Bills players praying after Damar Hamlin hit.jfif

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – In today’s fractured media landscape, shared viewing experiences are rare. But on Monday night, in a high profile National Football League game on broadcast and cable television, America had one.

When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collided with Cincinnati Bengals receiver Tee Higgins, then stood up briefly before collapsing from a cardiac arrest, it would transfix a large audience and the nation’s largest sports broadcast entity for the next two hours. It instantly got wall-to-wall treatment on CNN, with anchor Anderson Cooper pivoting to discuss it. ESPN carefully shifted from covering a key AFC matchup to covering the aftermath of a frightening human moment.

Early Tuesday morning, the Buffalo Bills confirmed that Hamlin's heartbeat stopped following the hit, and his heartbeat was restored on the field, with trainers administering CPR for eight minutes before he was transported by ambulance to UC Medical Center. He remained in critical condition there, and sedated, overnight.

The emotion of the moment, from the players on the field and sidelines, to the coaches, game officials, and millions watching, was raw. It required no translation.

But in a triumph of restraint and insight, ESPN’s coverage described not just the facts on the ground but the emotions of the moment in a way it likely would not have covered it even a decade ago.

As journalists, we’re taught to detach. I saw someone on social media decrying the ESPN coverage as “cruel,” not just to Hamlin or the Bills, but to the ESPN commentators reliving what they had witnessed on the field.

It wasn’t cruel. It’s the job. Even hard scenes require reporting. As a journalist, you assess the situation, describe it calmly and accurately, and try to give the viewer/reader a sense for what it like in that moment. In this business, we all work with people who cover scenes just as disturbing every day, and then go home to deal with their own emotions.

Play-by-play man Joe Buck showed his journalistic training when describing his feeling just after the medical incident, adding, “nobody cares what I think.”

At that point, he was interrupted by SportsCenter host Scott Van Pelt, who told him, in essence, you’ve done this job all your life, people very much care what you think and how you feel in the midst of it.

Time and again, Van Pelt would ask colleagues to share their feelings on the situation, in the absence of hard facts with which to update the public, and those honest responses formed the backbone of a measured and imminently useful broadcast of the moment. Former players talking about the feeling on the field and in the locker room about serious injuries brought needed perspective.

Ryan Clark, himself a former NFL safety, gathered his emotions (the raw version available in real time on his Twitter feed) to speak forcefully of the challenge of such a moment for the players and coaches on the field. His insight carried the night.

Van Pelt’s sound judgment and human sensitivity set the tone for coverage that was rare and commendable for its lack of speculation, its determination not to scapegoat, and by its responsibility to the moment and its impact on viewers.

It was everything that news coverage in 2023 often is not. On CNN, when the discussion raged, the usual was on display. Medical speculation. A discussion of the violent nature of football and what went wrong in this instance. It was up to a sports commentator, Bob Costas, to point out that what the nation had witnessed was a tragic anomaly, not necessarily the result of negligence.

If there was blame to be passed out, it went to the NFL for initially attempting to restart the game after a 5-minute warm-up period following Hamlin’s departure in an ambulance. “The show must go on,” is deeply ingrained in American culture. But credit must be given to the two head coaches, who quickly determined that their players were in no frame of mind to keep beating the hell out of each other given what they had just witnessed, and who negotiated a return to the locker rooms.

In a conference call early Tuesday morning, NFL officials said the decision to postpone the game was made after a series of communications with players, coaches, game officials, medical personnel and others.

"Medical advice guided our decision,” NFL Chief Football Administrative Officer Dawn Aponte said after midnight on a conference call. “We remained in constant communication with both teams, medical personnel, game officials and ownership. We made decisions that we believed to be in the best interest of Damar’s status and the state of both teams – players and staffs. There couldn’t have been more collaboration throughout this process by all parties.”

In the end, the right thing was done. The game was postponed. And focus shifted to Hamlin, a second-year pro out of Pittsburgh with an exemplary public service record and an inspiring story.

Closer to home, I struggled with the scene. Just 11 days earlier (can it have been 11 days?) I watched medical technicians perform CPR on my mother. Later she was intubated in what would be a failing effort to save her life. The scene in Cincinnati was difficult for all of us, each for our own reasons, and our responses ranged from pain to anger to fear.

Football is a violent sport. Still, its popularity continues. It is the most popular form of entertainment in the U.S. today. The NFL, famously, owns a day of the week, and in season, it owns Monday nights.

Though coaches and commentators often couch sports in military terms, it is rarely life and death. I thought back to that day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1996 when driver Scott Brayton died of injuries from a crash, and the feeling around the speedway then. I was there when Kevin Ware broke his leg in the 2013 NCAA regional finals against Duke, and though the national outpouring was impressive in that moment, it wasn’t a life-or-death situation.

On Monday night, a group of sports journalists and former athletes helped America process what it had seen, and immediately recognized when an event stopped being a game and started being real life.

A national audience got to see athletic trainers and other first responders in action. They got to see empathy and prayer from players on opposing sides. They got to hear a rare glimpse into the emotions that go into describing those events to the public.

And hopefully, and most importantly, here’s hoping they get to see a full recovery from Hamlin, who was still listed in critical condition at the time of this writing.

It was that rarest of moments in modern America, where the nation can show up for an event pitting two competing entities, and wind up all rooting and praying for the same thing.

Let’s hope those prayers are answered.

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