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.