Thumb Rivals Honor Connor 'One Last Time'
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
February 28, 2017
Jay Burton said one of his biggest fears after his son Connor passed away in 2009 was that he would be forgotten.
But eight years after his death, the memory of Connor Burton is as strong as ever in Marlette and Brown City, the two communities he managed to make a big impact on during his 10 years on Earth.
“Any parent that’s lost a child, one of the biggest fears is that your child will be forgotten,” Jay Burton said. “They never are, but that’s any parent’s fear. But he’ll be a part of this community for the rest of our lives.”
This past Friday, the two schools met in Marlette for the eighth and final Team Connor Classic, a game that has celebrated Connor’s life since the year after it ended. On this night, Marlette came away with a 49-40 victory, winning the game for the eighth straight time in what would have been Connor’s senior year.
“It’s a good time to call it quits,” Jay Burton said.
Connor’s life
On Thursday, April 16, 2009, Connor went to his gymnastics and baseball practices before shooting baskets outside his house until the sun set and he could no longer see the hoop.
It was a typical day for the energetic 10-year-old, who was described by many as a gym rat and a lover of all sports.
“Whatever sport was in season, he would be ready to play,” said Connor’s uncle Tony Burton, Brown City’s athletic director and former boys basketball coach. “During the winter, basketball was something that was a high priority with him. Obviously, he got taken from us too soon, but he sure loved sports.”
He was good at them, too. His friend Hunter Kelly, now a senior on Marlette’s boys basketball team, said Connor was a better basketball player than most of their friends when they were young.
In the Thumb, Burtons and basketball are synonymous, and Connor seemed poised to be the next in that line – even if he was coming through the Marlette program and not the Brown City one his uncle was leading and for which his cousins had starred. Connor was even a manager, along with his cousin Caleb Muxlow (who is a senior on this year’s Brown City team), for his uncle’s team.
On Friday, April 17, 2009, Connor, who it would be found suffered from Long QT – a heart rhythm disorder – passed away less than 24 hours after shooting his last shot.
“Basically the electrical system in the heart, which tells it to beat, his wasn’t running correctly,” Jay Burton said. “The thing about it was, you would have never known. … I went (into Connor’s room that morning) and the only weird thing he said to me was, ‘Dad, why did you open the door so fast?’
“I didn’t think anything of it, I flicked his light on, and when I came back he hadn’t made it out of bed. He had cardiac arrest.”
A tradition is born
The following basketball season, the Team Connor Classic was born, and the two communities that Connor loved showed their love for him. There were tributes and tears, and a great basketball rivalry was all of a sudden elevated to another level.
“It’s always been a good game between Brown City and Marlette,” Tony Burton said. “We border each other, we’re in the same county, so it’s usually a pretty good game when we play, regardless of records. It means a lot, and for both teams when we play each other, we want to win. But when the game’s over we still have our friendships and our associations with each other.”
While they compete for bragging rights, and often for Greater Thumb Conference East championships, Marlette and Brown City actually have a long history of coming together for good causes.
“Us and Marlette, we have a great relationship,” Brown City High School principal Neil Kohler said. “We do the pink out game in football every other year at our place, we do the Team Connor game. We did a basketball game last year where both teams gathered water for the Flint crisis. So, it’s probably our biggest rival, but also our biggest partnership. When they came to our place about three weeks ago our local rotary did a pancake dinner and had about 400 people come in from Marlette hospice to raise money. The two communities really come together.”
The Team Connor game has a different feeling than most tribute games because of its unique connection of the family to two tight-knit communities.
That was apparent in the latest edition, as Connor’s family – his father, his mother Sue, and his sisters Lindsey and Annie – were given a signed basketball from the Brown City community, and a bouquet of flowers and a blanket tiled with memories from all eight Team Connor Classics from the Marlette community. After the game, the family handed out medals to each player on both teams, receiving from them many long, heartfelt hugs.
It’s not easy for the family, especially in a year when Connor would have been the one on the court with his classmates enjoying a season that has seen the Red Raiders go 18-1 and clinch the GTC East title.
“This is only the second game I’ve watched the Marlette boys play (this season),” Jay Burton said. “I can’t watch them. I see Hunter Kelly; the kid stands a foot taller than me. What would Connor have been? He’s the 10-year-old in front of me and all of his friends are 18 getting ready to graduate high school.
