The Story of the Greatest Walk-On In Football History

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people who search for the Our American Stories podcast go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Burlsworth Trophy is awarded every year for the most outstanding Division I college football player who began his career as a walk-on. Previous recipients include Tampa Bay’s quarterback Baker Mayfield and Stetson Bennett of the L.A. Rams. It’s named after Brandon Burlsworth, a truly remarkable person on and off the field. Here to get us started with the story is Tommy Tye, Brandon’s high school coach. Take it away, Tommy.

Brandon Burlsworth’s the best person I ever met in my life. My name is Tommy Tye, and I was Brandon’s high school coach. I first came in to meet Brandon when he was the seventh-grader, and he entered our program and started his journey from there through the high school. And I remember being called by the junior high coach at that time, a man named Inky Williams, and Inky wanted me to come look at this young man. He said, “He’s really going to be something special.” So I was paying a little bit closer attention to Brandon as he got to be a ninth-grader because he’s one step away from coming into our high school program. And I looked at him, and Brandon was a great kid. Certainly everybody was proud to see him, but I didn’t see anything special. I kind of thought that Coach Williams might have been maybe imbibing in the spirits a little bit when he made that evaluation, but he was right. The thing that became very apparent to me about Brandon was you weren’t going to run him off. He was going to be there every day; he was going to be early; he was going to be one of the last ones to leave, sometimes with tears in his eyes or maybe your bloody nose, and sometimes maybe both, but he’d be back the next day. And that told you an awful lot about it, because we constantly told our kids, “If you stay, you’ll play. Just stay, just dig in tough, gritchy teeth, and you know it’s all going to be okay.” Now, his senior year, he really blossomed into an outstanding player. But you know, when you’re around kids every day, you don’t notice them growing, you know. And by the time, I think, he came in his senior year, he was probably about six foot tall, maybe two hundred and fifteen, two hundred and twenty pounds. But that spring of his senior year, after going through the season, after he’d made All-State, played in the high school All-Star Game, he was about six-two, two hundred and thirty-five pounds, and he was much, much stronger. Again, never took a day off. And one thing he did his senior year – one of his goals, and he was a tremendous goal-setter, you know. We’d talk about goals, and we’d tell him that goals are only dreams unless you write them down and put them someplace in your room where you can see him every day. And he’d repeat that to me. And I know I never want his room, but I know they were there somewhere. So one of his goals his senior year was to beat me to work every morning. And I get there pretty early, about six o’clock every morning, and every morning, sometimes in the dark, sitting by the door was Brandon, and every now and then he didn’t say a whole lot, but if I was late… He might say, “Sleep in today, Coach?” and I’d say, “Burlsworth, don’t quit your day jail. You’re not that funny.” And so his senior year, we won the conference championship, and he was, like I said, an All-State player. He wanted to be a college player, and he continued to work, continued to work, and that spring he went to a couple of basically tryout situations at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia and at Arkansas Tech in Russellville. He comes back. First, I get a call from the coach at Arkadelphia, and he said, “When did you become a liar?” I said, “I did not ever quit.” He said, “Well, you told me this Burlsworth kid was this tallst plate, this strong, this fast.” And he said, “He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s faster.” You know, the Razorbacks not interested to him because we don’t want to offer him. “If the Razorbacks are, you know, are interested,” I said, “They’re not interested.” So they were going to offer. Same thing from the coach at Arkansas Tech, Brooks Sollisworth at the time. And on Monday after he got back from those places, I called him into the office, and I was really excited that he was going to get an opportunity to play college football. And I was telling him, I said, “Man, this is great. You’re going to get you has to play, continue your career playing. You’re going to help you mama out because I know that financial situation.” This is going to be a really big deal for you. Well, quickly I figured out I’m the only guy in the room it’s excited. He’s not excited. He’s sitting there and he’s looking at the floor, and he looks up at me. And this is one thing that I learned about Brandon and all kids. Be careful what you say to them because it may come back at you at any time. And he told me, he said, “Coach, you told me and the rest of the team. It didn’t matter what anybody else said. It only mattered what we thought.” And I’m going, “Oh, I’m trapped, Coach!” “I want to be a Razorback, and I’m going to be a Razorback.” “What are you going to do?” I had Danny Ford’s number at the university, and we knew each other, and I called him and I said, “Please take one more look at this kid. He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s faster.” He said, “I’ll have Harold Horton as the head of recruiting. The time I have Harold. Look at.” I said, “No, no, Harold, look at. Harold’s already looked at him. He’s already really out,” as a favor I’d like for you to look at. And after seeing the new statistics and new little tapes that we’d done some things with him, running through ropes and stuff like this, he said, “Tommy, we don’t have the scholarships.” “We’ll make him a preferred walk-on.” I said, “What’s a preferred walk-on?” He said, “Nothing.” “It just sounds good.” You know, it’s a walk-on situation. If anybody knows what a walk-on is, it’s not a real good life. You get the hand-me-down equipment. You may get a few reps, but you ain’t going to get much, and you’ll be a tackling dummy. And you know, and you’re already told them the beginning you’re not good. And the coaches are not really wanting you because if you come and you make it, it makes them look bad because they didn’t recruit you in the first place.

