The NFL has learned its lesson; you have to at least pretend to care

After the Damar Hamlin incident – he’s the player who collapsed on the field and stopped the Bills-Bengals game – an acquaintance sent me an email and asked if I thought the game should have been stopped, but I got distracted and didn’t answer right away because my response is kinda complicated so I wanted to think about it, but having nothing better to do this morning, here it is.

Since I’ve spent my entire career having and expressing opinions this might seem hypocritical and possibly is, but one thing I’ve learned for sure is you don’t have to have an opinion on everything (even though social media and sports talk radio encourage you to whether you know what the hell you’re talking about or not) and you really don’t have to have an opinion immediately.

Through trial and error (mostly error) I learned to wait until I had enough information to feel confident about expressing an opinion and frankly, a lot of my cartoon observations seem fairly obvious: the pandemic is real, Donald Trump is a jerk and killer robots are a spectacularly bad idea.

(More on that killer robot thing shortly.)

And one of the problems with having an immediate opinion about the Damar Hamlin incident is nobody was exactly sure what they just saw; it’s one thing to think you may have just seen a player tear an ACL, it’s another to think you may have just seen a player die.

Professional athletes are used to seeing teammates injured, but they’re not used to seeing a teammate get CPR because his heart stopped.

The players looked stunned and if the NFL had insisted that they resume the game, the league would have looked heartless and they’ve got enough problems with that already because they pretty much ignored the long-term effects of repeated concussions until they started getting sued for it and being greedy, heartless assholes was actually costing them money.

If you want to read more about that, here you go:

https://theathletic.com/3451280/2022/07/27/cte-study-nfl-concussion/

Now they’ve learned to at least pretend to care about player safety, but if you watch NFL football you know they care way more about quarterbacks than anyone else on the field because quarterbacks sell tickets and nobody (with the possible exception of immediate family members) buys a ticket so they can watch an offensive tackle.

Apparently, the NFL is going to have some kind of moment or tribute or pause to reflect before every game this weekend and as the above cartoon suggests, I believe that’s because they’re worried about their image and their history suggests they should be.

In 1971 Detroit Lions wide receiver Chuck Hughes died on the field after a hit dislodged a blood clot and he suffered a fatal heart attack. Players and fans were stunned then, too…but then they went ahead and finished the game.

Here’s a story about that:

https://time.com/6244346/chuck-hughes-died-nfl-game-damar-hamlin/

And just in case you didn’t read it; according to announcer Joe Buck, after both teams went to their locker rooms, the Bills and Bengals players were told they had five minutes to warmup to continue the game, which the NFL denies and when has the NFL ever misled you?

Joe Buck said he stands by his story.

Bottom line: if the players and coaches said, “Screw it, we don’t care what the league wants, we’re not going back out there” I support them 100 percent.

Full disclosure: in 1969 I was – as they said in the Ice Cube movie Friday – “knocked the fuck out” during a high school football practice and spent the next day in a daze and neglected to go to some classes and that night’s football practice because it didn’t occur to me while I was orbiting the Twilight Zone, and for failing to show up and get hit in the head again 24 hours later, I was benched for that week’s game, a benching that lasted exactly one series of downs before I was put back in to resume slamming my head into people.

But that was 1969 when they thought giving you water during a 2-hour practice was a bad idea so at least pretending to care is “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” assuming mankind isn’t too dazed to leap. 

So what did we see?

According to a Washington Post column written by Leana S. Wen and published in the Kansas City Star (she’s a doctor) Damar Hamlin heart stopped after taking a shot to the chest and the most likely explanation is he suffered “commotio cordis” which is rare, but can happen if the impact is strong enough and occurs at a specific moment between heartbeats.

It sends the heart into an “erratic, disorganized rhythm called ventricular fibrillation” which without immediate treatment, is fatal. The heart needs to be shocked back into normal rhythm and Wen called for automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) to be placed at all athletic facilities because the heart needs to be shocked right away.

OK, so far so good and we’re all familiar with the TV shows where doctors jump start a patient. Now here’s the surprising bit:

Among 69 “well-documented sports related cases” compiled by the National Commotio Cordis Registry only three occurred in football.

The majority happened in youth baseball or softball (they think it’s more common in kids because they don’t have the developed chest muscles of a professional athlete) and getting hit in the chest by a hard object like a ball or an ice puck was involved in the majority of cases. If that’s what happened to Damar Hamlin and we really want it to never happen again, we should ban Little League baseball, which let’s face it, we’re never, ever going to do.

