Chris Burgess was born in Provo, Utah, on April 23, 1979, the eldest son of Ken and the rest of the Burgess clan — a family whose pipeline to Brigham Young University reads like a recruiting board. Father Ken: BYU graduate. Uncles: BYU graduates. Sister Angela: future BYU women's basketball player, starting forward 1997-99. Brothers Josh and David: future BYU men's basketball players. Cousin Sam: BYU basketball. He was raised LDS in a family that had raised generations of LDS Cougars. The expectation was that Chris would be next.
And then his father moved the family to Southern California, and the basketball gods got bigger ideas. Chris attended Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana as a freshman — the Catholic powerhouse that had launched Larry Brown's UCLA recruits a generation earlier — then transferred to his local public school, Woodbridge High in Irvine, for his sophomore through senior years. By the time he was a senior in the spring of 1997, Burgess was, by consensus, the No. 1 high school basketball recruit in the United States: McDonald's All-American, Parade All-American, Slam Magazine All-American, USA Today All-American, three-time California All-State First Team, and the leader of a Woodbridge team that won the California Interscholastic Federation Championship that spring. He was 6-foot-10, lean for a center, soft hands, soft touch, McDonald's All-American Game in his rearview mirror. Every program in America wanted him. He took recruiting visits from Roy Williams' Kansas. He took visits from Rick Pitino's Kentucky. He let Roger Reid of BYU come over to his Irvine house twice — the only recruiter he let come over twice — because Reid was, in Burgess's words years later, "the best recruiter of them all. He made me feel at ease and I enjoyed being around him."
The narrowing came down to Duke and BYU. The pull on Burgess's BYU side was generational. Family. Faith. The Provo birth certificate. The pull on the Duke side was Mike Krzyzewski. "With Roy and Pitino, I was a star-struck kid," Burgess remembered. "But I was such a Duke fan that no matter who recruited me… it was all about playing for Coach K and living this childhood dream." In spring 1997 he made the call. He told Coach K yes. He told Roger Reid no. And what happened next would become one of the most-told recruiting stories in the LDS basketball world: Reid, devastated, reportedly told the 17-year-old kid that by choosing Duke he was letting down his parents, the prophet, and the entire membership of the LDS Church — nine million Mormons in one sentence. Burgess shared the comment in a media interview. A firestorm erupted in Utah. Seven games into the next season Reid lost his BYU job, and the Cougars program — which would not return to the NCAA Tournament until 2007 — never fully recovered from the chain of events that the recruiting decision had set in motion. "If I could do it all over again," Burgess said years later, "I wouldn't have said anything."