It’s tough being a high-profile professional athlete and having to be careful about who texts you — especially when one of those texts could have been a big opportunity.

Former New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end Rob Gronkowski won multiple Super Bowls, including one in Tampa Bay in 2020, and since then, he’s been asked plenty if he plans on coming out of retirement, both by media and by NFL players hoping to lure him to their team. And on the Dudes on Dudes pod with former teammate Julian Edelman, Gronkowski revealed that his distaste for answering unknown phone numbers caused him to accidentally ghost one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks.

Gronkowski revealed that Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow reached out to him to try and get him to play for the Bengals — and that, due to a prior incident with a fan pretending to be former New England Patriots defensive tackle Malcom Brown, Gronkowski ignored the text from a number he didn’t recognize.

“I was like ‘I ain’t getting got again, like, this is nuts,'” Gronkowski told Edelman. “So I’m at the White Party this year, I go up to him… within 10 seconds, he’s like, ‘Yo, you never responded to me,’ and I knew exactly what he was talking about.”

See the full story from Gronkowski and Edelman below:

That didn’t happen, though, and Gronkowski retired as a member of the Buccaneers. He even recently appeared back in his home uniform to hype up the crowd in Tampa Bay when the team played the Baltimore Ravens on Monday Night Football.