When the cleats come off and the stadium lights dim, what’s next for a former NFL star? Gary Baxter, once a cornerback for the Baltimore Ravens, joins us to share his journey after pro football. Baxter discusses the importance of precise goal-setting—a lesson learned from reaching the Hall of Fame in high school and college. Through personal anecdotes, he offers a candid look at the necessity of money management for athletes dazzled by substantial contracts.
In an engaging dialogue, hear about the gridiron’s technological evolution, where AI and data analysis are revolutionizing both player safety and preparation. Baxter weighs in on how these advancements provide an edge, not only to those in the league but to sports enthusiasts at every level.
TRANSCRIPT
LANDESS:
He was an outstanding football player at John Tyler High School and later at Baylor University before embarking on a career in the NFL with Baltimore and Cleveland. I’m UT Tyler Radio News Director Mike Landess. Now he’s back home in Texas. With deep East Texas roots and UT Tyler Radio Connects with Tyler native Gary Baxter. What was it like watching a quarterback from Whitehouse put away your former Ravens team?
BAXTER:
Well, I tell you what. It was, I was sad in the moment, and I was not doing well, but I was happy for him. It’s one of those bittersweet moments, right? So I was bitter because we was losing, but it’s also sweet because I also like to see someone from East Texas do well, too. So, I was having a little mixed emotional day.
LANDESS:
I get that. I totally do. I mentioned that you were a standout player at John Tyler and Baylor. You’re in the Tyler ISD Sports Hall of Fame, the Baylor Hall of Fame. Knee injuries pretty much cut any hopes of an NFL Hall of Fame bid, right?
BAXTER:
Yes, you know, but you know, it’s a funny thing you say that because when I was young, I used to always pray and say, “God, I just want to be in the Hall of Fame, I want to be in the Hall of Fame, I want to be in the Hall of Fame.” And then I got in the Hall of Fame in high school. I got in the Hall of Fame in college. And then I realized, I said, “God, I wasn’t specific. I should have said the NFL Hall of Fame.” And I just said you know what, I take it, I love it and it’s just, the moral to the story is, whenever you pray to God, be very specific, be careful what you ask for, and be very specific, but yes, it’s a great thing, though.
LANDESS:
Now, when those outside of professional sports see athletes sign contracts for millions of dollars, many think, boy, that guy is set for life. But it’s not that easy, is it?
BAXTER:
No, it’s not that easy. You got Uncle Sam. You got some taxes you got to pay. You got some agents you got to pay. You got some past bills you got to pay. And then, you also got to be really good at just managing money, because you know it’s not, you’re getting that money all up front, but that is supposed to go over your lifetime. You know, your family. So you really want to be careful. So it’s not all what you think it is, and if it’s whatever, you get just half, and put it in half, because Uncle Sam wants half.
LANDESS:
Well now, when those outside of professional sports see athletes such as yourself, had their career end, like yours did in Cleveland in 2008. What kinds of projects and endeavors have you been involved in since?
BAXTER:
Oh, great question. So I, you know, I went back to school, and I decided to get into business. I think once you play professional sports, I tell all athletes this: you know, your name, your last name is a walking billboard, right? So once you get done, I think you have the drive, you have the discipline, you have the principles and the drive to get up and go every day. It’s just not doing any sports now. So now you have to take that and transition that over to the business world, and it’s parallel to the sports world. You got to still stay disciplined, be on time, work hard and just try to maneuver people, but at the same time, those skills and those qualities that you learned from sports, you apply them to the business world, and then great things happen. So for me, I decided to get into real estate. I wanted to get into commercial real estate. I wanted to learn about business. I started learning about business infrastructure, business administration, and you know, some of the ups and downs that a lot of people and businesses that had very great success, and then they went through turmoil, right, they went down. How did they come out of that? So those are the stories that I learned, and then getting into it. And the best teaching in business is you got to get in. I tell people you ain’t been in business until you had to meet payroll.
LANDESS:
That’s the truth. Any small business person will say that one.
