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On a bright fall Sunday in October, Damar Hamlin took the field for the Buffalo Bills. That he didn’t play much—18 snaps, all coming on special teams duty—was beside the point. His being there at all was the stunning thing. Nine months earlier, Hamlin had collapsed on the field, right there on camera, during a Monday Night Football game. The night fell into a strange, echoing pause in the usually seamless operation of America’s most inevitable cultural institution. Nearly 24 million people watched as Hamlin was taken off the field in an ambulance. The game was called off with viewers unsure of whether or not they had seen a man die on television. The next day, a sportscaster prayed live on ESPN. For a time, updates on his recovery were headline news.
And now, here he was. Hugging teammates in the tunnel before kickoff. Dapping up the trainer whose quick response had helped save his life. Dancing on the field during warm-ups, a young man glad to be playing the sport he loves. “To be able to still do what I love at the highest level in the world is amazing,” he told reporters after the game.
It was quite possibly the most remarkable comeback in sports history. It was also a more interesting story than that.
.I spent time with Hamlin this fall, and I found a warm, kindhearted young man doing his best to make sense of the strange turns his life has taken. He was glad to serve as the smiling face of a cause that, between heartbeats, chose him. But he was also ready to get back to being a football player, despite the obvious challenges, and to do everything within his power to make sure his collapse wasn’t the only thing people know him for.
It isn’t always easy. Recovery is not a linear process. And if fame comes with unique obligations, fame for this carries an even weirder burden. It can be hard, for instance, to predict how people will react to his presence.
“Some people be treating me like I was Michael Jackson,” he told me one night. And then, almost as if an afterthought: “Some people treat me like they seen a ghost.”
In a convention center in Oklahoma City one evening this fall, Hamlin took the stage. It was his first off day since returning to NFL action and Hamlin had zipped into town to speak to a room of medical professionals and charitable donors. He does a good deal of this sort of thing now: He spent the better part of this year crisscrossing the country, maintaining a schedule that in its mix of charity and celebrity reflected the wholly unique position he had instantly come to occupy in the American psyche. He held CPR training sessions and provided no-cost automated external defibrillators (AEDs), like the one that saved his life, to youth-sports organizations. He took his family to visit Joe Biden at the White House, and he spoke on Capitol Hill. He attended Michael Rubin’s celebrity--thronged Fourth of July party in the Hamptons, and sat courtside with the billionaire at a Sixers playoff game. He went to the Super Bowl. He attended the ESPYs, where he wept while presenting the Bills training staff with an award.
It was a blur—a whiplash from trauma to triumph that resisted comprehension, most of all his own. “I couldn’t tell you one thing I did in the month of April, couldn’t tell you one thing I did in the month of May,” Hamlin told me. “But I did some legendary things.”
Tonight in Oklahoma, Hamlin was once again happily raising awareness for a cause that he’d prefer not to have a personal stake in. His speaking agent had booked him to appear as the keynote speaker at the Champions of Health gala, an event celebrating achievements in public health across the state. Among other things, the gala emphasized the contradictions that have emerged in Hamlin’s life since January. He suffered an unimaginable trauma doing a job he loves, and made a stunning recovery. He got head-spinningly famous, but not for a reason anyone would choose. He was eager to get back to being a football player, but spent his off day flying to and from Oklahoma.
If he was burdened by the peculiarities of his new role, though, it wasn’t obvious. He smiled patiently as a line of 70-odd VIPs waited to take their photo with him, greeting each person with a warm, “Hi, I’m Damar.” During a Q&A session onstage, he deftly handled a series of intimate questions from a local news anchor, speaking about his ordeal like a seasoned professional. (One admission—that President Biden had called him the previous weekend, to wish him luck before his first game back—received brittle applause from the Oklahomans.)
“That situation, it doesn’t necessarily define me,” he said to the room. “I’m blessed to still be here and still be able to leave an everlasting impact. It’s a place that I always wanted to be. Now, I didn’t expect it to go the way that it went, but I look at it like a calling. We don’t get to choose our callings. So this is just my new calling: standing for AED awareness, standing for trying to get everyone CPR certified, things like that. I’m 100 percent in on it.
“It probably wasn’t on my top 10 list of things that I planned on doing,” he said, and the room broke into laughter. “But it’s my new calling, and I’m here for it.”
One question he received onstage was a familiar one—about how he thinks about the night of his collapse. “The first thing I tell everyone when they ask me that question is: Story’s still being written.”
A week earlier, I met Hamlin at his home in Buffalo, a modest gray town house a few minutes from the Bills’ facility. Inside, a Bills-themed arcade game lurks in a corner. There are two portraits of Hamlin on the walls, and a Martin Luther King Jr. poster in the stairwell. The living room is dominated by a large television and an enormous L-shaped white leather sectional. On the couch sit two of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s flower pillows, along with two others embroidered with the words “Gather” and “Thankful.” It is very much a 25-year-old’s home.
