Into the Light: A Reckoning
by Valerie Morales
Three hours before the calamity there was a vicious hit that was deemed appropriate. It was the last seconds of the Cotton Bowl game and Tulane was driving down field when a violent collision left both Tulane receiver and USC defender dazed. There was a break in the action as referees debated whether the tackle was targeting (using the crown of the helmet to make a tackle) which is a penalty. It was determined it was not targeting, the game resumed. Tulane scored, won. Cue the cliches about underdogs and believing in yourself and football is life. But not much was said about the vicious hit after the fact because the audience both in the stadium and at home were respectively compensated. The game was an offensive showcase with great plays, a few stupid ones, a blown lead, ostentatious self-aggrandizement, a Heisman Trophy winner, dramatics, competitive despair, and euphoria. There seemed to be little appetite to wonder what was happening in the brains of those two kids who crashed into each other so violently.
Then three hours later an NFL player named Damar Hamlin was struggling to stay alive while millions- the most ever to witness a professional game on ESPN- observed the calamity. Damar Hamlin’s tackle wasn’t vicious, offensive, or out of bounds. It wasn’t targeting or unnecessary roughness. It was routine in the sense that players are taught tackling techniques in that exact way. It was a play repeated hundreds of thousands of times over the decades; that Damar Hamlin stood after the tackle was evidence of its banality. But ordinary can also be unspeakable and the unspeakable can become catastrophic.
Football violence like motion picture violence lures in the hedonist not because of the violent agony but because of the athletic grace. The transactional aspect of football is the pretense, a fake sort of understanding of what is at stake while conflating the ruthless aggression with a video game. We say of players stuck into the ground by such unholy velocity: they will be okay. We say of players limping off the field: injures are commonplace.
Torn Achilles. Ripped ACL. Dislocated Labrum. Groin strain. Neck strain. Concussion. Tendon tear. Hamstring strain. Acute fractures. Hip flexor strain. We are inured to the kind of violence football bestows because we benefit from the outcome and because we are constantly bargaining with the game’s darkness and its light. American football is violent but harmless. Violent but competitive. Violent but exciting.
I have always found football players to be optimistic men and simultaneously I have found them to be delusional. They are willingly to bargain with their bodies and brains in the prime of early adulthood when they are at their athletic and mental best. For some it’s nicks and tears that they work around. For other’s it’s escape, no lasting damage long term. For a few the calculation is unthinkable: dementia, CTE, Lou Gehrig disease, crippling arthritis, mental struggles, suicide and premature death.
Many years ago I heard a football player asked what it was like to hit someone at full speed when they were running at full speed. The reply was unfathomable. He said, well, run into your closed garage door as fast as you can 100 times without stopping. That’s 1% of the pain of one hit.
My son played football when he was 8, 9, and 10 years old. It was flag football but even that wasn’t as benign as it seemed. He went down once in such a heap it made a thunderous sigh, like the clouds above were running into each other. The coach- his father- told him to get up, he wasn’t hurt. But he was hurt. This is how it starts for many, many boys, conflating violence with masculinity and toughness, a redefinition of what pain is, and mothers like me playing along.
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Football’s dehumanization is particularly pungent. Players faces are shielded behind helmets which purposefully exaggerates the perception that football players are robotic predators unleashing torment and abuse on weaker prey. It’s not a civil game and the threat of danger is real yet there is no other place where large black men are coveted and not feared. This is the beautiful though fantastical ballad that football and its millions of fans cling to, what frankly makes it different. Basketball doesn’t have enough whites, baseball is Latin-dominant, but football is Americanization absent profiling, tropes, and bias. The football field is the rare place where racial boundaries aren’t violated.
In modern times football has mothered us, its children. It has anesthetized our brains and normalized us to the risk men take when they line up against one another and repeatedly take on such velocity into their bodies as if there isn’t an escalating cost. Football’s illusion is its bold badass lie. We say we don’t want anyone to get hurt when every football player is hurt after every single game they have ever played. We look beyond what we cannot see and they look behind what they routinely feel and both sides are complicit in what is going on, this hopscotch around near death because one side is living a dream and the other side is having a good time.
Except on Monday night no one was having a good time. No one was thinking about the playoffs. Or who has homefield advantage in the AFC. Or the brilliance of both Joe Burrows and Josh Allen. Football was built to do this very thing. It’s risky, like climbing up the face of the treacherous Matterhorn or surfing down the surface of a volcano or diving 702 feet underwater without scuba gear. The game is about hitting another human being as hard as possible, stopping him in his tracks. That is never going to change. The violence is the sports oeuvre. Just like a plane crash once in a blue moon, in football the unthinkable happens on live television and we are instantly chastened.
