Welcome to What Happened to That Guy? A podcast about former Ravens and life after football. I'm your host, John Eisenberg. I hope you don't mind if I ask for a favor here at the start of episode number five. It's not a big favor. I'm going to set a scene and I want you to close your eyes try to envision it. Not if you're driving, of course, if you're driving, please don't close your eyes. Just pretend. The setting is a bar in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a typical sports bar kind of place. Brick walls, lots of TVs. It's a weekday evening and the place is dark, but it's rock and packed with enthusiastic customers. A small wooden stage it's been erected up front. It's empty right now save for a microphone stand. Then the house lights dim and the do Good comedy show begins. It's a night of stand up comics, performing one after the other. The crowd claps and whoops. When the opening act takes the stage. He's a big guy dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, his face vaguely familiar. He plucks the microphone off the stand and he starts talking. I used to play in the NFL, he says, in a flat Midwestern twang. I didn't think there was any way I could be more famous or more important. Then I retired and everyone forgot about me. That draws some giggles from the audience. The guy keeps going, I know some guys who are still playing in the NFL, and I tell them, you think you're such a big deal. Well, six months after you retire, people are going to be standing around the water cooler saying, you know, I'm never gonna forget. Oh what's his name? The audience laughs, He's funny. The big guy on stage, Matt Burke. He's funny. You remember him, right, Burke? Oh what's his name? He played center in the NFL for fourteen years, first with the Minnesota Vikings and then with the Ravens from two thousand nine through two thousand and twelve. When Joe Flacco led the Ravens to a Super Bowl title, Burke was snapping the ball to him, protecting him, helping make it all happen. He retired after that Super Bowl. He was thirty six and had accomplished everything there was to accomplish in football. What would he do with the rest of his life. Now there's a question. Matt Burke probably could have done just about anything. He earned an economics degree from Harvard. He could have become an NFL executive, maybe even commissioner one day. He could have run a team as a general manager or a salary cap guru. Hey, forget football. He could have gone to Wall Street and started a hedge fund. Instead, he's doing stand up comedy. I can't say I'm totally shocked that Matt Burke has become a stand up comedian. I'll always remember one of his interviews with the Baltimore media after an otherwise forgettable Ravens training camp practice at the under Armor Performance Center. It was a sweltering late summer afternoon. Burke had come off the field and was standing at the podium in full uniform, sweat cascading down. I'm sure he couldn't wait to get to the air condition cool of the locker room, but it was his turn to field some questions. Podium interviews during training camp are not always shall we say, super enlightening. Many disintegrate into cliches, especially on a sweltering day. Just getting my work in, embracing the grind, looking forward to a big year this time, though, A reporter asked Burke an unusual question, Matt, what are you reading? Being a Harvard guy, Burke invited that sort of thing, an economics book, he replied. The follow up question was inevitable. What's the book about, Matt, He paused, letting the mystery build. Oh, Burke said, it's a book about how we're all totally screwed. The media laughed. The guy at the podium the sweating center, Matt Burke. He was funny. When I spoke to Burke for this podcast, I recounted that scene and his punch line. He didn't remember it, but he laughed. Yeah, I've got a little bit of work. I'm a smart Alice get a bit sarcastic, so yeah, yeah, and it tortured saw when that's at all. You know, there's a famous show business joke you may have heard. Dying is easy, Comedy is hard, the point being it's pretty terrifying to get up in front of people and try to make them laugh. Burke had no intention of trying. What happened was a friend dared him, and Burke, like many NFL players, is so insanely competitive. That he couldn't stand to let the challenge go unaccepted. So he got up on on stage and it went well. He didn't crash and burn as they say. The audience didn't sit there silently staring at him with mounting disdain as his jokes fell flat. The audience laughed. They thought he was funny. I have a company where I do a fair amount of public speaking and consulting, and I'm not horrible at it seems to work. I don't mind you up on stage in front of people. How To likes to be entertained and informative, and so that comes to humor. To be clear, he isn't relying on stand up to support his family. He's forty three years old, married with eight kids and two dogs. He knows better than to base his ability to support a brood that large on whether he can make people laugh. The truth is Burke signed some nice contracts when he played for the Vikings and Ravens, and we didn't get into his financial situation when we spoke, but I'm guessing he's pretty smart with his money. He also has always recognized that they're a world beyond football, a real world where people have lots of problems. As hard as he worked to make it in the NFL and last so long, Burke believes he was lucky, unbelievably lucky. His perspective is that you're lucky to make a living, a nice living, playing a kid's game, as opposed to say, working in a mill or cranking out sales reports. And with his strong Catholic faith guiding him, he has always sought to share some of his good fortune give back to those not as fortunate. When he was playing, he had a foundation that provided educational opportunities to at risk kids, the Hike Foundation. It was called Hope Inspiration, Knowledge Education hik E. That's also what Burke did on the field, of course, hike the ball. When he played for the Ravens, he frequently could be found in schools helping with literacy. These days, he's involved with numerous charities. If it's a cause he supports and they have a sound plan, he's in in the midst of doing that, he was struck by a thought one day. These charities, most of their fundraising events tend to