Eric Sorenson
Former Arizona Cardinals and NFL quarterback Kevin Kolb suffered four concussions in just over a years worth of games but no hit was as hard as the one he took while vacationing with his wife and friends in Cabo San Lucas earlier this month.
Kolb wasn’t throwing touchdowns, he was bracing for one, in the form of Hurricane Odile which rocked the tropical paradise, destroying nearly everything in its’ path. Thankfully, Kolb and his wife weren’t but both experienced enough tense moments to last a lifetime during the eight-day ordeal.
“We were actually in the bathtub with stuff around us and we put mattresses up around the bathroom walls,” Kolb explained in detail to Sports360AZ.com’s Brad Cesmat in a phone interview Wednesday morning. “The thing that was most frightening was the walls were flexing so they were moving three to four inches each way along with the ceiling buckling down on top of us.”
After 30 minutes of mother nature’s violence the front wall was completely ripped off of Kolb’s hotel room. The two eventually evacuated the room for the hallway where the ceiling nearly fell on Kolb’s wife Whitney who scurried safely to a nearby shelter as live electrical wires sparked on the now-puddled floors.
“It was like a horror film,” he told Cesmat as winds reached up to 125 miles-per-hour. “I’m a man of faith…we were definitely praying out loud. I was just praying for guidance. I didn’t know what to do.”
All of this with Kolb’s kids being back in Texas staying with his mother.
With all the nearby airports out of service after Odile touched down Kolb’s group went into survival mode collecting water, food and even knives to use as preventative weapons as they attempted to function among the wreckage and looting which was occurring.
He essentially turned their ground-level room into a fortress equipped with a homemade security device.
“I rigged up all kinds of stuff where there was no way, no matter how deep a sleep I was in, I wouldn’t get woken up if somebody came in that door,” he said. “I had all kind of things set up where they would slam and bang where I could at least wake up and defend myself and my wife.”
The group, with the help of Mexican military planes, eventually made it to Guadalajara and back safely into Dallas-Fort Worth.
Now the 30-year-old Kolb, whose career was cut short early due to the concussions, wants to give back. He’s planning on returning to Cabo and is helping, with a likely assist from the Red Cross, to schedule a future event in Dallas with proceeds benefitting the Hilton Hotel where he stayed and neighboring areas shredded apart Odile.
