While ESPN was putting on a master class of how to cover difficult news, another member of the sports journalism industry was showing exactly what not to do in a moment of life and death.
After Damar Hamlin’s scary collapse on the field of Bills-Bengals on Monday night, FOX Sports personality Skip Bayless had the audacity to tweet about the “magnitude” of the game and the difficulty of postponing it. After a player went into cardiac arrest and required CPR on the field, that’s what was most important to him.
Talking out of both sides of his mouth, Bayless made sure to say the game seemed “irrelevant” in the same post. But that was only after he mentioned how “crucial” it was to a regular season that suddenly didn’t matter at all to the most humane of us.
No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game – but how? This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular-season outcome … which suddenly seems so irrelevant.
— Skip Bayless (@RealSkipBayless) January 3, 2023
The last thing on any decent person’s mind after what we witnessed with Hamlin and his distraught teammates was when the game would be played. There was no shortage of people wondering why it even took as long as it did for the announcement of a postponement. What else needed to be discussed other than Hamlin’s well-being?
But for Bayless, a living caricature of his take-spewing television self, the sport of it all still took precedent.
After deserved backlash, Bayless tweeted a follow up that nothing is more important than Hamlin’s health. However, it was too late to retract the latest example of his disregard for the humanity of the athletes he regularly spews garbage about. Time and time again, he shows how little he cares about the person inside the jersey. How someone with such a reprehensible perspective continues to have a platform is beyond me.
Thankfully, Twitter didn’t let him off the hook.
