Pembrook burrows biography of mahatma

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Oler wouldn't let me know but he was keeping them in a box to give to me when my last season was over.

Ha, like I ever expected anything to come of that."

Oler found Burrows a place to live in Cocoa and picked him up each day for classes and for practice. Jacksonville had a 23-1 team that had just closed down the regular season with road wins over Georgia Tech and Miami.

Jacksonville's players headed off to class on the first day back at school, not counting on anything from an NCAA selection committee that never before had chosen the school.

Besides, there was no live television broadcast to reveal the brackets.

The Dolphins caught them in the brief period between Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's departure and Bill Walton's arrival, but so what? The Dolphins made it through, however, winning 104-103 on a tip-in by Burrows with three seconds remaining.

That capped a 23-point game, a season high for Burrows. One day Burrows got a call from his mother to head straight home after work instead of going to shoot hoops.

"I got home and there's this white man in a sport coat sitting on the porch with my mom," Burrows said.

"When I left Brevard, I had over 250. Burrows, who contributed 12 points and six rebounds , immediately longed for a chance to do it all again, only better.

"It just wasn't our time to win it," Burrows said. That disappointed Burrows, who says he always wanted to go against the best his opponent had to offer.

But there would be no problem with that in the championship game.

UCLA was such a powerhouse that the Bruins had lost a total of two games in the previous three years, and all three of those were national championship seasons.

That defeat knocked Jacksonville back a couple of spots to No. 8 but it didn't matter much. The Dolphins won 109-96 and crowed for more.

Next came what should have been a dead end, a collision with Iowa's Big Ten champion Hawkeyes and future NBA star Fred "Downtown Freddie" Brown. At game's end, the A-Train was watching from the bench, fouled out.

"I just happened to be there," Burrows said of his game-winning play.

Nobody else beat them until the NCAA championship game.

Burrows' numbers for that season (10.8 points and 7.3 rebounds per game) don't grab your attention next to Gilmore's, but whose could? The University of Miami integrated its basketball team in 1968 and Florida waited until 1971.

Jacksonville, a full four-year university for only 11 years when Burrows signed a scholarship offer there, was only beginning to make the change, too.

Chip Dublin joined the Jacksonville Dolphins in 1967 and soon became the first black player to start for a major Southern basketball school.

I said, 'I'm not good enough to be playing basketball and I don't want to sit on the bench anymore.'"

Over the next year Burrows changed a bit. His widow relocated to Palm Beach County, which is how Pembrook Burrows Jr. came to be a U.S. citizen and join the U.S. Army and later to work as a maintenance supervisor at Sears & Roebuck. I could go anywhere I wanted to go."

Well, not exactly, at least not when it came to colleges in Florida and the rest of the South.

Florida State University signed its first black basketball player in 1966.

Go to the boards. Burrows tells of a day when he and Gilmore and Dublin were driving around town and spotted a couple of kids shooting baskets on an old hoop in the projects.

"We decided to stop and shoot a little bit with them," Burrows said.