The Press Box - How ESPN Handled Damar Hamlin’s On-Field Collapse

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Bryan is joined by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay to discuss the Damar Hamlin incident during the Buffalo Bills–Cincinnati Bengals NFL game that has left him in critical condition. They touch on the aftermath from the perspective of the players and coaches, weigh in on the social-media response and support for Hamlin, and discuss ESPN’s coverage of the event. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jason Gay Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. We're devoting today's show to the awful story from last night involving Buffalo Bill's Safety, Damar Hamlin, who went into cardiac arrest during the Bills Bengals Monday night game. Joining us to talk about it is Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay. Jason, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, Brian. So, DeMarne Hamlin is a second year safety at a pit who had been starting for the Bills most of this season. Last night around 8.55 Eastern, Hamlin made a tackle during the first quarter of the Bills Bengals game. He stood up. He fell backwards. He then went into cardiac arrest on the field.

medical personnel administered CPR, they restored his pulse, according to a statement from the bills this morning. Then around 9.25 Eastern, about 30 minutes later, Hamlin was taken by ambulance to a Cincinnati hospital, and we're now awaiting news on his condition. Jason, you watched this last night, you wrote about it this morning. Where do we start? I mean, you just have to start with, obviously, the athlete himself,

DeMar Hamlin and his family, his friends, his teammates, his neighbors, his associates, the people who are close to him, your heart goes out to the individual, your heart goes out to the people who know and love him best. You know, his condition, his health and safety and welfare is the most important thing here critically and all the other conversation that we'll probably get into is sort of after the fact compared to that. I mean, that is, you know, what happened last night in some respects is the ultimate prioritizer, right?

You see what, you know, something like that happened. very viscerally. And it just, you know, course corrects you. It makes you understand that these are individuals, these are human beings, these are vulnerable people who have livelihoods and worlds very much removed from our entertainment. And that's what that's really the only conversation right now, I believe. There were so many images last night on ESPN of Hamlin's Buffalo Bill's teammates crying on the field. as medical personnel were attending to him.

And, you know, in that moment to me, we talk about teammates so much in sports and the bonds between teammates. To me, at that moment, they looked as much like his coworkers as his teammates, you know, people that share a workspace with him. And you just begin to think, my God, if something like this happened in any office in America and you were watching this up close, you know, of course that's how you'd be feeling. Of course, that's how you'd be reacting. It goes to your point of just seeing them in that moment, seeing their faces. I just, I don't know that I will ever forget that image. No, it's incredibly jarring. And it's especially jarring when you consider that there's a degree of normalcy around a player being taken off the field injured in football, sometimes from a serious injury.

We've seen that. We've seen that repeatedly in professional football and all levels of football, frankly. But this seemed to be a level of urgency. And it was very abundantly clear on the eyes of the players of the people who are closest to what had gone down. And that was very chilling. You know, football, a lot of people have said this already is, you know, our gladiatorial sport in which we are pretty much inured to the idea of, you know, injury and contact and people leaving in the game in physical distress.

But not like this. And I think that that was, you know, when you see that ambulance coming on to the field, And when you hear the reports coming out soon after saying that CPR was administered on the field, you know, I don't want to say shocking because I feel that's too glib, but it is, you know, unnerving and incredibly upsetting. Lisa Salters, I thought, made a good point last night. She was talking about, you know, we have these rituals when we watch a football game. As you say, a player gets injured.

Sometimes they get really seriously injured and go off on a cart or even one of those backboards that we've seen way too many times during football games. And they give this thumbs up gesture. And everybody in the crowd cheers. And those of us watching at home breathe a little bit of a sigh of relief. And that gesture almost becomes this kind of permission to now you may enjoy football again. You've just watched this horrible thing happen, this moment of violence. And now, okay, you know, back to your football game continuing. And it was really striking last night that there was moment of permission like that. You know, there was, there was no moment where it said, okay, now back to this thing. It wasn't, it didn't exist at all. Right. And,

and, you know, a few people have made the point in the aftermath of this that maybe we should think about the fact that we have normalized that ritual, the idea of the player in, you know, severe physical distress being taken away and then just resuming play, that there might be something completely, you know, wrong with that. But she's right. I thought she did a terrific job of conveying not just the details and facts of what were happening in that stadium. Because, again, there weren't a lot of facts. I mean, we didn't have a great deal of information, especially at first. But she was so good about conveying the atmospheric of it.

