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jimsumner
07-01-2019, 07:08 PM
A few weeks ago I identified Jeff Burdette as Duke's first ACC-era player from California in an article on Duke recruits from California.

I received a nice note from the poster named DST Fan who remembered Burdette playing prep ball in New Jersey, Governor Livingstone School to be exact.

I went back and checked. Every single source lists Burdette as being from Buena Vista, California. That includes contemporary sources, the most recent Duke media guides, John Roth's Duke Basketball Encyclopedia and countless other materials.

But. I did find one 1972 source that listed Buena Vista as his home town but also listed Governor Livingstone as his most recent school.

What gives?

DST speculates that the family moved to California the summer after Burdette graduated from high school but before he enrolled at Duke.

Sounds plausible. I can't rule out the possibility that his family lived in California while he attended high school in New Jersey.

But in either event I no longer have any confidence that Jeff Burdette played high school ball in California. Which would make Scott Goetsch and Steve Gray the first California natives to play hoops at Duke at least during the ACC era.

Thanks to DST to alerting me to this and letting me set the record straight.

Back to your regular programming.

Duke76
07-01-2019, 07:27 PM
A few weeks ago I identified Jeff Burdette as Duke's first ACC-era player from California in an article on Duke recruits from California.

I received a nice note from the poster named DST Fan who remembered Burdette playing prep ball in New Jersey, Governor Livingstone School to be exact.

I went back and checked. Every single source lists Burdette as being from Buena Vista, California. That includes contemporary sources, the most recent Duke media guides, John Roth's Duke Basketball Encyclopedia and countless other materials.

But. I did find one 1972 source that listed Buena Vista as his home town but also listed Governor Livingstone as his most recent school.

What gives?

DST speculates that the family moved to California the summer after Burdette graduated from high school but before he enrolled at Duke.

Sounds plausible. I can't rule out the possibility that his family lived in California while he attended high school in New Jersey.

But in either event I no longer have any confidence that Jeff Burdette played high school ball in California. Which would make Scott Goetsch and Steve Gray the first California natives to play hoops at Duke at least during the ACC era.

Thanks to DST to alerting me to this and letting me set the record straight.

Back to your regular programming.

Jim don't know about all of that....just remember watch Jef Burdette and Alan Shaw throwing full length passes to each other as they warmed up every game my freshman year...craziest warm up I've ever seen....it was the early 70's

Reilly
07-01-2019, 07:43 PM
Here's a 2007 source mentioning the NJ hoops playing: http://blogs.mycentraljersey.com/hoopshaven/2007/05/16/a-taste-of-the-big-time/

Devil2
07-01-2019, 09:44 PM
Burdette was a couple of years behind me at Duke. He played HS basketball IN New Jersey and moved to LA area afterwards with his family

DST Fan
07-02-2019, 08:14 PM
As I mentioned to Jim, Jeff lived in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey before enrolling at Duke and played his four years of high school basketball at Governor Livingston Regional High School, a high school that, at the time, was shared by two towns, Berkeley Heights and Mountainside. Eventually, Berkeley Heights acquired the high school from the Union County Regional School System and dropped "Regional" from the name, and the school began to serve just the one town. Jeff's entry in the database at GoDuke refers to the school as "Governor Livingstone." That's incorrect and the school was named after William Livingston (no "e"), who was one of the New Jersey signers of the U.S. Constitution.

I knew Jeff and played on the Governor Livingston basketball team two years behind him. I also remember a few of the events surrounding Duke's recruiting of Jeff. Bucky Waters visited Governor Livingston late in Jeff's senior season and, until that point, we all understood that Jeff would be attending William and Mary. My recollection is that Bucky had one scholarship left and offered it to Jeff.

I also forwarded to Jim the link from the New Jersey high school basketball blog that Reilly found. That was the only reference I could find on the Internet connecting Jeff to Berkeley Heights, which probably is not surprising given that he played high school basketball in the late 1960's.

With regard to Duke76's comment-- Jeff used the same warm up before our high school games. I never asked Jeff about it specifically, but my understanding was that, as a wide receiver on our football team, he patterned it after the throw and catch warm up that quarterbacks and their wide receivers use on the sidelines before a game. In the pregame before our basketball games, Jeff would throw the full court passes to our big men (or what passed for big men at 6'4" and 6'5"). Although he probably graduated from our high school as the career scoring leader, Jeff was very much a "pass first" point guard. Our press offense against both man and zone presses was simple-- inbound the ball to Jeff and everyone head up court. I am guessing that he viewed the passing drill as a way to prepare his big men (at least one of whom had less than soft hands) for passes that he was expecting to make during the game.