Part
1 of the Floyd Irons Story
“I find I’m so excited, I can
barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only
a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion
is uncertain.” ― Ellis
Boy “Red” Redding, Shawshank Redemption
Let’s get it out of the way first. Floyd Irons is a convicted felon. In 2007 he was convicted of participating in a real estate scam and sent to federal prison for one year.
In classical tragedy, the lead character makes choices that ultimately lead to his downfall, that causes tragedy; thus, a tragic flaw.
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The tragic hero undergoes great pain and suffering for a mistake in judgment. Hamartia is a Greek word that describes, “the sin of humanity.” But not all Greek heroes succumb to their human flaws; some are destined for tragedy as they are trapped in environments and circumstance beyond their control. Floyd Irons’ fall can be cast as both – destiny and environment, as can his redemption.
The Floyd Irons story is one of a great and talented coach, but also of a flawed man who has spent the last decade looking to redeem himself.
We Americans love a good comeback story. Like Shakespeare's Borachio, the roller coaster loyalty of a fickle fan base will "condemn into everlasting redemption," our sports heroes. Losing demands redemption and shortcomings are absolved only by winning a championship.
In 2006, the fall from grace of Floyd Irons was a top news story in St. Louis.
I originally wrote about Coach Floyd Irons for my 2019 book, Ball of Confusion: Race, Basketball and the Chaos of 1972. It ended up on the editor’s cut floor – not relevant enough for the narrative. However, I was told, this would make a great book on its own. The only problem was getting Coach Irons’ cooperation. His reputation within the St. Louis area sports scene preceded him. He cuts a wide swath of both respect and fear. He is not the kind of guy a stranger calls up and suggests meeting for a beer at the corner tavern.
I first met Coach Irons in 2008 through former Mizzou All-American and NFL All-Pro Demetrious Johnson. I was writing the book Riding the Storm Out: a year of inner-city high school football. In 2008 Irons was at a low point in his life and he asked that we not speak on the record. By 2019, Irons shared a city office with former NBA player Hercle Ivy, a main character in my book Ball of Confusion. Despite repeated attempts, I was never not able to secure an on the record interview for Ball of Confusion with the enigmatic Irons, nor his successful coaching son Tony.
In August of 2020 Coach Irons asked Hercle Ivy for my phone number. He had read a profile of himself I had written on my blog and Coach Irons wanted to speak with me about it.
I though the blog I had written was very fair and balanced. I expressed my respected for what the winningest coach in the history of the state had accomplished at an underfunded and neglected ghetto school in perhaps the worst public-school district in the nation. I also pointed out the many controversies he has been immersed in over the years. He is a complicated man and that is what makes his story so compelling. My prognosis was he would find my sometimes-negative critique on his 40-year career by a stranger as annoying as nails on a chalkboard.
I told Hercle I would look forward to speaking with Coach. I also prepared myself for an angry Floyd Irons.
Coach Irons called me the next morning. “I liked your blog,” he said. “Would you be interested in hearing my side of my story?”
“Maybe,” was my coy response. “But I don’t do fluff jobs,” I said. “I need to tell the whole story, yours and the other side.” This did not phase the 73-year-old legend. “The other side has been out there a long time,” he said. “It would be nice to have someone tell my side of it, for once. You know, I was not always the bad guy they made me out to be. I made a lot of mistakes and I have spent years attempting to atone for them. I have got a lot of skeletons in my closet but I know where the skeletons of others are hiding, also.
I was initially ultra-personal with my questioning of Coach Irons. If he was as power-drunk as he has often been portrayed as, he would have answered with anger and defense. I needed to know immediately how candid and receptive to my questions Irons would be. He has been, with me, always polite, honest and available.
Over the time I have spent collaborating with Coach Irons, an unlikely alliance of opposites has grown to one of mutual support. I respect the man, warts and all, and perhaps the warts are the most enduring lessons to learn from a man who has been a lifelong teacher.
There’s hope in this story, but plenty of sadness, too. Floyd Irons admits to many mistakes, but his passion for all the young men he has helped over the years is still palpable.
Some say everyone is special. I disagree. I do believe that everyone was once special, but most will over a long life succumb to human folly. In between the glowing brightness of a life lived above reproach and the darkness of a conscience blighted by poor judgment lie many between hues. This is where most of us live our lives. Floyd Irons is far from perfect but not beyond redemption. He has faced his mistakes head on, grasping onto responsibility. He has a remarkable life’s story.
**********
He tries to hide it, for it
weakens the Type A, strong and stoic male character he tries so hard to
portray. Hide it from his former players, hide it from media, hide it from his
own family – even try to hide it from me; but he is woefully unconvincing. His
former players say it is easy to see through the façade. Hide as he may try,
Floyd Irons is a romantic. Off and on the basketball court mentoring young men
is the central passion in his life.
Floyd Irons came into this world
on September 2, 1947, the 13th of 18 children born to John and
Bertha Irons. It is complicated, but in the Irons’ family, Floyd says, “we
didn’t believe in using the terms, ‘half-brother and half-sister.” It is the
only vague explanation Irons gives me for his massive family. I do not prod
deeper.
It is a sad part of our national history that too often black children’s lives become a cliché of criminal pathology: absentee father, mother struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction, no food in the fridge, neighborhoods of casual violence, a spiderweb capable of ensnaring the most innocent. As a child, Floyd Irons was precocious. He fit the components of the most innocent - prime recruiting fodder for the local street gangs. But instead of Gangbangers, Floyd’s constant teenage companions were his schoolbooks and his basketball.
The playground became his release and outlet. Almost always the smallest guy on every court he played on, Floyd was all heart and hunger. It gave the awkward pre-teen freedom and security. Kept him off the dead-end path of gang membership.
Basketball was his drug; his street high. It took him somewhere else. Irons says that when he was playing basketball, he was always somewhere else. Nothing else existed. Nothing else mattered. Floyd learned nothing else goes on when you're nowhere. You just flow – flow away and right over the societal threats waiting every time you cross your beloved mother’s threshold and hit the mean streets.
Irons graduated from Blewett
Elementary School in June 1963 and Vashon High School in June 1967. Irons was
an all-city point guard in basketball for legendary Vashon coach George Cross.
He was also, his senior year, the Wolverines football quarterback. He says as
both a quarterback and a point guard, he was destined to become a coach. Floyd
always was planning. He played for a coach, George Cross, whose attention to
detail fostered the order his Vashon teams of the 1950s and 60s were known for.
Cross would, for example, stop practice repeatedly to teach a player the right
way to set a pick, precisely the spacing of the feet when the teammate rubbed
past, then the proper hip rotation when rolling to the basket. Irons absorbed
it all. Cross lived to teach the game. Floyd lived for practices and the
knowledge Cross espoused.
But life at home was not so
structured. “The essentials were what we worried about,” Irons describes
everyday life in his childhood home. “Survival just day to day was a constant
struggle for my mother. She always said, ‘don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow
will bring its own problems.’ My mom ran the family. I can’t remember my dad
ever living with us for very long. He would show up some, but never really was
involved in raising us. It was all mother. I can’t imagine how hard it was or
how she managed. She had only an 8th grade education herself, but she did one
heck of a job raising us.”
The family, Irons admits, was dependent upon government subsidies. “But it, the welfare check, came nowhere near supporting all of us. When you got old enough, if you were still living at home, you were expected to get a paying job and help support the family.”
Irons mother was a domestic housekeeper. “She worked for several wealthy Jewish families,” Irons recalls. “She did their laundry, cooked their meals, and cleaned their houses. She worked for pennies her whole life. But she always said shame had no usefulness. She did what she had to do, perhaps sacrificing her dignity to keep us fed.”
She was also a product of a time when parents did not show outward affection. “I never once heard my mother tell me or any of us kids, ‘I love you.’ She just didn’t. I know her actions and hard work speak volumes of how she loved her kids, but it would have been nice to hear her say it. I don’t know if she felt that saying that would be a sign of weakness or if maybe she just didn’t know how to express emotions. Many parents back then were like that.”
Even as a young child, Irons knew his mother lived a tough life. “I grew up thinking she had an iron and an ironing board as an extension of her hands. She was always working. The pressure on her was immense, unrelenting.”
