Floyd Irons and University of Missouri Head Basketball Coach Norm Stewart did not like each other. That was well known. And very true.
Today, two of the state’s most cantankerous Secondhand Lions are aged and battling cancer, but 30 years ago their feud burnt red hot and mesmerized the Show-Me State. Irons stills relishes the until now untold story from 1988, when as he says, “the day the Mountain Came to the Man.”
Stewart was not only the University of Missouri’s winningest all-time basketball coach, but he was also the most popular man in the state. It was said often that had Stewart decided to run for state governor, he would have won in a landslide. A product of rural Missouri, Stewart built his three plus decades of success on the Columbia camps by always having a least a couple of hungry small-town Missouri gym rats on his team. Most had white skin.In the early years of Stewart’s career, the late 1960’s up until the mid-1970’s, his teams could compete nationally with a blended roster of rawboned Missouri farm boys and a few imported blacks. But the blacks did not come from St. Louis. For every John Brown from Dixon and Kim Anderson from Sedalia there was a Willie Smith from Las Vegas.
In the state of Missouri, the name Norm Stewart resonated like the name Dean Smith did through North Carolina or Adolph Rupp through Kentucky. “You couldn’t go anywhere in the state of Missouri and not hear the praises of ‘Storming Norman,’” Irons says with more than a slight hint of sarcasm.
“I recall many people saying back in his heyday he was the most popular man in the state, and he (may) well have been.”
It was long rumored Stewart ran a racial quota system, as did many coaches of the time. In the early 1970’s, many southern universities had racially integrated, but to have more than two blacks on the basketball floor at the same time was unusual. A coaching clinic favorite line from then time, often tributed to Abe Lemons: “I play two blacks at home, three on the road and four when behind.” By the time Stewart retired in 2000, most collegiate rosters were primarily African American, including Stewart’s.
However, none came from the city of St. Louis. According to Irons, the last black St. Louis Public High League (PHL) player on a Mizzou Stewart roster was Lamont Turner of Vashon, a 1972 graduate. He spent two years at St. Louis Forest Park Community College before transferring to Columbia. He lasted only one year with the Tigers. He later played at the University of Kansas and St. Louis University. Turner’s son, Loren Woods was in the late 90’s a 7-foot-high school All-American at St. Louis Cardinal Ritter High School. He attended first Wake Forrest University and the University of Arizona where he led the Wildcats to the 2002 NCAA Final Four. He had a long career in the NBA. According to Coach Irons, Stewart never recruited Woods.“Lamont played at Vashon when I was the assistant,” Irons recalls. “Ron Coleman was the head coach. Ron was from Jefferson City, and he had played at Mizzou for Norm. So, there was a connection.”
Coleman was later the head coach at St. Louis University.
The state of Missouri viewed Stewart as a favorite son, the small-town boy from Shelbyville, MO who had made good at the state’s flagship University, first a star in both basketball and baseball who married the campus beauty queen, then became a Hall of Fame coach.
The head coach from the Tigers from 1967 to 1999, he compiled a record of 731-375. Today, in his 80’s, Stewart is still very active in community and campus events and is well known for the work he does raising money for cancer research. Like Irons, “Storming Norman,” was as successful as he was controversial. He was well known for his temper and the large number of players he ran off. Stewart basked in his role as villain, especially amongst the Tigers main rival, the Kansas Jayhawks. During the Stewart years, seven Vashon players suited up for KU, none for the home state Tigers. The powerful Irons made sure none from the Public High League ever would.
After some lukewarm attempts to build a relationship with city coaches, by the late 1970’s, Stewart stopped any pretense of his recruiting efforts of PHL stars, many who went on to stellar careers at major college programs and in professional basketball. However, by the mid-1980’s, there was so much basketball talent in the St. Louis black neighborhoods that Stewart had to try to rebuild relations that had been for 15 years rusting away. Irons said the effort lacked conviction and sincerity.
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“We had some great players at Vashon, but also the north side had Cardinal Ritter.” The Catholic high school at one time in the mid 1990’s had 7’1 Loren Woods, 6’10 Jahdi White and 6’6 Chris Carrawell. The trio attended major college programs, Wake Forest, Georgetown and Duke, respectfully. None, their high school coach Preston Thomas told me, considered the University of Missouri as a basketball option." Stewart never contacted any of them. “It was obvious,” claims Irons, “that the two powerhouse programs in the city at the time (Ritter and Vashon), when it came to playing at the University of Missouri, were on the same page.”The University of Missouri is unique in that is in the middle of a primarily rural farming state, smack in the middle of the state’s only two metro areas, St. Louis on the east and Kansas City on the west. For many of the years over Stewart’s long career, the state had no professional basketball team. Come wintertime, the Tigers were the darling of the entire state with its large network of AM radio stations carrying winter night Tiger games into rural farmhouses, suburban ranch style homes and urban mansions. But few inner-city project domiciles.
“Norm Stewart was a great coach,” Irons says today, “and I respected him for that. But I didn’t like the way blacks fit into his program.”
By the 1980’s, to compete on the NCAA’s national stage, a large contingent of African American talent was needed. The Mizzou pipeline came straight from Detroit, MI. The architect of the parade of Motor City talent finding its way to rural mid Missouri was Assistant Coach Rich Daily.
“Daily was known as Doctor Detroit,” Irons say’s today, with a laugh. “Since Stewart wouldn’t, or couldn’t - depends on who you talk to - recruit any black kids from St. Louis, they started working the Detroit area hard. Daily had a tough job. He had to convince black kids coming from Detroit that they would feel welcome in Boone County, MO and he had to convince them that playing for Norm Stewart was a good idea.”
