OUR BODY OF WORK MOTIVATES & ENTERTAINS TODAY AND WILL INSPIRE GENERATIONS TO COME

• Thursday, October 9th, 2008   STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE     

SPORTS / INSIDE

Small college, big success

ADVANCE STAFF WRITER

Alma  mater  will honor

Mickey  Burns'  journey

from local football hero

to media mogul.

Running and catching the ball from his wingback position in Somma's Single Wing, Burns averaged more than 10 yards every time he touched the ball, and led the city in scoring. When he crossed up the defense by pulling up and throwing the ball on a reverse, it was as if the Centrals weren't even playing fair anymore.

After that, he followed a steady trickle of Island athletes to little Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Mo., 10 miles off the interstate, where he went right on scoring touchdowns and winning games, a two-sport star in a one-horse town.

So when Burns, the president of Quest Media Entertainment and the host of his own show on NYC TV, goes back to Marshall next week to receive his alma mater's Outstanding Alumni Award - for his post-football accomplishments - it will be a signal of how Burns and the school have evolved.

WORD OF MOUTH

That part of the story begins with Milt Huttner, a neighborhood guy who took an interest in another of Somma's football players, Fred Fugazzi, and established a relationship with Missouri Valley in the days when college recruiting was a hit-and-miss enterprise, built on friendships and word of mouth.

"Milt was one of the few guys who advocated for athletes," Burns says. "He wound up helping some guys who didn't have a clue."

Burns puts himself in that category. In the summer after his senior year of high school, he was playing American Legion baseball, still unsure of what he was going to do next, when Huttner talked to him about Fugazzi and some of the others who'd matriculated at Missouri Valley. "I saw it as an opportunity," he says.

It was always about the opportunity for Burns. Give him the ball, and he'd find his way to the end zone. Give him an opening, and he'd drive a bus through it. Who else could headline a wedding band to 100 bookings a year, with a voice like a halfback? Who else would feel comfortable talking boxing with George Foreman one week, and philosophy with Maya Angelou the next, the way Burns did on his TV show?

Give him a team, and he'd get the most out of it, the way he learned from Somma. His McKee basketball team went 23-1 in 1977, with the only loss coming in the PSAL city championship game.

It was the music - learning to work with all that sound equipment - that led to television. Burns was playing golf with Bill McCreary, a former channel 5 news anchor, and cameraman Rich Murphy, when they invited him to drop in for a newscast. He parlayed that into production work on "The 10 O'Clock News", "The McCreary Report," and "Sports Extra" and eventually into his own production company and an on-camera career, first on local cable, and now on NYC TV.

TALK IT UP

Since then, Burns has chatted up politicians, musicians, actors and athletes. Because when you get right down to it, what's the difference between game-planning a football game and formatting an interview?

But in 1964 he was just another one of the kids Milt Huttner guided to a small-town school 1,000 miles from home. "If you were looking for a lot of action, or night life, it might not have been the place for you to go," he says. Burns found all the action he wanted on the football field in the fall, and the baseball field in the spring.

He threw for two scores the day Missouri Valley pulled off a 28-26 upset against Austin College, the top-ranked NALA team in the country, and scored three touchdowns when the Vikings beat Illinois-Chicago at storied Soldier Field.

The baseball team was having lunch in Memphis, on its way back from a spring trip, the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the other side of town. "We got back on the bus and got back on the highway," Burns says. "By the time we got back to campus, most cities across the country were in chaos, but we were isolated from all the turmoil. "It was like a little Shangri-La."

Burns went almost 40 years between visits to Marshall, before going back to speak at an on-campus entrepreneurial conference. "When we went there, everyone else was from the Midwest," he says. "Now they have students from about 100 countries. "The campus had a great feel to it."

The college has come a long way since the 60's - when it was easy for a kid from back East to feel cloistered - but not as far as the wingback from New Dorp, who keeps finding new worlds to conquer.