Flavor Flav’s grandson goes to his own beat.
Freeport’s Matthew Drayton is shining on the lacrosse field without a need for any family name-dropping, but he shares similar larger-than-life dreams that his Long Island-born grandpa achieved while rapping with Public Enemy and beyond.
“He does wear a clock — and I’m fortunate for him to be my grandfather,” the midfielder for Hampton University told The Post.
“But I’m making my own legacy…and I want to play professionally,” Drayton added before flying to Las Vegas to party with Flavor Flav and the gold medal-winning U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team.
The 20-year-old honed his gift for lax in high school, setting a single-season points record for the Red Devils with 74 during his senior year in 2023.
Grandpa Flav — a fellow Freeport alum and football player who was then known as William Jonathan Drayton Jr. — came back to see Matthew score his crowning goal.
“He’s very grateful that I’m playing lacrosse, and he’s seeing the journey that I’m on. But he always saw me as a football player,” laughed Matthew, who was also a talented wide receiver in high school.
Harder than you think
Drayton keeps his lineage secret and hardly speaks about who his grandfather is as a way of making his own, nepotism-free mark on the athletic world.
“He’s a hype man, he’s a rock star, but that’s something right now I’m not trying to achieve,” said Drayton, who emphasized his drive to play professionally.
He didn’t even mention the connection to the Hampton team staff, who only found out when one of Drayton’s former coaches called them.
Getting to the Virginia school has been quite the journey, as Hampton is Drayton’s third team since graduating from Freeport.
He started at St. Thomas Aquinas College, then returned to Nassau Community College before transferring on scholarship to his current HBCU for the 2026 season.
Playing with the Lions back on Long Island helped unleash the beast in Drayton, who was part of their national title run in 2025.
It still frustrates Drayton that Nassau lost 20-10 to Harford Community College (Md.) in that contest, as he was playing at a limited capacity.
“During the week of [the game], I got cut with a knife in both of my fingers,” he said. “I had 16 stitches in both of my fingers, and I wasn’t cleared by a doctor until the day of the national championship…the doctor said if I took a slap check to a finger, I could lose it.”
Drayton has channeled that into a new goal with his new team — snapping a daunting 70-game losing streak that’s rendered Hampton winless since 2019.
“I’m really on this mission of shocking the world. I live by ‘shock the world,’ ” said Drayton, who is hopeful of being named captain next season.
“And we’re going on a mission of winning our first Division I game in 13 years too.”
Yeah BOYS!
Drayton gets by with a little help from his close friend — recent Alfred State grad and fellow middie Ryan Baston.
The childhood pals who played together at Freeport spend their summers training on Long Island at local parks and in leagues several days a week.
“I’m defensive-minded, he’s offensive-minded,” said Baston, the Pioneers’ former captain.
“Iron sharpens iron,” the 22-year-old added.
Just as Drayton is looking to make history at Hampton, Baston is looking for one last dance in lacrosse as a grad student at another school — should he have to wait a year for an academy class assignment with the NYPD, that is.
“He wants to be better,” Drayton said. “He wants to come out here and work.”
Baston, who plans to coach at Freeport after the NYPD, credits the training he’s had with Drayton for earning second-team all-conference defensive midfielder last season.
“I’m extremely grateful,” added Baston, who confessed he’s too young to know Flavor Flav.
Regardless, Drayton said that his grandfather is all in on his kin’s success and wants to help in fundraising efforts for HBCUs like Hampton. That’s in addition to “lifting the culture” with celebrity status.
“He’s proud of me. He says, ‘Keep going.’ He sees I’m working,” Drayton said. “He knows the mission. He understands I’m trying to shock the world. He wants to shock the world too.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
