Muskogee’s Ill-noise: Game led to national recognition for 1991 Roughers

By Mike Kays
Phoenix Sports Editor

July 06, 2008 12:47 am

— For some fleeting moments 17 years ago, it marked a level of greatness not seen before, at least on paper, in the Muskogee High School football program.
The national rankings that were born from the pages of USA Today and even regional daily papers such as the Dallas Morning News recognized coach Ron Freeman’s team. USA Today had the Roughers ranked 16th, Dallas Morning News had them 10th. Not even the 1986 state championship team had that.
But the ’86 team didn’t make a trip to East St. Louis, which ended with a 22-0 victory over the East St. Louis Flyers, ranked No. 12 nationally by USA Today and No. 1 by ESPN.
For some who attended the game, the memories are renewed often. Steve and Margaret Wagner made the 427-mile drive to the game. Their daughter, Lynn, was a sophomore cheerleader.
“We had some friends in nearby Belleville, Ill., who went with us to that game and even today still talk about it in awe,” Margaret Wagner said. “We were at a Christmas party up there just recently and they introduced us as being from the place in Oklahoma that beat East St. Louis.”

TOUGH PLACE

East St. Louis had a national reputation for both sports and crime. Muskogee witnessed the effects of both, addressing one. “People were coming up to us in a restaurant, in the hotel, at the airport, saying “you don’t do that,” recalled Richard Bradley about the game’s outcome.
Bradley, the MHS quarterback club president and father of quarterback Carter Bradley, made a trip to the city a year earlier to go over details of the trip. His most striking impression was walking toward the front door of the school.
“I was getting the lay of the land and here’s this huge banner as you walked on campus about drug use and possession of firearms and being subject to seizure and then going inside the building, you had to go through a metal detector,” he said. “It was an impression that was enough to make you a little nervous.”
In 1991, FBI statistics showed East St. Louis had the nation's highest murder rate (117 per 100,000) and half of the 41,000 who lived there were unemployed and three-fourths got some type of public assistance. The murder rate was three times the national rate and almost four times that of neighboring St. Louis, which set a homicide record in 1991 with 30 per 100,000.
Adds Jamie Young, the only remaining coach from Freeman’s staff that season who is still at MHS: “Even our poorest kids had never seen some of the sights they saw going through town,” he said. “Deserted buildings, burned-out buildings. I remember some of the kids making a big deal out of a charred water tower. To them, this was like scenes from Beirut.”

MOORE CONTROL

East St. Louis was coached by Bob Shannon, who won 195 of 226 games in a tenure that brought about a book, “The Right Kind of Heroes” by now St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Kevin Horrigan. In a school that produced NFL stars Bryan Cox, Kellen Winslow, Dana Howard and Olympic track phenom Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Shannon was more interested in shaping lives than stars, a philosophy that would play a role in the loss to Muskogee.
For many athletes there, sports was a pathway to survival — which occasionally, said Shannon, was in a literal sense even on the practice field.
“We had a body laying out there one day, shot,” he said by phone to the Phoenix recently. “There were several times cars would drive by, people shooting at each other. You never knew where the bullets would go. We’d hit the deck and wait for it to quiet down and resume practice.”
The environment would occasionally bring a particularly tough personnel challenge to Shannon, who was well-known for a my way or the highway approach. He said he had to. “Kids are going to try you and in that environment, where people come up and talk in your ear in a not-so-positive way anyway,” he said. “I had a few that would come along that were a little big for their britches.”
One that was happened to be Chris Moore. A running back who helped fuel the second-half comeback for a 38-26 victory in the 1990 meeting at Indian Bowl, After helping the Flyers to the Illinois 6A semifinals the year before, Moore was kicked off the team by Shannon in the off-season for grades and that “too big for his britches” attitude Shannon speaks of with regularity.
Shannon valued his principles and stuck to his decision until a conversation with Moore’s dad at the start of the ’91 season — according to the book, a dad desperately fearing what his son might turn out to be if he didn’t return to the field — albeit to prove himself on and off the field for Shannon for the duration of a four-week suspension.

GRAND OPENING

The suspension meant that the career rushing record breaker that season would miss the coming out party for the new $5 million, 7,000-seat on-campus Clyde Jordan Stadium, named for a prominent East St. Louis publishing business owner.
For 32 seasons, the Flyers had played at crosstown Parsons Field, a place that depicted the downtrodden atmosphere of most East St. Louis neighborhoods. Games were played on Saturdays during the morning or afternoon hours, partly due to tradition, partly due to security.
To Richard Bradley, the impression of the stadium stood in stark contrast to those first-visit impressions. “That stadium was OU on a junior varsity scale,” he said. “It had a press box that even the Roughers of today could only aspire too, with a stadium club level with a dining facility.”
People dined in anticipation of a repeat performance from 1990 against a Muskogee team that was .500 that year. Homer Bush, who went on to play professional baseball with the New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays and Florida Marlins, had a 22-yard touchdown reception that started a string of 30 unanswered points that helped East St. Louis, ranked No. 2 by USA Today at the time, recover from a 26-8 deficit midway through the second quarter.
But the Flyers were faced with duplicating that effort without Moore, who had a modest but timely 67 yards on 16 carries in that game. The quarterback, a highly-recruited Deondre Singleton, had looked unimpressive in the season opener the week before in spite of some high rankings on college recruiting lists. Singleton was not only without Moore, he was also without Bush. That would compound his problems.