And you mentioned the players and sort of the hollow look in their eyes and the tears. I won't forget the surreal scene of that Cincinnati Stadium, barren of football players. And just a crowd of tens of thousands just sort of standing there wondering what's going on. They're, of course, aware because people are aware of things that are happening in ways nowadays that they weren't able to in the past. They all have phones. They're all able to reach out to each other, check social media and so on. So they're probably following this on their, you know, phones as this is happening. And yet there was no resumption. And that sort of very eerie scene of that full stadium without players was very jarring.

Standing there for the better part of an hour with just that one image on the screen, right? The game has been temporarily suspended. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you grew up in Texas. You're accustomed to the way that games can get delayed by weather, right? You'll see a stadium clear out and, you know, suspend a game for a period of time, sometimes, you know, hours. But nothing like that. I mean, that is, you know, trivial theater compared.

to what happened last night. So, DeMar Hamlin was transported to the hospital in an ambulance. Again, this is somebody whose pulse was restored on the football field. And then, Jason, it looked for a few minutes like the Bengals-Bills game might actually continue. Joe Buck announced on television that the players have been given five minutes to warm up and get ready. I was watching and I was like, oh, my God, it's just so strange to see the ESPN scorebug. and first and 10 logo there at the bottom of the screen. That ultimately didn't happen.

The Bengals coach, Zach Taylor, walks across the field, says something to Bill's coach Sean McDermott, and then both teams went to the locker room. We finally find out around 10 o'clock that the game is in fact canceled. What did you make of that whole period of uncertainty? Well, I'm not claiming to be any kind of expert in any of this, but I never thought for a minute the game was going to resume. It was abundantly clear in the eyes of the players

and in the coaches that there was no room for that. I know that there was a great deal of, you know, speculation online about whether there was some sort of inertia on the league's behalf and whether or not they should have called it more quickly. But I just didn't think there was a possibility that the game was going to resume. I mean, again, the part of this that is jarring is, or there are many parts of it, there are jarring, but we're just, again, used to the ritual of resumption. You know, we do this.

We go through this. and they find a way to plow through, but I didn't think for a minute they were going to resume last night. And, you know, this was something where I think because of the way the NFL kind of portrays itself as this invincible juggernaut, I don't think they're given a great deal of the benefit of the doubt and don't really deserve the benefit of the doubt, frankly, on matters like this. But I don't think in this instance they were, you know,

commanding players to get out of the field and the players were, you know, not following that. I don't think that happened at all. So we should. In fact, the league, you know, has come out pretty strongly and said that there was never any discussion of resuming the game. And I would like to know more from ESPN as in the next couple of days about what they heard on the field and where that factoid about five minutes to get back on the field came from. But your point is exactly right. Like the NFL congratulates itself on figuring out ways to keep playing football.

Yeah. During this during COVID, they do this whenever there's a giant weather event like we've seen this year. oh, no problem, let's just move it to another stadium, no matter if there's a devastating hurricane bearing down on Florida, or a big snowstorm bearing down on Buffalo, we're going to find a way to play football games. So, you know, I agree there's a certain, you know, social media aspect to it,

but at the same time, that's, you know, we all have heard that from the NFL over and over again. So you're right, there is very little benefit of the doubt. Right. And it wasn't until the players were off the field and in the locker, that it became pretty clear that this was not going to go forward. Somebody made the point on TV last night that, you know, there are two different parts of this decision. There's the league making a decision from New York, Roger Goodell making a decision. And then there's the players and coaches making their own decision.

And, you know, there was a lot of imagery last night. And again, how much of that was actual decision making and how much of that was what we were seeing on television of Zach Taylor and Sean McDermott talking and seemingly making decisions like, we just need to go back to the locker room right now. But there is, you know, decision making that's happening, right? Players are saying, I don't want to play anymore. I'm not going to do this right now. This is not appropriate that I think does exist probably outside of whatever is decided from New York.

Sure. And you have to, you know, assume that that was factored into the decision making. And the NFL had people on the ground there who were, you know, part of that decision-making process. And I'm sure they were privy to the feelings of the players in the locker rooms. And, you know, one thing that was also very clear about this was that this was not strictly, you know, undoing of the Buffalo Bills. It was the Bengals as well. We're completely shocked by this and undone.