be well boring. You know, thanks for coming, blah blah blah, here's what we do blah blah, blah, leave your check on the table, blah blah blah. Burke thought, why not put on a fundraising event that's actually fun. Hire comedians, rent out a bar, give people a reason to laugh as they write those checks. Goodness knows we could all stand to laugh a little more these days. So we put together the first edition of what he calls the Do Good Comedy Show. Lined up some real comedians, professionals, went on stage himself, and the event drew a big crowd, raised a bunch of money. Now he's done it seven or eight times, and there's more coming, and we've raised about four than a million dollars for charities through these events. He had long with raising money, and we're able to do with it. I figure, what the heck? Everyone needs to and wants to laugh a little bit more. How does he come up with his jokes? Well, eight kids and two dogs start right there. Most of my material probably comes from from having eight kids. I don't need to look very far as find material or to feel humbled on a daily basis, And I think most people can relate to that. You know, parenting is hard, and kids have a way of making you feel like your normal failure. Sometimes so I think I tapped into that and most people can relate. He also riffs on being a big dumb football lineman, not that anyone takes him for that, and I'm being a guy whose time has come and gone. He'll go. People ask me how I'm doing in life after football? Well, here I am standing in front of a room full of strangers, begging for your acceptance. How do you think I'm doing. When he played football, Burke didn't give too much thought to what he might do after he retired. You get later out of your career, probably from my year ten on. During the season that was like, yeah, it's gonna be my last year. Your body heard retired, hits the struggle, and then the season ends, the rest a little bit, and yet you kind of forget help, help, how bad it hurts, he said, I himil year. The thing with Burke's final years, which he spent in Baltimore, because he had never played in the Super Bowl and the Ravens were close in twenty eleven, Billy kind of missed the kick they kept them from taking the AFC Championship game into overtime in New England. Burke couldn't let that be his last act. So we came back in twenty twelve. Good call. The Ravens won the AFC North, rolled through the conference playoffs, beating the Patriots in New England, and then they won a thrilling Super Bowl over the San Francisco forty nine ers. Even after that, though Burke had second thoughts about retiring, the Super Bowl triumph provided him with the perfect opportunity to take that dream ride into the sunset. You could go out on top. But he fought it. There was a big part of me that wanted to come back. Idiom never went in on super Bowls, right, and we knew that's why John Brady's still playing. But for me it was like man to win. It was so hard and then the repeat is even harder, and like let's go, let's go try to accomplish. Back in my head to the Senate, trying to Brewer be back a little bit. It's been a ridiculously good run, way way way better than I could have ever hoped to dream for just seeming when it was it was the right time to stop and be around for my family more and we're r onto what's next. We're on the lights Without football. He took a year off, wrote a book, and then he took a job with the NFL. The league office brought him in to be the appeals officer on player fines for illegal hits. It became his job to step in after a player had been fined for a hit and the player had appealed to fine for being unfair or excessive. Burke would listen to everyone one's version of events and render a judgment, basically rule whether the fine should be upheld, reduced, or erased. Entirely, you're standing on a phone call and you've got the final say, and on one side you've got this player who's making millions of dollars, and you get to head coach, and you get the general manager, and they're all leading the case from the player. And then on the other side you've got the union who's trying to support the player. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, everybody on this call is making millions and millions of dollars here, and the guy that gets the final say is the woman had to save his twelve dollars lunturret seats so he gets reimbursed. He ruled on cases involving former teammates and former opponents guys. He'd been on the field with a tricky business for sure. He also was making decisions that could pretty much determine how a team's season went. So there's some pretty high pressure hearings. You know, there's a lot of stake, and knowing that he suspend a star player for a game or two, that might mean the difference in that teammates in the playoffs, that might mean the difference in that coach or that coach, the staff keeping their jobs. There's a lot too. I for Ultimately, I was trying to do what was speared the rules and how the rule were written, and what was in the best interest of the game. It was actually really interesting time because that was the year that they drastically changed the rules and the helmets sailts hit with the defenseless players, and so there was a lot of adjustment going on by everybody. It was difficult, you know, I don't think anybody was out there trying to if receivers going across the fiddle. There wasn't anybody trying to potentionally take somebody's head off. But there was a lot of guys trying to retrain themselves so they would be within the new rule. Even as hard as they tried, sometimes it didn't work out that way that guys were getting fine and guys were frustrated. So it was pretty interesting. In the end, though the job became somewhat monotonous. Burke only stayed a year. The NFL gave him another job, actually, Roger Goodell did. The commissioner wanted Burke to learn the business side of pro football. It was flattering an opportunity he couldn't pass up. Who knows what it might have led to, certainly a high profile position down the line, But Burke was living on the East Coast doing the long commute hustle here and their thing, and he and his wife longed for the slower pace of the Midwest, specifically Minneapolis and Saint Paul, where they've both grown up. Burke quit working for the NFL after two years of learning the business side. He and