And you’ve been listening to Tommy Tace. The thing that became apparent about Brandon: you couldn’t run him off. He wanted to be a Razorback. That is, of course, an Arkansas Razorback. In the SEC, they don’t have scholarships. He was told that. That did not deter Brandon. More of this remarkable story, the story of Brandon Burlsworth, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we do it all from the heart of the South: Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Brandon Burlsworth. Telling the story is Brandon’s high school coach, Tommy Tace, and Brandon’s older brother and his wife, Marty and Vicky Burlsworth. Let’s continue with the story. Here again is Marty.

Not when Brandon was born. You know, that’s kind of – that’s really strange for me. You know, I’m fifteen at the time; would turn sixteen. A couple of months. But having a baby in the house. Wow. You know, fifteen-year-old – I’m trying to be cool. You know, I don’t know what to do with this. He’s not going with me. Yeah, I’m not taking him anywhere. That’s not cool. I’m not hanging out with a two-year-old or whatever, three-year-old. But he was fun when he got a little bit older, when he, you know, got out of the baby baby stage, and I could mess with him, have him do silly things and play pretend baseball in the living room and having him sliding headfirst on the carpet and all kinds of things like that. It was, you know, it was a lot. It was a lot of fun. But, uh, you know, as a kid eight or nine, ten years old, there was no indication that you were looking at a future All-American, at an NFL player, nothing. Just the same as everybody else trying to figure it out. Just a normal kid loved sports. He shouldn’t have any choice, ’cause, you know, he’s going to be with me. You know that we’re going to be balling in some way, whether it’s football, basketball, baseball, really into baseball. But you know, he was just like everybody else, loved to play ball. I coached baseball junior high-age. Brandon was eight or nine years old, ten years old. He wanted to come out and be at practice, so I’d always bring to baseball practice. Wasn’t my team. The angry is no more. He just shag balls and, you know, just helped me out. And he wasn’t very good. He just wasn’t naturally gifted. It certainly didn’t show it at that age. But, uh, I knew that we will run sprints at the end of practice, and he was kind of chunky. I always felt like he was kind of chunky. Always felt like, “You, hey man, you need to get after here he is.” You know, you look back on it, you said, “The kid’s nine or ten years old, and you’re trying to make him act like he’s sixteen or seventeen.” You know. But he would run sprints, was and always did. But I was trying to get some that weight off of him. And it wasn’t like he was an unhealthy, you know, fat kid. He wasn’t just kind of chunky, and, uh, he’d like to lay around watch the TV. He wore out a Star Wars VHS. I don’t know how many times I’d come over to the house as watching that again. But when he got older, he got thirteen years old. Now he’s old enough to be in our league, on our team, and so he was playing on my team, and, uh, at that time told him, “All right, here’s the deal.” There’s rules in the league. And I’m saying that much more formal than he and I talked about it. But rules in the league. Everybody bats once, regardless of how good or bad, or everybody bats at least once during the game, and plays two innings in the field. That’s rules that do not apply to you, because this is family. If I want to bench you not play at all, that’s what I’m going to do. And the only reason I said that is we’re going to set a goal. I want you to lose two pounds. Every week you lose those two pounds, that we’re going to go. You’re going to play. He lost those two pounds every week all season long. Never felt put him on scales. He lost those two pounds.