BAXTER:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. When you meet payroll, you’re in business, and then you really get the green. You just get going and you really understand it. But it’s just been, it’s been blessing to me, you know, get to meet new people and just do things that you know that you love to do.
LANDESS:
Now in that time I also understand that you were involved in radio with the Ravens and the Browns. Do you think that at some point you’d like to work in the broadcast booth as a profession?
BAXTER:
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I love radio. You know sports is always exciting, and then that allowed me to get into radio. I love radio. I love radio more than TV. I tell people that. And because, there’s just something about radio. When you’re talking about radio, just like me and you having a conversation right now, you can do that. But on TV, you really can’t do that, and people it’s not always going to be in front of your TV, people are everywhere. So, listening to radio, you can really connect with people, and people want to hear from you. It’s really hard for people to connect with you on TV because it’s so quick, it’s so fast. But radio–we can have a conversation, this segment, and then come back next segment and the segment, another segment after that, and really connect with people. So that’s the reason why I love radio so much — versus TV.
LANDESS:
Oh, want to buy a radio station? Are you thinking about it?
BAXTER:
Well, you know, anything’s possible. I am an entrepreneur. So, uh, you know, this is my passion, my love and, I tell people, if sports was my passion and my love, then this is also my passion and my love. I’m a communication major at Baylor. So you never know, you just never know. I might be, I might be buying something. Maybe I might look into it and invest into it.
LANDESS:
Well, it makes sense to me. At one point, weren’t you part of an effort to help other athletes who had been sidelined by injuries? I mean, after all that you went through 2006 to 2008 and trying to come back and that bad knee and that sort of thing. Tell me about that.
BAXTER:
Well, you know, one of the things that us, as athletes, we train our bodies, we get our bodies ready to go and perform at the highest level. So, but then what happens is you got all these beautiful facilities out here that you could go to and train and work out at, but then when you get hurt, right. So when you get hurt or something happens, then where are the facilities at that we can go to? It’s not like a regular facility, because we are high performance, right? We’re really training and very specific, so we need to go have a facility that’s very specific for us and our injuries. And so, we didn’t have that. And so, yes, I was one of the pioneers of trying to put one of those facilities together and started guys to talk about life after the game, right. So you know, we’re great athletes when we were young. You know, you’re 20 years old, you’re 30 years old, but what happens when you’re 40 and 50 and 60 years old, right? So what are those challenges look like as an athlete, cause, we beat our bodies up, we put our bodies through extreme stress and rigorous pressure, and so what do we look like when we 40, 50, 60 years old? And so, those are the things that we was looking at doing and still doing as well, still doing some research on that as well.
LANDESS:
Let me ask you something. When you, when you see a young player, sometimes right out of high school or just barely in college, and they’re really a standout, I mean they are quite amazing. Do you see them, do you see them being taken care of if they make that leap to professional football?
BAXTER:
Well, the game is changing, just like everything else. Technology, the game, everyone’s communicating, and science, right? I mean you gotta, you gotta, really I tell people, training when we was training back then, training today is totally different than when you have older guys back, Too Tall Jones when they was training, right. So, those guys in Emmet Smith and Tony Dorsett was training totally different than how you would have an Adrian Peterson or someone training today, right? So it’s totally different because of the technology. But I will say that you know, with the advancement of technology, training, data, science — there’s AI in sports, right? You just, how many, how many sports injuries that certain people get, why, when, in what kind of training that they’re doing. We’re marketing, writing all that stuff down and using videos and capturing all that. So that AI is helping us to train better, smarter and then using — there’s a lot of chips, right? There’s a lot of sensors that you’re putting in your helmets and your shoulder pads or in your clothes, on your body, so you could tell how hot your body’s getting, how much sweat, how much water, you know. So those what I call KPIs, key point indicators, and in the sports data world is happening to advance the sports and happening to prevent injuries. And, last thing I will say, that data that helps athlete also helps the general public as well. For those people to get athlete-type injuries from your weekend warriors or people who are active, from running, jogging and swimming, whatever the case may be, well, they’re still athletes. They might not just be competing where people can see, but they have athlete injuries, and so that data helps the general population as well.
