The 2020 class of the UW Athletic Hall of Fame has been selected and new members will be announced from June 15 - 26. Visit UWBadgers.com each day to celebrate each new member of this distinguished and historic class of Badgers!
BY MIKE LUCAS
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer
MADISON, Wis. — Prior to the 1998 season, Wisconsin defensive end Tom Burke wrote down his expectations for his senior year as part of an annual exercise in which each player listed their team and individual goals and turned them over to their respective position coaches.
"My individual goal," Burke said, "was 20 sacks."
By any account, it was a staggering number since he had only 10 sacks through his first three seasons combined (20 career starts). On the other hand, he was voted the team MVP in 1997 and he was the third-leading tackler on the defense with 86, including 19 tackles for loss and 9 sacks.
Burke's goals came under the scrutiny of defensive line coach John Palermo, a grizzled vet.
"Palermo called me into his office," Burke recalled, "and he said, 'I think you're setting your goals too high — 20? — that's unreachable. You should set your goals for the school record. You should lower that standard a little bit because I don't want you to get hurt in the long run.'"
The school record was 14 sacks set by defensive end Tarek Saleh in 1996.
"I grabbed the piece of paper off his desk," Burke said, "and I walked out the door."
Palermo wasn't the only one who had his doubts.
"Everyone I told that I was going to get 20 sacks told me that I couldn't do it," Burke said. "I don't like it when somebody tells me that I can't do something, especially when I believe in myself and I know that I'm going to put the work in and I know that I'm going to put the effort in to get it done."
In the end, Burke didn't get 20 sacks.
He got 22.
It has become cliché to suggest somebody can't be blocked. More often than not, Burke was unblockable in 1998.
He had 22 quarterback sacks in 12 games, totaling 130 yards in losses.
Burke led the nation in sacks and broke the single-season Big Ten record.
For good measure, he had 31 TFLs for a minus-151 yards, also UW records.
"Burke was a beast, and he was just that good," said offensive tackle Aaron Gibson, a former Badgers teammate. "If you want to get better, you need somebody like him to go against every day. There's that whole myth that you're brothers and friends on a team. Not with Burke.
"He was coming and he was coming full-speed and he was coming strong and hard every time in practice. Every single person he went against he made better because he didn't come slow, he didn't loaf.
"He was really strong, freakishly strong. And he had this motor that never shut off. You would kind of wonder, 'Why is he still going so hard?'" Asked if he was a little crazy, Gibson said, "No, he was a lot crazy."
Maybe it's only appropriate that Gibson and Burke will be teaming up again in the 2020 class of the University of Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame. The 387-pound Gibson was just as dominant at right tackle as Burke was rushing off the edge. And their friendship has only gotten stronger since leaving Madison.
"Aaron and I have kept in touch over the years and we went down a lot of the same roads," said Burke, who's had to navigate some potholes in his life. "We have an understanding of each other's stories. Gibby is one of my closest friends. We're a lot alike. Our hearts are bigger than the world."
Burke hasn't forgotten his first meeting with Gibson.
"I remember I was unpacking my bags in my dorm room when I got down to Madison as a freshman," he said. "And I heard this high-pitched voice saying, 'You must be Burkie.' I turned and looked around I saw the biggest man I've ever seen in my life.
"He had to turn sideways and duck his head coming through the door."
Burke laughed loudly. And then he got emotional talking about being a Hall of Famer. The last few years have been tough on him physically. He had major neck surgery. And he needs to have one of his knees replaced. Despite the painful reminders of his sacrifices, he swears he'd do it all over again.
"I've been thinking about the Hall of Fame for a while," said the 43-year-old Burke, who's now living in the Superior, Wisconsin, area. "I knew the day was going to come. And this was a time in my life when it was really a great time for it to come. It's just amazing. It means everything to me.
"I've got that fire back in my soul again. I'm on the upswing. I've got my faith back."
• • • •
The quarterback sack didn't officially become an FBS statistic until 2000. Arizona State's Terrell Suggs is the record-holder with 24 in 2002. But Alabama's Derrick Thomas reportedly had 27 in 1988. For comparison, Ohio State's Nick Bosa never had more than 16, Joey Bosa never had more than 13.5.
What made Burke so special as a pass-rusher? At 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds, he didn't have overwhelming size (unlike Gibson). But he benched 445 pounds and squatted 620. He also had a 37-inch vertical. And he was a little crazy. No, let's double-down on Gibby. He was a lot crazy.
He was still covering kickoffs as a senior.
"And he was 10 yards ahead of everyone else getting down field," Barry Alvarez remembered of Burke, a fixture in a D-line meeting room that included Ross Kolodziej (the current UW strength coach), Chris Janek, John Favret, Wendell Bryant and Ben Herbert (the current Michigan strength coach).
"Burkie was out there yelling and screaming. He scared half the people he played against."
The other half couldn't match his energy.
"It was the motor — my drive and the motor," Burke said of his ability to dominate opponents. "I lost some battles along the way. But everybody does. I won my fair share. And I had that mindset when I stepped on the field, I believed that I was the best player on that field. I really believed that.
"I also studied film. I could tell you just about every play that the other team was going to run, whether it was pass or run. I could tell which way they were running by their motions and off-sets. I knew what everybody on the defense was doing. You've got to do that to be a step ahead."
Another ex-teammate, left tackle Chris McIntosh, felt Burke was just wired differently.
"When it came to game day," said McIntosh, now the deputy athletic director to Alvarez, "Burke was one of those players that you were really happy that he was on your team because he approached the game with an intensity like no other person I've ever met. When he arrived here, he was so much more developed than the ordinary freshman.
