Willie Burton, the author of arguably the most surprising 50-point game in NBA history, has made it his life’s work to help those that struggle with addiction just as he has.
Where Willie Burton was concerned, nothing would ever compare to this. Really, what could? Just over 30 years ago, on Dec. 13, 1994, he scored 53 points in an NBA game.
Amid his lone season with the Sixers and a troubled time in his life, he stood with franchise royalty for that single night. Never again, though. He was the ultimate one-hit wonder, a fitting embodiment of a team that too often in its history has had only a nodding acquaintance with sustained success.
What you should know is that Willie Burton’s tale doesn’t begin and end there, even if our awareness of him does. That the guy who once wondered if he would see his 18th birthday is drawing ever nearer to his 57th, in May. That the guy who was once doubled-teamed by mental-health and substance-abuse issues has been clean and sober since July 7, 1997.
What you should know is that he has found other things in life that have in fact matched that night, when he torched his former team, the Miami Heat. That he has been stacking good days for a good long while now.
“From what he’s gone through, you can either go one way or the other,” said Keith Askins, his friend and former teammate with the Heat. “There’s no gray area between. There’s no gray when you take that life. For him to come out of it, and to be working and to be doing positive things in his community now … God bless Willie, man.”
Burton has talked often about how difficult it was growing up in Detroit. How the violence he saw left him deeply scarred. How he would go on to self-medicate, first with alcohol, then with other drugs. How that sidetracked his promising NBA career, and left him looking for answers he only belatedly found.
Now he has fully embraced the idea of taking one day at a time. Now he serves as an assistant professor in the kinesiology department at the University of Minnesota, his alma mater. He is also working toward his doctorate, while at the same time making it his goal to help others avoid some of his missteps.
To that end he counsels young people through his association with an organization called Excel U., which he describes as “a catalogue of programs designed to help student-athletes and the adults who guide them.” He speaks to various groups, goes the extra mile. In January alone he appeared at a Martin Luther King Day celebration at a St. Paul rec center and participated in a seminar called “The Power of Wellness and Leadership.”
“To put it in a nutshell, I’m returning the favor,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I’m offering what was given to me. That’s what my life is about. … Basketball was my gift. I was very talented. That was a gift. Now what is my life’s purpose? To do what I’m doing now.”
So understand this: He was never known for his rebounding as a player. But in life? Totally different story.
In a 2021 video he said he underwent “a seven-year growth process of self-awareness and self-discovery” encompassing the bulk of his NBA career. John Lucas, who coached Burton in Philadelphia during that 1994-95 season and is a recovering addict himself, chuckled when he was informed of that.
“That sounds like him today,” he said. “Right out (of) the book now”
At the same time Lucas is gratified to see how far Burton has come. He said he is proud of him, that indeed he has felt that way for some two decades now.
“For me, it wasn’t about basketball,” Lucas said. “It was about his life.”
For a long time they were entwined. Burton won two Michigan state titles in high school, then scored exactly 1,800 points at Minnesota, a total that remains third in school history. He also had his No. 34 retired. The Heat made him the ninth pick of the 1990 draft, and the 6-foot-8 wing showed great promise as an instant-offense guy his first two seasons.
Then the spiral began. He had begun drinking when he was 14 or 15, he said, but managed to keep himself squared away in college. The NBA is a different animal, though. Players are suddenly presented with more money and free time than they know what to do with. And in his case, that led to his drinking morphing into something more, something worse.
“I used to mix marijuana, cocaine,” he said. “I had some of everything — hash. Everything but heroin, because I saw what heroin did to people. So I caught myself staying away from something that would destroy me, when all the other stuff was just destroying me slower.”
After four seasons the Heat cut him in November 1994, and he was signed almost immediately by the Sixers. Lucas was new to the job, and appeared to be as concerned with saving souls as winning games. Once a star point guard who was taken atop the 1976 draft, he had battled addiction throughout his playing career, and would later open a rehab facility in Houston (which remains in operation to this day).
Lucas turned the Sixers into something of a halfway house, for Burton and others. And on that night in December 1994, the player who might have become a statistic came to be known for one.
His 53 points in the Sixers’ 105-90 victory over the Heat were a Spectrum record — one that will forever stand, since that building no longer does. It also equals the 11th-highest total in franchise history. Burton shares that rung in the ladder with Joel Embiid, Allen Iverson and Wilt Chamberlain.
He clings to that night, knowing it was the exception and not the rule. Knowing what might have been, were it not for his many issues. Excluding active players, no one who has notched 50 or more points in a game finished with a lower career total than Burton’s 3,243.
Explains why he had a ring made for himself a few years ago, commemorating that occasion.
“I left a mark in the game of basketball that will always be there,” he said.
And yet …
“Sometimes I have feelings that I could have been a much better player,” he said. “I could have been an All-Star. I could have had multiple All-Star Game appearances.”
His career average was a modest 10.3 points a game, and he appeared in just 316 games in the course of his eight seasons — including 40 over his last three, when he hopscotched from Atlanta to San Antonio to Charlotte. Then he played overseas and in the minor leagues through 2004.