Memories of his mother’s silent struggles sometimes would bubble to the surface. “I often saw my mother alone crying. She was often emotionally distraught.” But still, Irons remembers her caring heart - an “always leave the door open for a stray dog,” attitude of inclusion.
The coach has few good memories or compliments for his absentee father. “Remember that 1960’s Temptations’ song, ‘Papa was a Rolling Stone?’ That was my father. Remember the lyrics, ‘wherever he laid his hat was his home?’ That was him.”
Irons to this day bemoans the lack of parental support for his youthful activities. He knew his mother had no time for such attendance, but it would have been nice, he says, to have seen her at least once, in the bleachers. “My parents, neither one, ever attended even one of my events in either grade school or high school. Not one and I was in everything.”
Player after Vashon player, some now in the 50’s, described to me Irons as a “father figure,’ filling an important void in their lives. Irons says he views his role as a mentor as a payback to all the adult figures over his developmental years who befriended him, supported him, and served as his mentors and substitute parents.
“I don’t know why a man would not cherish the birth of his child, especially a son,” Irons states. “I remember when my son Tony was born and the emotion just overcame me. I don’t think my father ever had that feeling for any of the many kids he fathered. If he did, he never showed it. The most critical time for a young man is the period from birth to six years of age, formative years. Fathers need to be around.”
“Sure, Mother was busy, but my father, he could not come to at least one of my games,” the coach sadly asks, returning to a hurt that has festered in his soul for over fifty years? “My older brother James was the adult influence on my life. And he was just a kid himself. He was the one always there for me. He was the one in the stands cheering for me, telling me he was proud of me. Every young boy needs that. I have not told him and thanked him enough for that, but he knows how I respect and love him.”
Irons admits that the dynamics of his parents’ relationship confused him in his developmental years and had a negative effect on how he viewed trust and love. “During the summer of my junior year in college, my father passed away. It is hard to forget that day. I had walked to the store and when I came back in the house, I heard Mother screaming. She was not in the living room as normal, but laid across her bed wailing, ‘John is dead,’ she kept screaming. I held her and tried to console her but it felt strange that she was crying for a man that I didn’t think she had any passion for at all.”
“My Father had been sick for a long time,” Irons says, “so it was not a surprise when he died. At the end, I was the one who took care of him. I can remember the awful look in his eye when I had to bathe him or take him to the toilet.”
In those agonizing final days, Irons said he found a compassion for his father he never thought he would recognize. “I guess in some ways we are all once a man-twice a child. It was his time. Helping him in such intimate ways made me feel a connection (to him) that I did not know existed in me.”
Irons’ mother passed away in 1975. Irons is candid in acknowledging her addiction to alcohol. “That was very hard for me,” he states. “When I was a child, I could not understand why my mother drank so much. Sometimes, I guess, the question is more important than the answer. She could go months without taking a drink and then she would go for days at a time inebriated. As I got older, I understood she drank because it was a way she could escape the sad reality of her life. She became an alcoholic and she paid for it with her life.”
“All that my mother endured in her life,” Irons says in hindsight, “I realize now she was a strong person. It took a lot of strength for her to hold such a large family together and most of us turned out all right. But she had her demons.”
“I am glad my mother lived to see me graduate from college and come back home and start to get recognized as a success. She loved to see my picture in the paper when I became the head coach at Vashon, she would show the paper to all of her friends on the street and say, ‘see my boy.’”
Athletes from poor backgrounds often celebrate their mothers, but the pillars of love and understanding are sometimes missing. Such is the case for Irons and his often-depressed mother. She was an uneducated woman who knew not how to show young Floyd the motherly love he so craved. She endured a life-long relationship with a man she never knew in what woman’s bed for that night he may lay. Yet, she kept her son Floyd off the street, put clothes on his back and food in his mouth. She showered him not with outward affection and love, recalls Irons, but with accountability and order.
“She did the best she could," says Irons. "She gave me a chance. And today I look at the successful life my own son has, and I reflect back on how hard my mom worked - and now I connect the two – I see Tony's success and, now finally, can see now it shows me in her own way, she loved me.”
Part 2 of the Floyd Irons Story
The young men who made Vashon the top program in the history of the state had often carried with them the weight of the streets, some as adults fallen to unlawful behavior leading to incarceration. Several have died young. But many have made it out, buoyed by the prideful ambience of hitching their dreams to the Vashon dynasty built on Cass Avenue – “The V get ready to roll.”
When the game lights came on during the Floyd Irons’ years, egos at Vashon were checked at the gym doors. The reputation of Vashon was never glitzy or inner-city thuggish but one of old school tough guys— lean and hungry, underrated workmanlike role players who battled from the heart, equal parts of anger and pride. Nobody under Floyd strove to “Be Like Mike.” When the center jump ball went up, Chuck Taylor high top canvas fit better the blue-collar laborers on the floor than did Air Jordans. The “V” hated to lose. Style points didn’t matter. Bloody elbows along with skinned and scabbed knees did.
Ronald Simpson grew up two years behind Irons at Vashon High School, graduating in 1969. Simpson is a self-labeled basketball fanatic. “I started going up to the school and watched Floyd’s practices. In 1982 the PHL eliminated what we called the B team. It was a budget cut. If you didn’t make the varsity team, you couldn’t play. So, down at the Wohl Center (a local northside athletic club) they organized what became to be called the “Last Chance League.” It was for kids who wanted to play and normally would have been on the B team. Floyd asked me to coach them (Vashon’s entry) and I did. We practiced and played about two days a week, but it was better than nothing.”
In 1983, the PHL restored the sub-varsity teams and Irons asked Simpson to join his regular staff. “I never got paid, I was just a volunteer,” says Simpson.
Simpson claims few know the real Floyd Irons, and he blames, in part, the St. Louis media. “Over the years,” says Simpson, “I never thought the newspapers gave Floyd a fair shake. They loved a quote and Floyd thought the publicity was good for his team and his program, so he was always ready to give a controversial quote to the news guys. But so much was negative that it hurt him, and much of it was undeserved and overshadowed much of the good he did.”
Fair take aways by Simpson? Maybe.
Irons, no doubt, had over the years self-created a persona of a bully and the local media ran with it. His heart controlled his mouth. Always had. And with Floyd, those who knew him the best will validate, with him it's all heart; gut wrenching and emotional —gushing metaphors about discrimination and prototypes and denied opportunities and racist closed doors that crushed youthful dreams. Don’t ever attempt to debate social justice with Floyd Irons. To invalidate his argument is to deny his life’s work. He would not stand for it - and he counterpunched.
Simpson says that Irons was a taskmaster. “He demanded time year ‘round, you better be willing to put in the work and give the time.”
“All people would see was the winning and the championships,” Simpson continued, “but Floyd did so much more for those kids. He was hardnosed, but that was what those kids needed. Jonas Cody was a great player, but he was always pushing things. We were playing in the championship game of the Effingham (IL) Tournament, a big deal event. They (Effingham) had the 7’2” kid from Germany (Uwe Blabb, who went on to a great career at the University of Indiana). Floyd had a rule that he (Irons) was the last one on the bus and when he got on the bus was leaving. “
“We start to pull away, and someone yells, ‘T-Boy (Cody) is not on.’ Drive on, Floyd told the driver. We get to the gym and go to the locker room and Jonas (had) caught a ride and came in about two minutes late. We get ready to take the floor and Floyd looks at Jonas and says, ‘take your uniform off, you are not playing.’ We lost the game. After the game Floyd told me, ‘I don’t hold him to the rules, being our best player, I can’t hold any of them to any rules.’”
Part 3: The Floyd Irons Story
Indeed, for over 30 years, there were many sublime moments in gymnasiums throughout the city of St. Louis when the Vashon Wolverines of Floyd Irons rose to a kind of out of this world third dimension, to an almost paradisiacal level of the game of basketball where only the best of the best come to play. Fate can be like a border line block/charge call, how it breaks unbidden. Foregoing over six decades ago a no-nonsense pistol toting matriarch, just maybe crazy enough to use it, the dynamo Irons oversaw on Cass Avenue for 34 years would have never been, instead, the winningest coach in the history of the state, perhaps, tied to an automotive assembly line.