his wife and their eight kids and their two dogs all moved back to the Twin Cities. It sounds like a sitcom, doesn't it, But this is real life. The Burkes have been back for two years and they've settled in nicely between his charity work, speaking business and consulting opportunities. Burke has plenty going on. Now he's taken on yet another new adventure, one he never could have anticipated when he was playing football. He is co founding a Catholic high school. Right now, you look at the education system in the model, it's a little bit broken that it needs to be tweets, it's very anequated. Has that changed a lot over the years, even though if you look at our world and how kids live, how families live, things have changed drastically. And I thought, you know what, am I going to sit around and complain about it? Or am I going to do something about it? So we're opening up a new high school in September this year, Catholic High School. Our models a little bit different. We're going to focus on, of course, traditional academics, but also very much on leadership, character and entrepreneurship. But if you look at the economy of the future, which means ten years from now, what kind of skills are going to be in demand? This leadership and character and entrepreneurship, it's creativity, It's a lot of these things. It's start being cultivated in the traditional academic environment. These are things Burke has been thinking about since he stopped playing football. He's funny, but as you may have noticed, he's also serious about making the world a better place. I'm just kind of an entrepreneur by by nature, and this is something that saw it needs there they'll be doing. And I thought, hey, I got to put a bunch of kids through I school anyway, so I want them to be educated the way that I want them to be educated. That I think that's the sound and I think there a show of the country that there's a better way to do things. The response from the local Catholic school community has staggered him. If you have a good mission and a good vision, people stretch forward. They identify themselves and they say, I want to help. So there's no money in Catholic education, there's no money. See get people that are driven like pure altruistic motives to believe in what you're doing. And so yeah, there's no way anybody can do this by themselves. I certainly can do about by myself. But the people that have stepped forward, it's just it's fantastic and it's really fun to watch it, To watch it from to fruition, to watch it to start to come together. I think that's a god thing. When you're talking about great based education. I think it's the best thing there is, I think for kids right now these days, living in this crazy world I can edge and growing up and trying to navigate and figure out your value system and where you're sitting with how it's the foundation of faith. So that's just grateful to be a part of this. He'll sit on the school's board of directors and help teach what they're calling real World Wednesdays, which will include leadership training and a service component. It's a long way from playing in the Super Bowl. I know I'm probably never going to have another job as coolest playing in the NFL or whether that's gonna pay like playing in the NFL. But I feel like, God, you gotta plan for my life like he does for everybody. I just have to try to figure out what that is and calling that direction. I mean, that's just that's just life. It turns out there's a Matt Burke expert on the Ravens coaching staff, the current one. Yep, you wouldn't expect it, but Andy Bishoff, the assistant tight ends coach, goes way way back with Burke. They both grew up in Saint Paul Minnesota, and although Bischoff is eight years older, their paths have repeatedly crossed. I sat down with Andy to talk about Burke and and wound up gaining great insight into his past, present, and future. Here's Andy. I was coaching youth baseball for a fourteen and under team, and he was on the rival teams. So I was at this inner city urban he was in a little bit more of an affluent area, and we were very good youth baseball teams, and he was on the other team as the kind of the closer, the high profile picture, long, lean kid and very confident and plenty of opinions. You know, we're gonna win, We're gonna beat you guys, You're gonna beat us, that kind of a thing. But that's when we really met. Then he was a little older and he was a caddy at a country club. I was in college and decided to do some caddy. So we got to know each other a little bit more there here I was eight ten years older than him, but he was the veteran caddy. I was the new guy, So of course he wasn't gonna let that not be known. You know that he was the veteran caddy. So he's always had a great sense of humor. I was this public school guy. Many of the caddies were private school kids. I was a little bit of the outsoorder. I mean, these caddies are all fourteen fifteen, sixteen, and I was in college and somebody said, hey, you want to make some easy money, go double baggot a town and country golf course with long Behold. There's Matt Burke, who is the half boss of the caddyshack. So I'm working for him, you know. So he didn't let that go without being noticed. You know, Hey, Bischoff, get to work, you know what I mean. So it just goes on and on. Today Bischoff is in his fifth year on John Harbaugh's staff. Before that, he coached with the Chicago Bears and the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. His career began with a coaching job at Creton Durhamhall High School in Saint Paul, a Minnesota powerhouse. That's where Burke went to high school. Bischoff started coaching there in nineteen ninety three, the year after Burke graduated. He was a great player there. He originally had a scholarship offer to the University of Minnesota. Through a series of really odd events, they pulled the scholarship late, that recruiting coach was banned from the building, and how poorly he handled the Burke situation. He then moved on when to Harvard did his thing? Was a great player at Harvard. You mentioned the stand up comedy. We ran a youth football camp at Creten Daham Hall. That kind of began during his days at Harvard. Now Here he is he's a you know, well known Now he's going to start a school, and now he's a comedian and all those things. But at our football camp, he gave his first