Players touch the Chucky Mullins bust before taking the field during a game last season. (DM File Photo | Thomas Graning)
There was a sudden hush. What had been a riotous clamor only moments before was suddenly severed and left little more than a whisper amongst the 40,000 watching. It was the moment no one wants to witness, the moment the fans realized one player wasn’t getting up.
“There is a quiet sound in that stadium that is eerie,” said former head football coach Billy Brewer. “People are watching; people are looking. You can hear very little conversation. I’m sure there’s a lot of prayers being said.”
The fifth defensive back, Chucky Mullins, would not be standing up, wiping the turf off his pants and walking away. On Oct. 28, 1989 Mullins destroyed four vertebrae in his back and was instantly paralyzed from the neck down.
Brewer and his team didn’t know that. All they knew was that one of their own was being carried away.
“To have to, at halftime, tell a football team what I was told, that these are the circumstances: Right now Chucky has been airlifted to Memphis, and they’ll go from there,” Brewer said. “They were just stunned, heartbroken.”
Though the game was won, something was lost on the field.
Twenty-five years later, teammate and friend Jody Hill decided the story must be told, and today at 5 p.m., Jody Hill will be at Square Books to sign and release his novel “38: The Chucky Mullins Effect.”
Hill was in the same freshman class as Mullins and recalled what it was like to be around him.
“We were freshmen together, so we came in together in the summer of ’88,” Hill said. “This isn’t a trite statement when I say this: Everyone that knew Chucky was his friend. That was because he befriended you. He reached out to you. He had that personality that just reached out and wanted to befriend whomever he met. I really mean it when I say he was everyone’s friend.”
To Hill, Mullins was the friendly, warm player who just loved to smile.
“Those are the things I remember: the laughter, the fun, that he was a friend,” Hill said. “He reached out across all kinds of lines. He was that kind of person.”
It would not occur to him until far later that perhaps this smiling young man didn’t have the happy, privileged childhood they had all assumed.
“All of us greenhorn freshmen, we didn’t know of any of the challenges he faced in life. We thought he must be a guy for which everything has worked out perfectly. He was just so happy,” Hill said. “Once you delve into the journey and all of the challenges that he faced, you understand. Life slammed a lot of doors in his face, but he kept on knocking. Every time the world frowned upon him, he met it back with a smile.”
Mullins was raised in a single-parent home until the age of 13 when his mother died and he went into foster care. After a short amount of time, the Phillips family took him in.
Even in sports, where Mullins was most passionate, he was not uncommonly gifted.
“He wasn’t the best athlete on the team, he just fought for everything he had,” Hill said. “He got the most out of what he did have. Isn’t it inspiring to us? He had every reason to just take those setbacks and be frustrated. There was just something in that guy.”
“It’s that infectious smile that you always see,” Brewer said. “No matter what, he had it. I guess you call it the ‘It.’ He had ‘It,’ and that was his trademark.”
When the game was over, the players didn’t go celebrate their victory.
“Most all of the kids took off to Memphis, coaches, trainers, everyone,” Brewer said. “It was some real difficult times, I’ll tell you that, for everybody.”
Brewer said the players all had similar feelings the next few weeks. “Everyone just wanted to know why. Why did it happen to Chucky?”
The only person who didn’t ask why was Mullins.
“An easy question to ask with all of these hardships is ‘why?’ If there has ever been a person who had earned the right to ask that question it was Chucky Mullins,” Hill said. “Instead of asking why, he asked ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to respond?’ He didn’t let the whys consume him.”
The infectious smile he was famous for didn’t fade with the adversity he faced. Though Mullins was put through an unimaginable hardship, he didn’t lose his personality, his love of joy.
“It was like it never happened,” Brewer said. “That’s how he handled it. I mean it’s unbelievable. I never saw the kid cry. He never looked at me and said, ‘Why me, Coach? Why would this happen to me?’”
“My friend Tom Luke, he was the quarterback, and he’s on the team now as a coach, he worded it well when we were talking. He said, ‘If it wasn’t for that chair when we saw him, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong,’” Hill said. “He didn’t let the downtimes dictate his life. He chose to respond with life and joy, and I think that’s the beauty of it. It’s not that he didn’t have down moments; he chose not to let them rule him.”
In response to the tragedy, Oxford and the university responded above and beyond what was expected of them.
“Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets were gotten by the fraternities, and they passed them up and down the roads,” Brewer said. “Children, teenagers, pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters, five dollar bills, hundred dollar bills, checks, everything but their credit cards in there.”
By the next weekend, at the LSU home game, the community had gathered an unreal amount of money.
“It was something like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars in there,” Brewer said.
The support didn’t end there, however; over the course of the next few weeks, the amount had grown to more than $500,000.
“It was unbelievable,” Brewer said. “I’m really proud of my school, The University of Mississippi.”
Brewer told the story of a very special visitor Mullins had.
“I remember like it was today, going and getting him just a little bit aware that he was going to have a very special visitor. ‘Who is that, coach?’ he said. I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’”
To Mullins’ surprise, George H. W. Bush entered his room in the hospital. The story of a young man who wouldn’t quit had reached far beyond the fanfare of football; the whole country was now looking to the young man who always smiled. What they found was an inspiration. That inspiration is what Hill wanted to translate into his novel.
“The book originally was titled ’38: The Chucky Mullins Story’ because that’s what I wanted to tell, Chucky Mullins’ story,” Hill said. “What I wasn’t prepared for was the far-reaching effect he had on average, everyday people. It’s not a football story; it transcends that. It’s not an Ole Miss story; it transcends that.
“What I wasn’t prepared for was the effect on people just dealing with the challenges of life, people wrestling with grief and their own disabilities. I continued to have people come into my life who were affected forever by this guy who gave them hope and inspiration and joy. It’s truly an inspirational story.”
The title transitioned from “The Chucky Mullins Story” to “The Chucky Mullins Effect” because that’s what Mullins did. He didn’t see people, he touched them. Jody Hill felt compelled to share that effect and encouragement.
“There was a hunger to share him more with the world because I don’t think people fully realized what kind of person he was,” Hill said. “I wanted people to see him.”
Mullins influenced the lives of countless people, but Hill wants to help him reach even more.
“Chucky was an inspiration. A lot of people didn’t know that, people that didn’t get to meet him,” said Susan Vance, long time friend of the Hill family and owner of My Favorite Shoes on the Square. “Jody (Hill) said that all you had to do was get around Chucky, and he had a smile all the time, and he was just a big encouragement. That’s what we all should be.
“To see a man who was paralyzed and lived for 18 months but had a positive attitude, I mean, do we have anything to complain about?”
Square Books is proud to host such novels, those which affect and intrigue their sphere of influence.
“A lot of people in this community are interested, and a lot of people were affected by it,” said Richard Howorth, owner and proprietor of Square Books. “Our bookstore’s primary purpose is to serve the community, and we’re happy to help host it.”
In his own life, Hill said Mullins was a contributing factor to his decision to become a minister.
“He moved the world from his motionless state. Without lifting a finger, he sculpted beauty into people’s lives,” Hill said. “He inspired me not only to make a living in this world but to change the world for the better. I think God was working through that.”
This is the change that Chucky Mullins brings about in people. This is the Chucky Mullins effect.
