Ruminations on Akil Mitchell’s Left Eyeball
It was out of the goddamn socket. His eye, his bloody eyeball, was poking out into places no eyeball should ever be. It was nightmarish and they (accidentally) showed it on telly. For those unlucky or curious enough to have witnessed the vision, pray for your souls. For those who did not, try and keep it that way.
If we’re talking about gruesome injuries suffered on a sports field, there are plenty to choose from. Jharal Yow-Yeh for the Brisbane Broncos, Paul George for the American basketball team and Eduardo for Arsenal all spring to mind pretty quickly. Those were all broken legs and they were all just terrible. Yow-Yeh ended up retiring as his recovery stalled time and again while Paul George was able to return even better than ever (Eduardo was somewhere in between but he was never the same player again).
However, broken legs aren’t that rare. They’re horrible but they happen and we accept that possibility going in. Medical staff know what to do and if you’re a top pro then you’ve got access to the best surgeons and physios and all of that. If you’ve watched enough sport then you’ve definitely seen a couple.
What set this Akil Mitchell one apart was that it wasn’t only gruesome to the eye (no pun intended*) but it was gruesome to the mind as well. I’ve never even conceived of something like that before, it was so far beyond the realms of expectation. Like, we watch sports more or less knowing what we’ll see: it’s a game. They’re playing to score more points than the others and for entertainment we pick sides and invest emotionally in how they perform. That’s all it’s supposed to be, sometimes injuries occur but not of the variety that you think you’ll only ever see in cheapo horror films, where the impact of the shock is fully offset by the tackiness of the special effects. Watch a few gore-core flicks and it doesn’t take long before you’re completely inured to whatever they throw at you.
*(sorry, I tried re-writing that but I’m not Ernest Hemingway and I couldn’t get the same effect with other words – he’s already joking about it so I think the statute of limitations has expired)
After a good night’s sleep (pleasantly uninterrupted by visions of dangling eyeballs) it all now feels distant and historical. A thing happened and now it’s done, moving on. But in the moment it took an effort to gather all those scattered thoughts, the brain firing in a hundred different directions to find some theoretical point of reference. That’s what brains do: they categorise stuff. When they can’t categorise they get confused. Things get weird. People react oddly.
Can eyes even do that? Maybe it was just exposed, the skin ripped back or something? Would that be better or worse? Can you pop an eye back in like you would a dislocated shoulder? Does this mean he’s more susceptible to it happening again, same as a dislocated shoulder? Has this already happened before? Can he still see through it? Do they call the game off? Now what?
By the sounds of it, the commentary team of Mulls & Casey were every bit as stunned. We probably all were. Except perhaps for the crowd who were actually there, most of whom wouldn’t have had the chance to see it (though there was plenty of time to check their phones - the game stopped for more than 15 minutes). If you heard about it without seeing it you probably wouldn’t even believe it.
But if you saw it without hearing about it, then it tore at your entire belief system. We have faith when we watch the basketball that there won’t be a broken leg. We don’t have faith that somebody’s eye won’t be poked out because up until recently it didn’t even sound plausible. Then it happened and we saw it and we couldn’t deny it. There it was, sticking out of its socket, one more thing to worry about. The shock wasn’t as much from the sight as it was from having to rearrange your worldview to encompass that bulbous repulsion. (Although the sight wasn’t pretty either).
Thank Christ he’s fine though. In fact he was so fine that they didn’t even keep him overnight at hospital, they let him sleep in his own bed and he was tweeting about it with humour within hours. He’ll have to wear goggles when he plays but there’s a chance he might even play again this season, which still seems incredible at this moment. Then again, if there’s no serious damage and his sight hasn’t been affected very much (he already wears glasses when not playing – and contacts when he does) then there wouldn’t really be any recovery time at all, right? Not like the bone needs to heal. Not like the muscle needs to strengthen.
Although before you start laughing it off, imagine putting your hand to your face and feeling the eye out of its socket, then battling the panic of that aberration, coupled with the fact that the exposed eye is drying in the air and you can’t even blink to relieve that pain, no matter how much your body screams for it. Alright, now stop squirming.
At the time we didn’t know what the consequences of this would be, now it seems like things will all be okay in the end. Just another crazy story… remember that time that Akil Mitchell’s eye fell out? It’s kinda strange how the context affects the incident itself, after all far worse things have happened in sports before, even recently. I don’t need to list examples.
But just because Mitchell’s gonna be fine doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly alright to start showing the footage. Already certain clickbait hacks haven’t been able to resist the urge and frankly that’s disgusting. Akil himself has said he can’t bring himself to watch it, why should we get to? Even with a Warning Graphic Content note that’s still not acceptable.
The newsworthiness here is the medical angle and the rarity of the injury, which is already violent enough when described in mere words. Leave it at that and bury the video deep down in the dirt. The footage doesn’t add value, only shock-factor, so if they’re using it it’s because they think it’ll gather more clicks and the best way to fight that is to stop clicking on their stuff. Unfollow, unlike, unsubscribe and boycott.
Honestly, coming in the same week that a certain British tabloid falsely reported that Hull City midfielder Ryan Mason was ‘fighting for his life’ in hospital after a head clash with Chelsea’s Gary Cahill, this just isn’t tolerable anymore. It’s not so much that the information was wrong, they must have had sources somewhere and it’s true that Mason had fractured his skull, but within a few hours Hull City had released a statement that said their lad was stable and responsive, expected to remain in hospital for a couple more days. Maybe the paper jumped to reckless conclusions, maybe they got false information… either way what’s wrong with waiting for official information? You’re just gonna leave this stuff up in the meantime to frighten fans, footballers and, worst of all, the dude’s family and friends… all for a few hours of panicked views?
Oh no, they weren’t about to do that, no for a few hours. Nope, instead it’d be another TEN HOURS before those tweets were deleted, even after they’d become obsolete. Then they moved on to trawling his girlfriend’s Instagram for their next WAG teaser.
I wish I was joking about this. We’ve gotta stop enabling these scum.