Life & Mortality Quote by Brett Hull

Hull’s line lands like an unguarded confession, and that’s why it cuts through the usual post-celebrity noise. An athlete of his era is supposed to be built for risk: hard hits, broken bones, playing through pain. Yet his fear isn’t about the hazards he can train for or muscle through. It’s about surrendering control to a system that, after 9/11, stopped feeling like background infrastructure and started feeling like a stage for catastrophe.

The specific intent is partly practical and partly reputational. He’s explaining a behavior that fans might read as diva-ish (private travel, avoidance, special treatment) and reframing it as trauma math. “Scared to death” isn’t metaphorical bravado; it’s a blunt, ordinary phrase that makes him sound less like a star and more like any anxious traveler watching the cabin door close. The second sentence does the heavier cultural work: “since 9/11” is shorthand for a whole national before-and-after, a date that still functions as an emotional timestamp.

Subtext: celebrity doesn’t inoculate you against collective fear; it just gives you more options for how to live inside it. For wealthy public figures, opting out of commercial flying becomes both coping mechanism and class marker. Hull isn’t preaching politics or policy here. He’s registering a lasting psychological aftershock, and the awkward honesty exposes something uncomfortable: the terror didn’t only change airports; it quietly re-sorted who can buy distance from anxiety and who has to sit with it at Gate B12.