Greetings and welcome to What Happened to That Guy, a Raven's podcast about former players and life after football. I'm your host, John Eisenberg. I've come across a lot of great stories in doing this podcast, but I'll tell you upfront the story in this episode brought me to my knees like no other. It moved me so much that I'm going to devote two episodes to it, the last two episodes of the season. Once you listen, I'm sure you'll see why. What happened to this guy, this former Raven during and after his time in Baltimore is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. I've written ten books, more than five thousand columns and articles. I was pretty sure I'd heard and seen everything, but this story. Greg Montgomery's story is poignant and powerful in a unique way. I'm not gonna lie. I can't stop thinking about it. It starts a full quarter of a century ago in the Ravens inaugural season in Baltimore. As you may know, they won just four of sixteen games, and they finished last in the old AFC Central. But they were boring. To the contrary, their locker room was full of big names and big personalities. There were two future Pro Football Hall of Famers, Ray Lewis and Jonathan Ogden, both rookies. There was Benny Thompson, a special team's ace, still regarded as one of the brashest trash talkers in NFL history. Nobody riled up the other side like Benny Thompson. The center on the ninety six team, Steve Everett, had a long mane of blonde hair tumbling down his back, and he also possessed a wicked rebellious streak. It was no secret he hated the fact that the team had moved from Cleveland. Did you know that on the first offensive play in Ravens history, the guy who snapped the ball was wearing a Brown's bandana under his helmet. Yep, that was Steve Everett. But the biggest character in the Ravens locker room in nineteen ninety six was wait for it, the punter. That's right, the punter. Tom Toopa had held that job for the Browns in their last year in Cleveland in nineteen ninety five, but he signed with the Patriots during the offseason, leaving Ozzie Newsome the Ravens rookie general manager, with an opening to phill Ozzie looked around and he signed Greg Montgomery. It seemed like an easy call. Montgomery was a thirty two year old veteran who'd kick for the Houston Oilers and Detroit Lions. He'd been a pro bowler, even All Pro one year, and he led the league in yards per punt three times. He'd sat out the nineteen ninety five season, which was odd, but he was available and very qualified. YEP, easy solution. But while the Ravens had a pretty good idea of what they were getting with Montgomery on the field, they didn't realize what they were getting off the field. When the team's inaugural training camp opened in the long hot summer of nineteen ninety six in Baltimore, in walked a larger than live figure. Kevin Byrne, the ravens long time head of media and public relations, remembers being pretty shocked. First of all, he's big. He's six foot four, two hundred and fifteen pounds, so we were really scrambling at the time. We had played against him when he was in Houston, but I didn't know what he looked like. And I see this guy in the locker him, I think it's the tight end. He is different. You know, he walked in with you know, dyed hair and multiple piercings in his ears, and then when he started talking, he had a pierced tongue, and he had tattoos before a lot of people had tattoos, so he clearly looked different. Montgomery also was an extrovert. He'd sing in the locker room, sing so loud in fact, that teammates who didn't know him would steal glances at each other saying like, Okay, what's up with that dude. Kevin Burns's initial thought was, Wow, what polar opposites we have with our two kicking specialists. That's over as Tim Stripes in Wall Street and Greg Montgomery walks in, he's rock and roll in Studio fifty four, and he's going to be the hold of them, and that that dynamic. As you know, John, they have to be sympatical, they has to be one. There has to be trust with those two. And as it turns out, Matt and Greg got along well, and Greig not only was an outstanding punter, he was also an outstanding holder. Here's what Stover recalls, He's a little eccentric. You know with his painted fingernails and was dipping his mouth when he's playing in a game, and his blonde hair. But I'm never, as a teammate or as a friend, distrusted him. I always had a deep trust and a fond love for him. That's how it went with people meeting and getting to know Montgomery. His appearance and some of his conduct may have raised eyebrows, but any initial concerns dissipated once you spend time with him. Here's Kevin Byrne again. My son Tim at the time was a junior in high school and he was a ball boy, and Tim was an artist. And Tim was the first to really tell me about Greg Montgomery because Greg befriended Tim, and I wasn't sure that was a good thing for Tim or the family. I'm old fashioned, and here's a guy who's painted his fingernails and toenails black. And my impressionable son from Calvert Hall says, this guy's really cool. Dad, you should get to know him. I remember Tim saying this. He's really a kind hearted guy. He's very inquisitive. And I say, you know, Tim, you're here to be a ball boy. Just be a ball boy. You're not here to be planned players, and so I didn't encourage him, but my son Tim was impressed with him. Montgomery performed well for the Ravens in nineteen ninety six, punting nearly seventy times and averaging nearly forty four yards per punt. It was not a surprise. He'd been an All American at Michigan State, such a beast as a punter that the Oilers drafted him in the third round in nineteen eighty eight, the number seventy two overall pick a punter, Montgomery was something special, a huge guy who crushed the ball. As a punner, he was outstanding. I mean, he was very consistent his form, punting the ball with an you know, he was everything he'd warner in a punter. That's Sean Landetta talking. He punted in the NFL in the same era. And for those who don't know, Lndetta is a Baltimore native who went to Locker Raven High School and then punted for thousand State That's what they called it then before embarking on an amazing journey more than two decades in the NFL, starting in the eighties and continuing well into the two thousands. Landetta and Montgomery were contemporaries and they were pretty friendly. You know, his rookie year, he didn't have such a good year, but the next seven were very consistent and really really good. Thinking, here's a guy that should have played every bit of ten to fifteen years physically, but you know, unfortunately the other part wasn't there. The nineteen ninety six Ravens had plenty of problems, but their special teams were stellar, with stoverdoing the kicking and Montgomery handling the punting. Ted Marcha Broda, the Ravens head coach, figured that was one area of the team he didn't have to worry about going forward. But when training camp opened the next year in the summer of nineteen ninety seven, Montgomery was not the same guy back to the locker room and was stuck his head in with lockers, like, you know, this is a day to leave me alone. So I didn't understand it at the time. It would all come tumbling out later that year. Montgomery had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental illness marked by dramatic mood shifts, heat swing back and forth between an extremely elevated mood called mania and bouts of severe depression. He also had acute performance anxiety panic attacks so severe that sometimes his hands went numb. You'd think an NFL player might prefer to keep a battle like that private, but Montgomery didn't mind. What was impressive, especially for the time, the fact that Greg went out and spoke publicly to the media and to private groups about being bipolar and having depression and taking medication and how his life is filled with manic periods up and down and trying to live in a buttoned up NFL world was difficult, and he talked about that, and I'm sure he helped a lot of people out there because of the celebrity of the pro athlete, to say, Okay, he's dealing with it, I can deal with it too. So I give him great credits to doing that. It's become more common now, but back in nineteen ninety six and