public speech to our players at the camp, and I had always wanted to ask former players, hey, could he give the guys a couple of words? And he said, very clearly, this is my first public speaking in front of guys like this. How do he did great? He mixed a great balance of pointed seriousness and comedy. I mean, Matt always has a way of slipping in humor. His direction as a comedian doesn't surprise me. And really, going back to youth baseball, he's smart, he's sharp, he's witty, you know, and it comes quickly to him. So I mean stand up is a fit because it's improv you know, he can improv and he can roll, which is a great quality of his. Bishoff and Burke continue to run into each other after the Minnesota Vikings selected Burke in the sixth round of the nineteen ninety eight NFL Draft. Quite a faithful event actually, considering Burke's Minnesota roots. Burke won a place on his hometown team's roster. He would eventually develop into a perennial pro bowler. Meanwhile, Bischoff was still coaching at Creton Durhamhall High School. In Burke's early years with the Vikings, every Sunday morning we went to a particular breakfast place called Keys Cafe, and every Sunday morning, Matt was sitting in the corner, sitting eating breakfast by himself. But we didn't realize at the time was that he was scouting his future wife. Her family owned this restaurant and she was one of the waitresses. Her name's Adriana. As we all know, he's sitting eating breakfast by himself every week working on her. We're working on our coaching staff stuff. Of course, the rest his history and they're married, all the kids and everything else. His family. I mean, you want to talk about an assault to the earth family, I mean his mom and dad, beautiful people, two brothers, all three very good athletes. Mad'll tell you that Nick and Ben, his brothers, were much better athletes than him. He may not admit that, but he knows it. He just found his way to the NFL. Really athletic family, hard working, great people, core Saint Paul, Minnesota people. So it doesn't surprise you. After football, you know, he worked for the NFL for a while in the league office and after a while sort of chucked it and he was going down an interesting road in the NFL, but he and his wife wanted to live in the Twin Cities. That was more important to them. Does that surprise you, No, not at all, and you have alluded to I mean, this is a guy that can be a stand up comedian or the commissioner of the NFL. Let's be honest. I mean, the guy is a brilliantly educated man with all kinds of experiences. But what brings him back to Saint Paul, his family in the community, and what he can give to that space. I mean, the guy has loved in that community in terms of his years with the Vikings, then the impact he made with his Hike Foundation out here and there, and now the efforts that he's making, you know, in creating a school, and I mean, I don't even know the half of it, but what I know is that he's giving back to his community. At Bert's Twitter feed offers a nice picture of what he's all about. There's a blend of observations about the NFL, news, about his charitable works, a lot about Catholic education in some comedy. His profile pictures him with his wife and eight kids. Below it, he writes, Embrace the chaos. It's called life. Last month, he exchanged tweets with a comedian named Jen Follweiler, who was having some fun with the fact that Burke would be opening for her. She tweeted, should I use this picture to promote it, posting an on field shot of Burke from his NFL days, his helmet off, blood running down his nose. Yes, you should, Burke tweeted right back, because it screams I'm funny. I would love, dearly love to roll for you some audio from one of his performances. I know you'd enjoy it. But Burke has drawn a line in the sand. No money, no funny. He says, you only get to hear him if you pay to hear him at one of his events. He want you to attend to do good comedy show support one of his charities. As a result, there's no audio of him on stage performing, and as he pointed out to me when we spoke, the demand for bootleg tapes of his act isn't exactly soaring, so you'll just have to take it from me. He's getting more and more comfortable on stage, less and less afraid of being the stand up guy who bombs. I remember the headlighter. I'm always the warm up back. But yeah, it's fun. It's a challenge. There's probably nothing that can't be more vulnerable than going up on stage and trying to get people to laugh. You know, sometimes it's really good. Sometimes it's okay. I have yet to crash and burns there, so we'll just we'll just keep going. Yea, I failed that a lot of things, and if I went out there and bombed, and that doesn't really reflect on my character. But you know, it's just me up there bombing. But you know, football play but a lot harder. And if you don't play well, you know, to your job, you let your team. And so certainly I mean got she's almost get to the point of worked up to the point of vomiting before games. Sometimes I did. It's just so so anxious and nervous or excited and comedy come nowhere near to that, to that level of acre. Like a lot of stage, this is a lot easier. You can find out more about Burke and his career at Baltimore Ravens dot Com slash What Happened to That Guy? I'd like to thank him for speaking to me. I'd also like to thank Andy Bishop. Another new episode of What Happened To That Guy will drop in two weeks, and they'll keep coming every other week for the rest of the twenty nineteen season. Next up Chris Carr, a defensive back who played nine years in the NFL three with the Ravens early in the John Harbaugh era. A fine player in his day, Car has really moved on from football. He's now an immigration attorney with quite a story to tell. I hope you keep listening. If you like what you're hearing, don't hesitate to leave. A five star rating and write a review. Also subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes. This podcast and The Lounge, the excellent weekly podcast from my colleagues Ryan Meek and Garrett Downing, are part of the Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network. You can tell people just search for that wherever you get your podcasts, Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network and everything will come up. This is John Eisenberg. I'll talk to you in two weeks.

