Irons Supplement : Linebacker Has a Pro Pedigree, but He Stayed at Michigan for Fifth Year

Myrna Irons wasn’t surprised that her son, Jarrett, didn’t head for the NFL as fast as he could get there.

And that could have been pretty fast.

He had a degree in sports management from Michigan, had been an all-Big Ten linebacker and had nothing to prove in one more season in Ann Arbor. He was expected to be drafted in the middle of the first round and probably knew as much about what it takes to play in the NFL as anyone available in college football.

“Deep in our hearts we felt Jarrett would choose to stay for another season,” Myrna said. “He was 21, and it was his first major decision in life--well, his second, after choosing his school--and we hoped he would stay, but we couldn’t tell him.

“When he made that decision, we felt Jarrett would be fine for the rest of his life.”

It actually wasn’t that difficult a call.

“I thought about it,” Irons said. “I was tempted, and different people talked with me about doing it. But I have more that I can do here. My family isn’t in dire straits. If it’s meant for me to play in the NFL, I’ll play. But I don’t think I’ve reached my full potential here. For me, there are things I can still accomplish. I want to go to the Rose Bowl, to play in the Rose Bowl, to win the Rose Bowl.”

He went, for the 1993 game, as a redshirt, practicing in Pasadena with the scout team and getting a ring after Michigan’s 38-31 victory over Washington. But he didn’t play, and it’s not the same, so the ring went to his father, Gerald.

Jarrett wants one of his own.

And the NFL?

Been there. It can wait.

He cut his teeth and took his first step in the Oakland Raider locker room. He learned to read in the locker room of the Cleveland Browns.

Gerald Irons played 10 seasons as an NFL linebacker, six with the Raiders. After the Immaculate Reception game in Pittsburgh in 1972, when Franco Harris caught a deflected pass to beat the Raiders, Irons called Myrna from a locker room telephone.

“You saw it?” he asked.

“Yes, I guess we’ll be staying here this winter,” she said from Oakland.

“No, start packing,” he said. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

It was an annual trip to their hometown of Gary, Ind., a convenient commute to the University of Chicago, where Irons was in graduate school.

Four years later, while taking final exams for his master’s in business administration, he got an emergency phone call from Myrna.

“We’ve been traded,” she said.

He finished the exam before talking to reporters covering his new team, the Cleveland Browns.

Jarrett Irons has heard the stories, and he realizes the frailties of football. Clarence Davis and Jack Tatum were his baby sitters. Art Shell changed his diapers.

“He saw them as big men,” Myrna says, “but he also saw them as big men who had to go to work. They had jobs, just like anybody else.”

But Jarrett has also seen what can happen when the job is over, the employee fired in favor of a younger employee. In pro football, there is age discrimination because in the body, there is age discrimination.

“Jarrett has been around the business of professional football,” Gerald says. “He knows not to let the glitter and glamour of it go to his head. He loves football and plays it tough. He has technique. He was taught how to deliver a blow and pursue to the ball, all of the things that will make a good pro.”

He also learned what happens with technique and all of the other things are no longer enough.

“There’s more to me than football,” Jarrett said. “The game doesn’t last forever, and you have to have something prepared for the future. I’ve seen guys who were cut, football was over and they were crying. That’s why I’ve got a degree and am getting a master’s in facilities planning. Football doesn’t last forever.”

It has lasted four seasons at Michigan, where Irons has 365 tackles and counting, where he has broken up 19 passes, showing what can happen when you combine 231 pounds with 4.62-second speed in the 40-yard dash.

Michigan, ranked seventh, is 3-0 this season and plays host to UCLA on Saturday.

“Jarrett is certainly one of the finest linebackers in the league,” Illinois Coach Lou Tepper said. “But I met him at the Big Ten kickoff luncheon in Chicago and was impressed with his demeanor as well.

“I’ve been around a lot of future NFL linebackers, but I told Jarrett, ‘I’d sure love to coach you.’ He certainly has the physical skills, but has so much more going for him than that.”

The physical skills came early, taught by Gerald Irons to his three sons, passed on with heavy doses of affection.

Wrote the youngest Irons, Grant, to a teacher at McCullough High in The Woodland, Texas:

“There is not a day that goes by that each member of my family sincerely tells one another how much we love each other, or asks each other how their day at work or at school went.”

