Tua Tagovailoa exited Thursday’s game against the Buffalo Bills after suffering his third documented concussion in two years. It just so happened that the player who hit the Miami Dolphins quarterback was Damar Hamlin, the safety who collapsed on the field due to contact-induced cardiac arrest back in 2022. Hamlin downplayed his role in this latest incident, however, saying he was “trying to play football.”
“I was just trying to make a routine tackle,” Hamlin told reporters, per The Athletic, “trying to get them off the field on fourth down.”
And replays of Tagovailoa’s fateful scramble confirm as much: The Dolphins signal-caller initiates contact by lowering his head on a fourth-down run up the middle, opting not to slide and thus colliding with Hamlin’s chest before rolling off the defender’s legs and onto the grass. Hamlin initially thought Tagovailoa stayed down due to cramping, per The Athletic, but trainers quickly rushed onto the field once the quarterback displayed the fencing position, which is associated with a severe brain injury.
The scene played out less than two calendar years after Hamlin required CPR and later a medically induced coma to overcome his own collapse on the field, which came after a seemingly routine tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals. Recalling it on Thursday night, Hamlin emphasized the amount of both mental and physical work required to overcome such an event.
“It’s trauma,” he said. “It will always be there. I’m able to not be affected by it because of the work that I’ve done. I went through trauma therapy. I have a psychologist I talk to. It’s allowed me to push my mind forward, push my process forward. I did the hard stuff last year as far as putting the pads on, tackling, getting game-ready to know that I’m now perfectly fine and perfectly able to go back and play.”
As for the risk of further trauma on the field?
“It’s football,” Hamlin said. “I did the hard shit last year to free my mind, to be able to know that the field is one of the safest places to be for my situation that happened. We’ve got so many professionals that practice these situations that happen, and that resulted in me being able to come back. So my mind is free. My mind is clear. I’m just out there trying to play football.”