Welcome to What Happened to That Guy? A podcast about former Ravens and life after football. I'm your host, John Eisenberg. I hope you don't mind if I ask for a favor here at the start of episode number five. It's not a big favor. I'm going to set a scene and I want you to close your eyes try to envision it. Not if you're driving, of course, if you're driving, please don't close your eyes. Just pretend. The setting is a bar in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a typical sports bar kind of place. Brick walls, lots of TVs. It's a weekday evening and the place is dark, but it's rock and packed with enthusiastic customers. A small wooden stage it's been erected up front. It's empty right now save for a microphone stand. Then the house lights dim and the do Good comedy show begins. It's a night of stand up comics, performing one after the other. The crowd claps and whoops. When the opening act takes the stage. He's a big guy dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, his face vaguely familiar. He plucks the microphone off the stand and he starts talking. I used to play in the NFL, he says, in a flat Midwestern twang. I didn't think there was any way I could be more famous or more important. Then I retired and everyone forgot about me. That draws some giggles from the audience. The guy keeps going, I know some guys who are still playing in the NFL, and I tell them, you think you're such a big deal. Well, six months after you retire, people are going to be standing around the water cooler saying, you know, I'm never gonna forget. Oh what's his name? The audience laughs, He's funny. The big guy on stage, Matt Burke. He's funny. You remember him, right, Burke? Oh what's his name? He played center in the NFL for fourteen years, first with the Minnesota Vikings and then with the Ravens from two thousand nine through two thousand and twelve. When Joe Flacco led the Ravens to a Super Bowl title, Burke was snapping the ball to him, protecting him, helping make it all happen. He retired after that Super Bowl. He was thirty six and had accomplished everything there was to accomplish in football. What would he do with the rest of his life. Now there's a question. Matt Burke probably could have done just about anything. He earned an economics degree from Harvard. He could have become an NFL executive, maybe even commissioner one day. He could have run a team as a general manager or a salary cap guru. Hey, forget football. He could have gone to Wall Street and started a hedge fund. Instead, he's doing stand up comedy. I can't say I'm totally shocked that Matt Burke has become a stand up comedian. I'll always remember one of his interviews with the Baltimore media after an otherwise forgettable Ravens training camp practice at the under Armor Performance Center. It was a sweltering late summer afternoon. Burke had come off the field and was standing at the podium in full uniform, sweat cascading down. I'm sure he couldn't wait to get to the air condition cool of the locker room, but it was his turn to field some questions. Podium interviews during training camp are not always shall we say, super enlightening. Many disintegrate into cliches, especially on a sweltering day. Just getting my work in, embracing the grind, looking forward to a big year this time, though, A reporter asked Burke an unusual question, Matt, what are you reading? Being a Harvard guy, Burke invited that sort of thing, an economics book, he replied. The follow up question was inevitable. What's the book about, Matt, He paused, letting the mystery build. Oh, Burke said, it's a book about how we're all totally screwed. The media laughed. The guy at the podium the sweating center, Matt Burke. He was funny. When I spoke to Burke for this podcast, I recounted that scene and his punch line. He didn't remember it, but he laughed. Yeah, I've got a little bit of work. I'm a smart Alice get a bit sarcastic, so yeah, yeah, and it tortured saw when that's at all. You know, there's a famous show business joke you may have heard. Dying is easy, Comedy is hard, the point being it's pretty terrifying to get up in front of people and try to make them laugh. Burke had no intention of trying. What happened was a friend dared him, and Burke, like many NFL players, is so insanely competitive. That he couldn't stand to let the challenge go unaccepted. So he got up on on stage and it went well. He didn't crash and burn as they say. The audience didn't sit there silently staring at him with mounting disdain as his jokes fell flat. The audience laughed. They thought he was funny. I have a company where I do a fair amount of public speaking and consulting, and I'm not horrible at it seems to work. I don't mind you up on stage in front of people. How To likes to be entertained and informative, and so that comes to humor. To be clear, he isn't relying on stand up to support his family. He's forty three years old, married with eight kids and two dogs. He knows better than to base his ability to support a brood that large on whether he can make people laugh. The truth is Burke signed some nice contracts when he played for the Vikings and Ravens, and we didn't get into his financial situation when we spoke, but I'm guessing he's pretty smart with his money. He also has always recognized that they're a world beyond football, a real world where people have lots of problems. As hard as he worked to make it in the NFL and last so long, Burke believes he was lucky, unbelievably lucky. His perspective is that you're lucky to make a living, a nice living, playing a kid's game, as opposed to say, working in a mill or cranking out sales reports. And with his strong Catholic faith guiding him, he has always sought to share some of his good fortune give back to those not as fortunate. When he was playing, he had a foundation that provided educational opportunities to at risk kids, the Hike Foundation. It was called Hope Inspiration, Knowledge Education hik E. That's also what Burke did on the field, of course, hike the ball. When he played for the Ravens, he frequently could be found in schools helping with literacy. These days, he's involved with numerous charities. If it's a cause he supports and they have a sound plan, he's in in the midst of doing that, he was struck by a thought one day. These charities, most of their fundraising events tend to