And, you know, this was much bigger than, you know, individual team loyalty. I thought it was interesting, too, during that period of uncertainty. You had ESPN announcers sort of gently suggesting on TV that there was no way this game should be played. played anymore. You know, I think it was Troy Aikman said it. I think Susie Culber said it. And then I think Booger McFarland eventually in the studio there said, the NFL needs to call off this game right now.

Yeah. Let's move on. Again, maybe that decision had already been made in New York and just we were still going through the mechanics of actually doing that. But I thought that was an interesting element too. Right. And the other dynamic here, Brian, which is, you know, something you talk about on this show a great deal,

is that we live in a completely different kind of news environment now where real information is being processed in real time, not just by the media, but by the public itself on social media. And at the same time, you have ESPN, which, you know, as the moment this happens, you know, has to sort of convert to a news organization and not, you know, a sports channel. They're trying to gather information about what's happening. At the same time, you know, there's this pretty loud chorus on social media of stop the game and, you know, for completely defensible reasons. Yes, stop the game. I agree completely. And I'm sure they are aware of that. And the fact that there was this lag behind, you know, a very vocal public demanding to stop it, suspend it, and the actual official

decision coming down. Remember, we didn't actually find out that this was real thing until Buffalo started carting off its equipment. I think you saw that before you actually got the word officially that it was off. And, you know, there's this sort of undercurrent of frustration that's happening and the media is aware of that. And if you, you know, think about other, you know, incredibly stressful, real-time television events that have been covered in history, they haven't been done with this background track of social media, speculation, and, you know, opinion-making that, you know, this was not something that, you know, Walter Cronkite in his time or Edward Murrow in his time or, you know, people who covered other seismic events were alert.

to didn't have that. And so that is, you know, it's, it's just structurally a part of the way things go now. Let's talk more about social media because you're right. There was this very big and very immediate idea of we cannot possibly play football anymore. And then this time we're waiting for the NFL to sort of officially announce that we are not going to play football anymore tonight. It was also struck me as a lot of us and I'll just throw myself into this bag, people wanting to say something. Right. Yeah. There's just because there was no information and you just want to, you want to say something. You want to have some kind of small affirmative way of acting right in a situation like this. And there's just almost nothing to say because we just don't know anything.

It's very human to want to express in that. You know, I'm not a psychologist, of course, but I think what they would say is that it is a way of, you know, refocusing or reprojecting trauma, right? you're feeling, you know, to watch this last night was traumatic, for sure. And so to, you know, excise those feelings by either, you know, reacting to the delay and suspending the game or commenting upon the coverage, you know, that's just, you know, a way of people processing it. You know, on a positive note, you saw the incredible outpouring towards Hamlin's charity. You know, this guy had a toy drive that was based in his native Pittsburgh. that I think was in the thousands of dollars, you know, before this horrifying thing happened,

I believe it's sailed past $3 million. And that's a wonderful gesture by people, but it's also a gesture of people who feel helpless. They want to do something. They want to express, you know, their hope and admiration for this guy. And that was a vessel for them to do it. So strange times. Again, that's another thing that, you know, just didn't exist more than a handful of years

ago. Right. No, absolutely. one question for you about the television coverage we have come to this place or the networks have come to this place where whenever there is an injury in football they almost always cut very quickly to commercial players on the field being attended to we're going to play the sad fox music and then we're off to an ad and i have had very mixed feelings about that over the years i don't know that i've ever been able to quite get my mind around it because we know

a lot about brain injuries now. We know a lot about, or we know a little bit more, let's say, maybe about football injuries now and how awful they can be. And then as a viewer, you're sitting there and then you're transported to an ad that's very upbeat and comic about light beer or whatever it is. You noticed last night that ESPN as soon as it became clear that Hamlin was hurt, they went to a commercial. And then as it soon as it became clear that this was a very, very serious situation. They went to several commercials. I think it was three or four while he was being attended to on the field. What do you think about that as a practice? Well, it goes back to what we were talking about at the top of ritual, or what Salters was referring to on the field about

ritual. You know, we, look, the enjoyment of football requires a degree of cognitive dissonance. I think it requires a good deal of it because it is a violent contact-based sport in which people are routinely injured, and we know far too much now about brain injury. and the long-term implications of those. However, it is by far the most popular spectator sport in this country. And I think one way that people are able to process it and enjoy it is to compartmentalize all that thing. And so you can compartmentalize it in real time by watching it,

