The news out of Cincinnati has been nothing short of miraculous. By now everybody knows that Bills defensive back Demar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field last Monday night after getting hit in the chest by Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins during an otherwise unremarkable tackle. Hamlin was swiftly attended to by trainers and doctors there on the floor or the stadium. He was defibrillated at least once.
At the hospital, he was placed in a coma and put on a ventilator. As we have learned to our sorrow from the COVID pandemic, getting put on a vent is way serious business. And it doesn’t much matter how young you are.
The good news here is that as of Friday afternoon the young man is breathing on his own and talking to doctors, teammates and family. He seems to be neurologically intact. So he’s past the two big hurdles. Or biggest. Hopefully this is a sign that he can be discharged soon and get about the business of healing and living his best life.
There are people out there who want to take this opportunity to make this incident into a morality play about the whether it is appropriate for society to invest so much time, money and emotional energy into a sport that is as inherently dangerous as football. And I can have this discussion with those people.
However, the injury sustained by Hamlin is not so much a football thing as it is a fluky thing. The leading theory on what happened to him is that his heart stopped beating due to a rare medical condition called commotio cordis which occurs when a severe blow to the chest results in an electrical impulse that causes the heart to stop beating. According to what I have read, the condition is pretty much confined to children ages 8-18 who play contact sports. Even at that, the odds of sustaining such an injury is around 40,000 to 1.
Still, it happens. And it kills about 25 children per year, mostly baseball and hockey players. When I coached tee ball and Little League I constantly worried about a child taking a line drive or a bad hop to the chest. Thank God it never happened, at least not bad enough to kill anybody. Most bad hops with the little guys tended to go straight to the kisser. And nobody ever died from a fat lip. A bag of ice while sitting with mom generally was the extent of the intervention required.
So, if Hamlin’s near-death experience on the field is a fluke what lessons can we draw from this? First and foremost we need personnel trained in the art of first aid at every ballgame at every level of sports. Does this mean that you need the average 25 medical professionals that you can see on the sideline at any NFL game down at the girl’s softball league? Of course not. But every coach should be trained in CPR. There should an ARD defibrillator at every venue where sports are played. This is the lesson of Demar Hamlin.
There’s another lesson as well. We sometimes forget that there are good people in sports. Who can forget the images of the players kneeled around the stricken Hamlin while he was attended to? The sight of the Cincinnati coach consoling the coach of the Bills. There is no professional sport that has its eye affixed to the bottom line like the NFL. Not only did it suspend the game it ultimately cancelled it. Rarely has the NFL and the Players Association ever agreed to anything so quickly. And, last but not least, there was the grace extended by Demar Hamlin’s mother to Tee Higgins, when she assured him that she did not view him as responsible for her son’s plight. The fact that he indeed was not responsible is beside the point.
I won’t disagree with anybody who says football at the NFL level is damn near a blood sport. But what happened to Demar Hamlin is no proof of that.
