CNN
—
Former NFL player and ESPN analyst Ryan Clark described Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the field as the “extremely ugly” team in football.
Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed during the Bills’ game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday. His heartbeat was restored on the court, according to the Bills, and he remains in “critical condition” in a Cincinnati hospital.
“Tonight we got to see a side of football that is extremely ugly,” Clark told ESPN. “A side of football that no one ever wants to see or ever wants to admit exists.”
The match was later postponed with players from both teams visibly distraught following the incident.
“This is about Damar Hamlin. This was a 24-year-old boy living his dream…and now he’s fighting for his life,” Clark added.
Within 10 seconds of Hamlin’s collapse, the Bills team coaches were processing him. An ambulance was on the ground within five minutes, footage shows, and he received CPR, according to an ESPN broadcast.
“When Damar Hamlin falls on the grass, and when you see the medical staff rushing onto the pitch, and both teams are on the pitch, you realize that’s not normal. You realize that’s not just football,” Clark, who once collapsed in a game in 2007 while playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers, told ESPN.
Clark had a complication with sickle cell trait and had to be rushed to hospital. He eventually had his spleen and gallbladder removed, forcing him to miss the rest of the season before making a full recovery. He then became an analyst for ESPN on the NFL and MMA.
“I’ve dealt with this before and watched my teammates, for days, come to my hospital bed and cry. I asked them to call me and tell me they didn’t think that I was going to make it,” Clark recalled on ESPN’s live broadcast.
“And now this team has to deal with this, and they don’t have answers.”
Clark ended by calling on all members of the football fraternity, pundits and fans alike, to have more compassion for players who put themselves at risk for the entertainment of others.
“And so the next time we get mad at our favorite fantasy player, or we’re mad that the guy on our team doesn’t make the play, and we say he’s worthless and we say ‘you get to win all that money,” we have to remember that these guys are putting their lives on the line to live that dream.
Clark’s analysis of what happened to Hamlin has been widely praised on social media.
“Amazed at the quality of Scott Van Pelt and Ryan Clark handling this. It’s not exactly an easy task, and they shine. Perspective, class, honesty, emotion, all of it,” sportswriter Jason Mackey wrote on Twitter, while former sportswriter Matt Lindner said the two hosts’ handling of coverage will be “taught in lessons. journalism for years to come.
Meanwhile, former NFL player Dante Stallworth told CNN’s Jim Sciutto that the NFL is a “brutal sport.”
“I think people forget that,” said Dante Stallworth, who noted that “Hamlin’s mother was there to testify with her own eyes.”
“They sometimes see players more as commodities – especially with fantasy football,” Stallworth added. “Sometimes we forget the human side, that these players are actually human beings and they have families and they have wives and children.”
Stallworth also welcomed the decision to cancel the match, which he said would not have happened in his day.
“Five or ten years ago, the game probably would have resumed,” he said. “Half the players on the field were crying, the Bengals players were crying… Seeing the reactions of the players, even if you couldn’t see what was happening, it told me everything that was happening on the field.”