ninety seven, it was very uncommon, and Greg was a pioneer that way. And talking publicly at celebrity, talking publicly about his mental issue. I think he gave people hope, and that's a good thing. A few years later, when he was out of football, he went on ESPN and talked with unnerving frankness about what he dealt with throughout his career, culminating with that nineteen ninety seven training camp with the Ravens. He appeared on Outside the Lines, ESPN's Sunday morning news show, on an episode devoted to how major sports were dealing with athletes with mental illness. Montgomery said his entire career had been an emotional roller coaster. Remember when I said he'd sat out the entire nineteen ninety five season. That was due to a severe bout of depression. He said. At the time he thought his career was over, but he snapped back in time to catch on with the Ravens in nineteen ninety six. That he said was quite an accomplishment. But just before the start of training camp in nineteen ninety seven, his depression overwhelmed him again. As he explained of viewers on ESPN, there wasn't a day in that training camp that he didn't think about suicide. At a preseason game in Philadelphia, he had a panic attack and his hands went numb. He figured he was going to get cut, and actually that was fine. I wanted to get cut, greg Montgomery said. The episode of Outside the Lines ran on the morning of the last Sunday of the two thousand and one NFL season, Sean Lendetta watched it. He was in a hotel room getting ready to go to a stadium and punt for the Philadelphia Eagles. Some of what Montgomery said was familiar to Lendetta. They talked before about Montgomery's issues, he telling me that he was just a straight pass sea. Remember I went into a game one time, went back to punt, and I'm standing there. I said to myself, you know what do I do? And I said, what do you mean? He said, I didn't know what to do back there, but I didn't know I was supposed to punt the ball. I said, in a game this happened to you? He said yes. I said, well, what did you do? He said, well, I guess you know the muscle man Ramen. The ball came back. I caught it and punted it, and I just I said wow. I said, I'm so sorry to hear that you had to deal with that, because I can't imagine being in an NFL game. They're not sure what to do after He'd done this thousands of times for years and years. But even Landetta, his friend, was stunned by the depth of the struggle that Montgomery revealed on outside the lines. You know, I remember sitting down on the bed before I left, you know, watching the interviewer. I just thought, wow, you know, I know he had some things going on, but I didn't know it was that much. And it made me feel even more for him when I thought of you, all these years that he played, he had to deal with that stuff, And what a shame a guy who could have been one of the all times great NFL punters physically, talent wise, if he didn't have to deal with that situation going on instead. Montgomery didn't get cut in nineteen ninety seven. He got through training camp, made the Ravens roster, and performed solidly during the season, averaging nearly forty three yards per punt. He was managing his illness well, it seemed. But the next year the team brought in another punter to compete for the job, and that other punter, Kyle Richardson, beat out Montgomery. It was a good competition. Montgomery could still punt, but no other team picked him up. At age thirty four, he was done playing football. In some ways, he was prepared for it. He was a bright guy with a ton of interests. Right away he began working in music production in Baltimore, but in other ways, the absence of football and that structure in his life started a ball rolling downhill, and that ball picked up speed, taking Montgomery down faster and faster. In his playing days, he'd used alcohol and drugs to help combat the effects of his illness, self medicating it's called Now that he wasn't playing, his use of those substances increased. Bad things started happening. He fell in with the wrong crowd, He got mugged, suffering a broken jaw on a trip to Las Vegas. Whenever he spoke to his family, he was all over the map with ideas about what he wanted to do next, host an electronic music festival, write a book. His parents, brother, and sister became increasingly alarmed. Finally, in nineteen ninety nine, they staged an intervention. Here's his kid's sister, Margot. He went through a stage where he just thought he could do anything, and he had all these huge ideas. But he was brilliant. He was very smart. So a lot of times he'd have these ideas and it's like, yoh, yeah, that makes sense. Oh cool, you know, And then he would just keep going and he'd go for weeks without sleeping, and he would self medicate himself, and he was not being healthy by forms of you, drinking and whatever else he was doing, and that was kind of scary. And he was diagnosed with being bipolar, I believe when he was with the Ravens, And I don't know how he did it, like, I don't know how he played and did, you know, pretty decent, but it's kind of hard when a family, you know, learns of something when somebody has been on their own. And he was in his thirties, so he was kind of in charge of his own treatment. But as a family, we wanted to help them too. So I do remember him putting himself in Turkey spots and we just had a family intervention with him and told him he had to really think about the choices he was making, and he was totally on board. Now that you've heard Margot, Reg's younger sister talking about him, let me back up and give you a little background. Montgomery had an all American upbringing as part of a loving, close family. His father played quarterback at Michigan State and married the love of his life. They settled in New Jersey and raised three kids. Montgomery was the oldest, and he inherited every ounce of his father's athletic jeans. He was a magnificent, just natural athlete. Hockey was his first love. He loved hockey, and football and baseball were probably tied. He was a really good pitcher. He was an excellent golfer. So, yeah, he was very gifted. And it was an injury that sort of got him into punting. Yes, I believe it was a sophomore year. He was lifting and slipped some discs in his back and the doctor told him he couldn't play contact sports anymore. So he concentrated on kicking and punning. And actually he'd wake up at like five in the morning and my mom would drive him to the local why so he could swim before school to keep in shape, because you know, he was a linebacker before that injury. Basically, when the doctor told him no contact sports, he just thought, well, I want to play football. So that's when he concentrated on learning how to kick and punt. He would have played another position if he hadn't gotten heard right. I mean, he was a big look like a linebacker or a tied end or something. Oh yeah, he was six to four. He was a big dude or a punter. He was a beast on the hockey rink, and he was a beast in any sport. He played quite honestly. But even as a young person, a handsome star athlete from a great family, Montgomery exhibited unsettling signs. Greg was always really serious, a perfectionist, and my parents they thought that he was too serious for someone so young, and he was really hard on himself, so it wasn't a shock to us that something was going on with him later in life. He was an excellent student in high school and college, an avid reader with many interests music, art, fashion, not at landish in the least. That's why his family found it alarming when he showed up to play for the Ravens with tattoos all over his torso and his dark hair dyed blonde and piercings all over the place. There's nothing wrong with any of that, but it wasn't the person they knew. I looked at it like a teenage rebellion either, because he was always if you were to look at him and know him in high school and college, he was more of that all American that did really well in school and was really handsome, and you know what I'm saying. And he just kind of broke the mold when he was with the Ravens and that's and then he started getting all these different piercings and tattoos, and that's when I saw his mental state shift. And you know, Greg and I were really