Airborne Grit
At 60 years-old, Bob Burns was carried off the field by his players at the Dakota Dome after coaching the Sioux Falls O’Gorman Knights to victory in the first 11 AAA State Football Championship in South Dakota history. It was a dramatic culmination to a multi-layered life and career that few people seem to live anymore.
Burns’ journey to becoming a P.T. Barnum of the Plains included boxing and football glory, parachuting into France on D-Day, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, luring the Minnesota Vikings to Sioux Falls for their first-ever NFL game, and lifting multiple high school and college sports programs to unprecedented heights and traditions. What were the moments and motivations that created in Burns a desire to make a splash in nearly everything he did, creating a legion of loyal believers along the way? The aspiration to become “The Great Burns” started from the very beginning.
Written by Stu Whitney, The Bob Burns book project originated with a series of interviews in the 1990s that led to Whitney's Argus Leader profile of the celebrated coach and war hero in 1996. Burns died in 2000. Whitney traveled to WWII battlefields in Europe, pored through correspondence, military records, family photos and yearbooks while also interviewing more than 70 former players, historians, coaches and family members to bring Burns’ fascinating life journey to this book.
“A guy like Bob Burns comes around once in a lifetime. Or maybe more rarely than that.”
In 1943, Lieutenant Bob Burns was serving as the Athletic Officer of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Bragg (then called “The Eagle Division”). He was also the 101st Airborne Division Heavyweight Champion and boxed as heavyweight on the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment boxing team that fought in the Carolinas Golden Gloves tournaments. He named that boxing team “THE SCREAMING EAGLES.” The name was later used by Burns for the 502nd football team that was playing other Army units in England before D-Day. The Screaming Eagles name was picked up by Stars & Stripes newspaper writers at the time, and later adopted by the entire Division as its official mascot name. Historian Mark Bando writes about this in his book 101st Airborne: The Screaming Eagles in World War II (p. 28).
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Beyond The Books 2026
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Stu Whitney
Stu Whitney worked for 30 years as a reporter and columnist at the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader, the state’s largest newspaper, and later as an investigative journalist at South Dakota News Watch, an independent nonprofit.
His previous book credits include a novel, “The Covid Chronicles,” in August 2021 and the nonfiction “Behind the Green Curtain: The Sacrifice of Ethics and Academics in Michigan State Football's Rise to National Prominence,” published by Masters Press in 1990.
He is a graduate of Michigan State University and lives in Sioux Falls with his wife, Lisa.