Jesse S. Burbage

Jesse Samuel Burbage came up out of Shelbyville, Kentucky, the small town in Shelby County twenty miles east of Louisville that had produced, by his 1894 birth, a steady stream of central-Kentucky athletes who would carry the bluegrass-country basketball and football tradition into the early twentieth century. He was born on February 22, 1894. By the fall of 1914 he had enrolled at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, the land-grant agricultural and engineering college in the small east-Alabama town of Auburn that would later be renamed Auburn University. He played basketball there for the Auburn Tigers for four years, 1914 through 1918, at the guard position. He started for four years.

Auburn basketball in those years was a young program. The first intercollegiate basketball game in Auburn history had been played in 1905, less than a decade before Burbage arrived. The sport was still finding its rules - the dribble had only recently been legalized, the jump-ball after every made basket was still the rule, and college basketball as a national sport with a national championship would not arrive for two more decades. Burbage played in that early world. He was a four-year starter at guard on the program that would, fifty years later, develop into the SEC basketball power that produced Charles Barkley and so many other Auburn legends. He graduated from Auburn in 1918 a basketball player who had spent four years in the trenches of a young Southern Conference program.

In the fall of 1922, Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina hired Jesse Burbage as its new head basketball coach. Trinity College was, at that moment, the small Methodist-affiliated college whose endowment from the Duke family of tobacco-and-electricity wealth had been steadily growing for two decades. The school had been playing intercollegiate basketball since 1906, when athletic director Wilbur Wade Card had introduced the sport and coached the inaugural team. Trinity basketball had been coached by Floyd Egan in 1920 (9-6) and James Baldwin in 1921 (6-12). The job, in the fall of 1922, was open. Burbage, four years past his Auburn graduation and at the start of what would become a long teaching-and-coaching-and-military career, took it.

His first Trinity team, the 1922-23 squad, went 15-7. The schedule, in the way of early-1920s college basketball, was a regional mix of opponents that included the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Wake Forest, Davidson, and a string of smaller Carolina-and-Virginia colleges. The 15-7 record was the strongest single-season Trinity basketball had produced since Wilbur Wade Card's earliest teams. Burbage was building.

His second Trinity team, the 1923-24 squad, went 19-6. The nineteen wins were the most wins in Trinity College basketball history. The .760 winning percentage was the best winning percentage Trinity College had ever produced. And, in the late fall of 1924 - just months after that 19-6 season ended - the Duke family completed its long-anticipated endowment of Trinity College, transforming the small Methodist college into Duke University with a forty-million-dollar gift from the Duke Endowment - the largest single educational gift in American history to that date. The Trinity Blue and White, who had played their 1923-24 basketball season under Jesse Burbage as Trinity College, would play their 1924-25 basketball season under new head coach George Buchheit as Duke University. The school had changed names. The basketball program had a new coach. Jesse Burbage had moved on.

The two-season Trinity / Duke basketball line for Jesse Burbage reads 34-13, a .723 winning percentage. He coached the final two seasons of Trinity College basketball history. He coached the strongest single-season Trinity team ever fielded. He is the bridge name between the Trinity College era and the Duke University era of the program. By the time Eddie Cameron arrived in 1928 to begin his fourteen-year run that would put the program on the modern basketball map, Jesse Burbage's record stood as one of the founding-era benchmarks the Cameron program would build on top of.

Jesse Burbage left Trinity in the spring of 1924, before the school had officially been renamed Duke. For the next three years his coaching trail goes quiet in the public record. He resurfaces in the fall of 1927 at Southern College, the small Methodist liberal-arts college in Lakeland, Florida that would later be renamed Florida Southern College. He took over both the basketball and football head-coaching jobs.

His first basketball year at Southern, 1927-28, finished 8-8. The football year, 1927, finished with a brief regular season. His second basketball year, 1928-29, finished 11-4 - a strong eleven-win campaign for a small Florida college. His second football year, 1928, finished 5-2-1, with a 4-1 record in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association and a fourth-place SIAA finish. The combined two-year basketball line at Southern was 19-12. The combined two-year football line was 5-2-1. Across his complete college basketball coaching career - two years at Trinity plus two years at Southern - Jesse Burbage finished 53-25. He coached at the Division I level by the 1920s standard, won more than two-thirds of his games, and put both programs into the historical record as upward-trajectory teams under his watch.

After the 1928-29 season at Southern, the public record on his coaching activities ends. What is documented next is military: Jesse Burbage entered the United States Army and rose to the rank of colonel. The Wikipedia biography that draws from John Roth's 2006 Encyclopedia of Duke Basketball notes the rank without specifying which decades or which theaters of service - the most likely service-window covers the buildup to World War II and the war itself, with the possibility of continued service into the Korean conflict. Colonel Jesse S. Burbage walked out of basketball-coaching life and into a military career that would, in the framing of the obituaries his Alabama and Tennessee newspapers later printed, define the back half of his professional life.

In 1951, after the conclusion of his Army career, Jesse Burbage settled in Tuskegee, Alabama, the Macon County town in central-east Alabama best known as the home of Tuskegee Institute - the historically Black college founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 - and as the headquarters of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black US Army Air Forces unit that had fought with distinction in World War II. Burbage became the administrator of the Tuskegee City-County Hospital, the public hospital serving Macon County. He served as the City-County Hospital administrator for six years.

On December 5, 1957, at age 63, Jesse Samuel Burbage died at Huntsville Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama. The Huntsville Times ran his obituary the next day under the headline announcing the rites for Col. Burbage. The Birmingham News ran a second obituary on December 8, 1957. His Duke connection, by the time of his 1957 death, was thirty-three years in the past. He had coached the final two seasons of Trinity College basketball. He had not lived to see Coach K's arrival in Durham, the Final Four runs of the 1980s, the five national championships, or the modern Brotherhood. He had coached the Trinity-to-Duke transition, gone to Florida, gone to the Army, gone to Tuskegee, and gone home to the cemetery.

The Brotherhood, when extended back to the founding era, includes the Auburn-educated Kentucky basketball player who coached the final two Trinity College basketball seasons before the school became Duke University. The 1923-24 season Burbage coached - 19-6 against the regional college basketball field of the era - was the strongest single-season Trinity basketball team in the program's eighteen-year history to that point. The 34-13 two-year line he produced was the best two-year stretch the program had produced since Wilbur Wade Card's foundational seasons fifteen years earlier. The Brotherhood roster does not begin with Mike Krzyzewski. It does not begin with Eddie Cameron. It begins, with the founding-era coaches, with Wilbur Wade Card and Floyd Egan and James Baldwin and Jesse Burbage and George Buchheit - the men who put the Trinity and early Duke basketball program on the map, season by season, in the years before national championships and ESPN and Cameron Indoor Stadium existed. Jesse Burbage coached two of those seasons. He coached them well. The 19-6 mark of his final season stood for years as a Trinity/Duke benchmark. Colonel Burbage of the Tuskegee City-County Hospital is the founding-era Brotherhood member who built the bridge from Trinity to Duke. The Brotherhood begins with names like his. The Brotherhood does not forget them.