Burris ‘at peace, big time’ with life outside world of football
Henry Burris digs deep, three decades into his past, as he ponders the question.
When was the last time he didn’t have a football season to prepare for?
“I think I was 10 years old. That was the last time,” Burris said Thursday during a stopover in Saskatoon, where he was the guest speaker at the University of Saskatchewan Huskies fundraising Dogs’ Breakfast.
Well, he’s doing it again. CFL training camps are a few weeks away and Burris won’t be there — not in pads, anyway, after his off-season retirement. Burris, 41, played 18 CFL seasons, spent a bit of time in the NFL and won three Grey Cups, including the 2016 game with the Ottawa Redblacks.
And there’s not a single twinge of regret, he says, as he eases into life without a helmet — although he expects the Redblacks’ season opener to be a rough one for him personally, given his longtime tie to the league.
“I’m at peace, big time. I am at peace,” said Burris, who has landed an on-air job with CTV Morning Live in Ottawa. “Just that one game; that will be a tough one for me.
“Being able to walk off the field in that manner, winning a Grey Cup in my last game, that’s something very few get to experience. I won a championship. I helped change a city. I helped bring football back to Ottawa. I left the game without any concussions. I won’t have any ailments that will prohibit me from playing with my kids in the back yard.”
Earlier in the morning, Burris joked with the crowd about those millennials coming into the locker-room every season — trying to steal his job, taking jabs at his advanced age, clutching their electronic devices and monitoring their social-media platforms, looking at him with confusion when he mentioned singers like Barry White.
Later, Burris wore a broad smile as he greeted a long line of fans wanting to meet him — some of them, most likely, the same folks who felt jilted when he left the Saskatchewan Roughriders for a better offer with the Calgary Stampeders in 2005.
A sizable portion of Roughriders fans never really forgave Burris — but Thursday in Saskatoon, that water flowed under the bridge.
Once the crowd melted away, Burris talked about his drive to become a Canadian citizen. He applied for permanent residency on April 24 and will meet with his local MP on May 10. It’s time, he says, for his family to embrace the country that gave him a career.
It’s funny, he adds, to see where life took a football-loving kid from Oklahoma. The teenage Burris would have never seen himself becoming a Canadian citizen someday, but here he is.
“I never thought I’d be living in Ottawa; I never thought I’d be in Regina,” Burris said. “Who ever could have known these things? That’s the beautiful thing called life, and the journeys it takes you on.”