Only a matter of time: Investigating chronosystemic disruptions of sport-morbidity connections in the wake of Damar Hamlin’s in-game cardiac arrest

Rubin, Eva J.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124332 Copy

Description

Title

Only a matter of time: Investigating chronosystemic disruptions of sport-morbidity connections in the wake of Damar Hamlin’s in-game cardiac arrest

Author(s)

Rubin, Eva J.

Issue Date

2024-05-03

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Vitosky-Clarke, Caitlin

Department of Study

Kinesiology & Community Health

Discipline

Kinesiology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Damar Hamlin
• sport-health connection
• sport-morbidity connection
• sport
• health
• NFL
• athlete health
• athlete morbidity
• surveillance
• chronosystem
• sport discourse analysis

Abstract

Damar Hamlin, a 26-year-old National Football League (NFL) player for the Buffalo Bills, suffered cardiac arrest after completing a routine tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals on January 2, 2023. Damar received CPR on the field for over 9 minutes before an ambulance transported him to a Cincinnati Hospital in critical condition. The essential gameday personnel, namely players, coaches, support staff, commentators, and broadcasters were visibly fearful for Damar’s life, and football appeared far from their minds. A stadium full of 65,000 football fans was eerily quiet, while almost 24 million viewers at home (Patten, 2023), glued to their screens, anxiously awaited an update. Almost 45 minutes passed between Damar’s cardiac arrest and the official postponement of the game. During this time, crying players embraced each other and prayed for Damar’s life; television analysts and game callers struggled to provide composed commentary; shocked coaches and game officials wearily deliberated over what to do next; and the NFL itself, namely its team owners and their commissioner Roger Goodell, remained quiet and conspicuously absent from the scene. Indeed, broadcasters mentioned many times that we were all waiting for “an official word from the League office” as raw player emotions provided a nationally televised spectacle in lieu of football. By their absence, the NFL reinforced its loyalty to an unyielding business model, which has long superseded humanistic considerations. Indeed, the NFL’s disinterest in its historically high morbidity provides a rich, albeit grim backdrop to Damar’s worst-case-scenario injury. I use these contexts in conjunction with existing frameworks, including the sport-health connection, the great sport myth, and its accompanying voyeurism logic to present a new, related framework: the sport-morbidity connection. Despite the NFL’s omnipresence in American culture, the volume of American football scholarship fails to reflect its inarguable sociocultural significance. In light of this event and its surrounding context, this paper provides a critical multimodal discourse analysis of ESPN’s and the NFL’s response to Damar’s injury, including discourse as social practice, discursive practice, and text. CDA is suited to identifying coded forms of language during key moments of an event (Greckhamer and Cilesiz, 2014). In performing this analysis, I argue for a radical reframing of NFL discourse so that player health and humanity might one day supersede the NFL’s current priorities. In applying the present frameworks and specifically intending to supplement existing sport-health connection theory and literature (Coakley, 2021), I propose a sport-morbidity connection wherein sport is critically understood in terms of its ability to complicate the management of pre-existing chronic health conditions, its tendency to exacerbate chronosystemic (Bronfenbrenner, 1989) life course aging processes, and its hastening of players’ epigenetic predispositions to chronic illness (Baker et al., 2014; Zirin, 2022; Buchwald & Roberts, 2014).

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Eva Rubin

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