Nate Burleson Is Having the Time of His Life
Inside the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, a stuffed squirrel is taunting Nate Burleson. It’s laughing at him and, a moment later, presses a giant red button. Fluorescent-green slime pours onto Burleson. It’s bracingly cold and can stain clothing, but he claps his hands and grins wide. Another episode of Nickelodeon’s NFL Slimetime has just wrapped.
Welcome to life after professional football. Nate Burleson is enjoying the hell out of it.
If you’ve watched football since the turn of the twenty-first century, you know Burleson. For eleven years, he was a wide receiver and kick returner for the Minnesota Vikings, Seattle Seahawks, and Detroit Lions. He was good, but he didn’t put up Hall of Fame numbers or hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy. If you’ve been watching TV lately, then you’ve almost certainly seen him. The forty-three-year-old is a coanchor of CBS Mornings, an analyst on The NFL Today, the host of the rebooted Hollywood Squares, and a cohost of NFL Slimetime, on which he’s been slimed no fewer than twenty times.
“Bring it by the boatload!” he tells me on a Friday morning in New York, still fresh and energetic after two hours of live TV on CBS Mornings.
Transitioning out of professional sports is like returning from the moon. How could life after such a high-adrenaline experience ever compare? It drove Buzz Aldrin nuts, and it sparks an existential crisis among many athletes—including Burleson, who retired in 2014. Never winning a Super Bowl worsened the sting. “You have to come to grips with it,” he says. “How are you dealing with this?”
Burleson cast about for meaning. He opened a restaurant in Seattle, started a couple fashion lines. A year after retirement came his dark night of the soul—which, he admits, is pretty damn funny in retrospect. “I’m literally drunk watching my old highlights: ‘Look at those moves. Damn that guy was good. Look at those hips.’ ” Then he texted one of his former NFL coaches. “I heard you guys had some injuries,” he wrote. “Let me know if you want me to come out there.”
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