Gerald Jr., the oldest, became a nose guard at Nebraska, where he blew out a knee, costing him a pro career.

He is director of admissions at Kingwood College, near the family home in The Woodlands, just north of Houston.

Jarrett Irons could have gone to college anywhere.

“He makes plays from sideline to sideline,” said Lloyd Carr, Michigan’s coach. “Any time you have a guy like that, a four-year starter, captain, a fifth-year player, you have a good football player.”

Grant is the baby, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound high school senior and the object of affection for every college recruiter in the country.

“He’s probably going to be the best of all of them,” said UCLA assistant Marc Dove, who dealt with Jarrett Irons for three seasons while working at Minnesota.

The Irons brothers spring from a family unit that begins with Gerald and Myrna, high school sweethearts in Gary who have been married 26 years. He is director of office leasing for a planned community, The Woodlands, and president of the school board. She has her own voice mail company, which leaves her time for Grant’s football, as she had time for that of Jarrett and Gerald Jr.

“She’s my best friend,” Jarrett says.

Gerald’s up there too.

“There’s a lot of love in the household,” he says.

And a lot of football. And more than a little responsibility and achievement.

When Gary Moeller, then the Wolverine coach, went to the Irons home to recruit Jarrett, he talked about Michigan and the five-year educational experience.

“If I can finish in four years, will you pay for me to go to graduate school?” Jarrett asked.

Moeller laughed and said no one finishes college at Michigan in four years, because of the time demands of football.

“But I will finish in four,” Jarrett insisted.

Again Moeller laughed.

“If I finish in four, will you put in writing that Michigan will pay for me to go to graduate school for my fifth year?” Jarrett asked.

“Sure,” Moeller said.

Jarrett spent his summers in Ann Arbor, in the weight room and class, taking heavier loads than most, and in May, five months ago, Irons got his degree. He is also a member of the Michigamua Senior Honors Society.

Carr, who had been Irons’ defensive coordinator and who replaced Moeller when he was fired, was happy to honor the graduate-school guarantee.

“When Jarrett plays good football, we have a good football team,” Carr said.

Irons suffered through doubts about his future when he had to redshirt his first season, then became a starter as a freshman in 1993, leading the Wolverines in tackles with 95. Only 1991 Butkus Award-winner Erick Anderson had done so as a freshman.

He made 115 tackles as a sophomore, and 124 as a junior, when he was named all-Big Ten and became the first underclassman to be Michigan’s captain since 1984.

Then came the choice. Go to the NFL or stay for a fifth season at Michigan?

“I realized I could wait,” he says. “I’ve seen the business from the inside and I wanted to get all out of college that that I can. I want to realize my full potential.

“I want people to be able to look back and say more than ‘He was Jarrett Irons and he played football,’ ” Irons says. “I want them to be able to say, ‘He was Jarrett Irons, a great linebacker who accomplished all he was able to accomplish.’ That he reached his potential.

“Besides, I just wasn’t ready to go yet. I’ve never played in the NFL, but I’ve seen the life. I’m not so curious. I’ve been there. I’ve been in that atmosphere.”

The house in The Woodlands is already crowded with trophies, Jarrett’s now eclipsing those won by his father, with Gerald Jr.’s on display and Grant’s mounting. Myrna is in a house full of football players and memories.

“I finally put them all on one side of the house and took the living room for myself,” she said. “I put pictures and artifacts of strong women there. And of angels. They can see strong women and angels when they come in, and it’s important for them to see the mixture of strength and spirit.”

Gerald and Myrna are in the process of designing a new home, one that will include a large trophy/game room.

“Isn’t that crazy?” she said, laughing. “Worried about more room for trophies?

“I’ve told them, ‘Why don’t you find a cure for cancer? Why don’t you become president or a senator? At least then they would build you a library where you can put these artifacts of football.’ ”

Until then, there’s still room for at least one more trophy in the home on Berryfrost Lane.

The Butkus Award, emblematic of college football’s best linebacker, would fit in nicely.

“It’s one he wants badly,” said Gerald Irons, who puts out a weekly release on his son’s exploits for the neighbors in The Woodlands.

It’s another reason to come back to Michigan for one more season, and one he carries against UCLA on Saturday.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

SATURDAY’S GAME UCLA (1-1) at No. 7 Michigan (3-0)

TV: Channel 7, 12:30 p.m.

Radio: XTRA (690)