Giant Talent: A Q&A with Tiki Barber

Tiki Barber, the all-time leading rusher for the New York Giants, walked away from pro football in 2006 at the top of his game. Since retiring he has stayed in the public eye as a broadcaster and TV personality, and his latest venture—Thuzio, a company he co-founded two years ago—aims to help other athletes maintain their brand and connect with fans.

Barber spoke with City & State Albany Bureau Chief Jon Lentz about life after professional sports, the midterm elections and his Super Bowl favorites.

The following is an edited transcript.

City & State: You just ran in the New York City Marathon. How was it?
Tiki Barber: It was interesting. I learned something. I tell people this all the time, everything you do in life, you learn something about yourself—so I learned that I’m a really good half-marathoner. [Laughs.] My first half was great. Then I got to the 59th Street Bridge and my long distance training started to fail me and my body started to cramp, and so as I tried to push myself up First Avenue I realized that I was going to hurt myself. So I just slowed down and enjoyed it. And then I pulled out my phone and I was taking pictures, and I saw on the New York Road Runners tracking app that my wife was catching up to me. So I slowed down and then waited for her for about 15 minutes at the finish line so we could cross the line together. It was a great experience—probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The bucket list has been checked, and I’ll do other athletic endeavors instead of running 26.2 miles again.

C&S: You ran on behalf of a charity, the PitCCh In Foundation, which was founded by Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia and his wife.
TB: My wife, Traci, and Amber, CC’s wife, have been close for about four years now. And over Memorial Day she asked us if we would run it. And just on a whim, we said, “Absolutely.” So we started training and getting in shape for it. PitCCh In is awesome, and we’ve been involved with it for a few years now. They help a lot of inner city kids. They build also build baseball fields, out in California where they are from and here in the tri-state area. They’ve just become friends, and anything that they’re doing we try to support.

C&S: You’ve done a variety of things since retiring from the NFL, but now you’re focusing on Thuzio, a booking service for athletes. How is that going?
TB: It’s for various types of events, whether it be a corporate speaking engagement or a bar mitzvah or a lunch or a dinner, or anything really—it could be a flag football game—anything you could think of, experiential-wise. We book a talent, whether that’s an athlete, or we’re moving into chefs and authors, and every other vertical you could think of. What we saw when we founded this company was that we were looking at needs. Mark Gerson is the co-founder, and I went to school with his brother, Rick, at the University of Virginia, so that’s how we got connected. We saw this problem that former athletes face: You have this brand that you’ve built for many years that, all of a sudden, you can’t monetize it anymore, because you’ve lost connection with your agent, with your community. But there’s still a desire for people to connect with you. But unless someone was actively in that market, you weren’t going to find the talent. So we created a marketplace for these types of transactions to occur. As any e-commerce business grows, you evolve, and over the last 10 months we’ve gotten really deep into producing events. That kind of happened because of the Super Bowl with a lot of corporate clients coming to us and saying, “We want to do this, we want to do that, we want to do X, Y, Z, can you help up put an event together with one of your great talents?” We had an event last night that is another product for us—the Thuzio Executive Club, which is about 50 people who come enjoy an evening with one of our high-end talents. Last night we had Lawrence Taylor. I moderated the discussion, and it was colorful, it was fun, it was unique, and we believe it’s an alternative to other forms of client entertainment like a steak dinner or a Knicks game. If you know your client has a passion for sports or football, this would have been a great event to go to. We’ve done 30 or so of those events in New York, and we expanded into Philadelphia and just recently into Chicago. And ultimately we want to be in all the major metropolitan markets across the country.

C&S: We cover political and government news—do you ever do these kinds of events for people in these circles?
TB: We could. It’s currently corporate because that’s what we focus on in New York City. Any group could be a client, and it’s just a matter of us having the bandwidth and making them aware of the opportunities. I just got a question last night about whether we book politicians to do these types of events, and we’ve never dived into it because it’s hard to get our head around how to compensate them without running afoul of federal or local laws. But political groups are certainly potential clients: If they want to book a talent or put on an event with a talent, [then] we have to talk about whatever it may be.

C&S: You have a sports radio show, but you have also done some political coverage, including interviewing folks like U.S. Sen. John McCain. Any reaction to the recent midterm elections?
TB: We’re in an interesting point in our political life right now in this country, with the Republicans in control of both houses, and in a couple of years we may have a Republican president as well. Politically this country is at an interesting inflection point. We hear all the catchphrases like “mandates”—what this country wants. It gets complicated. I had a very unique journalistic background because I got into it doing sports because I wasn’t a very good football player. But then I got an opportunity with Sirius, when Sirius was starting to expand their programming, to do a show that had nothing to do with sports. My first guest was John McCain, and I interviewed some sports guests like Jim Brown, and the head of NASA because I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. It was great to open my eyes to different lanes in this country that I was interested in but never got involved with. That’s why I got involved in politics—not so much because I love or want to be a commentator on politics, but because I was interested in it as a consumer of our world.

C&S: How can New York fans tune in your morning show on CBS Sports Radio?
TB: In New York, we’re not on locally. Our local affiliate for CBS is WFAN, so naturally we compete against them, so we’re not on in New York. They don’t really need us as a show because they have affiliate programming. The best way for New Yorkers to catch what we’re doing is the CBS Sports app or TuneIn Radio or any of those other radio applications. Or we have a website that broadcasts our show, called watchtbd.com, which is a video broadcast of our show.

C&S: Any favorites to make it to the Super Bowl this year?
TB: This season is interesting in the NFL. It’s unpredictable. You have a team like Pittsburgh reel off three wins and then lose to a team like the Jets. There’s lots of ups and downs. If there’s two teams that are well positioned, obviously Denver, having Peyton Manning, the best player on the planet right now, and then Arizona, even though they lost their quarterback, I love their coach, Bruce Arians, who I’ve known, interestingly, since I was a baby—

C&S: He was a family friend, right?
TB: Yeah, a close friend. He was a roommate of my father at Virginia Tech and, obviously, we stayed close over the years. The mentality he has brought to that team—they’re not world beaters, they don’t rank in the top in offense or defense, but they make plays when they need to win, and they don’t make a ton of mistakes. It will be interesting to see what will happen now that Carson Palmer is out for the season. Currently they have the best record in the NFC, really the best record in football. They’re my favorite right now, along with the Broncos.