really close, and I remember telling him I really was concerned about him, and he'd call me at all different hours and I'd always talked to him. I appreciate him calling me, but I also felt like I needed to take the calls, you know what I mean. So when I think of Greg when he was with the Ravens and he had that manic break, and that was like a year or so of him being kind of on this like mania. There's like different levels of mania, and one is where I think people can function pretty well. They have more energy, and they have a kind of a feeling of enlightenment. I think that was easy for reporters or anybody to do stories on him because he was such a character and he still did well on the field. I remember being at my parents' house at Lake House and we're watching some interview they did on him, and it was you know, they had like born to be Wild in the background playing and my Dad's just like, oh my gosh, what was that about? And I said, oh, no, you know, but he was one of the funniest people you would ever meet, So I can understand why people let's get a kick out of them, and you know, when that all was going on. But the downside, of course, is after somebody's in the manic way and then they go down, he would spend a long time being depressed. Kevin Byrne did his best to understand it. I remember talking to the team psychiatrists about it, and I remember him telling me at times that he'll have moments if he's like others who will have moments of why am I here? What am I doing here? So I never heard or I never witnessed that frozen moment, but our team psychiatrist told me that, you know, he will wander away mentally, So that was part of it. And I think Matt Stover helped keep Greg focused on game day as happens with kicking specialist teammates. Montgomery and Stover spent a lot of time together on the practice field in the locker room on road trips. At that point, I didn't really understand by polarism, and I had a friend in college that dealt with it, and I did see it. You know, it wasn't crazy per se, and EDA was Greg. Greg was very well balanced, and I know that he's a Christian guy. We talked spiritual issues all the time. But I knew he had his struggles too. I mean, I knew he had some dark times and we talked about those personally. You know, he struggled with relationships with women, and he had a wonderful girlfriend at the time, but I was hoping he was going to marry and she loved him dearly, but that didn't maturate into marriage. But I was hoping for him. And then when I had the little kids at the time, I had a little one year old and a newborn in nineteen ninety six, and talking about an awesome friend. He just loved on my family and my wife and just showed a gentleness and a great spirit about him. When Montgomery's illness spiraled out of control soon after his NFL career ended, his parents and siblings stepped in and recommended that he go to Hazelton, a renowned drug and alcohol rehab clinic in Minnesota. Montgomery enthusiastically agreed to go, and I actually flew out with him. I remember sitting on the airplane and him holding my hand and looking at me and he said thanks. This His time at Hazelton impacted him profoundly. The clinic was full of young kids with serious drug problems. The side of them broke Montgomery's heart. He was in there, and obviously it lit a fire where he wanted to be well, and he also wanted to help other people because he just felt so sad. He was just like, says these kids, I know. I said, well, the first person we have to take care of your is yourself. For many years he did really well, and especially not drinking and taking care of themselves and eating well and going to therapy and doing all those things and taking care of yourself. Post Hazelton, things got better, a lot better. Always a dapper dresser, Montgomery started his own clothing line. He was a wonderful uncle to Margot's two kids. You know, the kind of uncle who got down on the floor and conversed earnestly with him instead of treating them like little kids. He traveled a lot in Europe, and then he was in that music production and he was always like a really great dresser and in the art and the music. His kind of a renaissance man, to tell you the truth. He also got back into football, not as a player, but as a punting coach, actually kind of a punting guru. This was in the early two thousands and it was big for him. It all started with Nick Saban, who'd been a young assistant coach at Michigan State when Montgomery played there. They'd remained friends, and now Saban had risen through the ranks and become the head coach at LSU. He brought Montgomery to Baton Rouge to work with the punters. It went well. Montgomery got along with the younger guys, and he preached a unique set of punting mechanics based in part on his golf swing, which he drilled into the kids. A young LSU punter named Donnie Jones had been struggling, but he got it together and went on to a long career in the NFL with the Seahawks, Dolphins, Rams, Texans, Eagles, and Chargers. He always credited Montgomery with mentoring him and helping him realize his potential. I owe my career to Greg Montgomery, Donnie Jones said. Montgomery's work at LSU became an annual gig that continued when Sabin moved on to Alabama and built a championship dynasty. Montgomery worked with the Crimson Tide punters almost every year in the spring and early summer, and that led to other gigs with high schools and colleges and with individual clients as well. He had formed these clinics and he would work with kids to that wanted to be recruited at the college level and also college kids that wanted to be recruited at the NFL level. He was a perfectionist and a lot of people turned to him for his advice because he did so well and he was good at what he did. He got a lot of these jobs with people that recommended him, like coaches with different teams and also former players kids you know that he played for in college, knowing, oh, I have a buddy who has a son. You know, that kind of a thing, and every summer he'd come in and help out. He helped out at Michigan State of course, and then all the years in Alabama. Every summer, Greg would go and help kids and he was really good at it. Greg's coaching was i'd say ten percent football technique like kicking technique, and ninety percent empowerment development and building up the kids esteem. He would have the boys number one thing is believe in themselves and trying to help kids get in in tune with themselves to take care of themselves because without that, nothing's going to work. That spoke so much to me, and he learned that from the times that he was going to a tough time. You know. The Baltimore years, really, the early two thousands were good years for Montgomery. His career as a punting coach took off. His friendship with a former Michigan State teammate led to a job in the mortgage industry, first in Chicago and then in Michigan, not far from where Margo and her two kids lived. I love those years. He was doing so well and it was amazing because he lived like twenty minutes from me and he was such a part of my kids' lives. But whenever I think of Greg and I would think of how successful he is. He was a rock star athlete but also just well liked in the financial industry. When he was working in the mortgage business, they would say, Yeah, he was like the top producer and everybody loved him. He kept everybody on their toes and light and we laughed, and you know, work was fun. And that doesn't surprise me at all, you know about that. I mean, I just was happy because he was a part of my life and he'd come over a Sunday for dinner. And you know, I have a son and a daughter and who adored him, and so those years were really those years were great years. Most importantly, Montgomery continued to publicly advocate for better understanding and treatment a bipolar disorder. He was very outspoken about his bipolar disorder, and he, like I mentioned earlier, he talked on panels and he was actually the NAMI National Alliance for Mental Illness Honorary Chair. He did that a couple of years. We went we'd hear him talk and he'd tell his story and then he'd lead people in a walk to raise money for awareness and to get the stigma. And it's to this day we hear people talking about mental