A Buried Lead

Devon Walker will never play a down on Sundays. He will never win the Jim Thorpe Award for best defensive back in the country. Walker’s team, the Green Wave of Tulane University, will likely never host College Gameday on ESPN.

These are just some factors as to why the kid who broke his neck in a game has become a one day story.

On the final play of the first half, Walker went in for a tackle and his helmet met the plastic headgear of a teammate. The resulting collision fractured Walker’s spine, collapsed his lung, and broke his neck.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal and ESPN.com both reported that Walker was in stable condition after being rushed to a Tulsa hospital. Both of these sites also reported that Walker’s mother watched her son break his neck on TV.

The big media outlets filed the Devon Walker story and ceased their coverage. It was time to ignore Walker’s condition and focus on whether to start Adrian Peterson or Maurice Jones-Drew for your fantasy team.

Expanding on Walker’s injury and questioning the safety of football would have put a damper on the NFL’s opening day. A multi-billion dollar industry would have had to share the media cycle with the demons of their game; but that didn’t happen.

The season debuts of the pro teams were too important to the big time networks. Peyton Manning playing on a new team, the expectations for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and of course everyone’s fantasy team was more important than the life threatening injury to Devon Walker.

A college senior fracturing his spine during a game did little to continue the national debate about the safety of football. The death of Junior Seau had a media cycle that lasted for days, and prompted several well reported stories relating to concussions in the NFL. Walker’s story had the impact of throwing a pebble into the ocean. When in reality, the horrid image of a player dying on a football field looks clearer than ever.

There is a good chance Walker will never walk for the rest of his life. Yet he isn’t a deceased hall of famer, a player on a noteworthy football school, or a kid on Mel Kiper’s draft board, so he clearly doesn't  matter.

Not all media outlets were guilty of dropping the story like Terrell Owens. Yahoo!Sports, USA Today, and SportingNews.com did their jobs by following up on Walker’s condition. Whether or not Walker would ever walk, let alone play football again, was not even on the home page of ESPN.com on Sunday morning.

Even still a young man almost died on a football field, and his story gets buried in less than a day. Meanwhile Tim Tebow, a quarterback who couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat, gets an entire summer’s worth of media coverage for taking his shirt off in the rain.

Somebody’s priorities are really messed up.

A family almost lost a son to a game where bone shattering collisions are encouraged. Instead of questioning the culture of America’s favorite collision sports, or filing stories about the devastating impacts of helmet to helmet hits, the media turned our attention to bigger behemoths hitting each other at faster speeds instead. Yet for the most part, the audience turned away from the ugliness of the game to see something else.

What nobody will be watching is if Devon Walker will ever walk again. And the decision to ignore the dangers of football, could lead to the death of somebody else’s son. Chances are, unless Tom Brady dies in a head to head collision next week, it will be downplayed as somebody else’s tragedy.

Sadly, we are all someone else to someone else.