Believe It Or Not, March Madness On The Dot: Joe Burrow’s Grandmother Joins Bengals Great Takeo Spikes In High School Hall
This trip, Joe Burrow, the point guard for the Bengals, is taking advantage of a little piece of his own March Madness. Burrow is the son of a shooter and a scorer.
His grandmother will be inducted into the National High School Sports Hall of Fame this summer, according to information that leaked out of Boston earlier this month. It turns out that in the winter of 1949–50 in Mississippi’s Hill County, which borders Tennessee, Dot Burrow was as smooth as her grandson Seamless Joe.
Back then, she was Dot Ford, a lean 5-10 who scored 50 points a night on average for Smithville High School.
“Dot believe-it-or-not pitched in a nifty 82 points,” reported a Jackson paper of Smithville’s 88-39 win at Caledonia.
A few nights before, her future husband, starting Mississippi State point guard James Burrow, took a bunch of his teammates to her game near Starkville in Hamilton when they didn’t believe his girlfriend was scoring 50 a game.
“She scored only 72 that night,” says Jimmy Burrow, their son. “They were impressed.”
It took a tornado to dig up Dot Ford Burrow’s accomplishments more than 70 years later. After last spring’s twister caused extensive damage to Dot and James’ Amory, Miss., home, a wayward sportswriter looking for the high school baseball field instead was introduced to Jimmy Burrow cleaning up the yard of his shaken but safe parents. The men knew of each other and after they talked a bit, Jimmy Burrow said to Mississippi Today’s Rick Cleveland, “You probably don’t know about my momma.”
Cleveland, the state’s gifted doctor of letters and letter jackets, made sure he told the rest of the world what Jimmy had read in the family scrapbooks after he confirmed the startling numbers in the archives of newspapers.com.
“We were kind of a basketball family first and evolved into a football family. It’s probably one of the reasons Joe loved basketball so much,” says Jimmy Burrow, the future college football coach who played in the Mississippi high school basketball all-star game and not in the gridiron classic.
“There was a point there in seventh, eighth, ninth grade where he was a good enough player we thought that maybe that was his future in college.”
The twister was followed by lightning. In addition to being inducted into the National Hall of Fame, Dot Ford Burrow’s four-person class includes a fellow first-rounder and one of her grandson’s greatest forebears in Bengals history.
Induction calls were also extended to Takeo Spikes, the prolific and driven linebacker who started his NFL career out of Auburn in the late 1990s, moved to Cincinnati the year after Boomer Esiason retired, and played a game against the Andy Dalton Bengals in his final season with the Chargers in 2012. Tyrone Wheatley of football and Joe Mauer of MLB did the same.
Prior to Spikes having over 100 tackles He was a captain for four of his five teams and caught 22 touchdown passes in his four years as a tight end/defensive end at Washington County High School in Sandersville, Georgia. His 15 NFL seasons were completed with a 15-0 campaign.
