By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, January 03, 2023
What happened to Damar Hamlin during last night’s
Monday Night Football game was horrific. It is also, from everything that we
know, impossible to use as a basis from which to draw any broader conclusions.
In the entire history of the NFL — as well as in the entire history of college
football — no player has ever had a cardiac arrest on the field. That has happened in basketball: In 1990, Hank Gathers died during
the semi-finals of the 1990 WCC tournament. It has happened twice in
soccer in just the last decade: In 2021, Christian Eriksen collapsed after suffering a cardiac
arrest during the European Championships, and, in 2012, during a game in the
English Premier League, Fabrice Muamba’s heart stopped for 78 minutes before he was eventually
revived. But it has never happened in football. By all accounts, this was a
freak occurrence, of the type that happens from time to time in an imperfect
world.
In his newsletter today, Jim Geraghty writes that Hamlin’s collapse left “the
entire league shaken and wondering how best to keep players safe while
maintaining the sport’s popularity.” Football is, indeed, a violent game, and
there are, indeed, some lingering problems associated with that violence. Concussions
remain an issue, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) remains an issue, and,
relative to, say, baseball, football players suffer a high number of dramatic
injuries each year. But cardiac arrests are not among those injuries, and they
have never been among them — even in the bad old days. Irrespective of whether Damar Hamlin’s
collapse was caused by an unknown preexisting heart condition, was the first
incidence of commotio cordis ever recorded in football, or was
a freak occurrence related to nothing discrete, the NFL will no more be able to
prevent the next one than the NCAA was able to save Hank Gathers or FIFA was
able to forestall what happened to Christian Eriksen and Fabrice Muamba. Hamlin
collapsed after making what, by the NFL’s standards, represented a relatively
innocuous tackle.
Nor, contrary to the grotesque insinuations of figures
such as Charlie Kirk and Alex Berenson, is there any evidence whatsoever that
Hamlin’s collapse was related to his having received the Covid-19 vaccine. It
is unclear whether Hamlin had been vaccinated, but, even if he had, the notion
that we have seen a dramatic uptick in vaccinated athletes “dropping suddenly” —
as Kirk claimed on Twitter — is nonsense. At some point over the last few
years, some figures within the United States — most of them on the political
right, a few of them on the political left — have transmuted their entirely
reasonable opposition to vaccine mandates (the case for which
is even stronger when the vaccine is experimental) into the baseless claim that
the Covid-19 vaccines that were developed in 2021 are, at best, useless and, at
worst, actively lethal. The result of this approach has been a repeated,
reflexive, and utterly irresponsible attempt to link any unexpected
or ostensibly unusual death to the vaccine, regardless of the facts, evidence,
context, or science.
Keenly aware of their own mortality — and primed from
birth to look for patterns — human beings do not like to be told that,
sometimes, bad things happen for no comprehensible reason. But, well:
Sometimes, bad things happen for no comprehensible reason. This was a tragedy,
not a crime, and, presuming competitive sports will continue to be a part of
our culture, we will see more such tragedies in the future. Certainly,
football’s extraordinary commercial popularity has created an incentive
structure in football that makes it a particularly attractive proposition to
athletic young men and, in turn, makes reforms more difficult to achieve than
the sport’s harshest critics would like. But if that incentive structure were
to disappear tomorrow, the underlying urge would remain. From the dawn of time,
ambitious young men have been attracted to high-octane, competitive endeavors,
and they have willingly accepted the risks that those endeavors carry. In its
early form, football was an amateur endeavor, played as a college hobby by men
who came from wealthy, well-established families and had lucrative careers in
business ahead of them. Relative to today’s game, it was also extremely
dangerous. Players lined up to participate, nevertheless.
They will next week, too.
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