Boers: Remembering The Great Bryan Burwell
By Terry Boers-
(CBS) The first time I set foot inside the storied walls of Madison Square Garden came during the 1982-'83 NBA season when I was a rookie on the beat, covering the Bulls for the Sun-Times.
After arriving ultra-early for the game, I had been given a quick tour of the most famous basketball arena on the planet by one of the Knicks' PR flaks, making sure I knew where the press room and locker rooms were located and how to get to my seat. Mission accomplished.
When I escaped the maze of hallways, I immediately went out to the court with one purpose in mind: I wanted to look down into the tunnel where a badly wounded Willis Reed had famously emerged during Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers.
I can honestly say that the majority of arenas I've been in over the years were kind of meh, but there was something very special about this place, all right. You felt it all the way down to your very basketball soul. I would later discover that Michael Jordan completely agreed with me.
After getting the undeniable tingly sense of history to subside, I continued to the media seating. I noticed a guy dressed to the nines was already in his seat. He looked up as I approached, extending his hand.
"Hi, I'm Bryan Burwell from (New York) Newsday,'' he said.
I shook his hand and introduced myself.
"I've heard a lot about you,'' he said.
It was nice of him to say that, even though I knew it wasn't true. I hadn't done enough in the business for anybody to know a thing about me. Geez, I had family members who thought I was in witness protection.
Besides that, the immaculate Burwell made me feel completely underdressed. Good thing I'm just not one who cares little about sartorial splendor. My guess is I was probably wearing pants that barely hid my pudgy underbelly and a shirt that might have been left over from the Carter administration. Yes, we're talking about something here from the fabulous Robert Hall collection.
But we hit off. Fast friends, I'd say. We eventually exchanged telephone numbers that night, promising that if we needed each other for any reason to just go ahead and call.
And yes, I called him practically every Thursday or Friday. The Knicks weren't any threat to win the championship with Boston and Philadelphia around, but they were an odd assortment of characters, including scoring machine Bernard King (who also could really dress up), Bill Cartwright, Truck Robinson and Mr. Skinny Genes himself, Louis Orr. There was almost always something there for my NBA notebook.
Funny thing, Bryan never wanted any Bulls' info when we talked. Imagine that. Even as coach Paul Westhead's frenetically paced offense was taking his team to all of 28 wins and a well-deserved firing. And for the record, Westhead stopped talking to me in February.
To no one's surprise, Bryan, like so many other guys I met on the NBA beat (28 by my last count) eventually became columnists. He also did a ton of TV and radio reporting along the way, including for "Inside the NFL" on HBO and the NBA games on TNT.
When Burwell died last week at the age of 59, he was saluted by multiple media outlets for days. And I mean days. The shared sentiments were genuine and heartfelt from his writing brethren, and the number of lives he touched was truly extraordinary.
It's seldom that guys who write sports columns for a living are afforded that much love. Write a column long enough that is strong on opinions and tough on people, and you can run out of friends in a hurry.
Burwell, who spent the last 12 years of his life writing columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, could on the one hand be firm and unwavering on his opinions, yet he managed not to permanently damage relationships with the majority of coaches and players. They seemed to love him, too.
That's an art form I'm really bad at. I wish I had the knack of nuance, the ability to use the right word in the right place at the right time. I'm more of the sledgehammer-to-the-head kind of a guy.
It's safe to say the news of Burwell's death jarred me professionally because he was so good at what he did and personally as well. It would appear that everyone who ran across Bryan in his remarkable life has the same thought.
I have no idea how many of his friends knew that he'd been diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer in October and would be gone within two months. But then, I've been out of the newspaper loop for a couple of decades.
The last time I saw Bryan (he's been a guest on Boers and Bernstein) was at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
Now you can go to some Olympics and run across hundreds and hundreds of people you've never seen in your life and hope to never see again. Same thing goes for many of the events. But these Olympics featured one of the most anticipated meetings in the history of the games -- Carl Lewis vs. Ben Johnson in the 100 meters.
And everyone was waiting. Like the rest of the world, I'd never seen a human being move like Johnson did when he ran the fastest 100 meters -- 9.79 seconds -- in history that sweaty afternoon.
But everyone, including the outspoken Lewis, knew that something was off, that the cut-from-stone Johnson had to be on something. And he was. Three days later, the news came that he had tested positive for Stanozolol. And while the event would later become known as the "dirtiest race in history'' given the subsequent history of the other sprinters as well, the media frenzy was enormous as Johnson was forced to give up his gold medal.
So who was the coolest guy in the room when all the upheaval was at its height and the press conference was at hand? Yes, as usual, it was Burwell. We'd managed to catch up a little at the race a few days before, and I was glad to hear that while every part of his media career was satisfying, he still considered himself a writer at heart.
And he proved it later when he chose to finish his career in St. Louis.
It saddens me to think that his big voice is gone forever. I know the curious can find a way to his columns from the Detroit News or USA Today to the Post-Dispatch.
I was lucky to have had the chance to meet so many talented and dedicated people doing the same job I did back in the '80s. As I mentioned, a lot of them became really big in the media business, not just newspapers.
And Bryan Burwell was right at the top of that heap.
A longtime sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Terry Boers now co-hosts The Boers and Bernstein Show, which can be heard Monday-Friday from 1p.m.-6p.m. on 670 The Score.