Of the ten Parochial League high schools, the last to form was Sacred Heart. The Polish academy on the city's West Side opened its doors in the Fall of 1954 but didn't field a team until the following season. Starting with the second year of the program, in November of 1956, Billy E served as an assistant to a dignified, almost regal parishioner named Adam Markowski, who was the school's very first head coach. And while Billy and Markowski worked well together – very well, in fact – they were vastly different men almost a full generation apart, and each brought different but critical things to the Hearts bench.
Billy was the happy-go-lucky prankster just a few years out of school, while Markowski was a reserved World War II veteran who dressed impeccably and fancied tweed jackets, bow ties and close-cropped haircuts.
Billy E could be one of the guys, with his bright blue eyes and machine-gun humor, laughing and eliciting laughs with ease. Markowski, meanwhile, was somber and dignified, and he carried himself with an air of authority so palpable that any young man under his watch never once found himself unsure as to where the line between player and coach was drawn. It wasn't so much fear that allowed Markowski’s players to draw that distinction so clearly, as it was the innate air of respect he commanded.
Adam Markowski had been a great athlete as a schoolboy. He’d starred at Central High in football, basketball and baseball before heading up Adams Street to play those very same sports at S.U. And while Markowski would prove to be excellent in both basketball and football, his true love was, and would always remain, baseball. Like so many kids in America in the 1920’s, he played baseball non-stop all summer long. Unlike virtually all his friends, though, Adam Markowski actually got to rub elbows with (and even compete against) some of the most revered icons to ever don a set of flannels or lace up a pair of cleats.
In the Fall of 1927, at Star Park, a minor league ball field just across Genesee Street from Sacred Heart, behind the Red Star Fish Fry, a team of major leaguers made an unlikely and much anticipated barnstorming stop. Those Major League All Stars were led by the great Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, two giants of the game who earlier that summer had served as the twin cornerstones of the ’27 Yankees, a team that many still contend is the single greatest in the history of baseball.
The two, under contract from a sports impresario named Christy Walsh, acted as player/managers of the Beltin’ Babes and the Larrupin’ Lous. And though Markowski was just a boy at the time, and too young to play in the game, he did serve as batboy for the Beltin’ Babes and got to sit in the dugout next to his boyhood hero, the larger-than-life Ruth.
Then in 1938, when the legendary John McGraw brought his world champion New York Giants to his tiny hometown of Truxton, just south of Syracuse, the now-tall and country-strong Markowski got invited to play right field for the team of locals. His opposite number that day was none other than Hall of Famer Mel Ott, while on the Giants' pitching staff was another soon-to-be Cooperstown-bound legend, Carl Hubbell. Local legend has it that Markowski even got a hit or two (though not against Hubbell).
Later still, in 1956, long after his playing days had passed, Markowski and some men from the parish got tickets through a well-connected Old Port regular to that year's World Series in New York. On the Fall afternoon of October 8, 1956, the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers met in Yankee Stadium for Game 5. At the game that crisp and slightly overcast day, Markowski sat alongside his son, Jody, in one of the best seats in the stadium, just twenty or so rows off the field.
On the mound for the Yanks was a tall and rangy (but until-that-day largely unknown) journeyman pitcher named Don Larsen. Over the course of the next two hours, with Jody at his side, Markowski witnessed, arguably, the single most unexpected performance in sports history as Larsen faced 27 straight Dodgers and retired them all, becoming the first and only man to ever pitch a perfect game in the World Series.
After Dale Mitchell took strike three for the game's final out, and catcher Yogi Berra raced toward Larsen and leapt into his arms, Markowski, son Jody, and thousands of other delirious Yankee fans rushed onto the field, cheering wildly as they did. A few minutes later the elder Markowski took a grainy black and white snapshot of his son, all alone in a sea of revelers near second base, beaming into the camera as only a ten-year old kid can beam as he stands amid the mist and still-damp memories of freshly poured baseball history.
After he'd graduated from S.U. with his master’s in education, Markowski had tried hard to find a teaching job in town, but found it a difficult task. As he would tell newspaper columnist Sean Kirst years later, back then no one liked a name ending in ‘ski’. A friend then suggested he try to make himself more attractive to would-be employers by Americanizing his name. He eventually did just that, re-naming himself Mark Adam, a move that eventually helped the stately Pole land his very first teaching job in Syracuse.
Following World War II, however, during which he served four years and witnessed first-hand the horrors of combat and the atrocities of the Nazis and Russians, Markowski vowed he'd never again betray his heritage. So when he returned to Syracuse after the war a sadder but wiser young man, from that point forward Mark Adam became, yet again, Adam Markowski, and he'd stay Adam Markowski until the day he died.
