This Just In – The decision-making model in large organizations has changed in a very big way and it may not be temporary at all.
Starting off this week (and in a loop of replays) we watched as Buffalo Bills Safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle during the Monday night game. He fell to the ground (with the offensive player he tackled), then sprang to his feet as expected. With only the slightest stagger, he collapsed backward and lay motionless in cardiac arrest.
Hamlin was attended to immediately and is recovering in a Cincinnati hospital. He’s young and healthy. I hope his recovery is swift and complete.
The larger story of what happened on Monday evening is that watching this awful event unfold on live television brought the NFL to a screeching halt (understandably so). Because players have been injured (sometimes grievously), carried off the field and whisked away to the hospital before, the immediate assumption was that after gathering themselves for a few minutes, the players would line up and resume play.
They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. There was no dramatic meeting in the middle of the field among the players. There was no vote taken. There was just this – sobbing human beings brought to their knees after watching the shocking violence that real CPR requires and the intuitive understanding that the guy on the turf could easily be any one of them.
Smack in the middle of a big deal game, the players collectively made this stunning decision – one whose justification was manifest. As the sports talkers and writers try to credit the NFL for making the call, it’s just crystal clear to me – the NFL simply made the players’ decision official. The league didn’t decide anything.
And when those players were all simultaneously traumatized and stricken with that very human response, their inability to continue informed their employers that work tonight was stopping. The coaches agreed. Any measure of fairness to both teams would demand exactly this response.
No one glorifies what happened here. It appears to be a medical event called “Commotio cordis” where blunt force to exactly the right spot in the chest causes a catastrophic disruption in the electrical activity in the heart – like a short circuit.
There’s been a week of coverage of this with serious-minded people trying to examine what this means for the NFL – for safety precautions in a violent sport, but this injury happens in other sports, too.
In 2021, Peter Laake, a lacrosse player in Maryland, took a shot to the check. He took a step or two and went down. Thanks to an Automatic Electronic Defibrillator (AED), he was resuscitated and recovered.
It’s important to keep our perspective about sports injuries and have a healthy respect for the risks of just walking around. More than 800 Americans die every day from injuries related to simply falling down. We live with this risk every day – not with life and death in mind, just riding a bike, taking a shower or descending a flight of stairs.
It will be interesting to watch the NFL negotiate its new decision-making reality. The league will have to announce a new date for the Bengals and Bills to resume their game, but in this new reality where the workers have so much leverage, the announcement will only happen in agreement with the players themselves.
(featured image via AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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