be well boring. You know, thanks for coming, blah blah blah, here's what we do blah blah, blah, leave your check on the table, blah blah blah. Burke thought, why not put on a fundraising event that's actually fun. Hire comedians, rent out a bar, give people a reason to laugh as they write those checks. Goodness knows we could all stand to laugh a little more these days. So we put together the first edition of what he calls the Do Good Comedy Show. Lined up some real comedians, professionals, went on stage himself, and the event drew a big crowd, raised a bunch of money. Now he's done it seven or eight times, and there's more coming, and we've raised about four than a million dollars for charities through these events. He had long with raising money, and we're able to do with it. I figure, what the heck? Everyone needs to and wants to laugh a little bit more. How does he come up with his jokes? Well, eight kids and two dogs start right there. Most of my material probably comes from from having eight kids. I don't need to look very far as find material or to feel humbled on a daily basis, And I think most people can relate to that. You know, parenting is hard, and kids have a way of making you feel like your normal failure. Sometimes so I think I tapped into that and most people can relate. He also riffs on being a big dumb football lineman, not that anyone takes him for that, and I'm being a guy whose time has come and gone. He'll go. People ask me how I'm doing in life after football? Well, here I am standing in front of a room full of strangers, begging for your acceptance. How do you think I'm doing. When he played football, Burke didn't give too much thought to what he might do after he retired. You get later out of your career, probably from my year ten on. During the season that was like, yeah, it's gonna be my last year. Your body heard retired, hits the struggle, and then the season ends, the rest a little bit, and yet you kind of forget help, help, how bad it hurts, he said, I himil year. The thing with Burke's final years, which he spent in Baltimore, because he had never played in the Super Bowl and the Ravens were close in twenty eleven, Billy kind of missed the kick they kept them from taking the AFC Championship game into overtime in New England. Burke couldn't let that be his last act. So we came back in twenty twelve. Good call. The Ravens won the AFC North, rolled through the conference playoffs, beating the Patriots in New England, and then they won a thrilling Super Bowl over the San Francisco forty nine ers. Even after that, though Burke had second thoughts about retiring, the Super Bowl triumph provided him with the perfect opportunity to take that dream ride into the sunset. You could go out on top. But he fought it. There was a big part of me that wanted to come back. Idiom never went in on super Bowls, right, and we knew that's why John Brady's still playing. But for me it was like man to win. It was so hard and then the repeat is even harder, and like let's go, let's go try to accomplish. Back in my head to the Senate, trying to Brewer be back a little bit. It's been a ridiculously good run, way way way better than I could have ever hoped to dream for just seeming when it was it was the right time to stop and be around for my family more and we're r onto what's next. We're on the lights Without football. He took a year off, wrote a book, and then he took a job with the NFL. The league office brought him in to be the appeals officer on player fines for illegal hits. It became his job to step in after a player had been fined for a hit and the player had appealed to fine for being unfair or excessive. Burke would listen to everyone one's version of events and render a judgment, basically rule whether the fine should be upheld, reduced, or erased. Entirely, you're standing on a phone call and you've got the final say, and on one side you've got this player who's making millions of dollars, and you get to head coach, and you get the general manager, and they're all leading the case from the player. And then on the other side you've got the union who's trying to support the player. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, everybody on this call is making millions and millions of dollars here, and the guy that gets the final say is the woman had to save his twelve dollars lunturret seats so he gets reimbursed. He ruled on cases involving former teammates and former opponents guys. He'd been on the field with a tricky business for sure. He also was making decisions that could pretty much determine how a team's season went. So there's some pretty high pressure hearings. You know, there's a lot of stake, and knowing that he suspend a star player for a game or two, that might mean the difference in that teammates in the playoffs, that might mean the difference in that coach or that coach, the staff keeping their jobs. There's a lot too. I for Ultimately, I was trying to do what was speared the rules and how the rule were written, and what was in the best interest of the game. It was actually really interesting time because that was the year that they drastically changed the rules and the helmets sailts hit with the defenseless players, and so there was a lot of adjustment going on by everybody. It was difficult, you know, I don't think anybody was out there trying to if receivers going across the fiddle. There wasn't anybody trying to potentionally take somebody's head off. But there was a lot of guys trying to retrain themselves so they would be within the new rule. Even as hard as they tried, sometimes it didn't work out that way that guys were getting fine and guys were frustrated. So it was pretty interesting. In the end, though the job became somewhat monotonous. Burke only stayed a year. The NFL gave him another job, actually, Roger Goodell did. The commissioner wanted Burke to learn the business side of pro football. It was flattering an opportunity he couldn't pass up. Who knows what it might have led to, certainly a high profile position down the line, But Burke was living on the East Coast doing the long commute hustle here and their thing, and he and his wife longed for the slower pace of the Midwest, specifically Minneapolis and Saint Paul, where they've both grown up. Burke quit working for the NFL after two years of learning the business side. He and