Hamlin's toughest fight, but not his first

Buffalo's fallen safety has endured tragedies and kept his faith.

Damar Hamlin watched his father Mario receive a 10-year jail sentence, for drugs.

He met Paris Ford, who became his best friend, at a funeral for a mutual friend named Javon Riley, who had been shot to death in Hamlin’s hometown of McKees Rocks, Pa.

His defensive coordinator at Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic High, Dave Flemming, nearly died of bacterial meningitis and had 26 surgical procedures, losing toes and fingers, bleeding through his socks as he endured practice.

His defensive coordinator at the U. of Pittsburgh, Larry Bates, suffered tonsil cancer and dwindled to 130 pounds.

Hamlin kept playing, kept leading, kept smiling. Mario was out of jail in three-and-a-half years and was there to help coach Damar. Ford became an All-ACC defensive back, just like Harris. Flemming is still at Central Catholic, Bates still at Pitt.

And Hamlin moved into the free safety spot on the Buffalo Bills when Micah Hyde got hurt. Going into Monday night, Hamlin was ranked third among NFL safeties in pass coverage by Pro Football Focus’ tape analysts.

“I don’t take any of this for granted,” Hamlin said.

Now a city and a sport are exhausted from worry over a 24-year-old who had made a lifetime of getting up off the ground, until he couldn’t.

As we all know, Hamlin was given CPR twice after he had tackled Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins Monday night. An ambulance carried him to a medical center in Cincinnati, where he remains today, unable to breathe without ventilation, although his uncle told a Buffalo TV station late Tuesday that Hamlin was on 50 percent oxygen, down from 100.

Hamlin has received overwhelming goodwill, and not just the thoughts-and-prayers variety. His injury led off the national news shows on Monday night, probably because the game was nationally-televised. Confusion, not shock, was the primary emotion. There were at least two uncalled targeting violation during Saturday’s College Football Playoff semifinal that were harder to watch than the initial contact between Hamlin and Higgins.

Higgins had caught a pass from Joe Burrow and gained 13 yards, to the Buffalo 48, when Hamlin brought him down. The two were entangled for a second, and Bengals’ runner Joe Mixon came over to patrol things. Hamlin got up, adjusted his chinstrap and, mysteriously, fell on his back, almost clipping Mixon.

Cincinnati guard Ted Karras was the first to grasp the situation. He knelt immediately.

When most players realized what had happened, they were terrified. Receiver Stefon Diggs tried to rally his teammates, which was interpreted as a call to stay sharp for the game’s resumption. But football was done for the night. The desperate sorrow on the face of Josh Allen, the Bills’ Robo-quarterback, will be hard to forget no matter how many cornerbacks he hurdles in the future.

It was ESPN’s game, and its announcers were suddenly dealing with nothingness. At one point Joe Buck said that the Bengals and Bills were given five minutes to warm up and get back out there. But soon the two coaches, Sean McDermott for Buffalo and Zac Taylor for Cincinnati, were conferring on the field as their teams knelt in two prayerful piles. They trotted into the locker rooms, and that was that.

Troy Vincent, a veteran defensive back and now the NFL’s executive vice president for football operations, said the five-minute report was “ridiculous and insensitive” and wondered where such a report originated. Buck obviously didn’t make it up. This could be an example of the fog of war, where a game official perhaps thought he heard a command that was never given. It could also been a delaying tactic as the officials sought some guidance.

As it turned out, the NFL’s announcement that the Bengals and Bills were done for the night was moot. There was no way anyone would be playing more football, just as there was no way the Angels were playing baseball the night Tyler Skaggs was found dead in his hotel room. And, as the NFL confirmed Tuesday, there’s no way the Bills will be made to walk back into Cincinnati’s Paycor Stadium to finish up. Most likely this game will be officially unplayed, and the standings and the first-round playoff bye will sort themselves out.

ESPN’s many voices were left to ruminate on what this all meant. They did the best they could, particularly ex-Steeler safety Ryan Clark. They were left high and dry by their producers, who apparently couldn’t find any doctors or acquaintances of Hamlin. It was left to CNN, which has no fulltime sports reporters, to bring out doctors who explained that Hamlin showed all the signs of a victim of commotio cordis, which happens after a blow to the chest area causes arrhythmia in the lower chambers of the heart. This can only happen during a five-millisecond span at the beginning of a heartbeat. That is why there are only 15 to 20 reported caes of commotio cortis per year.

In 1988 it happened to defenseman Chris Pronger, then with St. Louis, during a playoff series with Detroit. Pronger’s chest absorbed a slap shot from Dmitri Mironov. His reaction was delayed, like Hamlin’s, and he also suffered cardiac arrest. His eyes rolled back, and trainers cut through his jersey to get to his heart. But he awakened, and actually finished the series.

So what happened to Hamlin, after he tackled Higgins in mundane fashion, was the cruelest random event. It was a tragic fluke that, contrary to what you’ve been reading and hearing, had nothing to do with the savagery of football or the NFL’s insensitivity to it.

That’s not to say that such insensitivity does not exist, or that the safeguards against head trauma always work, as they didn’t in the case of Tua Tagovailoa ealier this season. But on-field concussions are on the wane, and the league has actually made its game harder to watch in the name of safety. Onside kicks no longer work, kickoffs are rarely returned to any consequence, and quarterbacks are treated like the nuclear codes, protected to an absurd extent. An unfortunate byproduct of these times is the immediate playacting, with Charlie Kirk blaming Hamlin’s fall on Covid-19 vaccines, or Skip Bayless saying the game should have been resumed because of the sanctity of the standings. These folks, and others, can only subsist on the attention that we give them.

Damar Hamlin seems to be so far above that. Maybe his life’s harshness grounded him in some way. He was an outstanding high school player, at Dan Marino’s alma mater, and could have gone to Ohio State and Penn State but decided to attend Pitt so he could be close to brother Damir, ten years his junior.

Hamlin had always been a fan of Darnelle Revis, who was Pitt’s ace cornerback before his All-Pro days with the Jets and was known as the king of “Revis Island,” because the Jets could afford to let him handle the best receivers by himself. So Damar’s Twitter handle became “Hamlin Island.”

Off the field Hamlin preferred crowds, particularly if they involved kids. A preschool teacher told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that one of her students dressed up like Hamlin for Halloween. On Tuesday her kids were making get-well cards.

Hamlin’s mother Nina owns a daycare center. During the pandemic, Hamlin formed a charity that provided opportunities for kids. It was organizing a toy drive at the time of the injury. Instantly and spontaneously, donations surpassed $5 million as Monday night became Tuesday morning. The name of the foundation is Chasing Ms, as in millions. It was a wonderful bonanza that came at a frightful price.

Now the Bills will have to reassemble themselves and play a home game against New England, the regular season finale. None will have more difficulty than cornerback Dane Jackson. He also played at Pitt, and regularly lined up a few yards from Hamlin. He was a seventh round draft choice in 2020; Hamlin, a sixth-rounder the next year.

In Week 2, Jackson suffered from friendly fire. He was knocked unconscious by teammate Tremayne Edmunds. It worried the Buffalo crowd into silence. But after the ambulance came, doctors found no serious damage. It usually works out that way.

For Hamlin, it was familiar relief, a confirmation that few bad moments are as irrevocable as they seem. He stood next to Jackson at a Wednesday practice, when they have their “DB prayer,” and he said later he grabbed Jackson’s hand a little tighter than usual.

He did that “because you know you never know when your last day could be, that you get to experience something like this. I’m cherishing every moment that I can."