It’s a refreshing perspective, really. Personal growth and introspection aren’t exactly buzzwords in an NFL locker room. And it’s an outlook that’s shared by his position coach, Matt Burke, a notorious thrill-seeker and fellow offseason adventurer. Burke’s been to Peru, too, among dozens of far-flung destinations over the last several years — scuba diving in Belize, ice climbing in New Zealand, hiking the jungles of Cambodia and Thailand. In July, while Levy was in the Amazon, Burke was somewhere in the middle of Mongolia.
“There’s getting away,” Burke says, “and then there’s getting away. I head to Mongolia with my backpack and I’m 500 miles from civilization. It kind of clears my mind. And I think for him, there’s a little bit of that, too.”
“Some people maybe misunderstand him a little bit,” said Burke, 37, a Dartmouth grad with a psychology degree. “And I don’t want to use the word ‘Renaissance Man,’ but there are guys whose whole identity is football, basically. With Lev, he’s obviously got a lot of other interests outside the realm. But the thing is, he’s a strong enough personality, strong enough in his identity, that it doesn’t affect him.”
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Stumbled across this, which does a pretty good job of explaining the college . . .
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That's it for today folks. We're headed over to the Maine coast this morning for our "summer" vacation. We'll be back home tonight and back at it tomorrow :-(
