A sports legend from NC mountains sells Christmas trees in Lake Norman for hurricane relief
I drove to a Christmas tree lot close to my house this past weekend and picked out our tree. It was pretty enough for a postcard and stood 7 feet tall.
The man I bought it from was, quite literally, taller than the tree.
That’s because the man was Tommy Burleson, who 50 years ago helped lead N.C. State to the 1974 NCAA men’s basketball title.
N.C. State was determined to make Burleson the tallest player in college basketball in the early 1970s, so it listed him at 7-foot-4. In reality, Burleson was 7-foot-2, and the literal centerpiece of a legendary team that also featured high-flying forward David Thompson, point guard Monte Towe and coach Norm Sloan.
Now Burleson is 72 years old, but he’s still 7-2. Temporarily living in the Lake Norman area this month, he’s made arrangements to sell Christmas trees alongside a couple of his buddies. The trees come from a farm near where he lives up in the mountains. The cool part is that Burleson plans to donate his profits to those in severe need of Hurricane Helene relief, specifically to a couple of local churches and several individuals he has personal connections with in Avery County.
Burleson’s roots in the mountains of western North Carolina run deep. He grew up in a tiny town called Newland and was nicknamed the “Newland Needle” due to his slender frame as a young man. He and his family have maintained their primary home in Avery County pretty much ever since, and he was at home when Hurricane Helene ransacked the mountains in late September. The driveway of Burleson’s home turned into a river and his house sustained tens of thousands of dollars worth of water damage. While it’s getting fixed, he’s moved in with other family members.
Burleson isn’t selling these Christmas trees to help his own situation, however. Many people in the mountains have it much worse, he said. And since he has connections in the Christmas tree industry — Burleson sold Christmas trees part-time for more than 20 years before stopping in 2016 — he decided to return to his old pastime for a few weeks before this holiday season and see if he could do some good.
“I’m trying to help as many people as I can,” Burleson said between pricing the trees, wrestling them onto the roofs of cars and ringing up sales at the lot, which is located at Lake Norman Baptist Church in Huntersville near the Birkdale area. “I’ve got a lot of knowledge about this business and how to run a tree lot — getting them drilled and spaced and priced. And I’m still 7-2 and 300 pounds. So I can deal with a 5- or 6- or 7-foot tree. If it’s an 8-footer, I get somebody to help me.”
It’s been 50 years since Burleson and the Wolfpack won that unlikely national championship in 1974, dethroning UCLA along the way and winning an amazing ACC tournament final, 103-100, in overtime against Maryland. Burleson was an All-American on that team. The result: A lot of people (mostly age 50 and older) know Burleson is “somebody,” but they don’t always know who.
In 2023, I interviewed Burleson at length for our “Sports Legends of the Carolinas” series. He talked about his experience on the U.S. Olympic team in 1972, his seven-year NBA career, the N.C. State championship in 1974 and the aerial acrobatics of Thompson (Burleson and Thompson have maintained a lifelong friendship, and Burleson named one of his sons “David” for his friend).
Later that same day, after the interview, we went to eat at a local diner in Lake Norman. One man at an adjoining table peered at Burleson folding his frame into a chair and said: “You played for North Carolina, didn’t you?”
“No,” Burleson said. “But we sure beat North Carolina a lot.”
On this day in late 2024, though, Burleson had other customers to get to at his Christmas tree lot. He’s working a busy schedule for a 72-year-old man, staying on the lot for about 8-10 hours a day from Wednesday through Sunday. Roughly a week before Christmas, he will head back toward the mountains. After we talked for a while, I asked him to help me pick out a tree and drove back home.
Lots of people sell Christmas trees, of course, and lots of the money goes to very good causes. You rarely go wrong at a Christmas tree lot. I love pretty much everything about them.
But the best Christmas trees have a story behind them. That’s why people sometimes go into the mountains to cut their own, right? To make a memory. Same with ornaments — the best ones make you recall something good.
And that’s what keeps happening to me. Because every time I look at our tree this year, I keep thinking about the day the Newland Needle sold me a Fraser fir.
This story was originally published December 4, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
