People disappoint you all the time, but it's not often that you are genuinely surprised.
I wasn't surprised when six people emailed me to stick up for George Santos.
But I was surprised when this guy wrote in and said that Damar Hamlin, the safety for the Buffalo Bills who collapsed on the field after suffering cardiac arrest during a Monday Night Football game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals on Jan. 2, was, to polite-ify his vernacular, "a wussie."
His takeaway from this young man almost dying on national television was that Hamlin wasn't tough enough to hack it in the NFL.
"Real men play football," the emailer wrote. "That's why it's the greatest game there is. This guy was too soft."
He went on to say they shouldn't have stopped the game, and they wouldn't have in the days when Chuck Bednarik and Jack Tatum headhunted, before America became a woke country where down linemen kept track of their concussions. "Real men" don't have heart attacks on football fields seemed to be his point.
In my experience, a lot of the guys most interested in telling us what "real men" do would be challenged by your average, no-judgment, go-at-your-own-pace, co-ed Zumba class. Maybe pop down and give me 10 before you start talking about how insufficiently tough Atlantic Coast Conference defensive backs are.
But let's acknowledge that there is at least a little truth in the emailer's hot take: Violence is inherent in America's favorite game and while, being civilized people, almost none of us actually want to see anyone seriously injured, we are willing to accept a certain level of breakage as part of doing business.
We understand that people will get hurt playing football, and that some will be crippled and suffer lifelong debilitation because they play the game. The cumulative effects of hitting and being hit play after play, game after game, season after season can be heartbreaking.
I was watching television on Aug. 12, 1978, when Darryl Stingley, a 26-year-old soft-handed wide receiver for the New England Patriots, ran a slant pattern over the middle during a preseason game. Tatum, one of the players celebrated by my emailer, was playing safety for the Oakland Raiders. In those days, if you ran a route through the middle of the field, you could expect to pay for it, even in the preseason.
In slow motion, in grainy resolution, Tatum lowers his shoulder and sticks his right forearm and helmet in Stingley's face mask as the receiver lunges for a pass that sails high and wide. Stingley drops to the ground, motionless. It takes a long moment; the hit is vicious, but just routinely vicious, something Tatum and other defensive backs try to do all the time. But as Patriot tight end Russ Francis, Stingley's roommate, reaches the fallen player, we can see from his reaction something is horribly wrong.
It's not on any of the YouTube videos I found, but I remember one of the trainers attending Stingley tapping the player's legs with a rubber mallet.
Stingley was strapped to a stretcher, his head secured in a stabilizing brace, and rolled off the field and into an ambulance. After a minute, the game went on. There was no penalty flag.
It was a legal hit.
It compressed his spinal cord and crushed his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. Stingley eventually regained limited movement in his right arm, but spent the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. He had just negotiated a new contract with the Patriots that would have made him one of the best-paid receivers in the NFL. Patriot management planned to announce the deal after the team returned from Oakland. It was never signed.
The Patriots tried to cancel Stingley's health insurance, even as their then-owner Walter H. Sullivan talked about Stingley's attitude being "the stuff dreams are made of," and reported Stingley was able to communicate "mostly by winking when he hears something that makes him happy."
Partly through the efforts of Gene Upshaw, who was playing left guard for the Raiders in that game and later became executive director of the NFL Players Association, the Patriots eventually agreed to cover his medical bills, provide for the education of his children and pay him $48,000 a year.
Stingley said he forgave Tatum who, according to his teammates and Coach John Madden, was deeply shaken by the incident. But Tatum never apologized. It was a legal hit, it was hard football, it was a freak accident, and nothing for which he should apologize.
Stingley objected to the way Tatum repeatedly branded himself as an on-field "assassin." So there was no reconciliation. Stingley died in 2007, Tatum died three years later, both relatively young men.
I watched that hit in real time, and think about it almost every time I watch a football game. But it didn't put me off football.
I'm not sure why. I used to be a boxing fan but let that go because I didn't want to be complicit in the gladiatorial spectacle. People can choose to make their living absorbing abuse for the entertainment of a crowd, but I don't have to be part of that. Maybe I am, by the lights of my correspondent, a bigger wuss than Damar Hamlin.
There is beauty and honor in sport; it offers more than hollow glory and, for the select few, good money. Football is more mystery than some other games, yet I understand why it has become the most American of our pastimes. It is the sport most like war, the sport that depends the most on the coordinated actions of teammates tasked with specific and difficult assignments essential to the success of the overall mission.
"Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge," Gen. George S. Patton told a bunch of scared soldiers on the eve of D-Day. "It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base."
There are people like my emailer who accept Patton's bluster as gospel rather than the tortured rationalization of an old man sending young men to their deaths.
Actually, Patton assured the wusses that only about 2 percent of them were actually going to die in the imminent landing. It's hard to say where he got that number; analysts warned Eisenhower that Allied paratroopers could see casualties as high as 75 percent in the invasion.
But as coaches and politicians know, rhetoric is just a means to an end, just words to get what you want.
I probably shouldn't have been surprised.