Voice of Armwood High football, baseball dies after prolonged cancer fight

SEFFNER — At the beginning of each week, Armwood High football coach Evan Davis walks the halls of the school feeling good about starting his day, passing the rooms where he began as a student in 2000 and returned as a teacher in 2009.

On Monday, he had to find his way through misty eyes.

He paused in front of Room 373 and traveled back to the first day of school in August 2001. He said he could hear the voice of his mentor, Bruce Burnham.

“From that first moment I heard him talk I was hooked,” Davis said. “He was center stage. He had the voice and the charisma. He was the actor who drove the play. He was prepared and engaged and everyone in the class was engaged with him. I told him once (in this room) that, ‘I’m going to come back here one day and take over teaching your history classes (a statement that became the truth).’ … He will be missed by so many former students and teachers, by everybody who had the honor of knowing him.”

Burnham, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, died Saturday with his high school sweetheart and wife of 50 years, Pam, nearby. He was 68.

In many ways it is a loss felt in the relative quiet he left behind: from his world history and Vietnam history classes to the football and baseball press boxes, where Burnham was affectionately known as “The Voice of the Hawks.”

For 21 years beginning in 1998 he was a fixture behind the Armwood microphone, calling games while announcing to the crowd his thoroughly researched trivia contests, ending with a restaurant gift card to the winners and his signature saying: “More importantly, I’m going to make you famous in the Seffner metropolitan area when I announce your name from the press box.”

For 13 of those years, one of his best friends, Tony Pirotta, was at his side in the press box and teaching across the hall during the school day. Before games, Pirotta and Burnham shared a pre-game meal at the local Beef O' Brady’s.

“He was a like a second father to me,” said Pirotta, who is teaching now at the new Sumner High, where he is calling football games like Burnham. “Just being around him made me a better teacher and a better person, and I know a lot of his students and fellow teachers will say the same thing. I called him the ‘The Mayor of Armwood’ because he was always out shaking hands and kissing babies in the community, former students and friends and so many others. I don’t think you could find anybody who had a bad word to say about him. He was that kind of guy.”

He also was deeply appreciative to Armwood, a sentiment he voiced in a 2017 interview after beating back the cancer. Sitting in his press box chair, fighting off tears, Burnham said you must understand “that coming to this press box helped save my life.”

He looked forward to Friday nights. They gave him the energy to fight through radiation and chemotherapy that left him ragged after 40 treatments over three months. And those treatments followed a 10-hour surgery months before that removed parts of his stomach, liver, gall bladder and pancreas, where a walnut-sized tumor had grown.

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In the 2017 interview, he paused and looked over the football field, then thought back to 1985 when he sat across a desk from Armwood principal Lyle Flagg. He told Flagg that he needed a job as a teacher because he felt teaching was his calling.

Burnham said he believed teaching would also help him heal from post-traumatic stress disorder, which plagued him for “10 lost years” following brutal fighting in Vietnam.

Flagg answered that there was a hiring freeze, and Burnham said okay but he had nine more meetings with different principals scheduled that day.

When Burnham walked into the parking lot, Flagg’s voice stopped him short. Holding out his hand, Flagg said, “I have a feeling about you. All I can give you right now is a handshake and a promise that you’ll have a job in three weeks.”

Burnham, who said he had such a strong feeling about Flagg, cancelled his other nine interviews. Three weeks later he started teaching history at Armwood, where he spent the next 30 years until his retirement in 2015. Along the way he created a Vietnam history class in 1997, then began announcing every baseball game from 1998 and every football game from 2002.

After he retired from teaching, “The Voice of the Hawks” continued battling the cancer and calling games, until he finally became overwhelmed before the 2020 season.

Memorial and funeral arrangements were still being worked out. Davis said he was trying to get a special service held at Armwood’s Lyle Flagg Stadium, and Pirotta said there was a movement to get the press box named the “Bruce Burnham Press Box.”