Almost everything Markowski touched in life seemed to turn to gold. In his day, he was not merely a great athlete and student, he was also a highly successful coach, taking the Hearts to the championship game in only their second year of existence. He'd prove, as well, to be a sage businessman, rising up to become a division manager at Prudential Insurance and, in time, a senior executive at the Syracuse-area General Electric plant.
Such success even played out in the person of Jody, who grew up to star for the Hearts in the early 1960’s, play two years of basketball for the Harvard Crimson, and eventually forge for himself a long and distinguished career as a pediatrician in Connecticut.
Markowski apparently even married well. As a young man he took a beautiful bride named Jean Tiffany, whose sister, Doris, in turn, married a genial insurance agent named Homer. Homer and Doris Gere eventually gave birth to three beautiful daughters and two handsome sons, one of whom they named Richard, and some thirty years later Adam Markowski watched with pride as his nephew struck gold of his own, eventually becoming one of the most bankable leading men in all of Hollywood.
During his time at Sacred Heart, Markowski always stressed two aspects of basketball that remained hallmarks of the program throughout Billy E’s stewardship: teamwork and defense. Offensively, despite having such high-powered individual scorers as Len Banach, Gene Fisch, Richie Pospiech and son, Jody, Markowski’s teams were known throughout the city for their ability to pass the ball and their uncanny knack for finding the open man.
Perhaps it was Markowski’s military training or his brief time running the Onondaga County Detention Center. Or maybe it was all those different coaches he'd learned from as a youngster – the by-product of having played three different sports over the course of eight consecutive years of high school and college ball. Whatever the reason, when an Adam Markowski basketball team took the court on a Friday in Syracuse, New York, it did so as well drilled and as fundamentally sound as any team in the city.
But if the Hearts’ offensive cohesion was a by-product of Adam Markowski’s inordinate sense of discipline, there was a different set of fingerprints on the Hearts' performance at the other end of the floor. And without question, those fingerprints belonged to the Parochial League's high priest of defensive intensity, the merry prankster himself, Billy E.
Billy was in many ways to defense what another Parochial League coach, Bob Felasco, was to offense. The two fundamentally changed how those two aspects of the game got played at the high school level. In Felasco’s case, he brought Syracuse University’s up-tempo, fast-breaking offense to the Parochial League and his Evangelist teams intimidated opponents by operating at breakneck speed, constantly forcing defenses to adjust to their offensive pressure and their endless waves of three-on-two and two-on-one fast breaks.
Billy E did much the same thing, only on defense. Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, a great many teams played standard zone defenses; a zone being a defensive strategy in which the player doesn’t so much defend an opposing player as he protects an area or “zone” on the court – usually close to or underneath his opponent’s basket. This was a product of the band-box nature of so many gyms in operation at the time, combined with the fact that most coaches believed that a well-run zone, which could expand outward or collapse inward, depending upon the situation, was far superior to a man-to-man defense, however well-run.
Plus, in an intense, physical game, and one that featured a handful of scorers surrounded by a cast of less-talented complementary pieces, a zone can help keep the scorers in the game by protecting them from foul trouble.
What's more, in the 1960’s virtually every coach picked which defense to play based on how well his opponent was playing at that point. Against a team with one or two suddenly hot shooters, for example, he might opt to switch to man-to-man, knowing that a good shooter can launch jump shots all night over the top of a zone, and slowly bleed it to death.
Similarly, against a team scoring in bunches by slashing to the basket or driving the baseline, a coach might switch to a zone, knowing that a floating mass of defenders in and around the key will minimize how freely and frequently his opponent can cut to the basket. In both instances the coach is making a decision based on what the other team is doing well – and not necessarily what his team does best.
What Billy E did was to turn that process inside out. He implemented a man-to-man defense that was relentless and did not so much react to situations, as dictate them. In other words, he took defense and used it as an occasion to go on the offensive. His goal was to get the other team to react to what he was doing defensively, rather than the other way around. Fundamental to this was Billy E’s knack for visualizing the game, not so much from how he wanted it to be played, but how the opposing coach wanted it to be.
Billy E’s defensive philosophy was predicated on one simple question: what is the other guy trying to do? Once he figured that out, he’d then condition his kids to let their opponents do just about anything they wanted on the floor – except that one thing.
Billy knew, for example, that every coach in the league would try to short-circuit his attacking man-to-man by playing some variation of what was called the “mill offense.” In such an offense, which is really nothing more than a non-stop series of picks, passes and cuts, a player passes the ball to a teammate and either sets a pick for a third mate, or cuts to the basket and looks for a return pass. In both instances, once the player passes the ball he wants to move; and on some basic level even needs to move. The mill offense was in vogue for years because its succession of non-stop picks and cuts was designed to bring about momentary defensive lapses, which in turn would result in baskets, or at least open shots.
This was even truer back before the implementation of the shot clock and the three-point arc, when basketball players on all levels were taught to pass the ball around until they exploited a breakdown in the defense and got for themselves a lay-up.
