DISCLAIMER: This article in no way undermines or obfuscates what the Hamlin family is going through, pain which I cannot imagine. The piece is in full support of Damar Hamlin and the choices he has made. It is not critical of him. It is critical of YOU.
Here’s how some players reacted to the on-field collapse of Damar Hamlin on Monday Night Football three nights ago.
“…it’s part of the game unfortunately. There’s nothing you can do about that hit. It happens on every play of every single game.” - Joe Burrow, QB, Cincinnati Bengals
“Playing this sport, we understand the risks that come with it…But we love this game. We love the life it’s given a lot of us. It’s a job that we’ve chosen. I don’t think that anybody would choose another one.” - Mason Cole, Center, Pittsburgh Steelers
“It’s a thing that if you dwell on too much, it’s easy to get down about, it’s easy to get depressed about, and I think it makes you more likely to get hurt. If you’re standing there wondering you’re going to get hurt, someone is going to run into and you’re going to get hurt. You play slow, you risk injury more than if you are playing fast.” - Kaleb McGary, OT, Atlanta Falcons.
These responses, from those who enact violence for our entertainment, reflect a justification, an understanding, of the true nature of the game they play, as absurd as that game may be under the sensitive eye of the modern media. They're being honest, consistent, courageous, logical, and in doing so they appear strong and dignified; an example for the rest of us, which is why we watch them in the first place.
The question is: why is it so hard for the NFL to do the same?
The Eggshell PR Rule
In American law, there’s a rule called Eggshell Plaintiff. If you hurt someone, Eggshell Plaintiff means you’re legally responsible for the full extent of their damages no matter how unforeseeable those damages may have been. If you rear end someone, just a tap, but they happen to have an “eggshell skull” and they die, you’re responsible for that death. If you’re sued for wrongful death, you’ll owe damages of anywhere between $1 million and $10 million, the value of a human life in Florida and California respectively.
Like much of our legal system, the Eggshell Plaintiff doctrine runs counter to both rationality and justice. It means even the tiniest infractions—say, playing your music too loud, speeding, or jaywalking—could ruin your life if it impacts the wrong vulnerable person. Small mistakes ruin lives all the time, but courts should exist to mitigate such ruin, not to enforce it. It’s absurd to hold individuals or institutions responsible for the unique frailty of every person we bump into on a daily basis. If someone is that fragile, they should be at least partially responsible for themselves.
But if there’s anything the modern American legal system abhors, it’s personal responsibility. Eggshell Plaintiff-type rules permeate our legal system everywhere from medical malpractice to employment discrimination. The system would prefer to destroy the tortfeasor, no matter how minuscule or inevitable their infraction, than to let the injured go uncompensated.
Even omissions, for example a city not affixing suicide netting to its iconic bridges, create full liability. In post-Civil Rights Act America, there are no freak accidents, no “get over it and move ons,” no “settling it like men,” no “common sense.” Rather, we’re governed by a “Reasonable Person Standard”—judges determine liability based on what a “reasonable person” would do in such and such situation. We’re liable for every single bit of pain and suffering proximately caused by any “unreasonable” deed we may undertake.
But the standard fails to reconcile that reasonable people do unreasonable things literally all the time. Nothing is more “unreasonable” than the sport of American football, yet 400 million reasonable people indulge in it every day. There is no rational justification for our obsession with watching innocent men assault each other for no reason besides our own enjoyment. The NFL is the world’s largest tort standing in plain sight—an unassailable monolith of unreasonable violence. Yet it’s not some exception. There isn’t a society on Earth without its own public displays of violence.
These toxically-masculine circuses present a nagging craw in the neck of our increasingly gynocratic Western PR-media complex, which begrudgingly includes sports in its stream of constant propaganda. PR people now run both the media and the message, constituting Bernays’ “invisible government
,” and they tell us—they strongly suggest—that we apologize, bow, cower to the whims of the mob. The mob must not be made to feel unsafe, unhappy, or guilty about their tastes and pleasures, even for one moment! Do we want to be right? Or do we want to be happy?
Here is one instance where culture is actually downstream from law: culture, that is to say the media, is now governed by an Eggshell PR Rule. No matter how random or unforeseeable an injury is, no matter how unreasonable or ridiculous it may be to seek justice, someone or something must pay the full price. Inappropriate joke tellers. Bangers of groupies. Challenging workplaces. Difficult universities. All these ever-so-slightly-guilty things must now offer heartfelt apologies or risk destruction.
A State of Constant Apology
Perhaps no institution has been forced to prostrate itself under the Eggshell PR Rule more than the NFL. After various scandals over CTE, homophobia, racism, sexism, youth endangerment, and of course dog fightin
g, the NFL has been a never-ending apology tour, enacting policy changes and public displays of empathy that paint it as anything but a league that thrives on war.
