Sully on Sports

Some good quotes from former Bills linebacker Darryl Talley on Kent Hull, who passed away yesterday in Mississippi:

"Kent didn't yell or scream or anything. But when he came over and sat you down to talk, you listened. You thought, 'OK, this is what I need to do,' and you did it. He was truly a man among boys. We were the only team that would send out five receivers in those days, along with Houston, so he had responsibility for the blocking schemes and everything. When Jim (Kelly) got knocked stupid, Kent would turn around and tell Jim, 'We don't have the personnel to do that. We can't do that!'"

"He was a very old soul, a very old soul who was really calming in a s---storm. He would be the calmest one in the room. He called me "Whacker". He'd look at me and go, "Nah, Whacker, can't do that."

"I called him 'Tough.' People talk about the things I went through. He was one of the toughest guys I ever saw, because what he dealt with on a consistent basis -- hurt or not, it didn't matter. He knew he had a job to do and he was going to do it. As long as he had his hands under Jim's ass, we had a chance."

"I've seen him get hurt and he'd say, 'I can't come out of the damn game.' He had that mentality and worked it into the rest of the O linemen. They could be hurt, but they couldn't come out. He didn't care, and he held them to that standard. He held himself to it. That's why I called him 'Tough'. He'd need knee surgery and say, 'I don't need to run that far.'"

"We talked about what it meant to walk out of the tunnel (at home). Most of us were from blue-collar families, blue-collar towns. We all had to work really hard to get where we got. We were all thankful for the opportunity to play. It wasn't like we had some sort of entitlement to play the game, and to play it with the group of guys we played with."

"Is it like losing a brother? My God, it WAS losing a brother. My wife didn't even think I was going to get up and drive today. She said, 'Don't go. Stay here.' I said, 'No. One thing I know about Kent. He would want you to do what you had to do.' There's a big hole in all our lives right now. And it's going to be there for awhile, because he will be missed."