Damar Hamlin and the Buffalo Bills returned to Cincinnati this week for the first time since Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest late last season at Paycor Stadium.
While the NFL wanted to turn the moment into a celebration, Bomani Jones said on his podcast Monday the league has it all wrong.
“The belief in this game and the way that people look at it is so powerful that they’ve got to believe they can make it into something good,” Jones said. “I’ll be honest, it’s been almost a year since all of this happened and I haven’t really reconciled where I am on it and how I feel about it.
“And you just keep showing me this … we’d all be better off acting like it didn’t happen.”
Jones continued by challenging the way the NFL is lifted up by fans to be more than it is.
“I do recognize that the role of sport in society is value promotion and all of these things. But now that everything has to be made into a television show, the NFL has to stand in every way for all that’s good,” Jones said. “And what they’re trying to do is turn what happened with Damar Hamlin into a story of inspiration.
“There is nothing inspiring about what happened.”
Jones was clear that he saw why Hamlin himself would be emotional and even want to reconnect with the medical professionals who helped save his life. But the NFL building it into more than that is where the questions arise.
“If there’s an inspiration it is, yeah, the first responders and their ability to save somebody’s life under those circumstances,” Jones said. “Hearing about Damar Hamlin, all that does is make me sit there and question, ‘Why exactly am I doing this again? What am I watching this for?'”
Jones also reminisced about the game last season in which it appeared for a moment that Hamlin may have died on-field. Looking at it through the lens of how viewers felt then, Hamlin’s story is hardly an inspiration but in many ways a harbinger.
That night, NFL fans learned that the most extreme fears about what they were watching were indeed realistic.
“It was one of the most awkward and honestly terrifying and unsettling moments that I can ever think of in watching a sporting event,” Jones added. “And you know it was terrifying and unsettling because they actually canceled the end of the game.”
The unsolved parts of what happened to Hamlin also make celebrating him as an NFL story more difficult.
“He’s become a mascot of sorts, and I don’t know really how to feel about that,” Jones said. “I don’t know just how much football had to do with what happened … so I don’t want to seem like one of those ‘football is evil’ kind of people.”
Hamlin continuing his career is a great story. His connection to the first responders is understandable and emotionally resonant. But the weekly check-ins and uplifting content can seem like an attempt to redefine something we’d all sooner forget.
“It doesn’t make me feel good,” Jones said. “And that’s not because something is wrong with me.”
[The Right Time with Bomani Jones on YouTube]
