Burgess was more than a ballplayer

Art Taylor drove from Chicago to Gonzaga University in the summer of 1960, towing his furniture unsteadily behind his old car and praying every 100 miles or so, vowing to join the church if his family was delivered there safely. And he kept his promise.

So when Frank Burgess discovered his new friend and basketball teammate was going to Mass, he couldn’t resist assigning a nickname.

“He used to tease me and call me ‘Deacon,’ ” Taylor said. “That never stopped. Whenever he called me over the years, it was always, ‘Deke, how you doing?’  ”

And there was always that rolling laugh attached, followed by more gentle barbs – as many directed at himself as others. For Frank Burgess could be an enormous tease – when the work was done, when the game was over, when the time was right.

Infectious and seductive as it was, the laughter may be missed most of all now that Burgess has died at the age of 75. Rarely are men of such dignity and accomplishment so given to the kind of easy delight and genuine warmth that earned him what seemed like a perpetual audience, long after people stopped paying to see him set records with a basketball at Gonzaga.

And that’s the thing about Frank Burgess.

If you never saw him play, he was legendary enough that you might wish you had. But if you hadn’t, you didn’t necessarily miss the best of him. His work in the law as a federal judge in Tacoma, his causes in service and social justice, just his way with people – basketball was not the least of him, but it wasn’t the most of him, either.

He was acutely aware of that. It was, in fact, why he found himself at Gonzaga and not USC or Wisconsin or Kansas, among the other schools that wooed him.

Somebody at Gonzaga – actually, it was the president, Fr. Edmund Morton – had the good sense to mention education.

“For me, the question came up, ‘What if I can’t do what you think I can do?’ ” he once said. “ ‘Do I get a chance to stay here until I finish my studies?’ That was a concern – especially when you walk into town with a footlocker.”

He also brought with him a wife and twin daughters, and an uncanny shooting touch. He left as the school record holder for points (still, to this day, with 2,196) and as the NCAA scoring champ of 1961 – and as a newly minted lawyer, a degree he earned while pulling all-night security shifts at Washington Water Power and helping Hank Anderson coach in the afternoons.

Long before Zagmania took hold in Spokane, he was the first glimpse that basketball at Gonzaga could produce something out of the ordinary. On an Eastern trip in 1961, the Bulldogs played three ranked teams in four nights, and Burgess lit them for 32, 32 and 33 points.

“They put their best defensive players on him, naturally,” said teammate Charlie Jordan, “and I can’t recall anyone really stopping him – including Lenny Wilkens.”

In Spokane, alas, too few people took notice – crowds at the Spokane Coliseum, the Zags’ home court in those days, were paltry. And sometimes they notice in an ugly way, as when Burgess had a lease canceled because neighbors complained about the landlord renting to an African-American family. Burgess, with the help of attorney Carl Maxey, sued and won. In the wake of it, a Spokane group called Citizens for Reconciliation purchased a newspaper ad, deploring the episode.

Seems as if Frank Burgess opened eyes in Spokane in multiple ways.

The basketball he could never quite figure out – “I always had a problem seeing what other people were seeing,” he said of his on-court gifts. Maybe it was an innate modesty; maybe it was that he knew Gonzaga’s basketball station in those days.

But when the Zags became a darling of March Madness in 1999 and forged a national identity over the next decade, it allowed Burgess to reconnect to both his school and the game. He was enormously proud of the program – and even a little obsessed.

“Me and his wife, Treava, used to tease each other about it whenever Gonzaga was playing,” said Taylor, a retired teacher who kept in close touch. “Wherever he was, he had to get home and watch the game if he wasn’t there. He’d schedule his day around the basketball game.

“I was up there one time and we were supposed to go to dinner, but he said, ‘No, not until the game is over.’ Treava and I looked at each other and shook our heads and laughed.”

Come dinner time, Frank Burgess joined in the laughter – and initiated most of it. In fact, it echoes still.