his wife and their eight kids and their two dogs all moved back to the Twin Cities. It sounds like a sitcom, doesn't it, But this is real life. The Burkes have been back for two years and they've settled in nicely between his charity work, speaking business and consulting opportunities. Burke has plenty going on. Now he's taken on yet another new adventure, one he never could have anticipated when he was playing football. He is co founding a Catholic high school. Right now, you look at the education system in the model, it's a little bit broken that it needs to be tweets, it's very anequated. Has that changed a lot over the years, even though if you look at our world and how kids live, how families live, things have changed drastically. And I thought, you know what, am I going to sit around and complain about it? Or am I going to do something about it? So we're opening up a new high school in September this year, Catholic High School. Our models a little bit different. We're going to focus on, of course, traditional academics, but also very much on leadership, character and entrepreneurship. But if you look at the economy of the future, which means ten years from now, what kind of skills are going to be in demand? This leadership and character and entrepreneurship, it's creativity, It's a lot of these things. It's start being cultivated in the traditional academic environment. These are things Burke has been thinking about since he stopped playing football. He's funny, but as you may have noticed, he's also serious about making the world a better place. I'm just kind of an entrepreneur by by nature, and this is something that saw it needs there they'll be doing. And I thought, hey, I got to put a bunch of kids through I school anyway, so I want them to be educated the way that I want them to be educated. That I think that's the sound and I think there a show of the country that there's a better way to do things. The response from the local Catholic school community has staggered him. If you have a good mission and a good vision, people stretch forward. They identify themselves and they say, I want to help. So there's no money in Catholic education, there's no money. See get people that are driven like pure altruistic motives to believe in what you're doing. And so yeah, there's no way anybody can do this by themselves. I certainly can do about by myself. But the people that have stepped forward, it's just it's fantastic and it's really fun to watch it, To watch it from to fruition, to watch it to start to come together. I think that's a god thing. When you're talking about great based education. I think it's the best thing there is, I think for kids right now these days, living in this crazy world I can edge and growing up and trying to navigate and figure out your value system and where you're sitting with how it's the foundation of faith. So that's just grateful to be a part of this. He'll sit on the school's board of directors and help teach what they're calling real World Wednesdays, which will include leadership training and a service component. It's a long way from playing in the Super Bowl. I know I'm probably never going to have another job as coolest playing in the NFL or whether that's gonna pay like playing in the NFL. But I feel like, God, you gotta plan for my life like he does for everybody. I just have to try to figure out what that is and calling that direction. I mean, that's just that's just life. It turns out there's a Matt Burke expert on the Ravens coaching staff, the current one. Yep, you wouldn't expect it, but Andy Bishoff, the assistant tight ends coach, goes way way back with Burke. They both grew up in Saint Paul Minnesota, and although Bischoff is eight years older, their paths have repeatedly crossed. I sat down with Andy to talk about Burke and and wound up gaining great insight into his past, present, and future. Here's Andy. I was coaching youth baseball for a fourteen and under team, and he was on the rival teams. So I was at this inner city urban he was in a little bit more of an affluent area, and we were very good youth baseball teams, and he was on the other team as the kind of the closer, the high profile picture, long, lean kid and very confident and plenty of opinions. You know, we're gonna win, We're gonna beat you guys, You're gonna beat us, that kind of a thing. But that's when we really met. Then he was a little older and he was a caddy at a country club. I was in college and decided to do some caddy. So we got to know each other a little bit more there here I was eight ten years older than him, but he was the veteran caddy. I was the new guy, So of course he wasn't gonna let that not be known. You know that he was the veteran caddy. So he's always had a great sense of humor. I was this public school guy. Many of the caddies were private school kids. I was a little bit of the outsoorder. I mean, these caddies are all fourteen fifteen, sixteen, and I was in college and somebody said, hey, you want to make some easy money, go double baggot a town and country golf course with long Behold. There's Matt Burke, who is the half boss of the caddyshack. So I'm working for him, you know. So he didn't let that go without being noticed. You know, Hey, Bischoff, get to work, you know what I mean. So it just goes on and on. Today Bischoff is in his fifth year on John Harbaugh's staff. Before that, he coached with the Chicago Bears and the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. His career began with a coaching job at Creton Durhamhall High School in Saint Paul, a Minnesota powerhouse. That's where Burke went to high school. Bischoff started coaching there in nineteen ninety three, the year after Burke graduated. He was a great player there. He originally had a scholarship offer to the University of Minnesota. Through a series of really odd events, they pulled the scholarship late, that recruiting coach was banned from the building, and how poorly he handled the Burke situation. He then moved on when to Harvard did his thing? Was a great player at Harvard. You mentioned the stand up comedy. We ran a youth football camp at Creten Daham Hall. That kind of began during his days at Harvard. Now Here he is he's a you know, well known Now he's going to start a school, and now he's a comedian and all those things. But at our football camp, he gave his first