Juggling Act

By Terry Tush

Scott Burk remembers arriving in Stillwater for the first time and never looking back. One of the top two-sport high school athletes in Colorado at the time, the teenager was looking to play football and baseball when he made a recruiting trip to Oklahoma State University in January 1974.

Burk is glad he accepted the scholarship offer from Jim Stanley, the Cowboys head football coach then.

“I wanted to go away [to school],” Burk says. “I really liked the environment and the atmosphere at OSU and still do to this day.”

But he’s the first to admit that his life was not easy in Stillwater. He played quarterback from 1975 to 1978 and was an All-Big Eight Conference third baseman while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in finance.

It was hectic.

“The only people that really had any trouble with it were the coaches,” he says. “And the football coaches were, ‘Well, you need to be in spring practice for football.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to play baseball.’ The baseball coach said, ‘You really need to be in fall practice for baseball.’ I don’t think it held me back. I was successful in both sports at OSU. Not to the level that I’d like to have been but that was taken out of my hand by all the injuries.”

Burk realized he had a golden opportunity in hand with his athletic scholarship paying for college.

“I had a little bit of an advantage with that because my dad was a college football player [at Rice University]. Both of my parents went there, and they both hammered it into you that education is important,” he says. “Playing sports is fun, but education is important.

“I loved my classes. We had great professors there in the university. At the time, the building there was leading edge, and I was very impressed with that. I was very impressed with just the physical layout of the university itself; I thought it was really pretty. The people there were just fantastic, and I got a little bit of a chance to leave a mark at OSU as a part of the [football] team that won the first Big Eight championship that had been won there,” Burk says.

Burk was a member of the OSU football team that won nine games and was crowned Big Eight co-champions with Colorado and Oklahoma in 1976. He admits it was a bittersweet season as he suffered a season-ending broken wrist against Tulsa in the first game of the season.

Two years later as a senior, he experienced perhaps the highlight of his OSU football playing career. The 13th-ranked Colorado Buffaloes had won their first five games of the season and came to Stillwater to face the Cowboys, who had yet to win in five tries. But Burk led the Cowboys to a 24-20 upset of the Buffaloes.

“I knew a number of the CU players,” Burk told Irv Moss with the Denver Post in 2012. “It was a huge upset, and probably my high point in football. CU was stacked with players that year.”

That came on the heels of the 1977 baseball season when he was OSU’s only All-Big Eight selection after leading the team in home runs (14), runs batted in (39), runs scored (44), stolen bases (13) and walks (34).

Burk was one of the rare athletes who had a chance to play professionally in both sports. Out of high school, he was drafted in 1974 to play baseball in the 25th round by the Cincinnati Reds, and then again as a secondary-phase first-rounder in 1975. After his OSU playing career, he was a sixth-round draft choice of the Boston Red Sox in 1977 and played one season in its organization.

He was also a ninth-round pick in the 1979 NFL draft by the Cincinnati Bengals and played in 16 games that season. Burk “bummed around for another two” seasons in the NFL before playing in the Canadian Football League for a year before retiring.

“I got hurt several times at OSU where I was out good parts of the season and did not have the college career that would provide the impetus to go into the NFL at the level you need to be successful,” says Burk, who moved back to the Denver area. He earned a master’s degree in accounting in 1988 and eventually became a CPA.

Today, the 61-year-old is owner of Burk & Company, an independent tax CPA firm specializing in partnership and corporate taxation, real estate development and oil and gas activity in the greater Denver area.

“One of the things I’ve learned in the 40 years of doing this is the more you make yourself an asset to somebody else, whether it’s to your business, a client or whoever, the easier you’re going to have it and the more you’re going to be successful,” he says.

Burk proudly states he’s an Oklahoma State graduate when asked.

“Most people’s first reaction is, ‘Oklahoma State? Where is that? Stillwater? Where is Stillwater?’ It’s a little town north of Oklahoma City where you’ll have the best time of your life. And you’ll learn a lot and have a great career because of that.”