UP, UP, AWAY

Unlike the Flyers, who came to Muskogee in a bus, the Roughers departed for Tulsa around 4:30 a.m. on game day for an early morning flight to St. Louis. Few of the players had ever flown. Some never really had the desire to.
“Worried is an understatement,” said Ron Mayes, a wide receiver and cornerback on the team who played and started with his twin brother, Don Mayes. “I was petrified.”
“When we landed,” recalled Young, “there was applause from some of the kids. They were truly thankful they had survived.”
It took a day of relaxing in the whirlpool and sauna at the team’s hotel in more upscale Collinsville, Ill., 11 miles into Illinois off Interstate 55/70, to regroup.
“It was a great trip,” Freeman, out of coaching and now a high school teacher in Yukon, said. “Most of our kids had never been out of state much less in the air. But that’s the situation we found ourselves in. We were having trouble finding people to play us.”
Same with Shannon, who in his book said he had seen Muskogee on tape prior to the first meeting, noting, “They’re pretty good, but they ain’t that good,”
After that game, Freeman was quoted in the Phoenix as saying Shannon’s team just hadn’t seen the likes of Oklahoma football.
It was time for another look.

CALL IT EVEN

In recalling the game last month, Maurice Scott, a writer for the St. Louis American, a black weekly, had a sense of things to come while watching from his press box spot doing cable television coverage for the Flyers.
“Muskogee wasn’t in awe of our tradition,” he said. “They were a well-coached team. When I watched them warm up, as a former coach, I could see that. Once the game started, I thought they could match up with our team speed, and they did.”
Roughers running back Jerome Burroughs made it 6-0 on a 3-yard run capping the team’s first offensive series. The big play of the drive: Carter Bradley hit Earnest Grayson for 37 yards on a key third-and-11.
That margin stood up through halftime, but no one in the Muskogee locker room at the break was too excited about it. After all, the Roughers had lost a huge early lead at Indian Bowl one year earlier.
Proof they learned a lesson showed on the first series of the second half. From their own 33, the play, called 94 snake, was a 5-yard out where Ron Mayes would show his hands as if to anticipate a throw and make the cornerback commit. That happened and Mayes turned in a sprint downfield. Bradley hit him on the run about 25-30 yards upfield and Mayes took it to the house.
The 14-0 advantage was a backbreaker. The defense did its part as well. Defensive lineman Jeff Howard tackled Dennis Stallings for a third-quarter safety and Bradley would add a 1-yard fourth-quarter TD to seal it.
“Right after halftime it was big, our first drive,” Bradley said. “My thinking was we just had more confidence to begin with. We were more in awe the year before. We knew we could compete this time. Thinking about last year at the half wasn’t really an issue.”
Burroughs rushed 16 times for 132 of the team’s 309 yards. But the MHS defense, whose coordinator was the late Larry Heard, was huge. Besides Howard’s sack for a safety, the Mayes twins had interceptions to stop drives — Don Mayes had one, an apparent touchdown return, wiped out by a clipping penalty. Singleton was 5-of-18 passing for 50 yards The Flyers had only 96 total yards.
It was the Flyers’ first regular season loss since 1986 and first shutout since 1982.
“Muskogee helped us re-evaluate our program,” said Flyers fullback Darron Suggs. “We made several changes position-wise after that game. Being that it happened in the new stadium, there was a lot of negative talk about us, about coach Shannon. The shock was not only that we got beat, but that we got shut out. We had to mute that out the rest of the season.”
Freeman felt Muskogee had walked away with a lesson of its own.
“I personally was so impressed with knowing what these kids faced growing up, how well they handled themselves as a team. And I know that’s a direct reflection of the discipline and leadership of coach Shannon,” he said. “I think our kids saw that and realized that maybe our rules weren’t so bad.”

THE AFTERMATH

East St. Louis wouldn’t lose again. They halted a 44-game victory streak of Missouri’s top-ranked team, Jefferson City, the following week and went on to win the Illinois 6A title.
The win also propelled Muskogee to No. 1 in the Oklahoma AP poll. They held that mark for three weeks, gaining for the first time in school history its own national ranking after a 35-6 win over Enid the following week, debuting in the USA Today poll at 24. Out to a 5-0 start, the Roughers peaked at 16 before being stopped 7-0 in week 6 by Ron Lancaster’s first team at Jenks. A loss to Union followed the next week.
Muskogee finished the regular season at 8-2, beat Tulsa Washington 8-7 in the first round of the 6A playoffs but lost Bradley on a consensus cheap shot in the final moments of a game in hand that resulted in an ankle injury. Without him and several other starters, including Burroughs, who suffered a severe knee injury that required his second surgery, Union won the quarterfinal battle 38-13 — Muskogee’s worst loss since a 29-0 regular season loss to Union in 1985.
The early glory thus gave way to later disappointment.
“I’m still not over it,” Don Mayes, who now serves as a laycoach at Okay High School. “I tell those kids and the little kids I coach in Paul Young, leave it all on the field. You don’t want to be sitting here 15 or 16 years later with regrets.
“I think we gave it all. I just think we should have given more.”
But for one night just off the Mississippi River, they did — so much so that people still talk about it in Belleville, Ill.

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