but also you're able, you're not as stricken by, you know, cutting away from a ninja player on the field to a Burger King commercial or something like that. And what was, I think, again, I'm overusing these terms, but jarring about last night's transitions was that this was very clearly, very quickly seen to be not the normal. And so the transition was very awkward and it didn't feel like the usual. And this had become a real-time breaking news event, something that, you know, I did this, Brian, I don't know if you did. I started scanning around cable news channels to wonder when they were going to start to

break in. And eventually, I think CNN did. And I'm not sure about the others. This had sort of jumped the rail from a sports event. I'm not answering your question terribly well, but I would just say that, like, I don't, I don't know what the contingency is for that. I think the proper contingency is to really lay back on the commercials as much as possible. I kind of feel last night they used it in several instances as a way of allowing their

on air talent to just kind of like. gather a breath. I think it was an incredibly painful topic for them to talk about. You know, you saw multiple people choking up on air, understandably. And going to break, you know, may have created the awkward sensation of, you know, ads for, I don't know, especially what they were, but fast food and automobiles and insurance. And you gave your people a minute to just sort of collect themselves. And that's always been the network argument about this, that everybody both viewer and broadcaster alike, needs to take a breath. You know, there's a moment here.

We've had something awful happen on the field. Let's all take a breath. To which my retort has always been, but isn't this part of the story of the game, right? You're here to cover the game. And this is it. And I think, you know, what you saw with ESPN last night was a sort of question about sports television

that goes back to Joe Thysman breaking his leg and even probably before that, right? which is there is a need, a requirement to cover the story, to keep viewers informed that is right in front of you, that is happening on your air, this very important and awful story. And then at the same time, there is a squeamishness about turning someone else's pain into content, right? That's why we don't show them too many replays of this thing.

Yes, yes. And I really felt those two polls last night on ESPN. unquestionably. Almost immediately you saw the footage stripped from the air properly, I believe. I don't think that was necessary to replay at all. You know, coming in the opposite direction, as you say, there are people who are worried about, you know, sensationalizing this moment, sensationalizing someone's suffering. And rightly so. And I don't think that there was any need to replay this. I don't think there was any need to replay this. I don't think there was. was any need to like, you know, lean even too hard into the emotional distress of the players on the field. I saw some people, you know, getting upset about that, the idea that, you know, like, let's lay off these players who are processing this too. I don't disagree. But it is kind of jarring when you get into like this real-time news event, this breaking news event, which is what this was, to kind to put the, you know, the, there's a sort of customary rubrics of sports television around it.

You know, I had a very strange experience just watching it last night, Brian, which is that I found out about the injury from someone texting me and went to the television and turned it on and saw that roundtable, the Schefter, Burger McFarlane, uh, Susie Culber roundtable and thought, oh, I'm on the wrong channel. This is ESPN3. This is one of those like chat channels where they talk about action on the field. I didn't realize this was actually this incredibly somber discussion that was happening in lieu of being able to show football. Again, you know, they said this repeatedly last night and to the point or it sounds just kind of facile,

but, you know, this was uncharted in many ways. And the lessons of this and sort of the style of how to handle something that this, I think, come much more from news channels than sports. sports. Absolutely. And then you saw eventually, so ESPN stays with the coverage from the game, going back and forth, as you say, to that studio, which had Adam Schefter, Susie Culburn, Pogammer Farland, to Lisa Salters, Joe Buck Troyickman at the game. And then eventually goes to Sports Center studio with Scott Van Pelt and Ryan Clark, sort of anchoring the coverage, as you say, more in the style of cable news. So that was an interesting moment, too, because I think, Jason, when we've seen a lot of news events like this, awful news events like this, they've been

very much about we are anchoring the coverage and we are going to give you updates about what's happening. And then the coverage is going to pivot around those updates. What was so striking about the DeMarie Hamlin story last night is there were almost no updates for a period of two hours. And in fact, if you woke up this morning, there have not been many updates since the ambulance left the field last night. That, to me, made it a very, very unique story for ESPN and for everyone else to cover. Unique story, but also, you know, hard as hell. You know, I think that if you ask a correspondent, what's the hardest thing to do? It's to go on the air without information, right? and to not have new things to tell people about what's going on

and to just sort of be caught in this stasis of what we know is what we knew 45 minutes ago or two hours ago or three hours ago. And because there was no new information, you know, the thing that became more vital is a little bit of perspective. And I think that for sure, the programming afterwards really found its stride when, you know, you had Ryan Clark in studio with Van Pelt and offering an incredibly passionate and moving perspective on this from a player standpoint of what this feels like to go through from someone who knows full well and is not the least bit

sentimental about any of it. I found that very moving and something you have to go to and have quality people to be able to do because if you don't have news happening, and this isn't any fault of like news reporters, if, you know, the medical situation, is such that you're not getting, you know, instant updates. There's little you can do. It's just shows the value of having people who can offer that kind of perspective. I thought Clark was good, too. You know, and when situations like this, I find myself as a viewer saying,