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| Irons and ESTL Lincoln Coach Bennie Lewis |
Today, at 89 years of age, Moore informs me, “I don’t have to talk to you or anyone else.”
Floyd Irons, I told her, had given me her cell phone number as I would like to talk with her about his upbringing. “Did he tell you when he was young, I once put a gun to his head? And did he not tell you I was just crazy enough to have used it? Well, maybe I am (crazy) and maybe I am not. I think he knew I probably wasn’t going to shoot him in the head, but you know what else, there had to be a small part of him that thought, ‘she just might.’ And that small voice made the boy listen to the good sense I had to anyway possible beat into his young fool head. Dang foolishness he was talking.”
I asked if the gun was loaded. “Of course, what kind of a question is that? What good is a gun if it is not loaded,” she spits back, obviously irritated with my inquiry?
It was the summer of 1968 and the sin committed by an 18-year-old Floyd Irons was to inform Miss Dorothy, as the 73-year-old Irons still addresses her today, that he was not going to return for his sophomore year at Oklahoma’s Langston University.
“When I came back for the summer after my first year away,” Irons says, “I started hanging around with some of my high school friends who had gotten good union jobs and were working full time well-paying shifts at factories like Chrysler and Chevrolet. They all had nice cars, their own place to live and here I am scraping by, at best, studying and going to class. It was just too tempting. I told Miss Dorothy it would only be for one year and then I would go back after I had a car and saved some money. She just glared at me but didn’t say anything. I had dreaded telling her I was not going back. All that first year she had written me regularly and would send me money. I knew she was proud of me.”
As he walked out of the store, Irons says he remembers thinking, “well, that wasn’t too bad.’”
Several hours later Irons returned to his mother’s house, at peace with his decision against returning to Langston. He was done with the pipe dream of a college degree, of following the same career path of his beloved Vashon mentor and role model, Coach George Cross.
When Floyd walked through the front door Moore was there in the living room with his mother, waiting. Miss Dorthey pulled out from her pocketbook the infamous pistol everyone always knew she packed. She pointed it directly at the wide-eyed young man. “I told him,” Moore tells me, “If you are going to throw your life away, kill your future, let me help send you on your way.”
Within an hour the teenage Irons was on a bus, with a ticket Moore had bought, headed back to college and a future hall of fame career.
Over time Dorothy Moore has learned to anticipate the faintest of shifts in the mood and rhythm of her town, Hillsdale. She, the mayor/alderman, knows her constituents as only a long-time street savvy politician can. As she nears her ninetieth birthday, her tiny, balkanized sliver on the north side of St. Louis set last year a record for homicides. The horrific statistics have become monotonously numbing to her residents, the sad Gregorian melancholy chant of violent and senseless times. She says she fears in her own home for her daily safety.
Only a fool would have no fear of these streets she has been elected to represent for near on 60 years, and Dorthey Moore is no fool for a fool would not survive and Dorthey Moore is a survivor.
She will not let fear win. She intentionally feeds herself into an urban dynamic that pounds everything in its wake into scrap. To survive, by her own admission, she rules with dictatorial muscle. Moore has been the political drive as the elected leader behind the north side St. Louis neighborhood of Hillsdale for as long as anyone can remember. “I don’t scare,” she says, “and I don’t like nonsense or nosy reporters.”
There is history here in this all-Black community. Dred Scott’s wife, Harriet, is buried up the street from Miss Dorothy’s modest two-bedroom home. Everyone in this closed circle community addresses Moore as Miss Dorothy.
Once a commercial and industrial park thrived here. Today, only brick shells and abandoned smokestacks are left. There is corruption in Hillsdale. Recently, two town police officers were sent to federal prison for conspiracy to distribute heroin, and another was arrested for soliciting prostitution.
For years, Moore has run a small neighborhood confectionary type corner grocery store, a block from her house. Here residents can buy everyday items like canned goods, headache relief pills and pay their municipality bills. It is where things got done. From her perch behind the checkout counter, she has for six decades mentored and guided many of today’s north side elected politicians. Her endorsement was once a must. Some say it still is.
In recent media accounts on her, none she gave a cooperative interview for, she has been labeled as a rough around the edge’s visionary, consistently gruff in her methods. A local businessman called her old, angry, and crabby, but admitted he still votes for her. He reasoned that the town had no one else with the grit of Dorthey Moore, so you accept her dictatorial ways. Four years ago, according to a press release from the Missouri Lottery, she won 1.7 million dollars. She refuses to acknowledge or deny her windfall, but she did three years ago buy her beloved city a much-needed police cruiser.
For as long as north siders can remember Miss Dorthey has understood the challenge of leadership in Hillsdale. Unpleasant work for the young and healthy - monumental for a nearly 90-year-old with severe health problems. Yet still, with all the fears and accompanying criticism— often singlehandedly she coldly and methodically keeps the city afloat. She has done so for a long time.
Few know much of Moore’s background, and she refuses to share any with me. It is documented that she grew up in Jefferson City, MO, graduating from the city’s Jim Crow era all black high school in 1950. According to an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, she ranked 8th in a class of 31. Records show she intended to become an office worker. Census records document that her father was a waiter and her mother a housewife.
Moore has at least one child, a 69-year-old son who lives in Jefferson City. Some in Hillsdale have heard he was raised by his grandparents. Despite the curious unexplained details of her own parenting history, along with her late husband Elkin, Moore has for years been a huge influencing factor on the children of her adopted neighborhood.
“Elkin and Miss Dorthey were a great team,” remembers Irons. “He was the steadying force she needed. He listened to her, but she listened to him, as well. My first year at Langston, Miss Dorthey was afraid maybe I was homesick. She didn’t tell me they were coming but she sent her husband and a couple of my Vashon friends down to Oklahoma to see how I was doing. It was like a dream when they walked into my dorm, I was so happy to see them. It really picked me up at a time I needed a pickup. She always had good instincts to know what I needed.”
Irons becomes emotional, he admits, when he speaks of Miss Dorothy. ''She took the time to nurture me and show me that I could do something special with my life,'' Irons says. “I grew up in the projects, but I never was a street kid. I was at 18 very naïve, no street smarts. I had been so involved in my studies and sports that I had been shielded, protected, but at the time, I didn’t know it. The streets and the culture that come with them could have swallowed me up if I would have stayed and had money in my pocket, but it didn’t because Miss Dorothy showed me so much tough love. She can be the most fouled mouth person if you don’t know her. She has always been that way, but she has a heart of gold, if she loves you. With her love is always unconditional. With her there is only right and wrong and you had better choose right. She does not tolerate foolishness well.”
Fate is fickle. Too many intangibles can turn up to haunt even the soundest conjecture. Fate is also often random in who is blessed with its fortuitous draw. Irons says he is brought to his knees with blind gratitude that for him, providence has never shrugged. With so many forks in his life’s road, guidance has been paramount - and the like leather tough Miss Dorothy gave to him the best.
“If Miss Dorothy had not cared enough to put me on that bus back to Langston, I would not have finished college,” Irons today shares. “In my family, to graduate high school was the ultimate. Of my mom’s 18 (children) I was the only one to get a college degree. My family was ok with me dropping out of college. They already considered me a success. They just did not have the vision because no one in our family thought past a high school diploma. They did not see the possibilities for me. But Miss Dorothy did.”
Even Irons, who may know and understand Moore as well as anyone this side of her deceased husband, cannot say definitively why Moore has dedicated her life to helping the helpless. A woman who instantly recoils from praise that she admits makes her uncomfortable, she is, to someone outside her tight circle, in a constant state of ferocious and unembraceable attack, stiffened with a pit bull’s growl. She can be to a stranger an enigma, impatiently blunt to the stage of unlikeable. But peal away the protective layers and you will find what Irons calls, “as fine a woman that has ever lived.”
Moore once told Irons you cannot fight bad with nice, and she does not try. The line between good and evil is thin, but it is possible to thicken that line, one young man at a time. “I have learned from Miss Dorthey, and I learned it early,” says the coach, “that If she can leave the world better than she found it, then so can I.”
