By George Johnson
Calgary Herald
Look closely enough, Willie Burden freely admits, and you can still see dents in the chassis.
“I’m 61 years old now,” he confesses, from his office at Georgia Southern University. “And I feel those carries. I do. All those carries from back in 1975. I feel them today. Arthritis. Knee-joint pain. All that stuff.
“Back then, you recovered so quickly.
“At 61 . . .
“At that time, when you’re young, two years out of college, I just wanted to carry the ball. Every play if I could, if they’d let me, to try and help the team win. That was my job. I didn’t mind at all.
“But you carry the ball that often, it does take a toll.”
By any gauge, Calgary Stampeders’ tailback Jon Cornish is putting in a season to remember. Cracking the 1,000-yard barrier with five games to go early in the second quarter of Friday night’s tilt versus the Eskimos at McMahon Stadium, Cornish now finds himself on pace for 1,537 and the distinction of becoming the first non-import since Orville Lee 24 years ago to top the CFL rushing charts.
That’s quite a lift-off to your pro career.
There have been countless stellar seasons witnessed at McMahon Stadium by Stamp devotees down through the years. And then there’s ’75.
Of all the highlight years, only Doug Flutie’s mind-numbing 6,092-yard/44 TD passing of the ’93 campaign can compare.
In 1975, the year Willie’s chassis was all dinged up, he rushed for 1,896 yards.
Let that figure sink in a moment: 1,896.
“That,” concedes Cornish admiringly, “is a LOT of yards.”
In 16 starts, remember. With the two extra games on the docket today, he’d have tucked in behind Lloyd Fairbanks or Basil Bark and whizzed past 2,000. Easy. Mike Pringle, in ’94 at Baltimore and ’98 as an Alouette, is the only man in the annals of the three-down game to better Burden’s ’75 number, and in both those years he had the benefit of 18 games to work with.
Consider this: With 332 carries — which is still Calgary’s single-season franchise high — Burden toted the rock 12 more times than QB Joe Pisarcik THREW it that year. On only one occasion — one — has a Stampeder receiver racked up more yards through the air through a single campaign than Burden did in ’75 along the ground — Allen Pitts, 2,036, 19 years ago.
Consider this, too: Carnivorous defences knew full well that No. 10 would be handling the ball on virtually every second play (the next-busiest back, Rick Galbos, carried only 47 times) but were nonetheless ridiculously ill-equipped to contain him. The Stamps fired a coach, Jim Wood, that year and finished a lousy 6-10, outside the playoffs. Yet Willie Burden with a target stapled to his back still eclipsed Earl Lunsford’s then-record of 1,794 and was feted with richly-deserved league MVP honours.
“When the record started to become a possibility,” he recalls now, “it became a team goal rather than an individual one. I could do nothing without my teammates. After a while we knew we weren’t going to make the playoffs, and that (record) brought the team together. We had a purpose.
“That became the focus. Everybody rallied behind that.
“You know, I could read about Earl Lunsford, hear the stories, look at his record. But it never crossed my mind that I’d have that as a goal when I was in Calgary. Once you get into the season and you get to a point where ‘Man! It could happen!’, everything changes. That’s what happened to me.
“But before the season started? No way. Not even part of the conversation.”
The day that propelled him past the fabled Earthquake, Lunsford, and into the history books remains etched in his mind. It came the season’s final game, Nov. 2, needing 137 yards.
Not leaving anything to chance, he trod all over the beleaguered Bombers for 238.
“I remember it,” says 61-year-old Willie Burden softly, “like it was yesterday. Against Winnipeg, in Calgary. I remember the salute the fans gave me, my teammates gave me, my mom . . . all of that stuff comes back. Warm memories. Great memories. Memories I’ll never forget.
“The greatest day I ever had playing football.
“It was the perfect storm, that day. The offensive guys, the line, they were like ‘We’re gonna get it! We’re gonna get it!’ They were more confident than I was. The defence was like ‘Don’t worry! We’re gonna get you the ball!’
“My feet never touched the ground that day.
“I’ve never felt that way, before or since.
“I was floating on a cloud.”
These days, Burden gets his football fix watching his kids. His oldest son, Willie Jr., is a backup tight end, a senior, at his dad’s place of work, the University of Georgia Southern. The youngest, Freddie, is red-shirting at centre at Georgia Tech.
After retiring from football and the Stampeders at the same moment, following the 1981 season, Burden hoped to transition into an athletics director role at a U.S. college. He’s been as successful in academics as he was here, currently in a 14th year as a highly-respected, published Associate Professor in Sports Management at Georgia Southern.
So, technically, that’s Dr. Burden to you . . .
“I absolutely love teaching and talking about sports all day, every day. I mean, how much better can it get than that?
“It’s very rewarding to see young people do well.”
If he were here to see, one young man in particular doing well would doubtless catch such a discerning eye.
“Maybe coming into a season where I’m at full speed the entire season, like the last few weeks, I could do something like that,” Cornish muses of the legacy of ’75. “But that, as I said before, is a lot of yards. I’d have to break off a big run every single game.
“You’ve just got to give credit to Willie Burden. Because that’s quite the feat.”
When Cornish’s credentials are listed off — that big-U.S.-college Kansas pedigree, the limitless potential yet to be tapped, yards per carry, his run at Orville’s Lee’s homegrown achievement — Burden, too, whistles in admiration.
“Wish him luck for me, will you? Records are made to be broken. Even mine. He’s young, like I was in ’75. And maybe one day, who knows? He’s obviously got a lot of natural ability and has a long career ahead of him.
“He’s just getting started.
“He’s only going to get better. And what he’s doing right now, from what you tell me . . . it’s amazing.”
If any man should have a line on amazing, that man is Mr. 1,896.