illness, and he was more about talking about mental wellness. You know, it's funny how just a couple of different words can make all the difference in the world. But no matter how much he faced it head on, his illness impacted him. He would do really well for like at three to five years, and then spin out and then be depressed. The ebb and flow, unfortunately of bipolar disorders, when when things start slipping, it can just spin out. And I think it's hard to as far as for a family. It's not like he was a child and this was happening and you have more control over things because he was a man, you know, and he made his own choices. And the way this is such a tragedy is with manic depression or bipolar disorder, things will be going great for years at a time he was making all the right decisions and making such a difference, and little by little his choices would slip up and we'd be back into him being depressed or being manic. So, yeah, that's a difficult part of bipolar disorder truly. He turned fit in twenty fourteen and moved on from the mortgage business. A man of many talents, Montgomery went to work for a Michigan company that sold organic skincare products. He handled the marketing, the branding, and it was a labor of love. He was passionate about wellness. He'd have all these years where he was doing just incredibly well, and you can't imagine him being down. You know, we lost our mother. I just remember he was such a beautiful, loving son to her, and he really was. It was just amazing to see our mom. She was diagnosed with cancer January of twenty nineteen, and they told her basically that she had a couple of months to live and without treatment, and then with treatment it was like ten. And she really felt great. And you know, as a family, she and my dad told us, you know what, I'm not going to do that because I feel great. And so Greg was really helpful with my dad when my mom wasn't doing well. We lost her in October, and just slowly but surely, I think that started taking a toll on him. I think the shutdown and COVID really spun him out. It was just the perfect storm. Unfortunately, you know, we're all just still licking our wounds from losing my mom. And you know, she was just amazing. You know, both my parents they're very supportive, loving parents, and yeah, that's a hard one huh. Between his mother's death and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Montgomery's mood turned dark. He was set to take his usual trip to Alabama in the spring of twenty twenty to work with Nick Saban's Punters, a great time always, but the trip was canceled. Months went by, Montgomery struggled more and more with the bizarre realities of life in a pandemic, living in a bubble, interacting less and less with others. It's been hard on everyone. But the sad truth, the tragic truth, is Montgomery reached a point where he couldn't handle it. On August twenty third, a couple months shy of his fifty sixth birthday, he took his life. Years ago, I read a great book by Dave Eggers, one of my favorite authors. The title was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It's a novel about a college kid who loses both of his parents within five weeks and takes on raising his eight year old brother. The story is different from Greg Montgomery's, obviously, but as I worked on this episode, the title kept going around and around in my head. Montgomery's life story is heart King, of course, and he was, in his own way, a staggering genius. Think about what he did in his fifty five years. Became an elite pro athlete, produced music, started a clothing line, worked in finance, mentor generations of young punders, worked in marketing, basically soared in many directions despite a debilitating mental illness, which he met head on until it crushed him. He was an original. When a reporter from Sports Illustrated visited his home in the nineties while working on a feature story, the reporter noticed that Montgomery had hung a bunch of picture frames on the walls, as people do, only there was nothing in the frames on Montgomery's walls. They were blank. Montgomery thought that was funny. Greg he was just a force. And I think anybody you've talked to that have ever spent any time with him would say that he was a spiritual man. He had just had the hugest heart and really cared so much about other people. And I remember saying to my dad, said, I wish he would have just been a little bit more time on him, you know, because I think it's it's really important to help others, but you got to you gotta stay in yourself first. You gotta be well first before you can help people. The news of his death hit Matt Stover hard. Did you keep in touch with him at all? After a couple of times during the first few years and then off the map and then I guess about eight years ago, right after I was in playing, he called me about an opportunity he had to run the IMGs kicking hunting service, you know, their peace there, and he told me about the business model and how they're going to integrate him in it and stuff. And then I told him absolutely I'd be willing to help because I did a lot of that too, want to help him and whatever he needs to lean on. And never heard back from him, and that was the last time I talked to him. And you know, I felt really really bad about not continuing to kindle the relationship and found out that this happened and that that shame on me. Heef struggle man, and I personally feel bad that I didn't do a better job of the relationship before. He always can look back with twenty twenty when something like this happens, What could I have done right? Everyone who knew him had the same thought. Here's Kevin Byrne, and I had not contacted, not heard from him, probably in ten years. Maybe we talked At one point. I told him my son Tim always asked about him, and he was inquiring about we were playing somewhere he was going to be close and whether he could come by, and we said we'd be delighted to have him come by, and then, as it turned out, he couldn't make it. It's the saddest story imaginable. A fine and generous person's life cut short in the worst possible way. Montgomery had so much more living to do and so much to give, but as his illness and the realities of the COVID nineteen pandemics swirled in his head, he couldn't take comfort in what lay ahead. It's truly a tragedy. He was the opposite of a self involved former star athlete. Greg was all about helping people, and it was amazing how many people he has helped. And that's what I mean, Like after we lost him, these phone calls and letters that we'd get just overwhelming. And that's definitely the impetus of starting the foundation and wanting to make a difference and to help. It's pretty incredible, you know, thinking about how this could happen to someone like Greg. And you know, when I was growing up, you know, you read stories or you see after school specials and it's somebody else's family, right, But in reality it's not. There's just so many people that love people that suffer and just thought right to do something about it. So that's what we're going. I'm going to stop this episode here, and I can already hear you. Come on, man, what a downer. Believe me, I get it. But what convinced me to take on this story at all is what's happening in the aftermath of Greg Montgomery's suicide. Margot and her kids and brother and father are can do people, and in their grief, they've realized that they can't just sit around and let something like this happen without trying to find something positive in it. So the story continues, and it's amazing and inspiring and yes, heartbreaking all at once. And I'll get to it in two weeks on the next episode of What Happened to That Guy. Meanwhile, you can find out more about Montgomery's life and career at Baltimore Ravens dot com slash What Happened to That guy. If you like what you're hearing, please scribe and tell your Ravens friends about it. This podcast is part of the Baltimore Ravens podcast Network, which also includes The Lounge hosted by Ryan make and Garrett Downey. We also have a new podcast this year, Black in the NFL, hosted by my colleague Clifton Brown. You can find them all wherever you get your podcasts. It's all good stuff. This is John Eisenberg. I'll talk to you in two weeks.

