockey as being tough, and an attribute of Canadian players. This attitude still exists in some quarters. So it’s a fair question IMO.
By the way Comrade Xi, if you’re listening, I love the Chinese. Really. I do not condone BDB’s heartless hypothetical.
Annefy, of course I’m not saying that emotion should be suppressed or that continuing to provide aid should be squelched or that no one has any duty to aid the family even once the ambulance leaves the office. Of course. Yet the event ends and people do continue to work. Again, if it’s either-or, if it’s a choice between continuing on as normal or providing extraordinary aid then of course the aid should be provided. How often is it either-or? In any case, this Monday Night Football example wasn’t either-or.
Fighting, too, is way different than head hunting or intentional attempts to maim (or worse). Anyway, it remains a different matter than how to react after an accident in-game.
I regret mightily that I went on autopilot that day and sent my children to school. It was a confusing and traumatic day and they should have been home with me.
I read my then 11-year old daughter’s journal entry and she wrote “I prayed so hard I got a headache”. All four of my kids have memories of being in school that day and they gained nothing from being there; I found out later that a few of them thought we might be attacked on the west coast (not a ridiculous conjecture) and they would be at school when it happened.
Recognizing that comparing children to adults is to some degree apples and oranges.
What was that all about?
No one is claiming that you think work should continue at the cost of aid being provided. It’s a strawman.
There were over 100 people at my husband’s work who had no part in providing aid (CPR, defib) and no part in going to the hospital to await news and render comfort. They stayed at work to await news, or they went home. For those who stayed at work, I’m pretty sure nothing got done.
It happened on a Friday (something JY is still bitter about; he has said more than once that if he is going to die at his desk, he hope the good Lord takes him on a Monday morning). Everyone was back to work by Monday.
I agree.