(See? I told you this was complicated.)

Actually, I’m still not done ranting about pro sports and hypocrisy, but we’ll save all that for another time and now we’ll move on to…

Our Socialist Presidents

On more than one occasion I have expressed the opinion that our real problem is not Liberals or Conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, Ghosts or Ghostbusters…it’s actually Extremism, which sounded like a pretty good theory until I made the mistake of expressing that opinion around one of my sons who pointed out that “Extremism” is a moving target and to prove his point (even though I’d prefer not to) let’s play a game.

Guess what Liberal President signed a civil rights bill, created a massive government program to build an interstate highway system, another massive program to explore outer space, refused to cut taxes or raise defense spending and ended a war.

That commie pinko, Dwight Eisenhower.

Round two:

Guess what Liberal President ended the draft, created an agency to protect the environment, hung out with communists, supported a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, desegregated schools, signed Title IX to prevent gender bias at colleges and universities, lowered the voting age and endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment.

That wild-eyed lefty, Richard Nixon.

My son would argue (and has) that since the Cold War ended and politicians quit worrying that we were all going to start wearing berets, growing goatees and become Communists, they no longer felt like they had to appease the people on the Left and the whole country has shifted to the Right and presidents who used to be considered Conservatives would now be considered Socialists and I think the lesson here is don’t offer simplistic opinions or failing that, do not send your kids to college where they might learn stuff you don’t know and come home and tell you just how far up your ass your head is located.

And at this point I’m pretty sure my son would say I didn’t send him to college, because he got a full ride scholarship so I’m wrong about that, too.

Nevertheless…

One of my first lessons in How Politics Actually Works came in the late 1970s from a Sacramento Union reporter who covered the state capitol and he explained that there were legislators who would make sure to miss a vote because if a bill passed or failed by a wide margin their vote didn’t really matter, but if one vote would make a difference, now they had something of value that could be traded for something else.

And the You-Need-My-Vote-So-You-Have-To-Suck-Up-To-Me Theory of Politics also applies to the Extreme Right in the House because Kevin McCarthy needed their votes to become House speaker so he had to appease jerks like Matt Gaetz and whack-jobs like Marjorie Taylor Greene who apparently believes there are Jewish space lasers that start wildfires.

The moderate Republicans (and apparently there still are some) think McCarthy made too many concessions to the Extreme Right to get the job he wants, but that’s not the most alarming news I’ve heard lately, which gets me to…

Weapons developers recently said deploying killer robots is the next logical step in warfare because drones have worked so well and they’re going to give the robots decision-making capability so they can pick their own targets, which would seem to indicate they haven’t seen even one Terminator movie.

According to a recent story in the Kansas City Star, killer robots might be deployed by both sides if the war in Ukraine goes on long enough, which led to the cartoon questioning the humanity of Vladimir Putin.

The number of things that can go wrong with this killer robot plan seem too numerous to mention, although the following article written in 2018 mentions a lot of them, like terrorists getting a hold of them or dictators using them to control their people or hackers taking over a system and I sometimes think the people who come up with this stuff get excited because they can do something and spend way too little time wondering if they should do something.

Now here’s a story that should scare the shit out of you:

Before they set off the first atomic bomb, some scientists thought there was a chance that it would set off a chain reaction that they couldn’t stop and it would destroy the world, but they set it off anyway because:

They’d put a lot of effort into it and wanted to see if it worked.

And some guys with the same mindset are about to turn Our Future Robot Overlords loose because how could that possibly backfire and here’s the article that answers that question:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Killer-Robots-The-Future-of-War-2118625

OK, that’s it for today because despite my opinions about the NFL I have to get going because the Chiefs are playing this afternoon and I don’t want to miss it, which reminds me of the time I was watching a UFC fight with my son and someone was getting the snot pounded out of them and my son turned, looked at me and said:

“This clearly ought to be illegal.”

But we kept watching and if you live in Kansas City and the Chiefs are playing odds are you will too. And if someone gets seriously injured and he’s not a quarterback, follow the NFL’s example and at least pretend to care.

P.S.

In the original version of this story I insisted on calling Damar Hamlin Damar Hamilton even though I had the newspaper headline right there beside my laptop while I wrote the story and I actually have no idea why I got Damar Hamlin wrong, but spelled “commotio cordis” correctly, but I’m going to blame that blow to head I got back in 1969.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/