On the other hand though. Football didn’t create violent entertainment. Throughout history, humans have had a sick fascination with violent games. Pankration was a Greek game of boxing and wrestling that allowed kicks to the groin or bites to the face. Breaking someone’s fingers was legal. Medieval Venetians would fight each other on a bridge with sticks and canes and if they shoved a rival off the bridge, job well done. Gladiators played a game called Venatio where they were in a ring with wild animals who were not fed and vicious. Often female slaves were fed to the animals. Shin-kicking was a thing in England where men kicked each other in the shin until the other gave in. Uncivilized from afar but then so is tackling a man at an acceleration of 150 Gs.
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I grew up in a sports loving family. My parents spent their childhood and early adulthood in Chicago where I was born, and Chicago is a city of intense sports passion. I grew up going to football, basketball and baseball games, the latter being my parents favorite sport with basketball coming in a close second. The consensus was sports mattered. When I was growing up my brother played football all the way through high school. My second day of college I walked to the local Sears and bought a television so I could watch Sunday football in my dorm room.
I overlooked the violence.
While American professional football is cultural, it is also an oddity. On the field black men behave like white men who behave like Latino men who behave like Asian men. The only flavor is when there is a touchdown celebration, or the occasional trash talk b.s. reminiscent of middle school lunch lines. Unlike basketball and baseball, football is a sport of interdependency. Everyone has to do their job for it to work. A quarterback needs his left tackle. The running back needs his blockers. The receiver needs to run creative routes to shake off his defenders. Football doesn’t reward individualism. It’s not stitched into the game. Football is a sport of we with seminal moments of trauma.
Chuck Hughes collapsed on the field in 1971 in the middle of the game. His widow Sharon was emotional after Damar Hamlin collapsed. “Can you imagine how his mother felt. It’s a horrifying feeling and I just felt so sorry for the whole family last night.” The sad set of circumstances about Chuck Hughes was that he was only in the game in the 4th quarter as a replacement for someone injured. He was tackled then fell face down into the dirt. He clutched his chest and could not be revived. The autopsy revealed this was probably his second heart attack. Like a stroke, heart attacks can go unnoticed.
A drastic number of changes have been made since Chuck Hughes tragic death. The NFL has an emergency action plan for every game that includes an ambulance nearby. An air-management physician is on standby for potential life-threatening situations and a level one trauma center is identified. The precision in which training staffs operate is specific even identifying who calls the ambulance to come on the field. Repeatedly, they rehearse for trauma.
It was Buffalo Bills Assistant Trainer Denny Hillington who noticed Hamlin’s fall was peculiar and sprung into CPR and defibrillator action, saving his life.
To compliment the medical response the NFL has implemented player safety rules. Yet older fans ridicule the way the game is now played. Targeting calls. Can’t hit a quarterback. Unnecessary roughness penalties. Protection of defenseless players. The prohibition of chop blocks and horse collar tackles. They say, these old heads do, that the modern player is soft. A cohort of men are drawn to football like a moth to light because of its barbarity, because of the viciousness and hits and violence. It is the only place in American life where you can hit someone and not be arrested for assault.
Years ago, when NFL running back Ray Rice slugged his wife in an Atlantic City elevator and it was caught on camera and the NFL minimized his behavior a lot of social scientists posited how exactly do you encourage violence without consequences for two hours and then say be civilized in the aftermath when football is not civilized.
The Damar Hamlin tragedy has exposed the game, yes. But it has exposed us; it is our game. We are the barbarians at the gate feeding the lions. We are its zealots. The violence exists in football because we demand its presence. We have certified what happens on the field, the agony and the ecstasy. A vicious hit that creates a fumble is, dare I say, reasonable. An average hit that sends men to hospitals, men like Damar Hamlin, is unacceptable.
We are married to the sport, no point in arguing anything but. I for one am a Packers fan and it’s mostly been a miserable season with high expectations thrown out the window. Instead, it’s a wing and a prayer and fragile hope for a Sunday win and a playoff spot.
After Damar Hamlin’s injury I cared a little less. It had been a sad week while waiting for the updates on Damar, praying for his recovery and then thankful he has crossed important health thresholds we take for granted like talking and writing and being lucid.
And so, it seems the football marriage did survive one more terrible, but not fatal thing. I can’t say when it will be better again when this emotional rawness will disappear. But I know it will get better with time even if the page won’t be completely turned. It will be business as usual again where we conflate American football with joy. No one wants that more than Damar Hamlin.