Hamlin, shirtless and in sweatpants, curled up on the couch and put a WNBA game on the TV. He has soft, wide-set brown eyes and an easy smile. His dreadlocks are flecked with Bills red. He is, by his own admission, inclined to keep quiet, and he followed the action on TV as we spoke. Eventually—inevitably—we got there. To—what even to call it? “You can say my incident,” he said, patiently. “My incident. My situation.”
It was January 2023, a late-season Monday Night Football matchup between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals. Midway through the first quarter, Hamlin, one of the Bills’ safeties, tackled the Bengals receiver Tee Higgins near midfield and fell to the turf. He got up, briefly, and collapsed again. Football is a violent game, and Joe Buck, the MNF play-by-play announcer, figured that this was the sort of collision that, while scary, is more or less inseparable from the sport. “You see a player get up and then immediately go back down, I’m used to going, at least mentally, Well, this is a head injury,” Buck told me. “The last thing you think about is cardiac arrest. That’s never crossed my mind in any sport I’ve covered.”
Before long, Hamlin was surrounded where he lay, motionless. “I couldn’t see Damar, but I could see the people working on Damar feverishly giving compressions on his chest,” Buck said. “And it went from, Oh, this is just one of those bad situations with a head injury, to, Oh, my God, what are we looking at?”
On the field, Hamlin’s friend and teammate Dane Jackson was among the first to grasp the severity of what had occurred. “We locked eyes as soon as he popped up from the ground, and I was able to tell by the look in his eyes that something wasn’t right,” he said.
Members of the Bills’ training staff gave Hamlin treatment, including CPR, for nearly 20 minutes. It felt longer. “Whatever was going on down there was making players react in a way that I had never seen,” Buck said. Players wandered the field aimlessly, broke into tears, gathered and knelt in prayer. The broadcast, meanwhile, continued, with Buck and his partner Troy Aikman attempting to make sense of what they had witnessed. “We’re coming back from commercial, and we have no more information than anybody sitting at home on their couch,” Buck said. “We’re all just watching it together.” Instantly, there were questions, many of them unanswerable. Would the players refuse to finish the game? Would the league make them? Was…Hamlin…? What on earth had happened? “It went from a sporting event to a news event,” Buck said. The game was suspended, Monday Night Football giving way to a shell-shocked edition of SportsCenter. Well-wishers, watching at home and unable to do much else, found an outdated GoFundMe page that Hamlin had set up for a toy drive in 2020 and poured over $5 million into it during the first 24 hours after his injury. (That number would eventually cross $9 million.)
In the days that followed, national discourse was consumed with the question of what had happened to Damar Hamlin, and what would happen to him next. What emerged was remarkable. Hamlin would eventually share that his collapse was the result of commotio cordis, an extremely rare condition in which a blow to the chest of specific force, delivered within a specific 20-to-40-millisecond window of the heartbeat’s cycle, causes cardiac arrest. Recovery relies on bystanders to begin CPR, and to promptly use an AED. Hamlin’s heart had stopped in the middle of an NFL game.
What followed seemed miraculous: Two days removed from the hit, Hamlin woke up in his Cincinnati hospital bed, and the next day he was communicating with friends and family. (His first question, scrawled on paper because a breathing tube prevented him from speaking, was “Did we win?”) The day after that he got on a Zoom call with his teammates. NFL games resumed the following weekend, and on Monday, a week after he’d been admitted, Hamlin was discharged from the hospital in Cincinnati. He more or less became a hero, a cultural obsession, a genuine celebrity. His jersey sales skyrocketed. He was interviewed before the Super Bowl. By the spring, he was practicing with the Bills again.
Publicly, Hamlin doesn’t talk much about the specifics of what happened that night in Cincinnati, or how he thinks about it. It’s not that he can’t—it’s more that, given the scope and intensity of the event, whatever he says has a way of rippling outward, until what began as his story has been warped and transformed into something he doesn’t recognize. “At the end of the day, it’s like, people don’t even give you the space to process what you’re going through before they want to write you off as something,” he explained. “I don’t like dealing with people and their opinions of me. So I’d rather just keep focusing on what I’m focusing on in my day instead of worrying about what y’all want to hear about. It ain’t really hard to talk about. It’s just, this is my personal life. I’m still going through it. It is not like it’s 10 years from now and I’m reflecting. It ain’t even been 10 months yet.”
He has tried to embrace the fact that things will be different for him. “You have to grow comfortable with not normal,” he said. Some days, he concedes, not normal is good. One unusual result of his incident is that he is “living every rock star dream I could have ever had.”