The Burlsworth family is a very small family. There are very few of us, and so we were together all the time, and so Brandon lived with his mom. Dad was not around that much. An alcoholic, he had kind of battled it, had gotten control of it, but he still wasn’t in picture much. You know, we loved him and tried to keep him around as much. But that’s why he and Marty, I think, developed such a bond. Brandon and Marty were together a lot. Whatever we were doing, we would take him with us, you know, Mom was working or Brandon just wanted to be with us. He really looked up to Marty. A lot of people would say that Marty was the father figure, and we don’t like saying that because he’d had a dad that had some issues but was still the dad. But they were just really, really tight brothers. And I didn’t. I wasn’t very fond of being called dad. So, “Oh, your boys played a good game.” “It’s not my son.” And that happened a lot. Even happened senior year in high school, which was strange. It happened last week. Yeah, I did, didn’t it? It happened a lot, and it’s still happened, and now it makes a little more sense. Maybe, you know, years go by of it. But when we’ve got like a two-year-old and I’m being congratulated on my son, who’s my brother, you know, I was… I was crazy about that. Finally, just like flying whatever. They weren’t really, really close. It was just a tight bond, the whole family. We called ourselves the Inner Circle because we just all knew that we had each other’s back and that whatever happened, it always seemed to be the same little core people. Anyway, he was fun to be around now. He wouldn’t talk much. If he wanted to start something, he’d get Marty to start it, not him. Tremendous attitude. Everything was “Yes, sir”; “No, sir.” If you wanted any more words out of his mouth, you’re going to have to drag him out most of the time. But he wasn’t older than now. He set a really good example. Most of the things that Brandon did, Marty and I found out after the accident. One of my favorite stories is humbleness. Okay, Brandon gets so silly, gosh-awful looking glasses, and he’s at the house one day and while he was Blast said, “What are you doing getting those glasses?” “You look like Drew Carey!” “Let’s see.” She said, “Oh, Coach, they just feel good on my head.” I said, “Really?” I said, “Let me look at them.” “Well,” we talked a little bit about his goal setting. Okay, so one of his goals the senior year was to be All-American. If you look at them, nose piece right here in the middle, it’s etched All-American. He kept it right in front of his eyes the whole time he was practicing and playing. And I said, “I know why you got those glasses. You did it to get publicity.” “Oh no, Coach! No, no, no, I wouldn’t do that.” “I don’t. You know me. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I wouldn’t do that.” And that’s when I figured it out. Right there it was. I tossed him back to him. I said, “I understand where this is at.” That’s the way. It was one of my favorite stories about Brandon in his college years. And we didn’t know this ’til after the accident passed away, but a couple of the Razorbacks called, telling us that they had been gone to his room, and Brandon was in his room, studying, which he did. He was, you know, as well as a great football player. He was a great scholar. But he was recopying his notes, which he did all the time. His writing was tiny, but very pretty writing he just had. But he was so from the day’s notes. He was recopying them. And the Razorbacks said, “Girls, how do you do it?” “Great athlete, great scholar. You’re just a good person!” “Do you, what are you doing?” “What’s your secret?” And they said Brandon never looked up that. He reached his hand up, grabbed his Bible from a shelf that’s there, pointed at him, didn’t say a word, put it back in the on his shelf, and went on. Never said a word, but he said everything, and that Marty and I are both driven, hard-driven people. We want Brandon’s story to be known everywhere. But Brandon had it figured out. He knew where his success was and what had gotten him there. He ended my playing career. In my days as a coach, every now and then I would ask for a helmet for one of the younger kids, show him how to perform a technique. So I was going to… Show this sophomore how to perform this defensive line technique where he would engage a blocker and then get off a blocker and make a tackle. So, “Give me that helmet!” I put that helmet on, and I turned around, looked, and he was in front of the line. And usually I performed these techniques on sophomores and they would always let me win. So I knew there was no way to get out of this, you know. And I’m thinking, “Well, yeah, Brandon will probably, you know, he’ll probably…” Take it easy on me. No. When we came together, bells were ringing and birds were singing, and I knew I had to get up, and I got up, ripped that helmet off, threw it to that young man. I got it from my turn to Burlsworth, and I said, “Now, don’t you ever make me have to show you how to do that again!” And I went off. I said, “Okay, everybody get a drink,” and, “Oh man,” you know, one assistant coach came over and said, “You all right?” “Yeah, I’m good after practice.” To Brandon’s credit, he did come by and check on me, but he put me. Put that was in my playing career. Never did that again, so it was a good thing. My wife was tickled to hear it that I wouldn’t play anymore, and…

And you’re listening to Brandon Burlsworth’s brother, Marty, and Marty’s wife, Vicky, talk about the young Brandon and how he matured, and Marty ended up being sort of a dad like her fatherlike figure. “I didn’t like being called that,” but there was adversity in young Brandon’s life, adversity he overcame. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Brandon Burlsworth here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Brandon Burlsworth. Telling the story is Brandon’s high school coach, Tommy Tace, and Brandon’s older brother and his wife, Marty and Vicky Burlsworth. Let’s continue with the story. Here again is Marty.

Every boy growing up – myself included – “Oh, to be a Razorback!” That’d be like saying, “I want to be a Kansas City Chief.” Well, this is how it happened. Like Coach Tace was saying, he had scholarship offers from some smaller schools.