"He had that Northwoods-strong reality to him. That was undeniable."
Gallery: (6-22-2020) 2020 Hall of Fame: Tom Burke
Burke was raised in Poplar, Wisconsin, a village of 600 residents in Douglas County, 20 miles from Duluth, Minnesota, and about a five-hour drive from Camp Randall Stadium. As a senior, he was the Gatorade state player of the year at Northwestern High School in nearby Maple.
"Up North," Burke said, "I was the biggest guy by far in our conference."
As a true freshman, he made the adjustments to the physical demands and was selected as UW's Special Teams Player of the Year. Off the field, he had a few wake-up calls. And missed a few.
"I remember I was late for practice one morning because my alarm didn't go off," he recounted at the time. "Well, it probably did go off, but I shut it off. Anyway, I was 45 minutes late and I was ready to jump out the window rather than face what I knew I would face.
"I got yelled at and then they made me run. That night, I called my high school coach (Andy Lind) and I told him, 'They're trying to kill me down here.' He just laughed and said, 'Don't worry about it because it will get better.' And that's what kind of happened. It got better.
"My biggest adjustment on the field was getting to know the speed of the game. It was so much faster than high school. I felt I had the athletic ability. But learning the plays was difficult.
"We had two defensive calls in high school and the UW coaches gave me a playbook that was four inches thick. That's a lot of studying. At night, when the other freshmen were in the game room (during training camp), I was up in my room going over plays."
Burke's homework paid dividends down the road. As a sophomore, he started the last six games and averaged eight tackles during that span, with a team-high 10 at Iowa. As a junior, he had at least one TFL in nine of the last 10 games. He was the UW Defensive Player of the Week four times.
Going into his senior year, more than one-quarter (25.8 percent) of his career solos were for minus-yardage, explaining, perhaps, why he was so confident that he could get at least 20 sacks. "I've always had the heart," said Burke, who stood out with his hustle and jersey number (No. 74).
Beyond everything else, he possessed the belief that he was unblockable.
And there were games where he was.
In late October, the Badgers crushed Iowa, 31-0, at Kinnick Stadium, a payback for a 31-0 beating that they had taken on their previous trip to Iowa City in 1996. "I don't know if I've ever been with a defense that was as smothering as the one that we had that day," Alvarez said.
Burke had special incentive.
"They did an Up Close and Personal on me in the game program," he said. "And one of the questions was, 'What's something that somebody wouldn't know about you?' And my answer was, 'I write poetry and music and I play the guitar.' All true.
"Well, I lined up against this guy on the first series of the game, and he says to me, 'Hey, Burke, why don't you write me a poem.' I looked up at him and I didn't say a word. When the ball was snapped, I drove him back into the quarterback and I tackled him for a sack."
Poetic justice. The tone was set.
Burke feasted on Iowa's inexperienced offensive tackles, Alonzo Cunningham and Ben Sobieski, who had one career start between them. He was so dominant — four tackles for loss, three sacks, two passes broken up — that the Hawkeyes began rotating tackles in an effort to slow him down.
Nothing did. Not even a heckler seated in the first row behind the Badgers bench.
"He worked his butt off to get my head out of the game," Burke said afterwards. "On the first series, it was Burke, you (bleep), you (bleep). After the game, I went over and gave him a high-five. You could hear the fans shouting things at you. But you just shut them out and laugh at them."
In his final home appearance, Burke got the last laugh on his skeptics in a 24-3 win over Penn State. Coupled with Ohio State's victory over Michigan, the Badgers were headed to the Rose Bowl. And Burke had a big say in the outcome with five TFLs and four quarterback sacks against the Nittany Lions.
"When I got my 20th sack of the season in that game," he said, "it was a great feeling to run off the field and see the looks on everyone's face. It's really great to do things that people don't think anybody can do. I hope that someone breaks my Big Ten record and achieves their goals and dreams."
The Badgers capped their 11-1 season with a 38-31 win over UCLA in Pasadena.
Prior to the game, Bruins offensive coordinator Alan Borges warned of a Burke takeover.
"When you get into a passing situation, you'd better tighten up your underwear because he's going to come with his hair on fire," Borges said.
Burke sacked UCLA quarterback Cade McNown once. That gave him 22 sacks for the season. Two more than he had predicted for himself on the sheet of individual goals that he turned over to Palermo. At the 20-year reunion of the 1998 team in Madison, Burke and Palermo revisited the past.
"I hadn't seen him since I left," said Burke, a third-round draft pick of the Arizona Cardinals in the 1999 draft. "I was across the room when I saw him walk in. And he came straight up to me and he looked me right in the eye and said, 'I just want to apologize for not having faith in you.'
"That meant a lot to me. Our relationship wasn't that great my senior year. And that hurt. That ate me up for a long time. He was a great coach. He knew how to light my fire and I loved that in him. He cared about me and how I played. And I know he believed in me. He believed I could do great things."
His Hall of Fame induction speaks to that.
2020 UW Athletic Hall of Fame
- Aaron Gibson, Football
- Carla MacLeod, Women's Hockey
- Ted Kellner, Special Service
- Jackie Zoch, Women's Rowing
- Mike Wilkinson, Men's Basketball
- John Byce, Men's Hockey and Baseball
- Tom Burke, Football
- Jessie Stomski, Women's Basketball
- Dick Bartman, Boxing
- Jeff Braun, Men's Track and Field
- Bo Ryan, Men's Basketball