I understand we're in this strange place where it's very hard to say anything because, again, we're just waiting to know, is DeMarie Hamlin okay? As a viewer, the thing I kept thinking was, I just want to know more. about Damar Hamlin right now. That's what I want to know about. This is a player who, again, was not a starter this year until an injury happened and he was thrust into the starting safety role. He was a player, I'm going to guess right here that Joe and Troy's game notes did not have very much information about going into this game. They were not prepared to talk about him for at any length. And when you're in a breaking news situation like that, I'm like, just tell me as much as

possible about who this guy is. Yeah, I mean, I saw some of that. You know, his story, of course, is interesting in that he was, you know, this incredibly beloved player from Pittsburgh who stayed at the University of Pittsburgh. He said rather movingly that he stayed there because he wanted to be a role model to his much younger brother. But you're right. He was not a household name, sadly, until now. He was not somebody who was on, you know, the tip of the casual fan's tongue. and yet was this great story of somebody who had made the most of an opportunity to come in and play and was starting to thrive. And I think that that humanization is really critical. You know, it's something that, you know, I tried to do when I wrote about it this morning that, you know,

I certainly did not, you know, go into last evening knowing much about this player's career or life. but I think in order to humanize, I think you have to deliver that detail as much as you possibly can. And there's a wealth of information about him online. There are interviews about him with him online

where he's an incredibly engaging, charming guy who, again, is obviously a heck of a football player on top. We should add that too to the social media discussion we had earlier because this is where social media actually can be very,

very useful in the situation. Yes. With all of us, playing the roles that news producers and PAs and people in the newsroom played once upon a time, like, here's a really interesting interview, here's his toy drive. Right. And on top of that, more hazardously, you know, disinformation, wrong information, incorrect factual material. We saw some of that too last night.

And you have to be extremely careful about that. That's why the wild west of social media, it is, I mean, those commandments go up every time there's sort of a breaking news event. but like, you know, the first cycle of reaction to this is often full of incorrect material. And so you have to be very guarded about that and what you decide to put on air. I mean, isn't it a little strange that you're having this real-time conversation, and I use quotes around conversation and social media, but there's this, you know, chorus of reaction and some information that's happening.

And yet you're also drawn to television to sort of, further the story, even if it's not furthering the story. It's just this weird disconnect where like it occurred to me at a certain point that I could probably shut off TV and not miss anything and eventually did. And yet you want it on. And again, there's this sort of the aspect of it, which, you know, it's what happened last night is sort of hard to separate from this, you know, infallibility of the NFL as product. You know, we talk about it all the time. It is, it is by far the most, or those for the last monoculture that exists in entertainment in this country, the last thing we sort of collectively all watch together. It is not wrong to say had this happened

in a different sport, and it has happened in different sports. It would have not been the kind of shared moment that it was last night. It's so jarring nationally. One last question before we go. We're in, as I heard many times on TV today, uncharted waters in terms of what happens now. seems pretty clear to me there. We are not going to play a Bill's Bengals game, nor should we, any time this week. What do you think happens next week? Well, I'm going to do the thing that I, you know,

is the most honest answer, which is, I don't know. I really don't know. I know that there are sizable logistical issues to be dealt with here, but I do feel like when you're talking about the livelihood, and that's where we are right now. This person is fighting for his life. That's a very strong organization. organizing principle, and that should be the priority.

Organizations much bigger than the NFL have figured out, you know, contingencies and other ways of dealing with distress. And football will find a way. But I think just structurally, just in terms of, you know, emotionally, I think everybody should be given every opportunity, and especially, again, the people who are closest to Hamlin, to process this. and to, you know, root for his, you know, continued health.

He is Jason Gay. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic by Erica Servantes. Back later this week with more press points.