“Caleb Muxlow, his cousin who plays for Brown City, I can go watch simply because he’s family. But this is only the second time I’ve seen (Marlette) play. It just hurts too much.”
Each team came out for warm-ups in the same Team Connor shirts, which combined the green of Brown City and the red of Marlette, and read “One Last Time.” They sat on the court before the game to watch the presentations and a slideshow of photos from Connor’s life and Team Connor Classics past, and stood with one another during the national anthem.
“I think this one was a special night mainly because these were his classmates,” Marlette coach Chris Storm said. “The rivalry has gotten stronger and stronger between us. It was there because of the league before, but it adds a lot of pressure to both teams and you could see that in the game.
“But it means a lot to see how many people come out for the event. The pastor comes back; he’s been out of the area for three years. It’s a great environment for kids to play high school basketball. It’s a District or a Regional feel almost on a regular-season night.”
As the game tipped off, Marlette took the court with four players. It’s a newer, but impactful tradition that was added in the years Connor would have been playing in the game.
“It was quite a surprise (the first year),” Jay Burton said.
It’s a sign that Connor is certainly not forgotten, and while the Team Connor Classic may be going away, anyone who played in one, coached one or simply attended one, will never forget it.
“It means that we’re remembering a great kid that would have given a lot more to his community if he had more time,” Kelly said. “It shows that us as a senior class, the way we represent ourselves as a team and a community, is reflecting who he was. It means a lot because he would have been a senior this year, he probably would have been playing with us. He was better than me, he was better than a lot of these kids, so he probably would have been starting, too.
“So it means a lot to play in remembrance of him, because he’s missing out on all these memories.”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Annie Burton, Connor Burton’s younger sister, presents Marlette boys basketball coach Chris Storm with the “Team Connor Classic” trophy after Friday’s game. (Middle) Hunter Kelly hugs Connor’s father Jay Burton as the family welcomes both teams' players. (Below) The game program from the night celebrated Connor Burton’s life and legacy. (Photos by Paul Costanzo.)
'Who Will Cheer for the Nimrods?' Peterson IV, Watersmeet Found Fans Worldwide
By
Jason Juno
Special for MHSAA.com
July 15, 2025
WATERSMEET — George Peterson IV talks to a lot of people through his job as a police officer in the Green Bay, Wis., area. When some of those folks are headed up north for the weekend, he tells them he’s from the Upper Peninsula.
Many are expecting to hear about one of the bigger towns located a couple of hours drive from Green Bay, like Iron Mountain or Escanaba. But they usually know his hometown, too.
“There’s more people than I would have thought know exactly – ‘Oh Watersmeet, the Nimrods,’” Peterson said.
Some surely know the tiny town because it’s not light years away from Green Bay – only about three hours. But Watersmeet’s dot on the map got a little bigger when Peterson was in school two decades ago, thanks to a run of media exposure that all started with an ESPN commercial that wondered: Without sports, who would cheer for the Nimrods?
Peterson and his teammates can look back on a high school sports experience unlike pretty much anyone else’s, which included the popular ESPN commercial, an appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, and an eight-part miniseries and media exposure from print and television outlets throughout the country. All because of their quirky nickname that has come to be an insult but was chosen because the biblical figure Nimrod was a mighty hunter, and hunting is a big deal in the U.P.
That era also coincided with the best basketball Watersmeet has ever seen. The 2004-05 team, with Peterson was a junior, won its only MHSAA Regional championship and only U.P. small-school team of the year award.
“Great memories from that year,” Peterson said.
The first moments he mentions from his time in high school sports as a aren’t of going to Hollywood – although that certainly came up later – or of being on ESPN. He instead recalled the camaraderie with his teammates, the bus rides, and proving people wrong even in elementary school that Watersmeet could be good.
“The Watersmeet Nimrods weren't supposed to be good,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to win elementary tournaments; we were supposed to fall apart.”
They definitely didn’t do that, as one of the smallest high schools in the state enjoyed instead an unforgettable three-year run.
The cameras first showed up when Peterson was a sophomore. ESPN staff came to get footage early that season, during a December 2003 game against rival Bessemer. The cameras didn’t faze the Nimrods, who upset the rival Speedboys that night; Peterson remembers Bessemer putting 100 on them later that season.
