March 4, 2007

By Adam Lucas

It is a Friday night in August and Chapel Hill is beginning to hop.

Students are filtering back into town and the atmosphere is coming back alive after the usual summer slumber. This is a time when it is good to be a Carolina basketball player, good to go down to Franklin Street and be recognized, good to soak in a couple final Friday nights of fun before practice begins and free time usually equals a good opportunity to grab a nap.

At 11:30 p.m., one car pulls into the Smith Center parking lot. The driver is Dewey Burke, alone.

"Got big plans for Friday night?" you ask him.

"Definitely," he says.

"Got to get some shots up."

Burke doesn't even eat the biscuits. This is more than a little ironic, considering there have been days this season when he'll walk across campus and be serenaded with, "Biscuits!" from his fellow students.

On three different occasions this season, Burke has provided the basket that pushed the Tar Heels into triple digits. The biscuit basket, if you will. That hoop triggers a Bojangle's promotion that enables patrons to buy two sausage biscuits for $1.00 the next day. But they're not on the diet of most college athletes, so he doesn't partake. No matter what he does, no matter where he goes, no matter what he accomplishes in life, when Burke returns to Chapel Hill people will say one thing when they spot him: "That's the guy who used to get us the biscuits."

"Of course," Wes Miller said. "He is Biscuits. That's just what he is."

Burke has become so ingrained in the fabric of triple-digit games that when the Tar Heels surpassed 100 points relatively early against Wake Forest, before he could get in the game, Roy Williams later walked down the bench and then jokingly decided not to put Burke in, as if the Philadelphia native had little left to accomplish now that the 100-point barrier was eclipsed.

"I'm happy to give people their food," Burke said. "As we get closer, everybody on the bench says, `Get ready, you've got to get us over 100.'

"I always look at the basket. If I touch it, I look. And if there's a glimmer of light, I'm going to put it up."

Whoa, wait a minute. A walk-on gunner? That can't be right.

Except that's what he is coached to do. Burke only moonlights a handful of times per year as the Biscuit Bandit. His job in practice--every single day from October to April--is to serve as a member of the Blue team, the group charged with preparing Carolina's starters for the next game. Over the past two seasons, he's been J.J. Redick in practice. He's been Sean Singletary. But his favorite?

"Guillermo Diaz from Miami last year," he says. "There was no shot he wouldn't take. The week of that game, Coach Robinson said, `Every time you touch it, shoot it.' That wasn't hard. Being a shooter is fun, because when I'm a guy like Redick or Diaz, no matter how far I shoot it from, Coach Williams won't say anything because I'm just doing my job."

A former football player at Fairfield University, he transferred after the Stags eliminated their gridiron program. He transferred to Carolina for the education, not the basketball, and joined the junior varsity program on a whim.

He still prepares like a football player. For big games, he'll visit the basketball office film library and watch extra tape of the player he's supposed to emulate. If that player exclusively drives left, Burke wants to only drive left. If he only shoots off the dribble, Burke will spend the next couple practices doing exactly that.

No one sees that type of preparation, just like no one sees all the extra shots he hoists every week just to keep his shot sharp.

He's the oldest of four, including 13-year-old Brady, who is "a normal bratty teenager," according to Dewey.

Understand this: "normal bratty teenager" is an exceptionally high compliment. When Brady was a toddler, he was diagnosed with muscle cancer. Four years later, he was back in the hospital with a rare blood disease.

"I was just a kid," Dewey says. "I just knew everyone else was sad, so I was sad. Brady had to go to chemotherapy every Wednesday and one week my parents asked if I wanted to go. When I saw what was happening, how hard he cried and how he looked at my mom like he couldn't understand what was happening, it was so hard to watch. I'm the oldest. I'm supposed to take care of my brother, and to be helpless to do anything was the worst feeling in the world.

"It's something I don't forget. If I'm having a tough day or Coach is getting on me, nothing I ever deal with will be as bad as what Brady had to deal with."

So now you know who you're cheering for.

He can be Biscuits to you and your buddies. Maybe he'll take a little bit of pride in being one of the most popular basketball walk-ons since Julius Peppers (for slightly different reasons).

But he'll be much prouder of being a big brother.

He may get in the game today, might even get a chance to hoist one of those signature 3-pointers. The students will chant his name on Senior Day, just like they do every time in the closing minutes of a rout. It can be heady stuff. But he's always conscious of preserving the integrity of the game.

"I'm always thinking about doing what Coach Williams wants us to do," he says. "I want the product on the floor to stay the same even if the top 10 guys aren't in. We're still on national TV and he's still going to coach us, so we're going to play the right way. If I'm lucky enough to get a shot off and it's a good shot, that's icing on the cake."

Or maybe biscuits in the basket.

Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.