“Everybody knew a lot of money was exchanging hands, but nobody questioned it. It eventually got them put on probation. But can you imagine if all of my good kids from those years would have gone to Mizzou? How much money I could have made? The (media) scrutiny that would have come from that?” But Irons said it was well known amongst college talent scouts in the 1980’s that the Vashon kids were not for sale.
“But Stewart didn’t treat his black players right,” Irons continued in his critique of the Mizzou icon. “His graduation rate for black players was very low. He didn’t respect us. That is the way with many white people who want something from the inner-city, the act like they are doing you a favor to invite you to the table.”
Most graduation rates of black basketball players at Division I NCAA schools in the 1970’s and 1980’s was dismal. Denny Crum at Louisville went thirteen years without graduating any of the many blacks that had made his program a national power and him a rich man. But Irons says it was the atmosphere around the program that made the Tigers a toxic experience for a young black player and why he didn’t send any of his players there. “Stewart was the coach, he set the tone.”Stewart was both, according to Irons, powerful and vindictive. “It was well known that he could derail a young coach’s career before it ever started,” says Irons. “Everybody told me when I took over at Vashon (1974), “don’t cross Norm,” Irons recalls. “Respect is one thing, but worship was something I would not do, and Norm was not use to that attitude. I felt since I was black, it made him even more resentful.”
Irons resented any indication of what he thought was unequal treatment or respect due to his skin color. He says with Stewart that racial profiling and disrespect was the accepted way at Mizzou. “It went on for years and no one above ever asked Stewart why or held him accountable.”
“Norm use to have coaches clinic every year and I was told before we started winning state titles was the practice to have every state championship coach speak at the following fall’s clinic,” Irons relates. “I was never asked to speak. Why not? Finally, I was asked to present at the clinic. Every speaker had an hour to present. I had 20 minutes, and I was the only black coach. I was done with them. I refused, and still do, to be anyone’s ‘house negro.’”
Over the years, Stewart did try at times, to make amends and establish a relationship with Irons, and thus the PHL. “But it never came to fruition,” Irons says today.
Irons feels the media gave Stewart a pass on the racial animosity that had for years swirled toxically around his program. “He started using Rich Daily as his go between with me,” says Irons. “We did talk about how we could just not comment if anyone in the media brought up the problem. That didn’t happen until the mid-80’s.” Still, it was the two-ton elephant in the room. “It was so obvious,” says Irons. “It got so bad Stewart knew it had to be addressed and that is when he used Daily to try and build a relationship. But we didn’t need Norm Stewart. We were doing just fine. Norm Stewart needed Vashon. He knew it.” And so did Irons.
“In the summer of 1987, I agreed to let a very talented roster of Vashon players attend Stewart’s Summer Camp, held on the campus at Columbia. Our kids all had to work in the summer,” says Irons. “It would be a big sacrifice to be away from their work for a week. But, I agreed, hesitantly, I would add.”
Dennis Beckett was at the time a young Mizzou grad assistant. He had coached at Division III Webster University and Irons considered him, “a good guy.” Beckett has spent a career coaching basketball at almost every level possible, including coaching overseas for eight years. Today, he runs a basketball skills academy. He proudly calls himself a “basketball lifer.”
“I have known Floyd for years,” says Beckett. “I coached many of his kids in the AAU ranks. I think one of the reasons Stewart hired me was that he knew I had the connections with the black kids and coaches in the city.”
Beckett was given the task of supervising and coaching the Vashon players at the Mizzou camp. They were a talented group.
“Eleven of the 12 players from the 1988 state championship team,” Irons remembers, “would go on to play Division I basketball. The team finished the year with a mark of 31-1. The only loss came in a tournament in Hopkensville, KY to a team with a point guard named Travis Ford.”
Ford would go on to play his freshman season for the University of Missouri and Norm Stewart, before transferring back home to the University of Kentucky. Today, he is the head coach at St. Louis University.
Despite Stewart claiming to have given special attention to the experience of the Vashon players, Irons was not satisfied and would never again send his players to Stewart’s camp.
“Beckett was in the eye of the storm,” says Irons. “Norm, I was told, did not like having a newcomer like us dominate his camp and our kids did dominate. He had kids from all over the county there to recruit and his camp gets dominated by a school that has never sent him a player. It made him look bad.”
“I asked DB (Beckett) later about it,” says Irons, “and he took the high road. Wouldn’t say anything bad about Norm. But it was made known to me that Norm was infuriated. Not long after that DB was let go from Norm’s staff. I (asked) him about it and he said his religion would not allow him to repeat the names Norm had called me.”
My inquiries were putting Beckett (when I interviewed him, I acknowledged such) in a tight spot. He was torn between his respect for Irons and his loyalty to Stewart. I promised not to throw him under the bus. But I knew as one of the few who has had a close relationship with both Stewart and Irons his input would be insightful. I feel he did a good job of being honest and candid with me while negotiating a slippery slope.
“I learned a lot of basketball from Coach Stewart,” Beckett says today. “Let’s just leave it at that. I will say Mizzou was not a good environment in those days for a young black man to be in that program. Coach Irons is right about that and about his decision not to send any of his kids there.”
The following October (1987) the Mizzou team and Stewart held a practice in St. Louis County for area high school coaches to attend. NCAA rules would not allow Stewart to use his own players as demonstrators for his on-floor presentation. Irons says that Vashon was invited to serve in that role. Irons refused the offer.
“Not I nor my team attended,” says Irons. “I felt that if he came to hold a practice in the county and ignored the black schools in the city, it was clear to me that Norm did not want any black players from the city. We had the facilities in the city to host the clinic. Why hide out in the county? It was just Norm playing games. Nothing had changed with his perception of Vashon. That was troubling to me. He always said he knew what was best for his program and that the city players, specifically from Vashon, were what he needed, but his actions never showed that attitude.”
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