PART 4 OF THE FLOYD IRONS STORY
From the onset, the Vashon and De Smet rivalry was drenched in bad blood. The long-time city power from the hood and the new upstart private school from the affluent suburbs, for almost 30 years, were the two premier programs in the St. Louis area. Their showdowns were often the highlight of the winter high school basketball season. At first, both were led by visionary young coaches destined for greatness. One a straight and narrow, cool and calculating, aloof strategist, the other a pragmatic disciplinarian who battled the streets for the souls of his players. The new establishment versus the entrenched subversives. How could great bylines not follow?
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| Rich Grawer |
“Coach Rich Grawer at De Smet was the first in the county to reach out and welcome us to come play,” Irons says today. Grawer would in time establish a long history of coaching success, first at De Smet and later at St. Louis University. “We played out at De Smet several years and we never had any problems. It was a great experience for the kids; theirs and ours. They could use basketball to connect. And like I said, we had no problems,” Irons repeated.
“Coach Irons always had the same philosophy as I when it came to scheduling,” the 78-year-old Grawer says today. “I always wanted to play the best teams out there to prepare us for the state tournament. At that time the best teams in the area were in the city and Vashon was most years the best of the best. So, it was a natural for us to get together.”
“The games were very, very intense,” Grawer continued. “We both had great players. Floyd was an excellent coach, he was very competitive, but I feel like the relationship between us was very respectful. I still respect Floyd today. I still like Floyd.”
After several years of Vashon making the trip to the county, it was, surprisingly Grawer who suggested De Smet travel to the city. “At the time, we were the only team from the county that would actually go in the city and play with the city teams.” Grawer recalls. “Some (county schools) would schedule a PHL team at their gym in the county, but they would not go to the city. I wanted our kids to experience going into the city and playing. We played on the stage at Beaumont. We played the great Northwest teams that were coached by Jody Bailey at their place. We went to the old Vashon on Cass Avenue. The basketball in the city at the time was the best basketball in the area.”
Grawer’s marquee player at De Smet was 6’11” Steve Stipanovich. Known by the moniker of “Stipo,” he would eventually lead the University of Missouri to national prominence and would be the number 3 overall pick in the 1982 NBA draft. Grawer would follow his star to Mizzou in the role of an assistant coach to Irons’ nemesis, Mizzou coach Norm Stewart. Three years later Grawer landed his dream job at St. Louis University. Irons and Vashon would for near a decade provide Grawer’s SLU Billikens with a steady pipeline of talented players.
“I saw Steve (Stipanovich) downtown at a festival in the late 1970’s,” Irons states, “I think it was between his junior and senior years of high school. He was with a bunch of his same age buddies, and they were drinking beer, which most people back then didn’t have a problem with - teenage boys drinking beer, so no big deal.”
“I introduced myself to him,” Irons continued. “I was somewhat stunned by his response to me, ‘Oh yeah, you are the coach at Vashon, you are the one my high school coaches always talk about who doesn’t play by the rules.’”
Irons appreciated the young superstar’s honesty. “When Steve told me that, I knew that we were making noise on the local scene, we were now considered a threat to Rich and his staff. I still see Stipo, and I kid him about that night. He has been part of a weekly Bible study I have recently attended. I brought this up to him because I wanted him to know that I knew there was never any love lost between myself and their group of coaches.”
Was Irons jealous of Grawer’s success. Or perhaps the reversal - was Grawer fearful of the dynasty Irons was building on the north side? Or perhaps both.
In many ways De Smet represented to Irons what he and Vashon battled daily - white privilege. He appreciates, respects, and likes Rich Grawer the man, but still, to this day, Irons finds it difficult to separate Grawer from what he sees as the advantages Grawer’s white skin and De Smet prestige brought to the rivalry – an unfair playing field. The resentment lingers still and probably always will.
“I respected Rich as a coach and came to consider him a friend, but I don’t think he was the ultimate super coach the media made him out to be. Being white and coaching basketball in Missouri at that time had its advantages,” Irons says today.
“They always bring up my name when it comes to recruiting, but nobody recruited the north side harder than De Smet (Grawer to this day denies the recruiting charge). They ran a bus right by our school to pick up players and take them out to De Smet. I called their van the De Smet Welcome Wagon. And no, it does not matter that they were a private school. If you follow the state rules, they cannot recruit kids based on athletic ability, but they all did it. So, why single out Vashon for recruiting?”
Today, Grawer is retired and working part time with senior citizens on social security issues. He laughs when told of his once fierce rival’s memories of those many long ago battles. “Recruiting,” says Grawer with a chuckle, “I am not touching that one.”
When each speaks of the other, two commons descriptors emerge from both: respect and intensity.
“My relationship with Floyd really helped me when I got to St. Louis University,” Grawer continued. “Not only did I get some of Vashon’s better players, I also got some of the better players out of the Public High League. Floyd had a lot of influence over those kids who didn’t go to Vashon. Floyd never had a corner on the market on great players in the city. There were a bunch who didn’t play for him at Vashon, but they still listened to him. I will always be indebted to Floyd for the gracious way he helped me connect with the city coaches and players.”
Like many Irons’ basketball associates, Grawer found himself in an awkward position when Irons’ legal problems exploded in 2006. “I don’t know a whole lot about what happened with the situation where he was in (legal) trouble,” Grawer says. “I don’t feel like it was any of my business, still don’t.”
Regardless, Grawer testified as character witness for Irons at his 2007 sentencing hearing.
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| Frank Cusimono |
Many of the Irons/De Smet confrontations over the years came from the always spirited and edgy all boys’ school’s student “cheer” section. Once, when a De Smet student showed up at a Vashon game adorning a gorilla mask, Irons took offense and refused to take the floor to start the game until the offensive symbol was removed. He felt the display had racial overtones and he felt the adults who ran De Smet, by allowing it to happen, condoned it.
In 1981, Jim Gant’s St. Louis Central Redwings played the De Smet Spartans in a quarterfinal game in what many consider one of the best games ever played in St. Louis. Both teams were loaded with future Division I players. Ironically, Central’s star point guard, Pee Wee Leonard, would eventually transfer from the University of Georgia, where he had teamed with Dominique Wilkens, to play at St. Louis University for Rich Grawer.
Before a sellout crowd at the University of Missouri-St. Louis Fieldhouse, De Smet would win a one-point thriller.
For years, Irons had complained that when the state playoffs began each February, the officials assigned by MSHSAA were always white. For the Central vs De Smet game, MSHSAA, at the last minute, did assign a black official to work the game, but this still did not placate Irons. “I do believe it was the kid’s first year officiating,” Irons recalls. He didn’t feel the official was ready for the level of play and the awards at stake. “The young black official, trying to impress the crowd, made most of the calls. In my opinion, the veteran white official let the kid hang himself,” is Irons critique of MSSHAA’s effort at officiating parity. At the time, only two officials worked a game. Irons says it was just another subtle nudge Grawer’s way, something he said happened way too often.
“Ironically, Soldan had lost to Central three times that year and then Soldan beat Rich and De Smet in the state finals,” Irons remembers. The state final setback would be Grawer’s last game at De Smet before he reunited with Stipanovich as an Assistant for Norm Stewart at the University of Missouri.
After Grawer’s departure, Dale Burgman became the new coach at De Smet and held the job for 18 years. For nearly two decades, Irons and Burgman made no attempt to hide their dislike for each other.
“Dale couldn’t accept the fact they were no longer the area’s number one program,” Irons states. “We took that from them. And we did it on Dale’s watch. That really got him. De Smet had no problem with us in the early days when they were beating us regularly. But then we got better they couldn’t handle it. Vashon was a real thorn in their side, and we loved it.”
The regular season rivalry ended in February 1986. In a game played at the Vashon pit, Vashon destroyed De Smet 72 to 46. After the game, things got ugly. Burgman complained that De Smet was not allowed by Vashon school officials to videotape the game. This is normally a routine courtesy. Burgman was also upset that the game was scheduled to start at 7:30 but when his team took the floor for that anointed start time, they were then told the game wouldn’t start until 8:00.
Burgman told the media after the game, that despite just recently signing a two-year contract with Vashon, De Smet would never play Vashon again. “We knew we wouldn’t win coming down here,” said Burgman, “But we wanted to learn something, we wanted to watch the tape and now we don’t even have a tape. Well, I did learn something tonight. I learned we’re not coming back.”
