Monday night’s game between the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals was postponed in the first quarter when safety Damar Hamlin collapsed and went into cardiac arrest after a tackle. It was a terrifying scene and a clear life-or-death emergency that nobody in the stadium could have anticipated.
For ESPN’s Monday Night Football announcer Joe Buck, he was tasked with calling the immensely difficult scene to a national audience. And by all accounts, Buck, Troy Aikman and ESPN covered the entire situation with care and respect as medical personnel treated Hamlin on the field.
As Hamlin remains in critical condition at UC Medical Center in Cincinnati, Buck spoke with the New York Post about his role in communicating an unprecedented on-field emergency to a primetime audience.
He said via The New York Post:
“My natural instinct at that moment is not to talk. That’s the last thing I want to do is to put my words to this serious situation. It’s very counterintuitive as the football play-by-play guy about somebody having CPR administered to him in the center of a stadium with 65,000 people in it and a national television audience. It’s just a weird place to be.
“I think being quiet is OK. Having it being reverent and quiet is OK because the stadium was stone cold quiet and the players were in utter shock.”
Obviously, ESPN never could have predicted something like that happening when it brought Buck and Aikman to lead its Monday Night Football booth. But Buck’s approach on Monday night showed why ESPN was right to hire the veteran announcer.
He handled the situation about as well as you could have hoped for from a broadcaster.
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