What’s the craziest number in your phone now? I asked, and he said, matter-of-factly, “President.” He waited a beat. “Is that a crazy number?” He tries not to bother Uncle Joe, he said. “He’s busy saving the world.”
But having the bulk of the country wanting to wish you well is also an extraordinarily strange thing to deal with. Not normal, it turns out, can also be difficult. “I used to be able to pick up and go to the grocery store and say hi to everybody in there, just because I’m a nice person. I can’t do that now,” he explained. “Everybody wants something. Everybody wants something. Now I’m scared to go anywhere.”
Bills fans, football fans, garden-variety well-wishers: Even if people don’t ask him about his incident, it’s in there, somewhere, in every conversation. And he’d rather talk about anything else. “A lot of people show love my way, so I be wanting to show it back,” he said. “But at the end of the day that could be the end of you, just being obligated to do shit for people. So I just stay in my shell because I feel guilty telling people no, even if I feel like it’s what’s best for me.”
What he wants most, he told me, is to live a normal life—or as normal a life as would be possible for a backup safety on a stacked team in a football-mad town. Run errands. See his friends and family. Sign the odd autograph. Stay under the radar. “I don’t got that luxury no more,” he said. Ultimately, though, he was working his way toward an understanding. “It’s just my new calling. It’s a part of the blessings of just being still here,” he said. “This is just my new life. It’s my second life.”
A few hours before we met, Hamlin received a text from one of the Bills’ coaches, informing him that he’d be making his season debut that weekend. He’d spent the first three games of the season as a healthy scratch—on the team’s active roster but not dressed to play. “It felt amazing to get that message,” he told me. “Just to be able to do what I love to do. I’ve been watching for a few weeks, so it made my hunger to play that much more.”
Football has long held a central, affirming place in his life. Hamlin grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of McKees Rocks, in loving but sometimes difficult circumstances. “My parents always gave me everything. I never went without having,” he said. But his dad, Mario, spent time in prison when Damar was young, and the neighborhood could be tough. He grew up quickly. “My reality was, like, that child innocence wasn’t there for long. By the time I was 10, I was 14. When I was 14, I was 18. I’m 18, I’m about my age now.” Now, he joked a little ruefully, “I feel like I’m pushing 40.”
Football, he explained, “was always that outlet”—a game that rewarded consistency with growth. When he was young, he was “an elite little-league football player,” the sort of kid who seemed able to do whatever he wanted on the field. “In that one percentile of little-league football players,” he elaborated with a hint of a smile. On offense, he played running back, and remembers his first touchdown with sterling clarity: “Straight up the gut, two-hole, straight down the middle. I just remember my entire family running down the sideline with me. It was crazy.”
Hamlin entered college at the University of Pittsburgh as a highly ranked defensive back. He had visited powers like Ohio State and Notre Dame, but chose to stay home at Pitt so his brother Damir, 17 years his junior, could see his big brother play. But by the time he left, five years later, he waited until the sixth round of the NFL Draft to hear his name called.
Recalling that day and being drafted by the Bills, he told me, “it was a feeling of relief.” Then he corrected himself and shared how it really made him feel. “Actually—I was feeling, like, I can’t wait to show them that they fucked up. Because I truly felt like I should’ve went higher than a sixth-round pick. I felt like that was a slap in the face, but I knew how the league worked. I don’t jump off the charts in height, weight. But the way I play football, how smart I am on the field, how I bring people together, how I make people better, those are attributes that you don’t get to see.” He was keenly aware that it would be an uphill climb, and acted accordingly. “My rookie year was just all locked in, all focus,” he said. “Sixth-round picks, they don’t get to stay.”
He kept his head above water that year, and managed to shine last season, his second. After starting safety Micah Hyde went down with his own scary injury, to his neck, in Week 2, Hamlin stepped in and started 13 games. He had teammates who looked out for him: Hamlin had gotten to know Dane Jackson, his teammate, when they were kids in Pittsburgh, and the two played together at Pitt. Once again they found themselves in the same defensive backfield, and Jackson, a year older, watched as his friend solidified his spot on the roster. “I was just seeing constant growth,” Jackson told me. “Confidence is a big thing in this game, and being a second-year player, when you’re up and down and dealing with a lot of stuff, confidence can waver. And I never seen any of that waver from him.”
Confidence, of course, isn’t a constant. In April, when Hamlin announced that he intended to continue playing, the news was greeted enthusiastically. Disaster had been averted, normalcy was being restored. But getting himself ready to play football again, he told me, was a more challenging process than he’d publicly shared.