No one told the Nimrods when the commercials were going to air. Then one came on one night when Peterson was watching ESPN.
“That was really cool, just little surprises you weren’t expecting,” Peterson said.
Watersmeet was featured in major newspapers, “CBS Sunday Morning” came to town, and Nimrods merchandise flew off the shelves.
They were even on “The Tonight Show.”
“I would say Jay Leno was probably the coolest experience,” Peterson said. “A small-town kid from Watersmeet, all of us that went, getting treated like we were important, something that a lot of people don’t get to experience. They flew us out, we had limos, we had a hotel right down the road – I think it was a Hilton.”
After the national attention died down during their very successful 2004-05 year – which included the run to the Class D Quarterfinals – the cameras were back for Peterson’s senior year. This time it was the Sundance Channel for an eight-part miniseries about life in his team’s small town.
Those cameras were around that entire season. But if something came up along the way – and it did – the team could just ask the filmmakers to go away while they hashed it out privately. Peterson said they didn’t pressure him to do anything, and the staff members were great to he and his teammates, while doing what they could to make them feel comfortable.
The buzz for the miniseries wasn’t quite the same as for the commercials. But Peterson enjoyed going to a screening ahead of its debut in Madison, Wis. And he can look back on scenes with his late grandfather.
“Now I can show my kids when they get older,” he said.
The basketball part of Peterson’s high school days was a pretty big deal as well.
Growing up, Peterson’s dad George Peterson III took him to the Regionals in Marquette each year. Rooting for area teams like Ewen-Trout Creek kept the fire going.
“I’d go back home, I’d shoot hoops and play ball,” Peterson IV said.
As he and his teammates entered in high school, the Nimrods finished well under .500 his freshman year. The next year, they flipped their regular-season record to 14-6, which included the early season upset of rival Bessemer with ESPN’s cameras recording commercial material.
“And then we were kind of like, ‘OK, we got something here,’” Peterson said.
They went to Michigan Tech’s basketball camp the following summer and won pretty much every game, including against the U.P.’s big schools like Marquette and Iron Mountain.
The Nimrods also won constantly early in the 2004-05 season – until Baraga gave them another piece of humble pie. But that proved to be a quick bump in the road. They won their District tournament at home and then both Regional games by double figures.
Watersmeet then lost a heartbreaker in overtime in the Quarterfinal against Posen, but it didn’t diminish what they had accomplished.
For Peterson, he got to do it with his dad coaching, his brother Jordan playing with him and the whole community cheering for them. He still remembers the bus ride home and the reception they got going through Bruce Crossing, part of the E-TC school district.
“We got to experience something we never got to experience before,” Peterson said. “That was probably one of, if not my favorite, moments from my junior year.”
He learned a lot of lessons from that time in his life — just from playing sports but also from playing for his dad and with the kind of spotlight most small-school athletes don’t see.
“Being an athlete and working in law enforcement, a lot of the lessons learned go hand-in-hand with my profession, because you have to be teachable, you have to be coachable and you have to take the losses,” Peterson said. “Obviously in sports, every time you step foot on the court, we didn’t win. There’s some things in life that you don’t get what you want, but you just learn you gotta work harder for it and strive to be better. That helps me in my profession.”
His dad, who recently retired from coaching boys basketball after walking the sideline for more than three decades, taught his son many things like humility, how to be respectful, patience, and how to respond when things don’t work out.
“That doesn’t mean the door’s closed; you just gotta find a whole different way to get what you want,” Peterson IV said. “I remind myself of that every day when I’m at work.”
As for being in the spotlight, he took valuable lessons from that as well.
“It’s helped me learn to take a step back and not get too excited about certain things,” he said. “Like when I’m around a crowd or when I have stuff going on, like board meetings, or we just have a crowd where people could be mad or people could be in support. It’s helped me to learn to take a step back and mentally just prepare, take that deep breath and everything seems to run smooth.”
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PHOTOS (Top) At left, George Peterson IV (12) puts up a jumper playing for Watersmeet in 2004. At right, Peterson holds his son George V while pictured with wife Elise and daughter Braelynn. (Middle) This Ironwood Daily Globe photo from 2007 shows Peterson talking with “Nimrod Nation” director Brett Morgan. (Past photos by Jason Juno; current photos courtesy of the Peterson family.)