Road to Duke
Ron Burt grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, the kind of midwestern public-school kid whose first love was baseball and whose favorite player was Ozzie Smith, the Cardinals shortstop with the highlight-reel backflips and the gold-glove range that made him every twelve-year-old's bedroom poster across the state of Missouri in the 1980s. Burt's family lived in the Hilltop Townhomes complex. He played the game until he was a teenager. Then he gave it up.
The pivot to basketball came indirectly. Burt's aunt, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, recommended a tiny boarding school in rural Maine: Gould Academy, in Bethel, a town of fifteen hundred in the western Maine mountains where the Sunday River ski resort had been the economic anchor for decades. Gould had been founded in 1836. It had a basketball team. Burt enrolled, and four years later he was applying to Duke University on a college list that put him in the same admitted class as Christian Laettner and Brian Davis — two of the most consequential names in the history of Duke basketball, both of whom were arriving in Durham as scholarship freshmen for the same fall of 1988 that Ron Burt was arriving in Durham as a regular undergraduate from Maine via Kansas City.
Burt's first three years at Duke were the years of the broader university experience: he chose mechanical engineering as his major, found his roommate in Mark Williams (a Duke student who would eventually become the basketball team's manager), and put together an intramural basketball team with his friends called The Diaper Dandies — a name borrowed, with the appropriate twinkle of irony, from the great Dick Vitale's vocabulary for prized freshmen. The Diaper Dandies won the intramural campus title twice. Burt played pickup ball with members of the varsity team in the open hours of the practice gym, and as he later put it, the varsity players were willing to let you stay on the court if you could hold your own and not slow the game down. He held his own. By the spring of 1991, the mechanical engineering major was a junior on the cusp of his senior year, with three years of campus intramural basketball under his belt and three years of pickup competition against some of the best college players in the country, and he was watching the Duke roster as it changed.
At Duke
The Duke roster changed twice in May 1991. Billy McCaffrey, the sophomore guard who had been Duke's main outside-shooting threat, announced he was transferring to Vanderbilt. Crawford Palmer, the junior big man who had been the third frontcourt rotation piece on the 1991 NCAA championship team, announced he was transferring to Dartmouth. Coach K's 1991-92 roster had eleven scholarship players, an open thirteenth spot, and a returning core that had just won a national championship and was about to defend it. The team would let one student-body walk-on into a tryout for the open spot.
The tryout was held in Cameron Indoor Stadium on October 15, 1991. Dozens of students showed up. Among them was a Duke Chronicle writer named Seth Davis, who would later spend two decades on CBS as a March Madness analyst and would not, on this October morning, make the team. Ron Burt did. He had spent the summer training in Kansas City — running from the Hilltop Townhomes apartment up and down a nearby gorge, then over to the Blue Valley Recreation Center to shoot and lift. The conditioning showed. Assistant coach Tommy Amaker, who would go on to become the head coach at Harvard, called Burt that night and told him to show up for practice the next day. Burt told Alan Siegel at Slate, twenty years later, that he was excited for a second after the phone call and then scared.
His mother reacted, as he later told it, like any mother would have reacted: she called the family and told them her son was about to be a starter on the Duke basketball team. He was not about to be a starter on the Duke basketball team. He was about to be a walk-on senior on a 34-2 NCAA championship team with four future NBA lottery picks — Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, and Cherokee Parks — and his job was to make Bobby Hurley's life miserable in practice every day. His first practice he sprained an ankle because nobody had told him ankle taping was mandatory. He learned the StairMaster routine: a brutal hour of cardio Hurley did after a full practice that left Burt, in his telling, never not tired again until the season was over. He once tried to strip the ball from Laettner in a scrimmage and got elbowed in the teeth. When he occasionally got dunked on, his teammates started a long drawn-out chorus of his first name. He played 19 games during the season — 38 total minutes, three field goals on eleven attempts, four free throws on four attempts, ten total points. Coach K, midway through the season, awarded him a full basketball scholarship for his final semester. Coach K also took him aside in a locker-room session in which he went around the room calling out each player on his shortcomings — and when he got to Burt, told him the staff thought he should be more vocal and bring more energy. Burt told Siegel that in the moment the criticism felt less like criticism than like recognition: Coach K had taken the time to say something to him.
The 1991-92 season ended where every casual fan of Duke basketball knows it ended. In the East Regional Final in Philadelphia on March 28, 1992, Duke and Kentucky played the game that has been called the greatest college basketball game ever played, and that ended on a Christian Laettner turnaround jumper at the buzzer of double overtime to give Duke a 104-103 win. Ron Burt was on the floor for it — in the way that bench players are on the floor — sitting on the end of the bench next to Christian Ast. During the timeout before the inbounds play, with Kentucky leading 103-102 and 2.1 seconds left, Laettner guaranteed a Duke victory in the huddle. Burt's internal reaction, as he later told Siegel, was the kind of skeptical line basketball players reserve for unsupportable boasts: he thought to himself that Laettner was being Laettner. He figured Kentucky would triple-team him. Then Grant Hill's baseball pass found Laettner at the foul line, Laettner dribbled once, turned, lofted, and the ball went in. Ron Burt sprinted off the bench. He thinks he was one of the first players to reach Laettner. Then, in his own words, everybody just went down in a heap.