Irons reacted to Burgman’s comment, when informed by the press, with his typical vehemently aggressive style. He noted that at the game the previous year, Vashon was not allowed to videotape because of an electrical problem. He said his request for a copy of the De Smet tape was turned down. Irons insinuated Burgman was only upset about the outcome of the game, that his team had thoroughly whipped De Smet. “To repeat something Dale Burgman said after last year’s game,” Irons told the media, “When in Rome do as the Romans do. We had a chance to be in Rome tonight.”
In the future, De Smet and Vashon would only play when forced by state tournament playoff brackets.
Burgman retired after the 1998 season. His last game was an upset loss to Vashon in the state quarterfinal round, a fact that to this day Irons relishes on.
In 1989, Irons attended a De Smet playoff game, ostensibly to scout the Spartans. When the Spartan always rowdy student section noticed Irons, they welcomed him by serenading him with a mocking taunt of, “Hiiiii Floyd, Hiiii Floyd.” Irons didn’t find it humorous. He responded to the students by expressing his displeasure. A verbal confrontation between Irons and several students ensued. Irons told the media it was disrespectful and Vashon students would never behave in like fashion. Burgman did not accept what he thought was a sanctimonious stance taken by Irons. He pointed out that Irons was a school administrator at Vashon and should have taken the high road as opposed to verbally sparring with teenagers.
Burgman was replaced after the 1998 season by Bob Stiener. He seemed to be a better fit personality-wise with Irons than Burgman had been. The two even once rode three hours together in the same car to Sedalia, MO to scout a common opponent. But, even if the rancor between the head coaches diminished, the rivalry did not.
Irons claims the games between the two powerhouse programs were always racially charged. “It was always listed as ‘The Game,’ the haves vs the have nots,” he says. “After Rich left, they acted like they were doing us a favor by playing us.”
Irons found that offensive. “I took it personally. They only beat us one time over my last 20 years at Vashon, in the state finals, in 1999.”
Irons complained that after the Vashon upset of De Smet in the state quarterfinals in 1998, Burgman’s last game as coach, played before a packed house of predominantly black fans on the north side University of Missouri-St. Louis campus, that MSHSAA the following year redrew the state brackets. De Smet and Vashon, now, come state playoff time, would not meet until the state finals. Irons saw this as another favorable move in De Smet’s direction, allowing the showdown to happen only in the state finals at Columbia, where Vashon supporters would not be as large a contingent as at UMSL. “Show me another sport where the brackets are drawn so two St. Louis teams can meet in the state title game. It never happened except for basketball.
“We never had the influence with the state De Smet had,” Irons complained. “We beat them too many years at UMSL,” a venue that had almost become a home court for the Wolverines. “So, MSHSAA, as they always did, bailed out De Smet and made sure we never played them at UMSL again.”
In 2002, Vashon won its third straight state title, routing De Smet in the finals, 82-27. The margin of victory was a state record. The win moved Vashon to a final mark for the year of 30-1. Irons’ team shot 72 percent from the field in the second half.
Irons was at his antagonistic best when he spoke to the press after the game. “First of all,” he said, “De Smet has some of the greatest fans. I’m surprised I didn’t get to hear ‘sit down Floyd.’ That’s the one I usually get.”
The 55-point differential was the largest in state championship game history. The Wolverines lead only 30 to 16 at halftime. Then Irons dropped the hammer. Vashon went on a 20 to 2 run to start the second half. They had six three-pointers in the third stanza including a half-court buzzer beater, to take a 61 to 19 lead. Irons did not pull his starters until less than three minutes were left in the game.
If the intent was to send De Smet a message, it was received loud and clear. Vashon employed their smothering full court press until the final buzzer. The reaction of the state basketball community was one of condemnation of Irons and Vashon. Irons remained steadfastly defiant.
Afterwards, Irons defended not letting up on the overmatched squad with a sort of backhanded compliment. They have a great program, Irons said. “To not have given them our best shot would’ve been an insult to them.”
Frank Cusumano is for many St. Louisans the face of sports in the Gateway City. He played basketball at De Smet High School in the late 1970s and was integral part of the school’s record setting 62 game winning streak. He played college basketball at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Since 1993, he has been the sports director at St. Louis TV station KSDK, widely recognized and liked for his work ethic and outgoing personality. Cusumano’s love and passion for his job have earned him the trust of his viewers. He broadcasts nightly to a metro area of 8 million, but his work has the folksy feel of a small-town AM radio station. He helps St. Louisans take their sports seriously, but not too seriously.
Cusumano has respect for Floyd Irons the coach. “He was always able to demand the discipline from his kids that a lot of city coaches never seem to be able to earn. He was so much about detail. He demanded in practice that the fundamentals be learned and followed. Floyd was a great practice coach. That was the base for his success. It was on the practice floor that he instilled the discipline that made his teams so successful.”
But the broadcaster has also over the years questioned some of Irons tactics. “Floyd is a complex man. Many times, Floyd has been his own worst enemy,” Cusumano says. “To do what he did to De Smet in the state finals (mercilessly running up the score in a 55-point win) was uncalled for. His feud with Bird Hamilton (the coach at PHL rivals Roosevelt and Beaumont) was something that should not have happened. Bird was a teammate of mine at UMSL and I felt he had every right to stand up to Floyd.”
In 1999, Coach Hamilton had at St. Louis Beaumont High an outstanding sophomore hoopster by the name of Will Franklin. (Ironically, Franklin is now the Athletic Director at Vashon.) He was also a star football player who would find a home on the gridiron at the University of Missouri and spend 13 games of the 2008 season with the Kansas City Chiefs. After his sophomore season, Franklin transferred to Vashon. Hamilton filed a complaint with MSHSAA, and the state athletic board ruled Franklin ineligible for his junior season. The feud between Hamilton and Irons intensified, spilling over into the media. Hamilton claimed Irons was playing hard ball, that Irons and several of his well-connected supporters were trying to run him out of the PHL.
Cusumano says Irons has evolved into a man who today is more conciliatory. “Floyd has mellowed, no doubt,” says Cusumano. “I think Floyd is in some was simply worn out from all the years and all the battles.”
“He has done so many good things in his life it is a shame so much was not recognized.” Cusumano says it was at times hard to see past the controversy. “He has a deep passion for his players, but too often the eligibility issues, the spats with other coaches, the feuds with the different leaders were all that got noted (by the public), not the good he did for kids.”
“The biggest change I have seen in Floyd over the years,” continued Cusumano, “is that today he is a Christian, I know his faith is very important to him and he tries to live it. He has made some mistakes, but he genuinely seems to have learned from them. I have always liked Floyd. I have always admired his coaching brilliance, and he was always a brilliant coach. He has helped a lot of kids and I hope he continues to for many years to come.”
PART 5 OF THE FLOYD IRONS STORY
Because gyms tend to look the same—institutional beige with too many-colored lines on the floor- I always go straight to the trophy case. I am a spring day afternoon guest of retired Vashon basketball Coach Floyd Irons, my tour guide to the home of a fourteen -time high school basketball state champion dynamo - ten won by the 73-year-old Irons and three by his 36-year-old son Tony.
On a wall labeled simply “CHAMPIONS” stares down at me from row after row of over 100 5X8 portraits of Vashon High’s hoops greatest. Black faces with that hungry look found only in the dancing eyes of the young and the impatient. Proud Warriors all. Not one smile.
It is an urban hairstyle walk back through time. Some photos are black and white and sport huge afros. Some are faded color with the grunge hairstyle of the 90s. And of course, a hefty dose of today’s sharp look of chop cuts and dreads.
Irons directs me to the first row on the far-left bottom of the montage - literally the cornerstone. With a voice raining down excitement, the most decorated coach in the state’s history points with his right index finger and proclaims to me: “That is him, right here, T-Boy, the foundation to Vashon’s dynasty.”
Ironically, Irons never, like he had most others honored on the wall, hung a state championship medal around T-Boy’s neck. “Don’t matter,” says Irons, “without T-Boy we would have never built what we did. I personally made sure everyone who ever played here after him, knew who he was.”