Greetings and welcome to What Happened to That Guy, a Raven's podcast about former players and life after football. I'm your host, John Eisenberg. I've come across a lot of great stories in doing this podcast, but I'll tell you upfront the story in this episode brought me to my knees like no other. It moved me so much that I'm going to devote two episodes to it, the last two episodes of the season. Once you listen, I'm sure you'll see why. What happened to this guy, this former Raven during and after his time in Baltimore is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. I've written ten books, more than five thousand columns and articles. I was pretty sure I'd heard and seen everything, but this story. Greg Montgomery's story is poignant and powerful in a unique way. I'm not gonna lie. I can't stop thinking about it. It starts a full quarter of a century ago in the Ravens inaugural season in Baltimore. As you may know, they won just four of sixteen games, and they finished last in the old AFC Central. But they were boring. To the contrary, their locker room was full of big names and big personalities. There were two future Pro Football Hall of Famers, Ray Lewis and Jonathan Ogden, both rookies. There was Benny Thompson, a special team's ace, still regarded as one of the brashest trash talkers in NFL history. Nobody riled up the other side like Benny Thompson. The center on the ninety six team, Steve Everett, had a long mane of blonde hair tumbling down his back, and he also possessed a wicked rebellious streak. It was no secret he hated the fact that the team had moved from Cleveland. Did you know that on the first offensive play in Ravens history, the guy who snapped the ball was wearing a Brown's bandana under his helmet. Yep, that was Steve Everett. But the biggest character in the Ravens locker room in nineteen ninety six was wait for it, the punter. That's right, the punter. Tom Toopa had held that job for the Browns in their last year in Cleveland in nineteen ninety five, but he signed with the Patriots during the offseason, leaving Ozzie Newsome the Ravens rookie general manager, with an opening to phill Ozzie looked around and he signed Greg Montgomery. It seemed like an easy call. Montgomery was a thirty two year old veteran who'd kick for the Houston Oilers and Detroit Lions. He'd been a pro bowler, even All Pro one year, and he led the league in yards per punt three times. He'd sat out the nineteen ninety five season, which was odd, but he was available and very qualified. YEP, easy solution. But while the Ravens had a pretty good idea of what they were getting with Montgomery on the field, they didn't realize what they were getting off the field. When the team's inaugural training camp opened in the long hot summer of nineteen ninety six in Baltimore, in walked a larger than live figure. Kevin Byrne, the ravens long time head of media and public relations, remembers being pretty shocked. First of all, he's big. He's six foot four, two hundred and fifteen pounds, so we were really scrambling at the time. We had played against him when he was in Houston, but I didn't know what he looked like. And I see this guy in the locker him, I think it's the tight end. He is different. You know, he walked in with you know, dyed hair and multiple piercings in his ears, and then when he started talking, he had a pierced tongue, and he had tattoos before a lot of people had tattoos, so he clearly looked different. Montgomery also was an extrovert. He'd sing in the locker room, sing so loud in fact, that teammates who didn't know him would steal glances at each other saying like, Okay, what's up with that dude. Kevin Burns's initial thought was, Wow, what polar opposites we have with our two kicking specialists. That's over as Tim Stripes in Wall Street and Greg Montgomery walks in, he's rock and roll in Studio fifty four, and he's going to be the hold of them, and that that dynamic. As you know, John, they have to be sympatical, they has to be one. There has to be trust with those two. And as it turns out, Matt and Greg got along well, and Greig not only was an outstanding punter, he was also an outstanding holder. Here's what Stover recalls, He's a little eccentric. You know with his painted fingernails and was dipping his mouth when he's playing in a game, and his blonde hair. But I'm never, as a teammate or as a friend, distrusted him. I always had a deep trust and a fond love for him. That's how it went with people meeting and getting to know Montgomery. His appearance and some of his conduct may have raised eyebrows, but any initial concerns dissipated once you spend time with him. Here's Kevin Byrne again. My son Tim at the time was a junior in high school and he was a ball boy, and Tim was an artist. And Tim was the first to really tell me about Greg Montgomery because Greg befriended Tim, and I wasn't sure that was a good thing for Tim or the family. I'm old fashioned, and here's a guy who's painted his fingernails and toenails black. And my impressionable son from Calvert Hall says, this guy's really cool. Dad, you should get to know him. I remember Tim saying this. He's really a kind hearted guy. He's very inquisitive. And I say, you know, Tim, you're here to be a ball boy. Just be a ball boy. You're not here to be planned players, and so I didn't encourage him, but my son Tim was impressed with him. Montgomery performed well for the Ravens in nineteen ninety six, punting nearly seventy times and averaging nearly forty four yards per punt. It was not a surprise. He'd been an All American at Michigan State, such a beast as a punter that the Oilers drafted him in the third round in nineteen eighty eight, the number seventy two overall pick a punter, Montgomery was something special, a huge guy who crushed the ball. As a punner, he was outstanding. I mean, he was very consistent his form, punting the ball with an you know, he was everything he'd warner in a punter. That's Sean Landetta talking. He punted in the NFL in the same era. And for those who don't know, Lndetta is a Baltimore native who went to Locker Raven High School and then punted for thousand State That's what they called it then before embarking on an amazing journey more than two decades in the NFL, starting in the eighties and continuing well into the two thousands. Landetta and Montgomery were contemporaries and they were pretty friendly. You know, his rookie year, he didn't have such a good year, but the next seven were very consistent and really really good. Thinking, here's a guy that should have played every bit of ten to fifteen years physically, but you know, unfortunately the other part wasn't there. The nineteen ninety six Ravens had plenty of problems, but their special teams were stellar, with stoverdoing the kicking and Montgomery handling the punting. Ted Marcha Broda, the Ravens head coach, figured that was one area of the team he didn't have to worry about going forward. But when training camp opened the next year in the summer of nineteen ninety seven, Montgomery was not the same guy back to the locker room and was stuck his head in with lockers, like, you know, this is a day to leave me alone. So I didn't understand it at the time. It would all come tumbling out later that year. Montgomery had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental illness marked by dramatic mood shifts, heat swing back and forth between an extremely elevated mood called mania and bouts of severe depression. He also had acute performance anxiety panic attacks so severe that sometimes his hands went numb. You'd think an NFL player might prefer to keep a battle like that private, but Montgomery didn't mind. What was impressive, especially for the time, the fact that Greg went out and spoke publicly to the media and to private groups about being bipolar and having depression and taking medication and how his life is filled with manic periods up and down and trying to live in a buttoned up NFL world was difficult, and he talked about that, and I'm sure he helped a lot of people out there because of the celebrity of the pro athlete, to say, Okay, he's dealing with it, I can deal with it too. So I give him great credits to doing that. It's become more common now, but back in nineteen ninety six and