public speech to our players at the camp, and I had always wanted to ask former players, hey, could he give the guys a couple of words? And he said, very clearly, this is my first public speaking in front of guys like this. How do he did great? He mixed a great balance of pointed seriousness and comedy. I mean, Matt always has a way of slipping in humor. His direction as a comedian doesn't surprise me. And really, going back to youth baseball, he's smart, he's sharp, he's witty, you know, and it comes quickly to him. So I mean stand up is a fit because it's improv you know, he can improv and he can roll, which is a great quality of his. Bishoff and Burke continue to run into each other after the Minnesota Vikings selected Burke in the sixth round of the nineteen ninety eight NFL Draft. Quite a faithful event actually, considering Burke's Minnesota roots. Burke won a place on his hometown team's roster. He would eventually develop into a perennial pro bowler. Meanwhile, Bischoff was still coaching at Creton Durhamhall High School. In Burke's early years with the Vikings, every Sunday morning we went to a particular breakfast place called Keys Cafe, and every Sunday morning, Matt was sitting in the corner, sitting eating breakfast by himself. But we didn't realize at the time was that he was scouting his future wife. Her family owned this restaurant and she was one of the waitresses. Her name's Adriana. As we all know, he's sitting eating breakfast by himself every week working on her. We're working on our coaching staff stuff. Of course, the rest his history and they're married, all the kids and everything else. His family. I mean, you want to talk about an assault to the earth family, I mean his mom and dad, beautiful people, two brothers, all three very good athletes. Mad'll tell you that Nick and Ben, his brothers, were much better athletes than him. He may not admit that, but he knows it. He just found his way to the NFL. Really athletic family, hard working, great people, core Saint Paul, Minnesota people. So it doesn't surprise you. After football, you know, he worked for the NFL for a while in the league office and after a while sort of chucked it and he was going down an interesting road in the NFL, but he and his wife wanted to live in the Twin Cities. That was more important to them. Does that surprise you, No, not at all, and you have alluded to I mean, this is a guy that can be a stand up comedian or the commissioner of the NFL. Let's be honest. I mean, the guy is a brilliantly educated man with all kinds of experiences. But what brings him back to Saint Paul, his family in the community, and what he can give to that space. I mean, the guy has loved in that community in terms of his years with the Vikings, then the impact he made with his Hike Foundation out here and there, and now the efforts that he's making, you know, in creating a school, and I mean, I don't even know the half of it, but what I know is that he's giving back to his community. At Bert's Twitter feed offers a nice picture of what he's all about. There's a blend of observations about the NFL, news, about his charitable works, a lot about Catholic education in some comedy. His profile pictures him with his wife and eight kids. Below it, he writes, Embrace the chaos. It's called life. Last month, he exchanged tweets with a comedian named Jen Follweiler, who was having some fun with the fact that Burke would be opening for her. She tweeted, should I use this picture to promote it, posting an on field shot of Burke from his NFL days, his helmet off, blood running down his nose. Yes, you should, Burke tweeted right back, because it screams I'm funny. I would love, dearly love to roll for you some audio from one of his performances. I know you'd enjoy it. But Burke has drawn a line in the sand. No money, no funny. He says, you only get to hear him if you pay to hear him at one of his events. He want you to attend to do good comedy show support one of his charities. As a result, there's no audio of him on stage performing, and as he pointed out to me when we spoke, the demand for bootleg tapes of his act isn't exactly soaring, so you'll just have to take it from me. He's getting more and more comfortable on stage, less and less afraid of being the stand up guy who bombs. I remember the headlighter. I'm always the warm up back. But yeah, it's fun. It's a challenge. There's probably nothing that can't be more vulnerable than going up on stage and trying to get people to laugh. You know, sometimes it's really good. Sometimes it's okay. I have yet to crash and burns there, so we'll just we'll just keep going. Yea, I failed that a lot of things, and if I went out there and bombed, and that doesn't really reflect on my character. But you know, it's just me up there bombing. But you know, football play but a lot harder. And if you don't play well, you know, to your job, you let your team. And so certainly I mean got she's almost get to the point of worked up to the point of vomiting before games. Sometimes I did. It's just so so anxious and nervous or excited and comedy come nowhere near to that, to that level of acre. Like a lot of stage, this is a lot easier. You can find out more about Burke and his career at Baltimore Ravens dot Com slash What Happened to That Guy? I'd like to thank him for speaking to me. I'd also like to thank Andy Bishop. Another new episode of What Happened To That Guy will drop in two weeks, and they'll keep coming every other week for the rest of the twenty nineteen season. Next up Chris Carr, a defensive back who played nine years in the NFL three with the Ravens early in the John Harbaugh era. A fine player in his day, Car has really moved on from football. He's now an immigration attorney with quite a story to tell. I hope you keep listening. If you like what you're hearing, don't hesitate to leave. A five star rating and write a review. Also subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes. This podcast and The Lounge, the excellent weekly podcast from my colleagues Ryan Meek and Garrett Downing, are part of the Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network. You can tell people just search for that wherever you get your podcasts, Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network and everything will come up. This is John Eisenberg. I'll talk to you in two weeks.