Even as he was announcing his comeback, he wasn’t sure about his decision. “I think even when I said I was coming back, I ain’t know if I still wanted to do it,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to play with what he calls “that little feeling” in the back of his mind: the unavoidable fear that the worst thing could happen again. “One in a million seems a lot bigger when it actually happens to you,” he said.
By the fall, when we spoke, though, he had accepted that he might not be able to erase that anxiety entirely—that he could learn to live with it. “I think I’ll probably have that with me forever, until I’m done playing,” he said.
He tries, as best he can, not to dwell on the bad thoughts. He sees a team therapist, and a personal trauma therapist, to work his way through the challenges. “We all have negative feelings that come past,” he said. “Just don’t grab onto the negative ones.”
I told him that it sounded like a practice my girlfriend taught me: that when bad feelings appear, we can acknowledge them, and let them linger for a bit, but that they don’t get to stay. “It doesn’t have a home here,” he said, nodding in recognition. “It does not have a home here at all.”
He began practicing with the Bills in May, first in individual drills and then with the rest of the team. He remembers being “overly cautious” that first practice, playing further from the line of scrimmage than he might usually. Not enough for his teammates to notice, but enough for him to tell. “But once the ball snapped and we were just playing,” he said, “it felt like—just, like, football.”
He is an instinctual, unflinching player. “See ball, go get ball” is how he describes his approach. But getting back to that place was a challenge. “Ain’t as easy as I thought it would be,” he said. “Football’s kind of something I just always did. And I had it down pat, to where a lot of shit was second nature. But now I’m kind of back in that phase where I got to figure out how to get that back. I’m still in that phase.”
He’s said that he’d prefer to do all this “under a rock,” and return to the sport the player he used to be—or even better, a Pro Bowler. But “that ain’t how the real world works,” he said. “Nobody wants to go through the ugly phases. Everybody just wants to live the best moments, but that’s not the real world. That ain’t how shit work. You get through those moments by going through the ugly phases. I went through what I went through to get back. Things get uglier before they get greater. I’m going to have to work. I’m going to have to go through the ugly phases again.”
In the days and weeks after he got out of the hospital, Hamlin found himself operating with a degree of freedom he found almost disorienting. “Free from sunrise to sunset,” he said, with some combination of nostalgia and bewilderment. “Free.”
What he really wanted was space—time and distance from the sport that had come so terribly close to ending his life, and from the wave of human curiosity pointed his way. “I wanted to get as far away from the game as possible and just live like a normal human and appreciate life. I just wanted to appreciate life,” he said. “Nothing about football.”
So he began to read. It was “something I always knew I should be doing,” he explained. “But just going through my sitcho just kind of made me really tap into what matters, and just wanting to do something productive with my free time. So I switched up my whole flow.” He read The Mamba Mentality, Kobe Bryant’s distillation of his no-holds-barred philosophy. He read Fear Is a Choice, his University of Pittsburgh teammate James Conner’s account of his recovery from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He read a daily devotional, and took time to pray each day. And he read The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s best-selling self-help-adjacent novel. Hamlin identified with that book’s protagonist, a young man encouraged to venture to reach his potential. The book, he explained, helped affirm his decision to play again. “It just made me feel like I got the opportunity to stop chasing, but I could still keep going,” he said. “It showed me I should keep going.”
He’s thought about what his life would be like without the game, and it doesn’t sit right with him. He was just finding his footing in the league when the incident occurred. He wants to get back there—not because it will be inspiring, but because it would feel like a loss not to. “If I would’ve turned back, man, I would be stressed the fuck out,” he said. “I’m not ready to be done, because I know I got more in the tank. I know I’m far from reaching my potential. Everybody want to judge me, everybody want to say this, say that. I’m not even in my prime yet. I’m not even in my prime yet.” So he keeps going. One play, one practice, one game at a time, until what was once second nature becomes second nature again.
By now he was standing at the kitchen island, methodically making his way through an order of wings. “I ain’t come back for nobody,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I ain’t doing this shit for nobody and I ain’t finna start. This is all me within myself, me living my life for what I want to do. I know what I stand for, and I know what I preach. And I know the magnitude of what happened and how many people was affected.
“But, at the end of the day, this is the choice I made for myself. I ain’t make this choice for nobody else,” he said. “I understand what it means to the world, but this is a personal decision. I’m living my life.”
Some of the changes in his life will fade with time. He still recognizes the man he sees in the mirror. “Ultimately, I’m the same person,” he said. “I stand for the same things I stood for before, even more now. I’m even more focused. I’m even more on the mission to make the world a better place.”
Other changes are more permanent. “I ain’t bullshitting,” he said. “I ain’t wasting no more time. I ain’t got time to waste. My mission is clear. I ain’t got no time to waste, to be just bullshitting and carrying on. I see this world, I see life, through a different lens. I mean, I’m different. I’m focused.”
