By Billy Watkins
It’s Super Bowl week and this time every year my mind turns to the late Kent Hull, a four-year starting center for Mississippi State (1979-82) and a beloved member of the Buffalo Bills.
He was a captain on the Bills’ teams that lost four consecutive Super Bowls (1991-94). And each one haunted him.
As a sports writer in 1998, I visited Hull at his home outside Greenwood the week of Super Bowl 32 between Denver and Green Bay.
“I promise you, this game will ruin somebody’s life,” he said.
And most likely the same is true about Sunday’s matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. The losses are sudden and forever. And it’s so difficult just to reach a Super Bowl. Football, of all the sports, might offer the fewest guarantees.
It was tough listening to him talk about the losses. I remember describing it as “cold, almost self-punishing.”
“There is one winner in the National Football League every year. One,” Hull said. “If you don’t win the Super Bowl, you’re a loser. Period.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get over them. We had four opportunities to be the best and didn’t get it done. I’m not suicidal about it, but we should’ve won two of those four games — the first one, against the Giants, and the last one against Dallas.”
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Hull was a terrific player at 6-foot-5, 280 pounds. A two-time All Pro, a three-time Pro Bowl selection. His teammates voted him a captain for seven consecutive years. He started 121 consecutive games from 1986 to 1993. He is a member of the Bills’ Wall of Fame and the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
Bills quarterback Jim Kelly called Hull “the heartbeat of our team.”
But he was so much more than a superb athlete. During my visit back in ’98, he showed me his memorabilia collection. It included a putter signed by Arnold Palmer. Signed jerseys by Wayne Gretzky, Joe Namath and Howie Long. A Shaquille O’Neal sneaker, size 22.
He thought the items were cool, but that’s not the reason he bought them. Every purchase went toward helping children battling cancer.
“That’s the Kent I remember,” said his former State teammate Johnie Cooks, also a talented NFL player. “Nine times out of 10, when you see Kent he’s doing something for somebody else.”
“There was nothing ever pretentious about him,” the longtime State athletic trainer Straton Karatassos told me back in ’98. “Kent was Kent.”
When I was at the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, they were looking for someone to speak at a banquet in honor of the local athletes who had won Player of the Week throughout the football season. “I know somebody who’ll do it,” I said. I called Hulla and he agreed immediately. Anything for kids.
I still have a hard time believing he’s gone. He died in 2011 of Gastrointestinal bleeding. Just 50 years old, leaving behind his wife Kay and their two children (Drew and Ellen).
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The first of the four losses was perhaps the most painful. Scott Norwood missed a 47-yard field goal on the final play of the game. New York Giants 20, Buffalo 19.
“I was a guard on the field-goal team,” Hull said. “Will Wolford was next to me. We did it so much, that we could almost always tell if it was going to be good or not by the way the ball sounded coming off the kicker’s foot.
“When Scott (Norwood) kicked it, Will said, ‘He missed it.’ I said, “Naw, I think it’s going to hook back in.’ But it went straight right.”
That is one of the few moments he remembers about any of the four games.
He didn’t remember the coin toss of the loss to the Giants in Tampa. Hull called heads. It came up heads. He was so excited that the Bills’ offense would get the ball first, he high-fived the guy who flipped the coin — O.J. Simpson.
He doesn’t remember Whitney Houston’s iconic singing of the national anthem.
“The whole thing is a blur and the whole week is helter skelter,” he said.
Ticket requests were non-stop. So were questions from the media. He was a media favorite because of his down-home nature and insightful quotes. He spoke what was on his mind.
“It’s enough pressure trying to win a world championship,” Hull said. “By Friday, you’re a miserable wreck. It’s like being in a crock pot and it’s getting hotter and hotter every day.”
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I didn’t realize the depth of his pain until I took a ride with him in his Dodge Ram pickup truck to a veterinarian clinic in Greenwood. His horse, D2, had stepped on a nail and needed medical attention.
After looking at D2 and providing some medicine for the horse’s hoof, the vet asked Hull: “Who’s going to win the game Sunday?”
Hull pointed at me and said. “Ask him, he’ll have more answers than me.”
He didn’t keep up closely with the NFL after retiring in 1996. And he rarely watched the Super Bowl, certainly not the complete game.
His Super Bowl Sundays consisted of the family attending church , then having lunch at the Greenwood Country Club. In the afternoon, he and Drew usually went rabbit hunting. He might catch some of the game or he might read or work crossword puzzles.
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Even with the endless cold and snow that usually began in October and lasted through March, Hull enjoyed his 11 seasons in Buffalo.
“The people there are just like the people of Mississippi,” he said. “Every Tuesday night, I’d drive 45 miles to visit with all the dairy farmers in the area. We’d sit around and eat hot dogs and drink homemade wine and apple cider.”
Just one of the guys.
And the people of Buffalo appreciated Hull probably more than he ever knew, not only for his football talent but for his and Kay’s involvement in the community.
When I called the team office following his retirement to get some photos of Hull for a story I was writing, the woman who answered the phone said just before we hung up: “You tell the people of Mississippi that there has never been a player who wore the Buffalo Bills uniform who is loved by the fans and the community more than Kent Hull and his wife Kay.”
That doesn’t sound like a loser to me.
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