Mark Maddox was a member of the Buffalo Bills for three of their four Super Bowls. He wouldn’t trade that for anything.
Even a Super Bowl ring.
“We may have lost on the field, but inside we didn’t lose,” he says. “We were there. The outcome may not have been what we wanted, but just to experience that three times was unbelievable. I wouldn’t trade all of that in for just one championship.”
Maddox lives in Phoenix now, where he finished his career with the Arizona Cardinals. Still, he remains a Bill at heart. That’s where he played in Super Bowls, and where he was embraced by Bills Mafia before it even had that name.
“There is not another stadium in the NFL that has the atmosphere that Rich Stadium does,” Maddox says. “That’s what I still call it, anyway. Maybe Green Bay comes close. But the atmosphere in Rich Stadium is something else. The support that the people give is ridiculous. I’m in Arizona, and I don’t see that at Cardinals games. They get 60,000 people there, and 20,000 are in the jerseys of the other team.”
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That was the case last year when Hail Murray broke the hearts of all of the Bills fans who had made their way to State Farm Stadium – including Maddox himself.
“I hope no one from Phoenix is reading this, but I was rooting for the Bills,” he says. “My first love will always be the Bills.”
Maddox was shooting video of the scoreboard that day, to capture what he assumed would be the final score, when Kyler Murray scrambled away from pressure and threw that 43-yard prayer of a pass that DeAndre Hopkins somehow caught amid triple coverage.
“I was looking at the scoreboard and out of the corner of my eye I saw Murray running and I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to get him,’ ” Maddox says. “And then he threw the ball and I heard everyone scream and I thought, ‘Oh, no. What happened? You’ve got to be kidding me!’ ”
Maddox has an important place in Bills history: He played a crucial role in The Comeback, in 1993, when the Bills came from 32 points down in the third quarter to beat the Houston Oilers 41-38 in overtime of a wild-card playoff game.
The Oilers had taken a 35-3 lead on a pick-six. On the ensuing kickoff, Al Del Greco struck the ball low – and it bounced hard off Maddox’s calf.
“He didn’t squib it; he mishit it,” Maddox says. “And when that happens, it comes rocketing off their foot because they put a lot of force on that ball. It felt like someone shot me in the leg. I mean, we’re already down 35-3. What else can go wrong?”
The Oilers seemed to have the recovery at first, but Maddox dove in and wrested the ball away. There’s no comeback if he doesn’t come up with it.
“The only thing that went through my mind was, ‘You got to go get this. We need something. You got to get it.’ And I did.”
He hears about it from Bills fans often.
“They don’t forget,” he says.
But Maddox does: He has memory issues, which he believes are related to CTE. His recovered memory of his recovery comes from watching replays of it – and talking about it often. Otherwise, he says, he forgets large swaths of his life.
"People might say it’s old age, not CTE, but I just know there is a lot of stuff I should remember that I just don’t. The video helps a ton with the football stuff. But if I don’t see (plays) or talk about them for a while, it’s gone again. I remember more of the emotion than the details. And when you can’t put the details to it, it sucks.”
Maddox, 53, runs a nonprofit in Phoenix called the He1p Foundation – pronounced “Help One.” Its motto: “Helping One Child at a Time.” It raises money for scholarships and school supplies, among other things.
Maddox was back in Buffalo for a Bills alumni event in September, and his foundation joined with Hearts for the Homeless to serve free breakfasts outside the Buffalo Central Library.
“I am always happy to get back to Buffalo,” he says. “Whenever you can meet Bills fans, it’s amazing. And for them to get to meet a former player, they have a love and appreciation for everyone who has ever put on that uniform. It means something to them. And that means something to me.”