Billy taught his Hearts kids, trained them really, that the moment an opponent passed the ball to one of his teammates was the moment you turned up the defensive pressure on him. That was the moment you rolled up your sleeves and went to work. The very instant the other kid gave up the ball and started looking to run to a spot on the floor, either to set a pick for a teammate or to cut to the basket, was the point at which you made him pay for having so limited his options.
Prior to that, if he wanted to pass, fine. Let him. If he wanted to shoot from long range; no problem. Let him fire away. But once he passed the ball and committed himself to doing the one thing that would set his team’s offense in motion, that’s when you slammed the door, jumped in front of your man and denied him a clear path to the spot on the floor his coach trained him to go.
The defense deployed by Sacred Heart under Billy E relied on beating the other man to a spot on the floor, somewhere between where he was and where he wanted to be, and then making him take the most indirect route possible. This was particularly true if where he wanted to go was toward the basket. And if, in the course of denying the opponent a direct line to where he wanted to go, the Hearts player initiated some physical contact to further dissuade him, all the better.
Billy’s defense was as unnerving as it was unconventional, and knocked many opposing players off their games. By denying an opponent the right to move unencumbered once he passed the ball, the Hearts took something most players accepted as a given; namely the ability to move without the ball, and elevated it on the scale of difficulty alongside man-sized tasks like rebounding in traffic, shutting down three-on-one fast breaks, and beating trapping, full-court presses.
For that reason, any Parochial League player set to play the Hearts on any given Friday night had to prepare himself for one cold hard truth: he was about to go to war and the experience was going to be every bit as mentally exhausting as it was physically so.
* * * * *
The first basketball game in the history of Sacred Heart High was played in the Fall of 1955. It was against North Side rival Assumption and took place at the opponent's odd little gym located on North Salina Street, a few blocks from downtown. Assumption, a predominantly German parish with a few Italians, had a grand, majestic church and an old but well-maintained schoolhouse. Its gym, however, was another story altogether. It was small and boxy, and built in such a way that the locker rooms were a level above the basketball court. What’s more, teams had to share both a shower room and a winding, narrow stairway that led from the dressing area to the gym below.
Assumption's gym had a few other defining features, as well. While the players had to enter the gym from above, the fans did so as well; walking up a steep flight of stairs to a set of doors high above the playing surface. They'd then walk down a series of steps to sit either in the balcony overlooking the floor or in the tiny set of bleachers directly on it. There was a shallow stage on the west side of the space, on which parish dignitaries like priests, nuns and the pastor's guests would sit during games, along with the occasional league official like Father Frank Sammons, who ran the Parochial League out of the CYO office, just a few doors down on the other side of North Salina.
In addition, the Assumption gym floor was not only on the smallish side – one season when the team fielded an even taller squad than normal, the middle three players on its vaunted 1-3-1 zone were said to be able to stretch their arms out to the side, fingertip to fingertip, and cover virtually the entire width of the court – it was covered in an unusual looking cream colored tile. Unlike almost every other gym in the city, the Assumption floor was not comprised of interlocking strips of hardwood, but an entire grid of shiny, slick and rock-hard linoleum squares. The result was a floor that completely altered both the dynamics and aesthetics of a game. Not only did the ball react differently to being dribbled on tile, and make a thinner, higher pitched sound than wood, but a player running in Chuck Taylor-model high-top sneakers would constantly find himself slipping and sliding as he ran up and down, particularly when he tried to make a sharp cut, abruptly change direction or deke an opponent, with or without the ball.
And if that weren't odd enough, Assumption school also held the distinction of being only one of two parishes in the city with its own bowling alley, a small manually operated, two-lane one that the priests and nuns utilized as a means of keeping their games as finely tuned as their duties allowed. In fact, Assumption's school, church, rectory and gym were a virtual maze of hidden rooms, tunnels, passageways and grottos. In a religion steeped in the celestial and slightly eerie sounds of Latin chants, in candles that lit the darkness, and in incense that filled the air, and one regularly practiced in a series of ancient, almost gothic structures that often included architectural layouts that mirrored the deep labyrinth of the human mind, Assumption took that whole concept to a new level. The school and church grounds were a panoply of nooks and crannies that made possible such things as secret poker games between priests and a few carefully selected parishioners in small, secluded rooms, and any number of out-of-the-way and completely unknown spots in which a tired or thirsty janitor might catch a quick nap or, perhaps, hide a small pint or six-pack of cold ones.
But in the fall of 1955, when Sacred Heart joined the league, their fans were only focused on Assumption’s gym. For nearly two decades, their school had served as a talent pipeline for teams throughout the city, and the parish faithful had watched time and time again as yet another great young player like Bob Dietz and Dick Nendza, after starring at Sacred Heart Grammar School, moved crosstown to St. John the Evangelist and brought that academy a level of glory that many West End Poles felt should have rightfully been theirs.