LANDESS:
I’m a football fan, but my wife is really a football fan. And she has noted any number of times in an NFL game that we’ve watched, on a given weekend, and she’ll say, “My gosh, those guys hit harder.” And they, I mean they don’t get up right away, and it seems like it’s tougher. As a guy who was out there on the field 20 years ago, I mean, now you look back at it, and do you, do you see what she’s seeing? Is it tougher out there these days?
BAXTER:
Actually, I’m going to say, I’m gonna say the opposite. And the reason why I say the opposite, and here’s, I’m gonna give you a little insight. Reason why I say the opposite I mean, those guys are still running faster. They’re there, they’re running into each other, and the collisions are real, right? The collisions are real. But the difference is I think we was tougher because we did actual two practices a day. Well, which you used to hear it called two-a-days, right? These guys don’t do that anymore, and it’s more for safety prevention and trying to make the game better. But at the same time you’re making the game better, these guys are, when they’re getting hit, they’re running into each other very fast and hard. They’re not, they don’t sustain the injuries. I mean, we just didn’t get hurt like that because I think we made ourselves tougher, and we conditioned ourselves for that physicality type of impact. And so when you don’t hit or you don’t run into each other all the time, and you only save that when it’s on game days, then, yes, you see the injuries happening more, and you see the guys getting up slower versus when we were doing it. I mean, we was used to it, we was kind of, you know, we hardened our bodies for the game. So it really didn’t affect us at the time. You know, we didn’t know we was hard on our bodies. But I look back and say I’m glad we did that because if we didn’t, I couldn’t imagine just going out on Sundays, in our Saturdays or Sundays, and then just playing right away and just running into someone for the first time and not really feeling that impact and then getting my body used to it.
LANDESS: Well, it’s also important to to see the advent of the protocols for concussion, and that pulls players out pretty quickly too, but it’s now we’re beginning to see, and I’m sure that you have people that you’ve known over the years that have gone through this — the issues of concussions and maybe the issues that they face later on in life.
BAXTER: Well, and you know, I think now we are more aware of the concussions, and we want to do more precaution measures and things like that to help the athlete and improve the game as well. And then try to study what is the long-term impact of that, right? So we’re now kind of seeing some of that. And so as to know the future, you got to know the history, right? So we’re seeing the history, what guys went through, the older guys went through, and now we, kind of understanding, have a better understanding of the future, which is allowing the NFL to put these rules in place to try to protect the game and try to protect the players and try to curb some of the things that are happening with a lot of our older guys and older players. But I think it’s, you know, you’re talking about football, right? This is a gladiator sport. This is a sport that, you know, you have human beings are running into each other full speed. So you know it’s, it’s you do your very best, but at the end of the day, we are running into each other.
LANDESS:
That’s part of what it’s all about. Now, what kinds of things are you looking for your future back here in Texas, now that you’ve been back for a while?
BAXTER:
Well, you know, I always like to make my community better. It’s always, you know, I always try to make your community better than you found it, and just give back, and try to find out ways to reach the young kids. You know, technology is changing a lot of things, right? So I’m used to being sociable with people. And then you got the younger generation. They like to be on their iPhone or they phone or their device, and they’re not really sociable, right? They not, they just, so I try to go back and give them an example. Yes, I’ve been there, I done that, and I’m still trying to look what’s now, what’s next? You know, keep going, keep improving and always try to give back, and try to feed that back into the community, but really invest in the community and try to create jobs. That’s what I want to do.
LANDESS:
Thanks for listening as UT Tyler Radio Connects with ex-NFL player and native Tylerite, Gary Baxter. To share, listen again, or for a transcript of this interview, visit our website uttylerradio.org. To be notified about future episodes, subscribe to UT Tyler Radio Connects on your favorite podcast platform. For UT Tyler Radio News, I’m Mike Landess.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)
