Steve Irion: The Quiet Gun From Harlowtown

"Ever seen the movie 'American Graffitti?' That's where I lived," says Steve Irion. The senior basketball co-captain grew up in Harlowtown, Montana, a hamlet of 1200 people, which earned him the nickname "Monty" when he came to Cambridge. Every Saturday, young Irion rose at 6 a.m. and went down to the asphalt courts built by the local Kiwanis Club to play roundball until sunset. When he wasn't playing basketball, Irion and his cronies "just used to hang out on Betty's corner." It was on the corner of the street and Betty owned the joint, he explains.

The highlight of each year came when Steve and his friends drove the 90 miles to Billings where they stayed at the Dude Ranch Lodge before watching the state high school basketball championships in Shrine Auditorium. Irion says with his droll sense of humor that smacks of the prairie, "Billings seemed so big. It seemed like hours before we got to the 'Shrine.'"

Before Irion entered the eighth grade, his family moved to Hoffman Estates, III., where Steve turned into a 6-ft., 7-in. center of a high school team that went 23-4 in his senior year, losing three of those games by only a point. Back in Harlowtown, Irion had been the biggest kid his age, but in Illinois he played guard on his eighth grade team. Incidentally, Irion's father moved back to Billings after Steve graduated from high school because "he couldn't take the big city." The population of Hoffman Estates zoomed to 45,000 inhabitants after the "biggest indoor shopping center in the world" was built nearby.

Irion had decided to apply to Valparaiso, Wisconsin and St. Olaf's colleges before one of his high school teachers gave him an application form for Harvard.

"I thought Harvard was little guys running around with their briefcases," Irion recalls. Soon after Irion filed his application, then-Harvard coach Satch Sanders came to Illinois on a business trip and watched Steve's high school five play. "Satch came into the locker room and spoke to us," Irion said, "It was really impressive."

The pep talk was convincing. Last year Irion was the bulwark of Sanders' squad. He led the Crimson in both scoring and rebounding. As he recalls, "I was tenth in the Ivies in scoring, seventh in rebounding, fifth in field goal average, and last in assists."

This year, Irion was expected to come away with even more impressive credentials. But in the last two minutes of play against Cornell, last season's final game, Irion wrenched his knee coming down with a rebound. The real damage was done, though, two months later while Irion was playing in a pickup game at Mather Huse. When he tried to pivot his leg turned but his knee remained locked in place. Irion underwent knee surgery over the summer.

Irion has not played a minute this season and right now he is hobbling around on crutches following a second operation performed in December by Harvard's chief surgeon, Dr. Arthur Boland. "I knew in pre-season that my knee wasn't as good as it should be, but I was hoping to play at about 80 per cent and I intended to play," said Irion. "Just the idea of playing for the new coach and the new program was enough motivation for me to go out there."

Emergency

Irion participated in three pre-season scrimmages but his knee quickly puffed up. Boland administered a dye test on the knee and decided it was necessary for Steve to undergo an operation known as a "lateral mackintosh." Irion had severed the cruciate ligament which holds the knee cap in place and it had literally dissolved. In a delicate three-hour operation, Boland drilled a pair of small holes in Irion's knee which he threaded with a tendon from a leg muscle so as to reconstruct the missing ligament.

Having dedicated much of his life to perfecting his basketball skills, learning that he would not be able to play again this year came as a monumental jolt for Irion. He was hoping to play basketball in Europe during the summer and had hoped to be drafted by an NBA team.

Irion worked on a railroad crew in Billings for three summers. Wielding a sledge hammer from dusk to dawn, he packed on extra muscle for battling under the boards for rebounds. Irion's father, who got him the job, worked for the Milwaukee Railroad Company before becoming a government railway inspector. Most of Irion's co-workers were illegal aliens from Mexico known as "wetbacks" because they "swim" the Rio Grande to get to Montana.

Irion also spent part of his summer vacations providing instruction at basketball camps. "I tell the kids that you have to be serious if you want to play and just love the game," he says.

Irion's attitude toward the game reflects his advice. He travels with the team on the road, paying the fares out of his own pocket, and provides constant support from the sidelines. Irion recalls, "I had to tell the guys to keep faith because at the beginning of the season things weren't going that well. I was elected co-captain because of the things I could do on the basketball court so at first when I couldn't play I felt like an outsider looking in. Everybody's tried to help and make me feel at home on the team. Ideally we should have had a real good team on paper this year and I feel like I let the coach down."

Irion's rickety knee has given him an unexpected opportunity to spend his spare time doing more than honing his jump shot. He occasionally serves as a color commentator on WHRB's basketball broadcasts and has assisted Ray Martin coaching the freshman cagers. As far as his duties with the freshman squad go, Irion quips, "I was just trying to help out the big men a little but the problem is they don't have any big men."

Irion also has plans to spend this semester working on an independent study project with teammate Bob Hooft and Kirkland House senior Tony Smith entitled "golf course architecture and management." Irion is handling the economic aspects of the project while Hooft, who is a VES major, is designing a model course.

Irion was bitten by the golf bug back in the days when he sneaked into the Golden Acres Country Club for a quick round while living in Hoffman Estates. Irion's home in Illinois was only five minutes away from the Medinah golf club where the 1975 U.S. Open was held. Medinah was built by the Shriners, members of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. The course features a resplendent mock Moorish clubhouse and is laid out around Lake Kadijah, named after Mohammed's wife. In fact, those same Shriners are responsible for building that nondescript arena in Billings where Steve Irion used to go to watch the Montana state basketball finals.