from Alex Prewitt of Sports Illustrated,
Beyond the colossal 44-½-foot RV backed into the driveway, the first thing visitors notice upon entering Brent Burns’s home is a life-sized, armored medieval knight keeping watch over the foyer, spear at his side. Fear not, though, for this is a welcoming place.
Burns invited me here one day after practice in late April, between the Sharks’ first-round win over Los Angeles and the start of their Western Conference semifinals series against Nashville. He kicked off his shoes, offered a cheery hello to the cleaning crew and walked out back, underneath the American flags gifted to him by military units that hang over the kitchen and the unopened Brent Burns Chia Pet box sitting on the counter.
Burns and his wife, Susan, bought this place in 2012, after his first season with San Jose. It’s close enough to the team's practice facility that he enjoys biking there in the summer. He also likes the spacious backyard where sometimes the family pitches tents, lights a fire, grills meat, toasts s’mores and camps out under the stars. Right now, he’ll settle for tossing some chicken onto the Green Egg while his two huskies, Zeus and Maia, lounge at his feet.
It was a beautiful afternoon, as afternoons often are in San Jose, and much of our conversation over the next four hours made it into a feature story in this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. Yes, Burns fully embraces the public’s image of him that he calls “being a goofy donkey.” For instance, during lunch, he’ll open a package of beard wax that had been gifted by a company and begin working his mustache into a curl. “This is pretty soft, this one,” he says. “It’ll be hard to get the twist.”
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