Gene Wojciechowski's book on the game, The Last Great Game, mentions Ron Burt only twice in its 320 pages. One of those mentions is a Laettner quote near the end of the book, in which Laettner says he watches replays of the game to see the joy on the walk-on Ron Burt's face. Siegel asked Burt twenty years later if it could possibly be true. Burt told him it was. There are only a few people who can say they've had those moments, he said. They're very rare.
Two weekends later in Minneapolis, Duke beat Indiana 81-78 in the Final Four semifinal (the game where Marty Clark, fellow walk-on-ish bench player, replaced fouled-out Grant Hill and made 5-of-6 free throws down the stretch) and then beat Michigan's Fab Five 71-51 to win Mike Krzyzewski's second consecutive national championship. Ron Burt, walk-on senior, mechanical engineering major, Kansas City kid via Bethel, Maine, was a national champion.
After Duke
Ron Burt graduated from Duke in the spring of 1992 with a mechanical engineering degree and a national championship ring. He was offered a chance to enroll in graduate school at Duke for the 1992-93 academic year, with the option of playing another year of basketball on Coach K's roster — the kind of fifth-year option that would have given him a senior walk-on's afterglow stretched a year longer than nature normally permits. He thought about it. He turned it down. He told Slate years afterward that part of his reasoning was simple: the experience he had just lived through had been so perfect that he did not want to risk diminishing it by trying to extend it. He let the moment be the moment.
He moved to New York. By the time Alan Siegel reached him for the Slate piece on the 20th anniversary of the 1992 NCAA championship, Ron Burt was 41 years old, working in finance, living in Brooklyn. Most of his old Duke gear had been claimed by family members over the years. He had a ratty practice jersey left in a drawer. In his basement, he kept a small shrine — a few photos, and his Glenn E. Mann Jr. Award, given annually to the Duke Blue Devils reserve who contributed most to team morale, which he had won as the only walk-on on the most decorated team of the post-Wooden era of college basketball. Twenty years on, total strangers were still walking up to him at parties and asking him about his year on the team. The conversation, he told Siegel, almost always started with the same line — somebody admitting they hated Duke, and then adding that what he had done must have been pretty cool.
Where Is He Now
In September 2011, on the eve of Bobby Hurley's induction into the Duke Hall of Fame, the Cameron Indoor Stadium gym filled with the surviving members of the 1991-92 back-to-back championship team. They were back in their forties now. They had spread across the country and across the basketball world — to NBA front offices, to Wall Street, to the pro leagues of Europe, to addiction recovery centers, to coaching jobs at high schools and colleges. Mark Williams, Ron Burt's college roommate of three years and the former team manager, was there. The film crew from a documentary called Back to Back, produced for the 20th anniversary of the 1991 and 1992 championships, was rolling. Bobby Hurley sat down on camera. Christian Laettner sat down. Grant Hill sat down. Erik Meek sat down. Greg Koubek sat down. Clay Buckley sat down. Marty Clark sat down. Ron Burt sat down. The mechanical engineering major from Kansas City who had played 38 minutes in his senior year of college and won a national championship and the Mann Award for team morale was, twenty years later, one of the voices Duke had chosen to tell the story of the most famous team in its history.
It is hard to overstate, looking at it from the perspective of the 2020s, how complete the Ron Burt arc actually was. He was a campus pickup-game regular for three years. He recognized an opening on the roster in May 1991 that nobody else had thought to recognize as openable. He trained for a summer in a Kansas City rec center. He won the tryout against future CBS broadcaster Seth Davis. He played 38 minutes in a season that became Duke basketball's defining season. He sat eight feet from one of the most replayed shots in the history of college basketball. He was one of the first players off the bench to reach Christian Laettner after that shot. He earned a full basketball scholarship from a coach who had originally invited him in as a walk-on. He won the team-morale award on a team of four future NBA lottery picks. He turned down the chance to extend the experience because the experience had already been the experience.
He went to New York to work in finance. He still has the ratty practice jersey. He has the shrine in the basement. The Brotherhood, when properly understood, is not only the All-Americans and the NBA picks and the European pros and the head coaches. It is also the walk-on senior from Kansas City via rural Maine whose mother was, briefly, in May 1991, the most optimistic mother in the state of Missouri — and whose son, a year later, was one of the people in a heap on the floor in Philadelphia under a pile of Duke basketball players celebrating a shot the country had stopped watching to see. There are only a few people who have those moments. Ron Burt was one of them.