Jonas “T-Boy” Cody (Class of 1982) was a leader of few words. He was also a street kid who at times was surly, defiant and aloof - close, but never triggering the issuance of the dreaded label that can kill the most promising of athletic futures; uncoachable. “He was always pushing how far Coach Irons would let him go,” recalls one former Wolverine assistant coach. Irons says today. “He was as bullheaded as I was. We clashed a lot. He is still one of my all-time favorite players.”
Today, Jonas Cody is approaching 60 years of age with a looming retirement near, living comfortably in his adopted hometown of Columbia, MO. He resides with his wife of 30 years and his 24-year-old daughter.
Cody said Irons knew how to challenge his players without taking away their spirit. Does he resent the numerous run-ins he had in high school with the equally headstrong coach? “He was the best man in my wedding and the godfather of my daughter. What do you think?” he rhetorically asks. Like many who over the years have starred for Vashon, it took a combination of Floyd Irons’ unbending Vashon discipline and some old school grooving with Basketball Jones to save T-Boy (a name Irons gave him as a high school sophomore) from a probable life outside the law, to which Cody says today, could well have been. “It was a rough neighborhood back then, where I grew up” Cody says. “My mom had her hands full, but she also had coach on her side, and I wanted more than anything to please that man. Still do.”
It took Irons a decade as the head coach of the Wolverines to win his first state title in 1983, the year after Cody graduated. But the bricks to the foundation for that title started to fall in place in 1979 with the arrival from Soldan of four talented but raw young men.
“It is funny,” Cody says today, “but Ramon Trice, Altonio Campbell, Willis Stokes, and me, all grew up together in the Soldan district and we thought that is where we would all end up playing together. But then after my 8th grade year, my mom told me we were moving, and I was going to go to high school at Vashon. I was anxious about it. Vashon had a reputation as a tough school, lots of gangs and I didn’t know anyone there, but then Ramon, Altonio, and Willis, for different reasons, I guess, all ended up at Vashon as well.”
All four would play major roles between 1981 and 1984 in building the foundation on Cass Avenue for the undisputed greatest and longest lasting basketball dynasty ever seen in the state of Missouri.
Did Irons influence the mass transfer of talent? “Not really,” says Cody. He points out that Soldan already had loads of talent, winning a state title in 1981. “But he was always out in the neighborhood in the summers, always around the parks watching us play; even in junior high, but I can’t say he recruited us, but he knew who we were. We used to play every night at a place called Visitation Park. Lots of good players and coach was there a lot watching.”
Still, the relationship through Cody’s high school years was strained. “Coach and I were both strong willed,” says Cody with a laugh. “My freshman year, at the first practice, I was late. I was just messing around in the hallway after school, and I walked into practice late. Coach sent me home. I was pissed. I quit, just didn’t go back.”
But Irons saw the raw talent in Cody and was persistent in his pursuit. He also saw a young man he felt he could save from the streets.
“Coach would see me in the hallways and tell me I needed to come back to the team,” says Cody.” The next year, I came back out. I had to wait my turn and play(ed) on the JV, that is just the way it was then, the young guys had to wait their turn. During my years there were a lot of great players at Vashon. But, I worked hard in practice against the varsity and my junior and senior years I was a very good player. I was proud of myself. I earned it.”
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“One time,” Cody laughs, “and this is silly and shows I was just an immature kid, but the team shoes came in. They were Nike and blue and just cool. Well, my size got lost and had to be reordered. Shotgun (teammate Altonio Campbell) was giving me a hard time in the locker room because I didn’t have the shoes like he did, and I yelled at Coach. He said, ‘go home, then,’ and I did. I have often wondered over the years how I could have been so dumb as to give Coach a reason to wash his hands of me over a pair of shoes. They were not that cool and Coach didn’t have to put up with me, there were lots of guys during those years who could have taken my place. I know now I put the man under a lot of unnecessary stress just being a dumb kid who thought he knew it all. He threw me out of practice several times, but he always let me come back. Thank God or who knows where I would be today.”
Irons says he saw immediately through the hard façade Cody tried to project to the outside world, pointing out that many city kids, even at a young age, have carefully cultivated an aura that will keep outsiders at bay and insiders off balance. “He was very unsure of himself, trying to hide his insecurities with a bad, I don’t care, attitude. But he really did care, and I could see it. I was not going to give up on him and I was not going to let him give up on himself,” says Irons.
Coach Irons, undoubtedly, gave the adolescent Cody direction by the kindling of the young man’s self-esteem. But, just as Oz never had to give the Tin Man a heart he already had, Irons could not up Jonas’ courage, his relentless tenacity, his natural strength, his stamina. Those he was born with. Irons relentless faith showed Jonas he already possessed within what he needed for greatness. What he did with his gifts, Irons said, was up to him.
"I've had some strong-willed young men pass through our program,” Irons says, "but T-Boy, without a doubt, took it to another level, and with him, he took us."
Cody averaged 20 points as a junior and over 23 points a game as a senior. In 1981, his junior year, he led the Wolverines to a state third place finish. In 1982, second place.
“That was the start there. From then, starting in 83, we won ten state titles,” Irons summarizes.
The 6’2” Cody could, according to Irons, play any position on the floor. “He was versatile. A lot of our better teams were dominated by kids like Jonas. Seldom did we have the dominant post player, but we always had good balance and those 6 feet to 6’4 kids. That let us play a lot of different styles, let us dictate to the opponent how the game was to be played. Jonas is a good example of what a Vashon player was; disciplined, fundamental, and versatile.” All with a chippy attitude and a street toughness that Irons welcomed.
Cody recalls the structure Irons brought into he and his teammates life’s – much needed structure. Irons was the only one in the Vashon program allowed to be unpredictable. Everyone else had a simple but strict rule to follow: no drama allowed. "Little things are man's work," the coach would say. There was nothing he or they could do about big things. That was God's work. “But little details we would screw up,” Cody says, “like not setting the pick in the right spot, not fundamentally blocking out to rebound, and oh, and this was huge with coach, being late for anything, that infuriated Coach Irons. ‘There's no excuse not to do the simple things,’ he would say over and over."
After his stellar career at Vashon was completed, Cody played two years at Kansas State University and two years at Central Missouri State in Warrensburg, MO.
When word reached the public in 2007 that Irons had serious legal problems, a group of his former players asked their coach to attend a meeting with them and explain himself. T-Boy deferred, said he didn’t need a meeting with or an explanation from the man who had selflessly inserted himself into his life as the father he never had. He sent a curt six-word text: “No matter, I ride with Coach,” answered the man of always few words.
After college graduation, Cody returned to St. Louis. One day in the late 1980’s he called Coach Irons. “He told me that there was nothing in St. Louis for him but trouble,” says the Coach. “He needed to get out. He had met a small-town girl and he wanted to marry her and get out of the city. It was on his part a very mature and wise decision.”
Irons says he knew at that moment that all the years of tough love he had given Jonas Cody, that had at times wore the coach down, was now validated. Jonas Cody had made it to the other side.
“I have made it a point not only with our players at Vashon but our students as well, that they know about the legacy that my dad developed,” says Tony. “When my dad left Vashon in 2007 it wasn’t on the best of terms. That’s no secret. They pretty much tried to eliminate him from the history of the program. I have made it a point to put up the old pictures, display the old trophies, let people know about the legacy of Vashon basketball that he built.”
After Floyd Irons removal as coach of the Vashon Wolverines, and his subsequent stretch in federal prison for his role in a felony mortgage scheme, two of his former players were given the keys to the program. First, Anthony Bonner, Irons’ best-known former Vashon player, a superstar at St. Louis University and a long time NBA regular took over the Wolverines in 2006. He resigned mid-season in 2009. DeAndre Davis, a resource police officer at Vashon and a 1992 graduate, sat in the head coaches’ seat through the 2015 season. Neither was able to keep Vashon at the level anywhere close to the lofty perch of the Floyd Irons’ years. During the tenure of both coaches, most seasons the once mighty “V” finished with a very un-Vashon like record of below .500.
It is a twisted and complicated past between the Irons coaches (Floyd and Tony), the Vashon community and St. Louis area basketball. In 2015, the son fully and voluntarily interjected himself into the brew. Floyd was never the type of father to hold his son’s hand. He is the type who will have his son’s back. Dad attends most Vashon practices and games. He sits alone, his entourage from the glory days of long ago, dispersed.
The fact that Tony is the only child of the man who ran with the “fist of Irons”, the Vashon program for so many successful years is certainly grist for the Freudian mill, but don't go too far with it. There is no question of who today leads the “V”. The son is his own man running his own resurrected version of the hoops dynasty his dad started building on Cass Avenue almost 50 years ago.
In the glory years, Floyd had a game face that oozed fury. He stomped, he screamed, he pointed and jumped like an ireful child, his puffed-up face often frozen in a sneering rictus of rage. Tony’s courtside manner is much less demonstrative than his father’ was – mostly stoic to the extreme. If father was Type A, son is Type Z.
Tony has developed his own bench persona. He paces constantly, a combination, depending on game circumstances, of a gentlemanly Dean Smith amble and a Bobby Knight High Noon saunter. His banter with his players and his assistant coaches is steady and focuses on corrections and strategy. He will raise his voice, but seldom to an official. His communication with the men in stripes is always clinical and lacking emotion or insinuation.
Jimmy McKinney was a McDonald’s All-American playing for Floyd at Vashon in the early 2000s. He played over a decade of pro basketball in Europe and then returned to work for Tony at Vashon as an assistant coach. McKinney says the two Irons’ gameday sideline demeanors may be opposite, but what makes both successful is an identical approach to practice. "Discipline drives both. Their obsession with detail is identical,” says McKinney, currently the head coach at suburban Kirkwood High.
Tony’s tongue is as whip sharp as his dads ever was. He was destined from birth to be a basketball coach, a very good one. With a clipboard in his hand, a new practice drill on his fingertip and a barb on his tongue, he says he is today exactly where God intended. Sounding like the lyrics from some 1970s soft rock love song, Tony Irons tells his players, “When you think you have given me all you have, you had better reach down and find me just a little bit more.”
Today, Floyd Irons has been for near a generation removed from his position as head coach of the Vashon Wolverines. With his son Tony now leading the north side power, Floyd Irons is a sort of conscience-in-residence. Dad is a good and willing sounding board.
The senior Irons knows his son is not a template of his dad’s style. “He is more like his mother,” Floyd says, when discussing the difference in temperament. “He has never been one to like to get out of his comfort zone, whereas I was always looking to push the limits. Still, even today, after all the success he has had, he is very low key. Tony keeps his circle pretty tight.”
Floyd Irons has always played an oversized role in the lives of his players: a disciplinarian, a counselor, a mentor, a hard ass, a kind soul and, above all, a pedagogue. Torrance Miller, a small-time drug dealer and cell mate who taught Irons about the vagaries of the criminal justice system says, "Floyd could teach a dead rat to be deader."
Floyd’s wife and Tony’s mother, Sandra Irons lived shoulder to shoulder with her husband through that frustrating first decade. The wins always came, an average of 22 per year between 1974 to 1982, but never the Big Win. They lived in a fishbowl. Everyone had an opinion. Sandra says her husband agonized over each loss, never fully enjoyed the wins. She suggested that he attempt to develop a better relationship with the press, but he never listened.
In an age of peripatetic, keep-trading-up-for-a-better-job coaches, Irons stayed put. During his over three decades as coach of the Cass Avenue dynasty, Irons says he has seriously entertained only two offers from other schools. In the mid-1980s, Irons traveled to Rhode Island and interviewed for an assistant coach’s position with the Providence University Friars. He says he knew right away it was not a good fit. “They wanted a guy on the road full time recruiting. I wanted to be on the practice floor coaching.” To say Floyd Irons is not cut out to be an assistant, would be a more than fair assessment, one he was wise enough to make early.
In the mid 1990’s, Irons says he briefly looked into the position at neighboring suburban school University City. “By then, I had moved into administration with the St. Public Schools, and it was a bad time. The bussing, the charter and magnet schools that seemed to be springing up everywhere, the revolving door of superintendents; we literally were watching daily the gutting of the public schools in the city.”
But as with Providnce, when it came time to pull the trigger and separate from the V, Irons could not do it. What Irons has done over the years is to gather around him an extended Vashon family of former players he could not abandon for suburban greenery; colorful and strong men like, Cody, Campbell, Trice, and Collins. Maybe not generating the endowment connections of a De Smet or a Chaminade, but they’re family.
Floyd Irons was 34 years old when he won his first state championship. Today, Tony is 35 years old and has already captured five state titles, three as the head man at Vashon. Dad sometimes worries son’s road has been too smooth, lacking in the character-building disappointments he himself endured for a decade.
“If Tony is missing anything from his resume,” Irons observes, “it is failure.”
The younger Irons, even as a player, knew nothing but success. He finished his high school career at Lutheran North High School as a state champion. His collegiate career at College of the Ozarks closed with him as a member of an NAIA national champion.
Father says son recognizes this. “This was his idea, but I loved it,” Floyd says, “comes right out of my coaching playbook. A couple of years ago Tony had his whole team back from a state championship year. That fall he made them all play soccer. Vashon has never been known for its soccer and most of his players had never played. They won one match the whole fall. I think one loss was like 14-0. He said he wanted them to see how it felt to be on the other side.”
Does the son feel the yoke of family honor to bring back the gloss to his father’s reputation? If he does, he does not show it. Revenge is best served cold. Regardless, once again, with an Irons back at the wheel, the “V” is ready to roll and the north side pride in the iconic Irons’ led Vashon basketball machine has returned with a whole new generation of passionate supporters.
“I am very family oriented,” Tony says. “I am with my mom and dad all the time, visiting at their house, going out to dinner. To be honest, my dad’s probably my best friend. My wife and I hope to be starting a family soon. Covid has kind of pushed everything back. But I’m hoping things soon are going to get back to normal.”
“It’s really been tough on our kids with the pandemic. We’ve got a couple of Division I level seniors this year that really didn’t get to show their stuff this summer in the AAU ball. Basketball is just so important to these kids and to this community. If you do it the right way, basketball can be a positive. My dad did it the right way for 30 years. I like to feel I’m doing it the right way now.”
How will it end? Regardless of how, the son has made the dad proud. “To see him bring back the “V” is truly gratifying,” says Floyd Irons of his son’s mega success.
“I could see myself someday getting into college coaching,” says Tony. “But I’m not actively looking. I think I have a great situation at Vashon. I have a chance to continue a family legacy but also to make my own mark, to have my own impact on these kids. So, if it happens it happens. If not, I’m very happy here.”
Nothing stays the same, even on Cass Ave. Evolution can have a melancholy aspect, of course. Whenever things change—attitudes or the times themselves—there are inevitably those who fade away. But today, hope has poked its head from the hole of irrelevance the Vashon basketball program had become, and the consistent tune of the pied piper played loud and proud for 33 years by Floyd Irons strums again on these north side streets.
A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be. Within the Iron’s coaching tree, the son is not burdened with the restoration of his father’s legacy but, more fittingly, in 2022 is respectfully establishing his own.
Say this for the still young coach living in a fishbowl darkened by the long shadow of his iconic and controversial father, through nine years and five state titles, he hasn't yet turned into anybody but whom his parents raised him to be – simply he is Tony Irons. And, the 74 year old man who created all these expectations will tell you, that's good enough.
Part 7
A Program Brighter Than the Streets
Today, North St. Louis has the feel of anonymity even to those who live here. The media has drawn tag lines that paint the area to the world as an unhabitable squalor of urban crime and dysfunction - the rage of Ferguson. It was not always so. Once community pride towered over the somber skyline of spires and church steeples; towered over thriving distinct ethnic sectors, a melting pot of hard living blue-collar workers and side-street taverns whose stools filled up nightly when the shadows crawled up the alley walls.
With the end of Jim Crow in 1956, the PHL’s predominant black schools north of the city’s local version of the Mason-Dixon line, Lindell Boulevard, took dominance of the sport of basketball. Immediately, they struck fear in the hearts of outlying suburban opponents. The game sprawled over the countless playgrounds of the north side neighborhoods. In the Gateway City of the 1960s and 1970s, Vashon, Sumner, Beaumont, Soldan and later, Northwest, played the best high school basketball the region had ever seen. Long time PHL coach George Simmons remembers how it used to be. “Those cats in the county were scared to death of us, wouldn’t step foot on a PHL court.”
Times have changed. Today, all over America the once powerful inner-city teams from the Age of Aquarius are a long-gone memory, replaced by high dollar private schools with ivy covered suburban campuses who swear they don’t recruit black athletes from the inner cities but just were lucky enough to have hired a coach who knew a few kids on his nationally ranked AAU team who could carpool with him, so they tagged along. And yes, we do have some money laying around for tuition scholarships.
Starting in the mid 1970’s, trendy, and wealthy suburban St. Louis private schools, three in particular: first DeSmet, then CBC and Chaminade, took over area basketball. Private school’s territorial enrollment for athletic eligibility was not restricted - their players could reside anywhere and be eligible for athletic competition. They could even live in another state, and many did, and still lead their private school team to a Missouri state title. All three of the afore mentioned, in time, become national powerhouses, often with rosters loaded with black players who lived in north St. Louis and would be attending the former Public High League (PHL) powers, if the Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA) had not given the private schools a pass on the enrollment boundaries it subjected its public-school members to uphold.
Today the PHL is sadly a stripped-down version of a once powerful athletic juggernaut. In 2022, wretchedness has a death grip on the St. Louis Public High League. The grip's five fingers being first a lack of administrative vision and planning; second, a lack of financial support; third, too many coaches in it only for a paycheck; fourth, horrific equipment and playing facilities; and finally, a diminished and now too small pool of top talented athletes to choose from, too many having been siphoned off by the county and private high schools.
The 2022 PHL teams in boys’ basketball, with one noted exception, cannot compete with area private schools or the surrounding suburban teams. It is not close. Often, it is embarrassing. The basketball programs have been watered down with several PHL school’s schedules now allowing for only games against other poorly performing PHL teams - not much more than a glorified intermural league.
The one exception, as it has been throughout the 40-year implosion of the once powerful PHL, were and are, the Vashon Wolverines. The “V” has always played a full non-conference schedule, they have always traveled out of town for games and tournaments, and they wore nice uniforms. They won state championships. Still do.
Vashon’s iconic boys’ basketball coach Floyd Irons steadfast resolve would singlehandedly not allow PHL glory to die completely. Irons refused to sit by idly and watch the Vashon boys’ basketball program sink to the sub- mediocrity levels that had been the fate by the 1990’s of most PHL athletic entities. If the Vashon Wolverines boys’ basketball team and Coach Floyd Irons were going to go down, it would not be without passionate resistance. Irons never, both critics and admirers agreed, backed away from a good fight.
Michael. Pele. LeBron. There are a few whose reputation is so immense that they are known, only by their first name. If you say “Floyd” in the sports circle of the Gateway City, everyone knows you speak of Coach Irons. This side of Stan Kroenke, no St. Louis’ sports figure will stir the raw emotion of controversy that the mere mention of “Floyd,” will.
From 1983 through 2007, Vashon teams coached by Irons won 10 state titles. In 2008, the state association took two of those titles away, historically now listed as “vacated.” The governing body finally had the proof of what had been alleged for years, the Vashon roster, year after year, was stacked with players who did not live in the area (that depending on the year, varied from 6 to the 11 square miles) assigned to Vashon for enrollment and were thus ineligible to play. It was well beyond any reasonable doubt the Wolverines were guilty of blatantly violating MSHSAA residential eligibility guidelines for public schools only (italicized mine).
In a bizarre 2008 hearing pre-destined for a Dystopian ruling, the state board told Irons and Vashon, in essence, “there is no way you are winning all these state titles if you are playing fair by adhering to the unfair rules, we have harnessed you with.” If they were playing “fair” and following the enrollment area rule, the state’s chthonian logic went, then Vashon should have placed teams on the court with the same inferior level of play found at all the other PHL schools. Instead, Vashon’s team rosters, year after year, rivaled in talent private school powers like DeSmet, CBC and Chaminade, who couldn’t break the rules Vashon was breaking because they didn’t have to play by them (italicized mine).
By 1984, as a freshman at St. Louis Vashon High School, DeWayne Brown was drifting and disoriented, just another 14-year-old rootless ghetto kid facing an uncertain future of futility and frustration—but Coach Floyd Irons had seen him during a PE class play some solid basketball.
“My best friend freshman year at Vashon was a kid named Steve Knolls,” says Brown today. “He will never see the light of day again as a free man. Locked up for murder. When we were 16, he killed two brothers, six months apart. Got off both times claiming self-defense. When he was 19, he shot and killed a man who came to his apartment to complain about Steve’s loud music. This time he didn’t get off. What a wasted life. I was headed on the same path. Steve was a better basketball player, at that time, than I was. Coach talked to both of us that summer before our sophomore year about coming out for the varsity. I bought in, Steve didn’t.”
Brown says it was the extras that had nothing to do with basketball that made his Vashon “Experience” so special. “Get this straight,” says the passionate Brown, “Vashon basketball was a program, not a team. We always had two goals, win a state championship, and get a scholarship to college. Anyone not buying into those two goals could not handle the discipline Coach demanded. But if you did buy in, the man gave you a future life beyond any hope you had without his help.”
Brown achieved both goals. His sophomore and junior seasons the Wolverines were crowned state champions and he did earn a Division I basketball scholarship to Indiana State University, where he graduated in 1992.
But with his high school career over and he no longer able to help Irons win on the basketball court did not mean Floyd was finished with Brown. Without Irons inserting himself once again into Brown’s destiny, in the summer of 1987, he would have never arrived in Terre Haute, IN.
“I called coach on the Friday before school started and told him I didn’t have a ride to college, so I was not going. ‘I will be by Sunday to pick you up,’ he told me. ‘You are going.’ So, Coach shows up on Sunday afternoon, in this little two-door Caprice he drove in those days. I had everything I was taking with me in one suitcase. Three pairs of jeans. Every pair of sweats I owned said “Vashon Basketball” on them. My mom hands me all the money she has in the house, two $20 bills, and a bag with five ham sandwiches in it and off I go to college. Coach didn’t have to do that, there were no media people there to glorify him.”
At a time when the most famous college coaches could use their players feet as billboards for Nike and Adidas, enriching themselves by millions, Brown points out Floyd Irons, the most successful high school coach in the history of the state of Missouri was driving a Caprice and burning his own gas to get a former player a leg up on life. “He did what he did, because he cared about me, the person, not me the basketball player,” says a to this day grateful Brown.
“On the four hour drive I am crying the whole way, telling coach I don’t want to go. ‘You have to,’ he said. Coach said once you have that degree, no one can take it away from you. He told me all kinds of stories about his college days, his fraternity and how it changed his life. Once we got there it took us about five minutes to unpack my stuff and I go down the hall to use the bathroom. I get back and Coach Irons is gone. The son of a gun just left me. I remember I looked out the window and all I can see is white people and grass, nothing like St. Louis. I stayed in my room for a day and half. Why did I finally come out? Because I had eaten the five ham sandwiches my mom had given me.”
“But soon I met some teammates and it all got to be ok. And in four and one-half years this kid from the projects has a college degree from a school that is 98% white.”
Today, Brown is a man of 53 years of age. He lives in Indianapolis and is the head of Brand Development Management for a beverage distributor. “I am proud of myself but humbled and thankful for the role Coach played in my life.”
Former Irons’ players like Brown show us why we should never feel regret for raising dragon slayers in a time where there are actual dragons to slay.
I point out to Brown that Irons had broken the rules. “Coach Irons did what he had to do,” says Brown, not trying to hide the anger in his tone. “Criticize his methods if you want, but he saved a lot of young men. The man is a fighter. Against odds no white person who didn’t grow up like we did can understand, he built a program that was so attractive, for me at least, it was brighter than the streets. Did he break some rule about where a kid slept at night to do it? Whose rules? Where the rules fair? Did those rules hurt kids? If, he did (break residence rules), I am ok with it because the program he built saved my life. So, I don’t want to hear about breaking no rules.”
