In a new low for reflex race-baiting, Daily Beast columnist Ernest Owens, a reliable progressive hysteric, accused the NFL of being racist because the league took more than an hour to suspend and postpone yesterday’s Monday Night Football game after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a tackle. Hamlin, 24, went into cardiac arrest on the field and remains hospitalized in critical condition.
“One would have thought the game would have immediately been cut short. After such a drastic shift in energy and spirit, surely the game would be called without a doubt,” Owens wrote. “It would take an hour after Hamlin was first administered CPR for the NFL to officially postpone the game after first attempting to suspend it. Yes, after all of the chaos, the league thought it was practical to have the traumatized players continue to play….It would be one thing if Monday’s incident was a rare drop of the ball from the NFL, Instead, it’s another reminder of how incompetent this multibillion-dollar institution has been to its players, who are mostly Black.”
DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! There it is! The obligatory race-baiting! Hamlin is black, so the time it took to make a decision to end and postpone a nationally televised football following his medical emergency must have been motivated by racism, even though no NFL game had ever been suspended and postponed following an injury no matter how serious. The only games that have ever been cancelled and rescheduled at all since 1930 involved player strikes, and those games had not begun. One would think that a white player’s injury had previously caused a game suspension in the past for Owens to even suspect that NFL officials took too long to make their decision because of race.
No, he’s just a shameless, race-baiting asshole. It’s as simple as that.
There is no reason except black-victim obsession, shameless race-hsutling and a desire to promote and exacerbate racial distrust that anyone could see racism in the way last night proceeded. Since no NFL game had ever been canceled after beginning, there was no protocol for doing it. The decision involved the NFL and its players, as well as ESPN, which was broadcasting the game. It also involved contracts and a lot of money. Frankly, I’m surprised that the game wasn’t continued. If I had been the NFL commissioner, I wouldn’t have stopped the game. I suspect that the Buffalo Bills players refused to play. In other professional sports, players have suffered life threatening injuries without the games being suspended.
Owens wasn’t through with his ridiculous racism claims: he used this incident to circle back to…Colin Kaepernick? “And now what had once felt like a debatable point seems to be a fact: The NFL blackballed former player Colin Kaepernick after he decided to take a knee in protest of police injustice,” Owens bleated. “For a powerful institution to instantly railroad the career of a Black person for practicing their free speech…showed me how the NFL truly felt about diversity when it wasn’t profitable to it.”
Hilarious. What a jackass! First, the mostly black NFL would be rejecting “diversity” if it “blackballed” a white player. Second, Kaepernick just wasn’t every good by the time he pulled his stunt. Third, it was not “free speech,” as I and many other have pointed out repeatedly. Fourth, his incoherent virtue-signaling alienated fans and cost the NFL millions. Other than all that, the fact that no team signed Kaepernick after the season is exactly like the NFL not postponing a game because of an injury to a black player until an hour had passed…you know, just as it’s exactly like the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.
I yield to no one in my contempt for the NFL and its great ethics void, but in this case the league did nothing wrong, and certainly nothing that could be called “racist.”
Ethics Alarms 
Left a comment.
Hope it did not get eaten
-Jut
Arggh. I searched. It’s not in SPAM or waiting for moderation.
Bah!
I can’t recreate it, but the highlight was:
“My first reaction:
“WWJD?
“What Would Jack Do?
“The Answer: The Show Must Go On!”
I eventually came to agree with the NFL decision, but it was not a simple line of thought.
-Jut
1. I’ll keep looking.
2. You’re right. TSMGO is a creed for me. At my theater, an actor was knocked unconscious and the crack convinced everyone that his skull was fractured. They stopped the show as he was taken to the hospital, and the Stage Manager ended the performance. We had a cast member ready to step in—if I had been in the theater, the show would have continued. Absolutely. Now watch: the NFL will be suspending games left and right after this.
“shameless, race-baiting asshole” goes together like Hope-n-Crosby, am I right?
https://nypost.com/2023/01/03/skip-bayless-tweets-about-damar-hamlin-anger-nfl-players-and-analysts/
A bunch of, I presume, black former players went ballistic over Skip Bayless’s evidently not using the correct words to tweet about the heart attack situation. I’m going to assume Bayless is being gang tackled because he’s white and southern. Of course, had the verbose Howard Cosell clone Stephen A. Smith tweeted the exact same words in the same order, that would have been just fine.
And stop making me defend Skip Bayless. As are all the people in the NFL Industrial Complex, he’s a shameless, really wealthy blood sucker.
Early speculative diagnosis: Commodio Cordis. A not uncommon but freak occurrence in sports. There’s an article in the NY Post, the link to which caused an earlier attempt to be sent into cyber space.
Former Detroit Lions wide receiver Chuck Hughes was unavailable for comment.
I’d even say that this is a “show must go on” situation. By postponing the game, they robbed fans of the enjoyment for their paid tickets (maybe they’ll be reimbursed, haven’t seen anything) and have put themselves in a pickle on how to resolve the playoff situation, as this game was key to determining who gets a bye and/or home field advantage.
[BTW, belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Jack, and fellow travelers! I ended up taking an internet break during my week off after Christmas and it was wonderful.]
I’m going to assume the league bent itself into pretzels six ways to Sunday to get games played during Covid. Getting this game to completion will be a cakewalk.
They did — they played games on every single day of the week in 2020, but they played all the games.
My understanding is that the NFL has never canceled a game. If a hurricane is bearing down on the stadium, they’ll move to the other city or snag a neutral stadium that’s not being used that Sunday.
Even the weekend of the Kennedy assassination, the NFL played its games (garnering some criticism for doing so), and in 1963 it would have been much simpler to cancel an entire weekend — there were no byes, no Sunday or Thursday night football, everything happened Sunday afternoons.
The NFL has unique problems with canceling individual games, but there are so few and, particularly in this event, single games can be especially meaningful.
Actually I think they could possibly still get the game in — they’d need to play it on Thursday, probably, and then take the two games these teams would have played this coming Sunday and move them to Tuesday. As well, any teams for the Tuesday games that made the playoffs would need to be scheduled on Monday for the first round, rather than Saturday or Sunday. Tough, grueling for the players, but doable I would think.
The league should hire you, DG.
Another predictable aspect regarding the trajectory of this discussion – the mental health of super athletes. To wit:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/damar-hamlin-injury-update-bills-nfl-mental-health-11672809192?st=kgk1m64pdrg3sys&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
As for Owens, take a look at his profile and it’s not difficult to understand why he took the low road: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ernestowens
TL;DR – Everybody’s a victim of something. SMH.