Forty-seven years before Oregon placed a huge image of quarterback Joey Harrington on Times Square, 36 years before Brigham Young mailed cardboard ties to entice votes for quarterback Ty Detmer and 13 years before Notre Dame changed the pronunciation of Joe Theismann’s name to rhyme with a certain college football trophy, no less a straight-laced custodian of the game than Bud Wilkinson got in on the Heisman Trophy campaigning.
The object of Wilkinson’s stumping was Kurt Burris.
Then as now, Burris was a highly-decorated ballplayer who sometimes had to wait on his honors. Some of that changes Monday night, when Burris, who died in 1999, is inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame.