I am not about to be an apologist for Skip Bayless or any of the other pundits using the tragic Damar Hamlin situation to fill their time on TV, the web, twitter, instagram, and on and on...However, the remarks about "taking five minutes to resume the game" or "when wil this be rescheduled? It's such an important game" reflect the ugly reality of football as a business.
While I have no doubt that there are many NFL officers who recognize the tragedy of a horrible injury in fromt of an audience of millions, somewhere a bean counter is estimating the lost revenue from, an incomplete game, ramifications for the playoffs, and lost revenues across the board. I'm not insensitive, I'm being real. The game is about money, plain and simple. Players are simply meat to be thrown before coliseum audiences. I don't believe for a second that the Bills do not care about Damar or his condition, but womder if his condition were to occur later in life and attributable to having played?
My sister would see former Steeler Mike Webster from time to time, and withouty knowing who he was, felt sorry for the shambling wreck of a man he had become. Better protocols on head injuries may prevent some of today's players from suffering the same decline and demise, but players are still interchangeable pieces of a larger whole. The game is a business, and game receipts and licensing deals and endorsements of the "official popsicle of the NFL" will go on, despite the horrible trauma we witnessed.
If you have read this far, thank you. I am not advocating changes to the game ON THE FIELD I am much more concerned with the game OFF the field. The game where young men chasing dreams are often seen as expendable. Where the very idea of continuing a game in which such a tragic emergency occured crosses the minds of announcers and pundits alike, that is the real tragedy. I hope with every fiber of my being that Damar Hamlin recovers. I respect and admire the demonstration of love and support shown by the Buffalo and Cincinnati communities, I am moved by the other teams demonstrating their support, but I am not at all surprised by the callousness of some members of the media. I am old enough to (vaguely) remember the weekend in 1963 when Pete Rozelle thought that continuing to play the games immediately after the Kennedy Assasination was the right thing to do. Kennedy dies on 11/22 and the games on 11/24 went on. There was no broadcast of games, and perhaps there was an effort to bring normalcy to an anything but normal time. Again, I'm granting the benefit of the doubt, but I am concerned that the business of football caneat away at the humanity of sports. To his credit, Rozelle admitted that it was a very bad decision, but you cannot unring a bell
