Athletes fall down all the time. They get tackled. They lose their balance trying to make a move. They hit the ground diving for a loose ball. It's a little strange, when you think about it. I mean, who just falls down? If you're a stockbroker or a car salesman, chances are you don't hit the turf during the course of a normal workday. But in most sports, learning how to fall is part of your job. It's something you train for.

Every once in a while, though, an athlete goes down and it's…different. There's no good way to describe this, but if you've watched sports long enough, chances are you've seen it once or twice and never want to see it again. A player goes down, and almost immediately there's this miserable, crawly sense that something is different; something is wrong. It's a sensation, a sort of tingle that spreads from the other players to the fans in the stadium to the people watching at home. Oh no. You can tell when this has happened because within about 10 seconds, no one at the game remembers which team they're cheering for. Fans on both sides look on with their hands clasped in front of their faces. The top half of the player disappears under a dome of medics. Please get up, please get up, no one is supposed to die playing sports, please get up …

On Saturday, March 17, 2012, just over 40 minutes into the first half of Bolton's FA Cup quarterfinal match against Tottenham, midfielder Fabrice Muamba fell down. For a moment, nobody noticed. When the ball was whistled dead, the camera cut to Bolton goalkeeper as he prepared to resume play. At that point the director found Muamba lying facedown in the grass, with a member of Bolton's medical staff crouched down beside him.

There had been no one near Muamba when he fell; he simply collapsed. Everyone could see that there was something different about the way the trainer was interacting with him. More and more trainers kept running out; someone brought out a defibrillator. Pacing around the medical staff, the other players looked terrified. After two minutes, Bolton manager Owen Coyle ran out onto the pitch to be by Muamba's side. After three minutes, players started openly praying. After four minutes, the referee, Howard Webb, called off the rest of the game.

As Muamba was carried off in a stretcher, journalists reported that he wasn't breathing. A short time later, we heard that he was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. We heard that the medical personnel had administered CPR all the way to the hospital. And then, for around two hours, we heard nothing.

There's no gentle way to put this, so I'll just say it: I think everyone who watched this unfold believed that they had just seen a player die. Muamba had had a heart attack, was the (correct, as it turned out) assumption.

Athletes aren't supposed to die playing sports, and, amazingly, Fabrice Muamba didn't. His heart stopped beating, all told, for 78 minutes. He was "in effect" dead, the Bolton club doctor said, for more than an hour. He was given two defibrillator shocks on the pitch, another one in the tunnel, and 12 more in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. None of them worked. Then, at the hospital, his heart started beating again, and after a while he woke up. He's not well, by a long shot, but the latest reports say that he's resting comfortably in the hospital, he recognizes his friends and family, and he's talking a little in both English and French — news that feels miraculous considering how grim things looked in the hours after he fell.

We still don't know much about what happened, why he collapsed, or exactly how he was saved. His heart stopped, and beyond that, most of the story remains to be told. But an apparently good person is still alive in the world, which is a good beginning, and a good ending too.
 

Read the full story by Brian Phillips here.

Photo courtesy of google images