It’s the stuff of legend, a revelatory tale, this memory pulled from Scott Burrell’s past. He was 6 years old then, sick with a sore throat, but on this summer evening he ignored his illness, dressed himself and went off to his older brother Abbott’s Little League game.
Abbott was 11 then, playing in a division for 8- to 12-year-olds. But so many were on vacation that the team was short of players, and the coach asked little Scottie to fill in.
“Nervous? Why should I be nervous?” Burrell recalls, smiling at the memory. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
He was too young to be there, he knew, and later, after protests by an opposing coach, he would be removed from his brother’s team. But on that night, before anyone realized his age, he blithely grabbed a bat and strolled toward the plate for his first appearance, a 6-year-old suffering from a sore throat and standing where he didn’t belong, and what was he doing? Little Scottie Burrell was whistling.
And on the very first pitch, with his very first swing, he smacked a double.
Scott Burrell is 26 now, a full-grown 6 feet 7 inches and 218 pounds. And again he finds himself in a situation he wasn’t supposed to be in when the Bulls acquired him from Golden State in the off-season for Dickey Simpkins.
“Come in and give Scottie (Pippen) and Toni (Kukoc) and Michael (Jordan) some minutes to rest,” Burrell says of the role he envisioned for himself when the trade was made. But now, with Pippen out possibly until January after foot surgery and with Kukoc’s still-damaged foot as uncertain as an alderman’s ethics, all that has changed.
Now, as on that summer night two decades ago, Burrell will be asked to step up and play, to contribute meaningfully and not just provide stopgap minutes that give the starters a rest. Now he will be in the spotlight.
“I don’t think there’s that much pressure at all,” Burrell says. “I’ll get a little more playing time, but my role’s still the same. Get out there, play some defense, get some steals, get some rebounds, hit the open jumper.
“All I can do is play to the best of my abilities and try to help the team the best I can. I can’t do more than that.”
Burrell is that three-piece suit Dennis Rodman would never wear. He is as unadorned as Rodman is garish, as amiable as Rodman is contentious, as placid as Rodman is excitable, and if a question can be dealt with quickly or with a cliche, it doesn’t matter to him that he’s not providing a “SportsCenter” sound bite.
He is a nice guy, not controversial and not given to gaudiness or histrionics or self-aggrandizement. Old-fashioned virtues like work ethic and full-bodied effort still define him, and have since he was that little kid growing up in New Haven, Conn.
His physical skills were obvious from the age of 6, and always he was out there competing with Abbott, who would become a tri-captain of Connecticut’s 1989 football team, and older sister Lynn, who would develop into a track star at Yale. It would have been easy for him to get lost in games, to grow enamored of his own abilities. Yet hovering over him, providing some necessary perspective, were his parents.
His dad, Sam, worked for the New Haven Board of Education (which he still does) and coached freshman football at Yale until last year. His mom, Gertrude, now retired, taught nursing at a technical school. Together they would be his ballast as he developed into one of his state’s legendary prep performers, good enough as a quarterback that Florida State’s Bobby Bowden dropped by for a home visit and Notre Dame, Miami and Penn State sent letters expressing interest.
He was good enough as a pitcher that the Seattle Mariners selected him in the first round of the 1989 amateur draft. And he was good enough in basketball that he signed on with Jim Calhoun at the University of Connecticut after spurning the Mariners.
“Scott is the `Boys of Summer’ in the sense that he loves games,” Calhoun recalls. “We could roll out marbles on the locker-room floor and he would be seeing if he could beat you at that. He has a true love of competition.”
Burrell accepts that description.
“I love to compete,” he says. “That’s what makes people better. If you don’t compete in anything, you’re never going to get better. People who don’t compete have low self-esteem or have had everything given to them.”
And that’s not Burrell.
“He knows his ability is a gift, and he doesn’t take it for granted,” his sister Lynn says.
If taking it for granted is a curse of the precociously blessed, Burrell never succumbed. He averaged 13.1 points and 6.3 rebounds as a four-year starter at Connecticut. Taken by Toronto in the fifth round of the 1990 baseball draft, he pitched two summers in the minors and struck out 60 batters in 60 2/3 innings. Picked in the first round (20th overall) by Charlotte in the 1993 NBA draft, he became the first athlete selected in the first round of two sports’ pro drafts, and he chose basketball.
But after so many seasons of success, injuries began to visit him, so regularly that they were almost a constant companion. They limited him to 51 games in his rookie year, but the Hornets saw enough of him to trade Johnny Newman and designate Burrell their small forward. But the next year, after he had earned an invitation to All-Star weekend’s three-point shootout, Burrell tore his Achilles’ tendon. No sooner had he completed a strenuous rehabilitation than he separated his shoulder the next year. Last season it was surgery to repair torn cartilage in his right knee.
Perhaps the cruelest blow was a February trade to the Golden State Warriors for forward Donald Royal.
“I was shocked,” Burrell says.
The upside was a reunion with Dave Twardzik, the Warriors’ general manager, who had held that post at Charlotte when Burrell was drafted. But Twardzik was ousted in a postseason purge, and quickly following him was Burrell, who arrives in Chicago accompanied by statistics that belie his skills and possibilities.
In four star-crossed pro seasons he averaged just 8.7 points and 4 rebounds a game, shooting a modest 43.3 percent. Perhaps the most telling number was this: Of a possible 328 games, Burrell had played in only 193.
“That’s very frustrating,” he concedes, as is the perception that he’s injury-prone.
“To me, injury-prone is someone who comes in out of shape and has a nagging injury that stays throughout the year,” Burrell says.
He got that view from Allen Tyson, a physical therapist in Charlotte who often worked with Burrell.
“When you have a major injury, that’s just a freak of nature,” Tyson says. “When you have a catastrophic injury, that’s just unfortunate. I think he’s just had bad luck.”
Burrell ruefully agrees.
“Some people are lucky and some are unlucky,” he says. “That’s all part of the game.”
Acceptance of that fact leads to a modest goal: “To play 82 games.” Catching himself, Burrell smiles and quickly adds: “Well, more than that since this is Chicago.”
Burrell does not like to talk about himself, but poke him, prod him, prompt him to choose the characteristic that best describes him and quickly he says, “Competitive.”
Then he hesitates. That’s too facile an answer for a man who was long ago taught the value of perspective, so after some thought, he adds, “I don’t know if I can answer that. If I had a couple of them . . .”
Now at 26, a well-tested professional entering his fifth NBA season, he is once more a 6-year-old whistling as he steps to the plate to face off against a pitcher much older than he.
“I’m kind of fearless,” Burrell says. “It depends on what I’m doing. I try to be smart about things. I try to do things right. If I’m doing it right, then I do it without fear.
“Then I’m not afraid to do anything.”