ninety seven, it was very uncommon, and Greg was a pioneer that way. And talking publicly at celebrity, talking publicly about his mental issue. I think he gave people hope, and that's a good thing. A few years later, when he was out of football, he went on ESPN and talked with unnerving frankness about what he dealt with throughout his career, culminating with that nineteen ninety seven training camp with the Ravens. He appeared on Outside the Lines, ESPN's Sunday morning news show, on an episode devoted to how major sports were dealing with athletes with mental illness. Montgomery said his entire career had been an emotional roller coaster. Remember when I said he'd sat out the entire nineteen ninety five season. That was due to a severe bout of depression. He said. At the time he thought his career was over, but he snapped back in time to catch on with the Ravens in nineteen ninety six. That he said was quite an accomplishment. But just before the start of training camp in nineteen ninety seven, his depression overwhelmed him again. As he explained of viewers on ESPN, there wasn't a day in that training camp that he didn't think about suicide. At a preseason game in Philadelphia, he had a panic attack and his hands went numb. He figured he was going to get cut, and actually that was fine. I wanted to get cut, greg Montgomery said. The episode of Outside the Lines ran on the morning of the last Sunday of the two thousand and one NFL season, Sean Lendetta watched it. He was in a hotel room getting ready to go to a stadium and punt for the Philadelphia Eagles. Some of what Montgomery said was familiar to Lendetta. They talked before about Montgomery's issues, he telling me that he was just a straight pass sea. Remember I went into a game one time, went back to punt, and I'm standing there. I said to myself, you know what do I do? And I said, what do you mean? He said, I didn't know what to do back there, but I didn't know I was supposed to punt the ball. I said, in a game this happened to you? He said yes. I said, well, what did you do? He said, well, I guess you know the muscle man Ramen. The ball came back. I caught it and punted it, and I just I said wow. I said, I'm so sorry to hear that you had to deal with that, because I can't imagine being in an NFL game. They're not sure what to do after He'd done this thousands of times for years and years. But even Landetta, his friend, was stunned by the depth of the struggle that Montgomery revealed on outside the lines. You know, I remember sitting down on the bed before I left, you know, watching the interviewer. I just thought, wow, you know, I know he had some things going on, but I didn't know it was that much. And it made me feel even more for him when I thought of you, all these years that he played, he had to deal with that stuff, And what a shame a guy who could have been one of the all times great NFL punters physically, talent wise, if he didn't have to deal with that situation going on instead. Montgomery didn't get cut in nineteen ninety seven. He got through training camp, made the Ravens roster, and performed solidly during the season, averaging nearly forty three yards per punt. He was managing his illness well, it seemed. But the next year the team brought in another punter to compete for the job, and that other punter, Kyle Richardson, beat out Montgomery. It was a good competition. Montgomery could still punt, but no other team picked him up. At age thirty four, he was done playing football. In some ways, he was prepared for it. He was a bright guy with a ton of interests. Right away he began working in music production in Baltimore, but in other ways, the absence of football and that structure in his life started a ball rolling downhill, and that ball picked up speed, taking Montgomery down faster and faster. In his playing days, he'd used alcohol and drugs to help combat the effects of his illness, self medicating it's called Now that he wasn't playing, his use of those substances increased. Bad things started happening. He fell in with the wrong crowd, He got mugged, suffering a broken jaw on a trip to Las Vegas. Whenever he spoke to his family, he was all over the map with ideas about what he wanted to do next, host an electronic music festival, write a book. His parents, brother, and sister became increasingly alarmed. Finally, in nineteen ninety nine, they staged an intervention. Here's his kid's sister, Margot. He went through a stage where he just thought he could do anything, and he had all these huge ideas. But he was brilliant. He was very smart. So a lot of times he'd have these ideas and it's like, yoh, yeah, that makes sense. Oh cool, you know, And then he would just keep going and he'd go for weeks without sleeping, and he would self medicate himself, and he was not being healthy by forms of you, drinking and whatever else he was doing, and that was kind of scary. And he was diagnosed with being bipolar, I believe when he was with the Ravens, And I don't know how he did it, like, I don't know how he played and did, you know, pretty decent, but it's kind of hard when a family, you know, learns of something when somebody has been on their own. And he was in his thirties, so he was kind of in charge of his own treatment. But as a family, we wanted to help them too. So I do remember him putting himself in Turkey spots and we just had a family intervention with him and told him he had to really think about the choices he was making, and he was totally on board. Now that you've heard Margot, Reg's younger sister talking about him, let me back up and give you a little background. Montgomery had an all American upbringing as part of a loving, close family. His father played quarterback at Michigan State and married the love of his life. They settled in New Jersey and raised three kids. Montgomery was the oldest, and he inherited every ounce of his father's athletic jeans. He was a magnificent, just natural athlete. Hockey was his first love. He loved hockey, and football and baseball were probably tied. He was a really good pitcher. He was an excellent golfer. So, yeah, he was very gifted. And it was an injury that sort of got him into punting. Yes, I believe it was a sophomore year. He was lifting and slipped some discs in his back and the doctor told him he couldn't play contact sports anymore. So he concentrated on kicking and punning. And actually he'd wake up at like five in the morning and my mom would drive him to the local why so he could swim before school to keep in shape, because you know, he was a linebacker before that injury. Basically, when the doctor told him no contact sports, he just thought, well, I want to play football. So that's when he concentrated on learning how to kick and punt. He would have played another position if he hadn't gotten heard right. I mean, he was a big look like a linebacker or a tied end or something. Oh yeah, he was six to four. He was a big dude or a punter. He was a beast on the hockey rink, and he was a beast in any sport. He played quite honestly. But even as a young person, a handsome star athlete from a great family, Montgomery exhibited unsettling signs. Greg was always really serious, a perfectionist, and my parents they thought that he was too serious for someone so young, and he was really hard on himself, so it wasn't a shock to us that something was going on with him later in life. He was an excellent student in high school and college, an avid reader with many interests music, art, fashion, not at landish in the least. That's why his family found it alarming when he showed up to play for the Ravens with tattoos all over his torso and his dark hair dyed blonde and piercings all over the place. There's nothing wrong with any of that, but it wasn't the person they knew. I looked at it like a teenage rebellion either, because he was always if you were to look at him and know him in high school and college, he was more of that all American that did really well in school and was really handsome, and you know what I'm saying. And he just kind of broke the mold when he was with the Ravens and that's and then he started getting all these different piercings and tattoos, and that's when I saw his mental state shift. And you know, Greg and I were really