Tuesday 104: This was Always Going to Happen

When you consider something historically, it’s important to avoid the tempting “What if…” construct of inevitability. “Could _____ have been avoided?” Is a question, sure, and something you can think about, it’s just not a legitimate historical inquiry. Everything is inevitable because it happened.

When 24 year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field last week following a collision with Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins, the ecosystem of American football entered a new, and probably final, phase. For generations, the National Football League covered up the fact that participation in the sport and performance of the actions essential to competitive success caused grievous, irreversible brain damage. Players and spectators alike were misled or kept in the dark, even though common sense and the plain appearance and function of so many former players probably should have tipped them off somewhere along the line.

Almost every major professional sport today faces an existential conundrum. In athletics, human performance has seemingly plateaued, and although world records continue to fall, the question of performance-enhancing drugs and technology (everything from anabolic steroids to carbon-fiber augmented “super shoes”) pops up at every turn. In baseball, the understanding of statistics and their application to game theory has rendered many elements of the sport sterile1. Soccer faces most baldly the horrifying criminalities and inequities of global capitalism, though tennis and golf find themselves in the same arena. Basketball, though largely healthy, continues to reckon with a former tolerance of racist, abusive owners who ruled franchises with impunity.2 Ice hockey grapples with many of the same player-safety issues that football does. And in both established (gymnastics) and emergent (skateboarding) Olympic sports, the age and maturity of the participants remains a central concern: It seems probable that a pre-pubescent body is better suited to the physics of each sport’s increasingly complex aerial maneuvers, but there’s something inherently uncomfortable about watching 13-year-old children compete in the pressure-cooker of international competition.

And of course for every sport there’s the issue of exploitation at the collegiate level, and for professional women’s leagues.

The broader question is not how we fix these issues, but rather: What do we want our sports to be?

Sports are politics. It’s no longer a question of connection between two discrete entities, or an analysis of the manner in which one is mediated through the lens of the other, but the recognition and acceptance that sport, with its structures and mores and tribes and systems of belief, has supplanted the political as the more immediate avenue of negotiation for a global citizenry increasingly alienated from traditional political power structures. Sport gives us a more meaningful political identity today because it offers a more nuanced, sensible, and clearly delineated system through which we can articulate a set of values, whereas politics has mostly become a more primitive form of sport, a performative set of actions that offer no hope, no connection, no community, executed for no reason at the highest echelons of power, hopelessly disconnected from most people who wake up in the morning and function in the real world.

Compared to politics, sport finds itself at this juncture relatively unchanged despite the challenges of progress (physical and otherwise) and the inequities and contradictions that progress brings into relief. The overtly political action within sport is nothing new, but the transposition of the political onto the topography of the sporting scene is new territory.

Which makes it all the more significant that a guy almost died in a widely anticipated, high-profile NFL game between two of the league’s presumed championship contenders. In the days since Hamlin’s injury, his condition has improved remarkably, due in part, it’s been noted rather deliberately and conspicuously, to the presence of a highly trained medical team. A football stadium, the saying goes, is the safest place to have a heart attack.3 NFL coverage in the week following Hamlin’s injury focused largely on the humanity and grace of the players and professionals surrounding the game. They’re people before they’re performers, we were told. And this is, in a sense, true.

But there’s undeniable tension in the sentiment when a player faces extreme injury because the line between the person and the player, the sport and the political, is momentarily exposed as an illusion. The actions of an individual celebrated and observed, which delineate the confines of an accepted institutional reality, are the essence of a human being in some substantive historical sense. When an emotional Josh Allen insists, “We’re people first,” there’s a part of me that thinks, “But you’re players now.”

The argument goes that safe football isn’t football. Football isn’t even classified as a contact sport in many circles, but a “collision” sport, a distinction that suggests the necessity of accepting the more brutal human outcomes in the game. This seems to me again a point at which our current political moment aligns troublingly with sport, although I see more hope in sport than I do in politics. Because in sport there is still time and opportunity to examine and substantively affect the nature of what a game can mean, and ultimately be. What is that black root of collective experience that draws us to sport? If it is indeed human, and essential, it’s our duty to extract it and really try to understand it before we lose the ceremonial wonder of sport the same way we severed our connection to the politicical.