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The other night, my wife and I joined about 30 million of our closest friends and watched “Monday Night Football.” The Cincinnati Bengals were hosting the Buffalo Bills in a clash between two of the finest teams in the league. The matchup promised to be high scoring and full of aerial attacks from both teams.

With just over half of the first quarter played, a Bills player stopped a Bengals runner, got to his feet then collapsed. Damar Hamlin lie motionless as his team surrounded him and medical help rushed to his fallen body.

The scene is common on the NFL gridiron. A player is injured, medical help rushes out, they carry him off or cart him off, and play resumes.

This was different.

Minutes passed and Hamlin remained motionless. Teammates began to shed tears. Some crumbled to their knees, bowed their heads, and moved lips in unheard prayers. The packed stadium, filled with Bengals and Bills fans and the entire NFL world fell silent.

Officials met with coaches and the game was suspended for a period for the teams to regroup. An ambulance slowly drove off the field gingerly carrying the lifeless body of a man who, merely minutes before was a physical specimen, a model of health.

Ultimately the NFL made the decision to cancel the game. Neither team cared much about
football anymore.

During the drama, announcers grasped for words that could not be found. Desperate to fill air time with content, the directors shifted camera shots from desk to desk to field to any shot that was screen-worthy.

In the midst of the emotion, an announcer said, “Football is important. Then it
isn’t.”

I call it: perspective.

For the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, announcers begged for the prayers of all those watching. Cameras zoomed in on massive men in numbered jerseys as they knelt, wept and prayed. Suddenly, calling on God was all that was left.

I think God gets it.

Faith is singularly the most important thing in my life. In fact, faith informs my opinion, philosophy, and world view on every topic. Faith is central to me and my life. Not everyone is like me. And I believe God understands us.

 

Some people pray almost continually in a variety of ways. Others treat prayer like a spare tire. It stays locked away in the trunk until needed.

I tend to think prayer needs to be practiced long before it is needed.

On Sept.19, 2011, our 22-year-old son fell from a scissor lift from the height of 36 feet, onto a tennis court. In moments like this, prayer is all you have. In that moment the only solace was my prayer life.

Through almost three months of nightmarish surgeries, and rehab at Atlanta’s Shepherd Center, our son lived, he walks, and we are grateful. We are grateful for every prayer prayed for us during those dark days of uncertainty.

Even the spare tire prayers.

Last night, during the Monday Night Football game, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed with 5:58 remaining in the first quarter. The game with the Cincinnati Bengals was suspended.

This morning, the Bills said Hamlin had cardiac arrest on the field and is hospitalized in critical condition.

Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest following a hit in our game versus the Bengals. His heartbeat was restored on the field and he was transferred to the UC Medical Center for further testing and treatment. He is currently sedated and listed in critical condition.

— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) January 3, 2023

Tuesday, former Auburn University football coach Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) reacted to the situation during an appearance on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”

“We’re praying for him and hopefully he fights through this,” Tuberville said. “When you’re watching this in a very important professional football game, millions of people watching, then you got everybody looking at this one person on the field. It just really opens your eyes to how brutal this sport is to be honest with you.”

The former coach said he’s seen a lot of bad injuries during his career, but none similar to what happened on the field Monday night.

“I’ve been around devastating injuries before, but this obviously was life threatening,” he said. “I’ve been around broken ankles, Carnell Williams snapped his ankle right in front of me when we were playing in Florida one year.

“But I’ve never been through one quite like this where a player goes down because of cardiac arrest.”

Tuberville said things have to happen at just the right time for something like that happens to a player.

“It’s unfortunate that the player was high and the running back just runs over him with his helmet and hits him right in the chest and his heart quits beating,” he said. “It’s just very unfortunate. All the stars had to be lined up to make something like this happen.”

The senator also sided with the NFL’s decision to suspend the game.

“[W]hen you’ve got somebody’s life on the line,” he said, “you’ve got all those players on both sides that are affected with this, and everybody watching the game, it shows you that, hey, that’s just a game they’re playing, and what this young man’s fighting for is for his life. You can play this game anytime.

“They can play it the week after the season’s over with, play it three or four days after another game, but I think that definitely it was the right thing to do.”

Tuberville said he doesn’t have the answer on how to prevent an injury like that from happening again.

“It’s a contact sport, and you’re going to have unfortunately things like this happen,” he said. “Again, you’re going to have devastating knee, arm, shoulder, you’re going to have concussions, things like that, but very seldom do you have anything happen to your heart, where you have the collision.

“Unfortunately, it’s a contact sport, it’s very tough, and it’s just the blunt force to the heart, where the heart stops beating, you don’t know whether he had heart problems to begin with, but that makes no difference, it happened, and obviously they’ll look at things to try and correct something like that, but I don’t know what you do to prevent something like that from happening again. It just happened in an inopportune time.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee