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" As many of those watching last night&amp;#039;s quarterfinal basketball game between Louisville and Duke saw, the Cardinals&amp;#039; sophomore guard Kevin Ware jumped, landed on one leg, and split his shin split in two. The bone pierced his skin, at essentially a right angle. It happened just feet from where his teammates sat on the sideline, many of whom collapsed into each others arms. There were reports that some vomited. Duke players looked back in anguish. In fact, the first shot that CBS aired in real time after Ware&amp;#039;s injury \u2014 having not realized what had happened \u2014 was of a Duke player grimacing. Then they hovered over Ware&amp;#039;s teammates on the court, who&amp;#039;d fallen to the floor and begun to cry. But then they showed it. Within fifteen, maybe thirty seconds, without warning, CBS aired a replay of Ware&amp;#039;s injury. I believe they did it more than once \u2014 maybe three times back-to-back-to-back. Then they stopped. But I looked the first time. I felt sick, and my eyes began to tear up. CBS quickly realized that it was wrong; that the image was too terrible. They stopped the replays, and at halftime, Greg Gumbel told the audience that they wouldn&amp;#039;t be showing the replay anymore. Which is strange. Because it confirms that anyone who saw and took time to consider the clip knew it was too gruesome to be broadcast to so many sports fans. But it also means that before anyone could really consider the clip, there was another person in control of the broadcast who made a snap decision to cut, edit, and then broadcast to millions a kid&amp;#039;s leg snap in half, with the reflexive speed of highlighting an alley-oop. I do not blame whoever that choice fell to. There&amp;#039;s a rhythm to these things \u2014 see, process, show \u2014 that can lull someone. There&amp;#039;s also pressure. And also this was, thankfully, an incredibly rare occurence that few men have had to deal with before. There was no roadmap. But there seems to be a systemic failure, fueled by our collective expectations for immediacy. Some of us thought we wanted to see it, and they thought it was their role to fulfill that want \u2014 if they thought at all. It wasn&amp;#039;t their role. Despite what became a common rationalization: that this was news (or more simply, interesting to some), therefore it warranted broadcasting. There are a couple fundamental assumptions here. First, that sports broadcasts, because they air on a channel that has news programs, suddenly transform into news broadcasts because someone suffers a terrible, interesting, newsworthy injury. Which is wrong. People watch sports to be entertained; Clark Kellogg and Jim Nantz, considerate and intelligent as they may be, are storytellers but not newsmen. The second assumption is that the only way to explain the news or, again, just something interesting, is to show it. Which ignores the simple fact that you can, with words, describe what happened. You can say &amp;quot;the Cardinals&amp;#039; sophomore guard Kevin Ware jumped, landed on one leg, and split his shin split in two.&amp;quot; The people will know what happened. They&amp;#039;ll also see young men crying and hugging one another. They&amp;#039;ll see another teammate, Luke Hancock, go over and put his hand on Ware&amp;#039;s chest and help talk him through the pain. They&amp;#039;ll see their coach wipe away tears. They will hear a stadium of thousands hush to a silence. Viewers will know. CBS quickly learned. Kellogg and Nantz gracefully navigated the following minutes that didn&amp;#039;t feature any more replays, and returned us to the game as well as anyone could. But those first moments revealed something about us: that our reflex was to show the gruesome without consideration, that the desire to see came before the need to think. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a21281/cbs-kevin-ware-leg-injury/>