It banned helmet-to-helmet hits, made tackling the QB near-impossible, and tried to force players to wear padded helmets on top of their padded helmets during practice. It participated in the production of a nakedly anti-NFL propaganda film about CTE, Concussion
starring Will Smith. It vigorously offered up its end zones, goal posts, and helmets to “Don’t Be Racist” messaging. It adorns its field, coaches, and players with breast-cancer initiatives
and proudly celebrates its female referees. It released one of most intentionally-cringe ads of all time, “Football is Gay,” a self-imposed humiliation ritual. Advertising agency 72andSunny (where I used to work), cranks out commercial after commercial
that has absolutely nothing to do with football, trying to find something, anything, to grasp onto besides the scary game itself. All of this placate masses of non-fans who don’t, and will never, like the NFL no matter what it does.
https://youtu.be/fzBWMUW1juY
Painted into a Corner
Now, after Damar Hamlin collapsed after a hit in the chest and received CPR on the field (he remains in critical condition but appears to be improving), the NFL skids on the thinnest ice ever. “Abolish the NFL!” shout the abolitionists, always looking for something to abolish. CNN basks in the opportunity to publish stories
condemning the NFL’s very existence. Overnight, guilty watchers donated millions of dollars to charities involved with Hamlin and the NFL, which will surely stop the violence.
Per the Eggshell PR Rule, the league must now scramble to signal its guilt and shame over a situation that, according pretty much everyone besides media people, they simply couldn’t have done anything about. This cannot be your normal everyday affirmation of guilt and shame. The NFL will extract a pound of flesh, cutting deep enough to satisfy people who don’t watch the NFL. It cancelled the game in question (unprecedented) and now must reorient its season and its rules on the fly (formerly unthinkable) at is most crucial juncture—this only two years after it buckled to similar pressure during Covid. Its already offering guilty denials that it even considered continuing the game after Hamlin collapsed.
Professional commentator Skip Bayless was forced to apologize
for a Tweet merely asking what the implications of such an injury might be on the rest of the season. I still can’t wrap my head around why this was bad, but I guess there is some vague, unwritten rule that commentators must suspend all activities outside of lamentations following severe injuries, per the invisible commandments of media religion.
Skip’s tweet:
https://twitter.com/RealSkipBayless/status/1610101204687949827
The responses (from pro athletes):
https://twitter.com/KendrickPerkins/status/1610105435863801857
https://twitter.com/isaiahthomas/status/1610107333899874305
https://twitter.com/DezBryant/status/1610107554582904834
Glorious Motherf*ckers
Note that when the only on-field death in NFL history
occurred in 1971, the game continued to its completion, no policy changes were made, nobody lost their jobs, nobody apologized. The NFL didn’t even get sued. Probably because the victim, Chuck Hughes, suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition. Pinning it on the NFL was simply irrational.
But rationality no longer matters. Every institution that appears in the media must exude perfect moral purity, which now means perfect safety. They must enact theatrical displays of safety, like helmets on top of helmets or mandating masks on the way to the table, but not while sitting down. No institution can risk harming us, even if risk is exactly what we want. When someone is injured, the NFL must pay the full price, no matter how illogical it is to hold them responsible, because it’s not logic that matters anymore—it’s the emotions of the mob. And these emotions contain their own erratic notions of justice and morality, for e.g. that Damar Hamlin, a warrior, would want us to shut down the NFL and cancel anyone asking questions about the fate of his team and his league.
That means the NFL must pretend that it abhors violence in all its forms, which is a bit like Big Tobacco pretending it abhors smoking in all forms, which it has with it’s “Smoke Free Future
” ad campaign, another bizarre result of Eggshell PR. Hamlin’s current diagnosis is commotio cordis, which means only “agitation of the heart” in latin. Whether his commotio cordis derived from a prior condition, from one-in-a-billion bad timing, or from that-which-cannot-be-named won’t matter in the slightest. The NFL will have to publicly atone like a reasonable person, and reasonable people don’t risk their lives for sport.
But it sure does beg the question. How much longer can the NFL pretend that it isn’t a toxically masculine circus of violence, and that’s why we all love it? There’s something cynical about refusing to defend your raison d'être, but so far the NFL has been willing to do just that. But how much longer?
In response to this incident, it will once again be pressured to make deep changes by people who don’t watch the NFL. For starters, it will consider lengthening the time between games, giving players CPR training, putting more doctors on the field, painting the field for heart-condition-awareness. Beyond that, it’ll be pressured engage in acts of empathy theater we can’t even imagine right now—literally anything besides admitting the truth: that it’s a league of glorious motherf*ckers who inspire the rest of us to get off our asses everyday and go to work.
I hope the NFL realizes that it’s painted all the way into the corner, and that the only way to survive is to prioritize honesty—self-glorification. Empathy-obsessed PR people inside these institutions can’t be right forever. Things change. Vibes shift. Legal and media doctrines swing like pendulums. Staging endless shame theatrics for things that aren’t its fault doesn’t amount to respect for injured players—standing up for their genuine status as warrior heroes does. Because NFL abolitionists aren’t going to be satisfied until the NFL is dead. And if you’re afraid of violence, ask an accelerationist what happens when you separate the circuses from the bread.
Skip Bayless, when the mob came for him over his utterly innocuous tweet, apologized but refused to delete it. When co-host Shannon Sharpe suggested he do so, Bayless snapped back: “Time out – I’m not going to take it down because I stand by what I tweeted.” A smart response. Deleting the tweet would be cutting too deep. One step too far. At a certain point, a man has to stand up for himself. I hope the NFL will learn to do the same.