Burton’s big night in December 1994 represented a small side trip amid his longer journey toward sobriety. And certainly when examined strictly in a basketball sense, the game came out of nowhere. To that point in his NBA career Burton had never scored more than 28 points in a game, and he would never score more than 33 afterward.
He put up just 19 shots from the floor, making 12; only Utah’s Adrian Dantley has ever attempted fewer field goals in a 50-point game, having needed 17 in 1980. (Kyrie Irving also had 19 in a 50-pointer for Brooklyn in 2022.)
Burton, 5-for-8 from 3-point range and a staggering 24-for-28 from the foul line that night, has always insisted that he didn’t view it as a revenge game. Lucas believes otherwise. So too does Askins, who remembered Burton looking over at the Miami bench once he got rolling and engaging in various “antics.”
But Burton had faced the Heat on two earlier occasions that season, scoring 13 points the first time and 19 the second. This was something special, the ultimate one-off.
“He was probably the best player in the Association that night,” said Askins, now a scout for the Heat.
Burton started that game at guard with Dana Barros and as part of a quintet that also included Clarence Weatherspoon, Scott Williams and Shawn Bradley. It was a team destined to finish 24-58, but it was immediately apparent this would be something more than your average humdrum affair.
Burton nailed a three-pointer from the right corner on the Sixers’ second possession, then another three-ball moments later. He notched 13 of Philadelphia’s first 15 points, and finished the first quarter with 18. By halftime he had 29, and after three quarters he had 38.
“We had one certain play for him that we ran, I guess, 40 times that game,” Lucas said — i.e., a flare screen to get Burton into a pick-and-roll.
The idea, Lucas said with a laugh, was “to get to his right hand, because disaster was coming in that left hand.”
Askins remembers Burton’s game being more complete than that — that he could go either way, and score on all three levels.
“Willie had the body, athleticism,” Askins said. “He had big hands, and he had confidence. … He would definitely be what you would consider a tough cover.”
There is an element of mystery to that game, in that there were those in the arena that night who believe the Heat players were only too happy to help Burton breach the 50-point mark. And certainly the official play-by-play would suggest as much. Burton shot no fewer than 16 free throws in the fourth quarter alone, making 13. He managed a single field goal in that period.
Askins, for his part, entered the game for the first time at the start of the fourth, and in 11 minutes was whistled for five personals — at least the last four against Burton; it’s not clear from the play-by-play sheet who he tagged on his first foul. He also drew a technical. Burton converted those transgressions into seven points.
Burton nonetheless insists that he did not have any extra help in achieving his milestone.
“No professional player would ever do that,” he said. “They were trying to stop me. That’s why they were fouling me so much. They all like me, but they don’t like me that much.”
Askins, however, stopped short of a denial.
“I don’t know, because we did have some guys that grew up with him in the Detroit area, so maybe they did help him a little bit,” he said, an apparent reference to guys like John Salley and Glen Rice, neither of whom could be reached for this piece.
“But like I said,” Askins added, “Willie was doing his thing that night. If you didn’t foul him, he was going to score anyway. I think those fouls were probably out of context of making him earn it at the line, without embarrassing you — like, giving you some stepback or finishing over you at the rim.”
Whatever the case, it was a personal highlight without equal for Burton, and a triumph over himself.
“It’s a matter of (whether) he can keep that canary on his shoulder settled,” Lucas told the Philadelphia Daily News at the time. “Tonight, it had plenty of birdseed.”
Reminded of that recently, Lucas chuckled again.
“That canary would get off his perch at any minute,” he said. “He had to try and keep that canary on his perch.”
That has proven to be a life-long chore. In his public appearances these days Burton often mentions the violence that enveloped him at an early age in Detroit. Specifically, there was a shooting he witnessed at age 5, as he and a cousin walked to a store, and a stabbing he saw a few years later, as a result of a dispute over a dice game.
“That was, maybe, three percent of what I actually saw,” he said. “I’ve had guns put to my head growing up. I’ve had real life-and-death situations.”
The experiences took their toll on him. In fact, he said he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of all he saw, which in turn led to his substance abuse. During his pro career he was in and out of rehab, at Lucas’ facility and others. He sought the counsel of Dr. Lloyd Baccus, who before his death in 2006 headed the NBA’s Player Assistance Program. And finally, in the summer of 1997, Burton got himself squared away.
“I never accepted that I had mental issues, and I never realized that me drinking and doing drugs was my coping mechanism,” he said. “I had to accept that. I had to accept that there was something wrong with me, with seeing people getting shot and stabbed and all the violence growing up as a kid.”
Clean and sober since that July day in 1997, he saw his playing career meander to an end seven years later, in Lebanon. He earned his undergraduate degree, in multidisciplinary studies, in 2013, his masters in sports administration seven years later. He hopes to earn his PhD in sports exercise and psychology this year.
“Basically what I’ve committed my life to,” he said, “is the things I’ve gone through.”
Helping others avoid following the same path. Helping them understand that better things are possible. That the number of great days need not be confined to one.