really close, and I remember telling him I really was concerned about him, and he'd call me at all different hours and I'd always talked to him. I appreciate him calling me, but I also felt like I needed to take the calls, you know what I mean. So when I think of Greg when he was with the Ravens and he had that manic break, and that was like a year or so of him being kind of on this like mania. There's like different levels of mania, and one is where I think people can function pretty well. They have more energy, and they have a kind of a feeling of enlightenment. I think that was easy for reporters or anybody to do stories on him because he was such a character and he still did well on the field. I remember being at my parents' house at Lake House and we're watching some interview they did on him, and it was you know, they had like born to be Wild in the background playing and my Dad's just like, oh my gosh, what was that about? And I said, oh, no, you know, but he was one of the funniest people you would ever meet, So I can understand why people let's get a kick out of them, and you know, when that all was going on. But the downside, of course, is after somebody's in the manic way and then they go down, he would spend a long time being depressed. Kevin Byrne did his best to understand it. I remember talking to the team psychiatrists about it, and I remember him telling me at times that he'll have moments if he's like others who will have moments of why am I here? What am I doing here? So I never heard or I never witnessed that frozen moment, but our team psychiatrist told me that, you know, he will wander away mentally, So that was part of it. And I think Matt Stover helped keep Greg focused on game day as happens with kicking specialist teammates. Montgomery and Stover spent a lot of time together on the practice field in the locker room on road trips. At that point, I didn't really understand by polarism, and I had a friend in college that dealt with it, and I did see it. You know, it wasn't crazy per se, and EDA was Greg. Greg was very well balanced, and I know that he's a Christian guy. We talked spiritual issues all the time. But I knew he had his struggles too. I mean, I knew he had some dark times and we talked about those personally. You know, he struggled with relationships with women, and he had a wonderful girlfriend at the time, but I was hoping he was going to marry and she loved him dearly, but that didn't maturate into marriage. But I was hoping for him. And then when I had the little kids at the time, I had a little one year old and a newborn in nineteen ninety six, and talking about an awesome friend. He just loved on my family and my wife and just showed a gentleness and a great spirit about him. When Montgomery's illness spiraled out of control soon after his NFL career ended, his parents and siblings stepped in and recommended that he go to Hazelton, a renowned drug and alcohol rehab clinic in Minnesota. Montgomery enthusiastically agreed to go, and I actually flew out with him. I remember sitting on the airplane and him holding my hand and looking at me and he said thanks. This His time at Hazelton impacted him profoundly. The clinic was full of young kids with serious drug problems. The side of them broke Montgomery's heart. He was in there, and obviously it lit a fire where he wanted to be well, and he also wanted to help other people because he just felt so sad. He was just like, says these kids, I know. I said, well, the first person we have to take care of your is yourself. For many years he did really well, and especially not drinking and taking care of themselves and eating well and going to therapy and doing all those things and taking care of yourself. Post Hazelton, things got better, a lot better. Always a dapper dresser, Montgomery started his own clothing line. He was a wonderful uncle to Margot's two kids. You know, the kind of uncle who got down on the floor and conversed earnestly with him instead of treating them like little kids. He traveled a lot in Europe, and then he was in that music production and he was always like a really great dresser and in the art and the music. His kind of a renaissance man, to tell you the truth. He also got back into football, not as a player, but as a punting coach, actually kind of a punting guru. This was in the early two thousands and it was big for him. It all started with Nick Saban, who'd been a young assistant coach at Michigan State when Montgomery played there. They'd remained friends, and now Saban had risen through the ranks and become the head coach at LSU. He brought Montgomery to Baton Rouge to work with the punters. It went well. Montgomery got along with the younger guys, and he preached a unique set of punting mechanics based in part on his golf swing, which he drilled into the kids. A young LSU punter named Donnie Jones had been struggling, but he got it together and went on to a long career in the NFL with the Seahawks, Dolphins, Rams, Texans, Eagles, and Chargers. He always credited Montgomery with mentoring him and helping him realize his potential. I owe my career to Greg Montgomery, Donnie Jones said. Montgomery's work at LSU became an annual gig that continued when Sabin moved on to Alabama and built a championship dynasty. Montgomery worked with the Crimson Tide punters almost every year in the spring and early summer, and that led to other gigs with high schools and colleges and with individual clients as well. He had formed these clinics and he would work with kids to that wanted to be recruited at the college level and also college kids that wanted to be recruited at the NFL level. He was a perfectionist and a lot of people turned to him for his advice because he did so well and he was good at what he did. He got a lot of these jobs with people that recommended him, like coaches with different teams and also former players kids you know that he played for in college, knowing, oh, I have a buddy who has a son. You know, that kind of a thing, and every summer he'd come in and help out. He helped out at Michigan State of course, and then all the years in Alabama. Every summer, Greg would go and help kids and he was really good at it. Greg's coaching was i'd say ten percent football technique like kicking technique, and ninety percent empowerment development and building up the kids esteem. He would have the boys number one thing is believe in themselves and trying to help kids get in in tune with themselves to take care of themselves because without that, nothing's going to work. That spoke so much to me, and he learned that from the times that he was going to a tough time. You know. The Baltimore years, really, the early two thousands were good years for Montgomery. His career as a punting coach took off. His friendship with a former Michigan State teammate led to a job in the mortgage industry, first in Chicago and then in Michigan, not far from where Margo and her two kids lived. I love those years. He was doing so well and it was amazing because he lived like twenty minutes from me and he was such a part of my kids' lives. But whenever I think of Greg and I would think of how successful he is. He was a rock star athlete but also just well liked in the financial industry. When he was working in the mortgage business, they would say, Yeah, he was like the top producer and everybody loved him. He kept everybody on their toes and light and we laughed, and you know, work was fun. And that doesn't surprise me at all, you know about that. I mean, I just was happy because he was a part of my life and he'd come over a Sunday for dinner. And you know, I have a son and a daughter and who adored him, and so those years were really those years were great years. Most importantly, Montgomery continued to publicly advocate for better understanding and treatment a bipolar disorder. He was very outspoken about his bipolar disorder, and he, like I mentioned earlier, he talked on panels and he was actually the NAMI National Alliance for Mental Illness Honorary Chair. He did that a couple of years. We went we'd hear him talk and he'd tell his story and then he'd lead people in a walk to raise money for awareness and to get the stigma. And it's to this day we hear people talking about mental