"Did We Win?"

Three days after he suffered a cardiac arrest on national television Damar Hamlin regained consciousness:

“Did we win?” he asked his bedside nurse.

Hamlin is now awake and appears to be neurologically intact, his physicians said, as they detailed his condition at a news conference for the first time after Hamlin collapsed and suffered cardiac arrest during Monday’s game. The doctors from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center spoke cautiously, noting that he remains critically ill, and is on a ventilator as his lungs continue to heal...

Hamlin continues to undergo intensive care and receive assistance for breathing. “We would like to see him continue to improve, to be completely breathing on his own, and then to be ready to be discharged from the hospital,” [Dr. Timothy] Pritts said. “We really want to get him home.”

Players, coaches, the thousands affiliated with NFL teams, and millions of fans had their priorities upended when the Buffalo Bills safety collapsed on the field. Everyone familiar with the game had seen on-field injuries, some severe, but never had anyone witnessed a player on the edge of losing his life.

The minds of the Bills and Cincinnati Bengals were no longer on playing football Monday night, and the game was suspended. The news, both print and electronic, have since been filled with discussions about the rewards and health risks of football, whether the Bills and Bengals should continue their contest, and the implications for the locations of playoff games leading to the Super Bowl under either scenario.

Regardless of their position on these topics, all have stated that the most important consideration was the health and well-being of Damar Hamlin and his family.

His first comment was therefore both amusing and poignant. When someone undergoes a life-altering experience, one usually resets priorities while the rest of society goes on as usual. "Did we win?" reminded us how Damar changed everyone's perspective about football, while the catalyst himself remained in the world that existed the second before he went down.

The Best Post-Season Ever

The four-game divisional round three weeks ago ("The Best Weekend of Football Ever") was followed by two closely contested Conference championship games: Rams 20, 49ers 17; Bengals 27, Chiefs 24.

The Super Bowl is often a letdown, but not this one:

The Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20 in the 56th Super Bowl.

Los Angeles led 13-3 before falling behind 20-13. They survived a pair of interceptions thrown by Matthew Stafford, an injury to Odell Beckham Jr. and long stretches when the offense struggled to move the ball.

Yet with the game on the line, the Rams turned it around. That’s because they went for it.

Down 20-16 with five minutes left on their own 30-yard-line, the Rams faced fourth-and-1. In lieu of punting, Stafford handed the ball off to Cooper Kupp, the NFL’s most productive receiver this season, who ran seven yards for the first down. It was the pivotal play on a drive that ended with a barrage of penalties—before Stafford hit Kupp for a one-yard score.

The Bengals got the ball back with 1:25 to go, and when Joe Burrow is the opposing quarterback anything is possible. He began the drive with back-to-back completions that totaled 26 yards. But after Burrow helplessly threw the ball into nowhere as he was getting dragged down on fourth down, the Rams players stormed onto the field. The Lombardi Trophy was about to be theirs.

Not only were they all close, the final and winning score was made in the last few minutes, sometimes seconds, of each game.

The ancient Romans stupefied the masses with bread and circuses, but they were pikers compared to the NFL.

The half-time show wasn't bad either

Look to the Heartland

"How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood" (Politico, 2016)

The spiritual hollowness of an all-consuming "greed-is-good" mentality has spread beyond Wall Street into other business settings, and in the startup mentality it's found fertile ground.

Here in the Bay Area we pay lip service to work-life balance, but in order to get to the top of the mountain many find that they have to cast aside the weights that are slowing them down, i.e., marriage, children, family, religious observance, and education outside of their specialty.

Efforts to right the ship, especially if they come from a Christian sensibility, don't get heard because of the scorn for traditional values that permeates this region (an exception is made for Christians who mouth their fealty to the anti-structural-racism, social-justice, and group-identity objectives of progressivism, but that is a topic for another day).

To find a place where religious solutions are given a sincere trial one has to go geographically and culturally remote fly-over country, a place like Cincinnati.

welcome to the worlds of both Christian and startup evangelism—worlds that, as recent trends in the American Midwest demonstrate, are increasingly intertwined...as the demographics of tech have become incrementally more Midwestern, those regional outposts have also set about remaking the industry in their own likeness—particularly where matters of faith are concerned...

Kristi Zuhlke

But perhaps the most interesting part of the Midwestern convergence of faith and technology, the most salient for believers and nonbelievers alike, is the way people there have begun to question the culture of tech entrepreneurship—and try to make it more humane. “Being an entrepreneur, you go through some very dark moments,” says Kristi Zuhlke, the 37-year-old cofounder of KnowledgeHound, a Chicago-based data visualization startup. “Raising funding is very lonely. You're basically convincing everyone that your idea is amazing while they constantly shoot you down.” It's the sort of thing that can make people question their faith, she continued, “or, if you don't have a faith, you start to clamor for hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel.”

Cincinnati, which has become one of the Midwest's leading tech cities, has also become a hub for people trying to find some relief from the loneliness at the heart of an industry that prizes unending drive and competition.

Cincinnati reached its nadir in 2001, when after decades of business closures and white flight, unarmed black teenager Timothy Thomas was shot and killed by police. Riots ensued, dozens were arrested, and $millions in property damage occurred.

Today Cincinnati is on its way back (Democratic Mayor John Cranley: “the Cincinnati Miracle") with a tech-based revival fueled by public-private-nonprofit seed capital.

Its resurgence has been paralleled by the growth of Crossroads, a Cincinnati-based church with tens of thousands of members who attend services physically and online. Many Crossroads attendees are themselves entrepreneurs who have created business-counseling-financial networks of kindred spirits.

American innovations in technology and culture have often come out of the West, but I suspect that in the 21st century we will be looking to its heartland.