From Oregon by way of WOU to the Super Bowl
Native Oregonian and WOU Alumni Kevin Boss - Super Bowl hero during first season in NF
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Excerpt from the Spring 2008 Alumni Magazine -Full PDF article | download issue | University Advancement | Alumni publications
The first time that Western Oregon football coach Arne Ferguson laid eyes on Kevin Boss, he was a skinny 6-foot-5, maybe 205-pound high school basketball player, who thought
that he might want to play college football at WOU.“I wondered right away if he had the potential to get big enough to play tight end,” Ferguson recalled. “And, if he had the right
make-up to be a football player because he really had been more successful in basketball.”
Fast forward to Feb. 3, 2008, Glendale, Ariz. Kevin Boss, of the New York Giants, catches a 45-yard pass on the first play of the fourth quarter that jump-starts a Giants drive and flips
the momentum of Super Bowl XLII. In one of the greatest upsets in Super Bowl history, the Giants go on to defeat the previously unbeaten New England Patriots, 17-14.
The Kevin Boss story is now familiar to legions of NFL fans across the country and especially to Oregonians and diehard Giants lovers in New York. From Ferguson’s first sighting,
to an All-American career at Western Oregon, to becoming a fifth-round draft pick, to starting Giants tight end when All-Pro Jeremy Shockey got hurt, to Super Bowl hero….That’s the
kind of copy that couldn’t have been written in Hollywood.
In fall 2006, Boss was catching passes on WOU’s McArthur Field in front of 3,000 fans. A little over a year later, 98 million people saw him play in the Super Bowl, the largest
television audience for that event in history.
Last year, over 200 people gathered at the WOU football banquet to honor Boss and his teammates on a fine season. Last month, hundreds of thousands of fans saluted Boss and
the Giants with a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes, where the Yankees, astronauts and Charles Lindbergh had previously been feted.
“I didn’t want it to end,” Boss said. “I wanted to take another lap.”His fans in Oregon didn’t want it to end either, and when he returned home a few weeks after the Super Bowl, he was
honored at the state capitol in Salem, in his hometown of Philomath, at a Portland Trail Blazers game and at Kevin Boss Night, celebrated at a Western Oregon men’s basketball
game.
“I am very excited to get back to Oregon; I’ve really looked forward to this,” Boss told the WOU crowd. “You people have been very supportive of me, and this will always be
home.”Kevin Boss, starting rookie tight end, Super Bowl champion New York Giants. You just can’t make this kind of stuff up.