illness, and he was more about talking about mental wellness. You know, it's funny how just a couple of different words can make all the difference in the world. But no matter how much he faced it head on, his illness impacted him. He would do really well for like at three to five years, and then spin out and then be depressed. The ebb and flow, unfortunately of bipolar disorders, when when things start slipping, it can just spin out. And I think it's hard to as far as for a family. It's not like he was a child and this was happening and you have more control over things because he was a man, you know, and he made his own choices. And the way this is such a tragedy is with manic depression or bipolar disorder, things will be going great for years at a time he was making all the right decisions and making such a difference, and little by little his choices would slip up and we'd be back into him being depressed or being manic. So, yeah, that's a difficult part of bipolar disorder truly. He turned fit in twenty fourteen and moved on from the mortgage business. A man of many talents, Montgomery went to work for a Michigan company that sold organic skincare products. He handled the marketing, the branding, and it was a labor of love. He was passionate about wellness. He'd have all these years where he was doing just incredibly well, and you can't imagine him being down. You know, we lost our mother. I just remember he was such a beautiful, loving son to her, and he really was. It was just amazing to see our mom. She was diagnosed with cancer January of twenty nineteen, and they told her basically that she had a couple of months to live and without treatment, and then with treatment it was like ten. And she really felt great. And you know, as a family, she and my dad told us, you know what, I'm not going to do that because I feel great. And so Greg was really helpful with my dad when my mom wasn't doing well. We lost her in October, and just slowly but surely, I think that started taking a toll on him. I think the shutdown and COVID really spun him out. It was just the perfect storm. Unfortunately, you know, we're all just still licking our wounds from losing my mom. And you know, she was just amazing. You know, both my parents they're very supportive, loving parents, and yeah, that's a hard one huh. Between his mother's death and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Montgomery's mood turned dark. He was set to take his usual trip to Alabama in the spring of twenty twenty to work with Nick Saban's Punters, a great time always, but the trip was canceled. Months went by, Montgomery struggled more and more with the bizarre realities of life in a pandemic, living in a bubble, interacting less and less with others. It's been hard on everyone. But the sad truth, the tragic truth, is Montgomery reached a point where he couldn't handle it. On August twenty third, a couple months shy of his fifty sixth birthday, he took his life. Years ago, I read a great book by Dave Eggers, one of my favorite authors. The title was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It's a novel about a college kid who loses both of his parents within five weeks and takes on raising his eight year old brother. The story is different from Greg Montgomery's, obviously, but as I worked on this episode, the title kept going around and around in my head. Montgomery's life story is heart King, of course, and he was, in his own way, a staggering genius. Think about what he did in his fifty five years. Became an elite pro athlete, produced music, started a clothing line, worked in finance, mentor generations of young punders, worked in marketing, basically soared in many directions despite a debilitating mental illness, which he met head on until it crushed him. He was an original. When a reporter from Sports Illustrated visited his home in the nineties while working on a feature story, the reporter noticed that Montgomery had hung a bunch of picture frames on the walls, as people do, only there was nothing in the frames on Montgomery's walls. They were blank. Montgomery thought that was funny. Greg he was just a force. And I think anybody you've talked to that have ever spent any time with him would say that he was a spiritual man. He had just had the hugest heart and really cared so much about other people. And I remember saying to my dad, said, I wish he would have just been a little bit more time on him, you know, because I think it's it's really important to help others, but you got to you gotta stay in yourself first. You gotta be well first before you can help people. The news of his death hit Matt Stover hard. Did you keep in touch with him at all? After a couple of times during the first few years and then off the map and then I guess about eight years ago, right after I was in playing, he called me about an opportunity he had to run the IMGs kicking hunting service, you know, their peace there, and he told me about the business model and how they're going to integrate him in it and stuff. And then I told him absolutely I'd be willing to help because I did a lot of that too, want to help him and whatever he needs to lean on. And never heard back from him, and that was the last time I talked to him. And you know, I felt really really bad about not continuing to kindle the relationship and found out that this happened and that that shame on me. Heef struggle man, and I personally feel bad that I didn't do a better job of the relationship before. He always can look back with twenty twenty when something like this happens, What could I have done right? Everyone who knew him had the same thought. Here's Kevin Byrne, and I had not contacted, not heard from him, probably in ten years. Maybe we talked At one point. I told him my son Tim always asked about him, and he was inquiring about we were playing somewhere he was going to be close and whether he could come by, and we said we'd be delighted to have him come by, and then, as it turned out, he couldn't make it. It's the saddest story imaginable. A fine and generous person's life cut short in the worst possible way. Montgomery had so much more living to do and so much to give, but as his illness and the realities of the COVID nineteen pandemics swirled in his head, he couldn't take comfort in what lay ahead. It's truly a tragedy. He was the opposite of a self involved former star athlete. Greg was all about helping people, and it was amazing how many people he has helped. And that's what I mean, Like after we lost him, these phone calls and letters that we'd get just overwhelming. And that's definitely the impetus of starting the foundation and wanting to make a difference and to help. It's pretty incredible, you know, thinking about how this could happen to someone like Greg. And you know, when I was growing up, you know, you read stories or you see after school specials and it's somebody else's family, right, But in reality it's not. There's just so many people that love people that suffer and just thought right to do something about it. So that's what we're going. I'm going to stop this episode here, and I can already hear you. Come on, man, what a downer. Believe me, I get it. But what convinced me to take on this story at all is what's happening in the aftermath of Greg Montgomery's suicide. Margot and her kids and brother and father are can do people, and in their grief, they've realized that they can't just sit around and let something like this happen without trying to find something positive in it. So the story continues, and it's amazing and inspiring and yes, heartbreaking all at once. And I'll get to it in two weeks on the next episode of What Happened to That Guy. Meanwhile, you can find out more about Montgomery's life and career at Baltimore Ravens dot com slash What Happened to That guy. If you like what you're hearing, please scribe and tell your Ravens friends about it. This podcast is part of the Baltimore Ravens podcast Network, which also includes The Lounge hosted by Ryan make and Garrett Downey. We also have a new podcast this year, Black in the NFL, hosted by my colleague Clifton Brown. You can find them all wherever you get your podcasts. It's all good stuff. This is John Eisenberg. I'll talk to you in two weeks.