But the construction of Sacred Heart High changed all that. And now, after years of watching so many talented Polish boys make All Star teams and win titles for other parishes, the Hearts faithful (and faithful may, indeed, be a woefully inadequate description) finally had a chance to embrace a high school team of their own.
The Hearts' high school actually opened in phases, with freshman being the only class admitted in 1954. The sophomores were added in '55, the juniors in ‘56, and so on. Because of that, in that first year, the school didn't field a team. Instead, for its first two seasons of basketball, it fielded only a junior varsity club and played only a JV schedule. It wouldn't be until the '57-'58 season that the Heartsmen would play their first varsity basketball contest, with Markowski and Billy E moving from the JV to the varsity bench.
That hardly mattered on that gray and chilly Friday in November of 1955 when the very first Sacred Heart High team of any kind got set to play the school’s first-ever game in any sport. Because two hours before game time, Father Sammons office received an urgent call from one of the Assumption priests. The priest, while explaining the situation, asked the league's chief executive to take a peek out his front window. And when Sammons did, and peered across North Salina Street, what he saw was a line from just outside the doors of Assumption School that snaked entirely around the block. It was, Sammons quickly surmised, a line of at least five hundred sturdy and well-dressed Poles, all of them braving the cold and waiting in eager anticipation.
It didn’t matter that it was just a JV game, and that JV games traditionally drew nominal crowds, even under the best of conditions. It didn’t even matter that, at least in this one case, there would be no varsity game to follow. What mattered to those Sacred Heart loyalists was one thing: that their boys were about to play their very first basketball game, and they were not going to miss it for the world.
That was the kind of almost feral passion that Parochial League games would engender in Hearts’ fans for the two short decades that the tiny Polish and all-white Catholic academy remained open on Syracuse’s West End.
* * * * *
The athletic director at the outset of the Hearts' basketball program, and the guy who'd serve in that capacity for the subsequent decade, was a young, energetic priest named Father Casimir Krysiak. And it was Krysiak, along with Markowski, who was responsible for setting the tone for the school’s 20-year run of excellence. Because, more than a mere administrator, Krysiak would prove to be his school's soul and moral compass.
Throughout his life, Krysiak had always been a stern and largely humorless man with a penchant for strict discipline that was matched only by his passion for the culture of his parents’ homeland. Born on the West Side of Chicago not long after World War I, Krysiak had moved with his parents back Poland in 1933, when he was 12 years old, and he stayed there for 16 years, three of them in a concentration camp run by the Nazis.
It was also during his time in his family’s mother country that he received God’s calling and entered the seminary, where he met and eventually became roommates with a young, would-be cleric named Karol Wojtyla. During their time together, the two grew into not just good friends, but almost soul mates. It was during that time that Krysiak came to realize what a remarkable young man his best friend was. For that reason, no one was less surprised than Casimir Krysiak when, decades later, Karol Wojtyla, his former roommate emerged, not as the simple monk he once claimed he hoped to be someday, but as the head of the Catholic Church and one of the 20th Century most electrifying world leaders, Pope John Paul II.
What the no-nonsense Krysiak brought to Sacred Heart and its athletic program was not just an inordinate pride in his roots. He brought a missionary-like zeal for protecting the rights and furthering the reputation of Poles throughout the land, starting with those in his adopted hometown of Syracuse. His mission was to get the sons and daughters of Poland more than merely accepted in America. He wanted them respected. Because by the time he returned to Chicago in 1949, after spending much of his youth exposed to the brutality of the Nazis and the horrors of life behind what had since become known as the Iron Curtain – while watching thousands of Poles fight and die for their freedom – Father Krysiak was utterly dismayed by what he found in the land of his birth.
Polish Americans in post-war America were being looked down upon and scorned as objects of ridicule; viewed as a hard-working people, but ones who were not particularly bright. Many educated and otherwise intelligent Americans wouldn't hesitate to make light of a Polish immigrant's strange-sounding name or chuckle at some offhand comment that called into question his or her intelligence. Indeed, in the 1950’s it seemed that the tired old Dumb Mick jokes, which had been around for years, and had been recycled a generation earlier as Dumb Wop jokes, and would decades later evolve into Dumb Blonde jokes, were now being dusted off and told in bars and even polite circles as Dumb Polack jokes.
It was as though the wave of Poles who entered the country following the devastation of their homeland during World War II had traded personal pride and their own dream of a better life for a lifetime's worth of public disdain; almost as though some omniscient force in America had waved its wand and declared it open season on all things Polish.
That gnawed at Casimir Krysiak’s pride, as did his growing belief that his Hearts boys were not being given their due, either in the local press or on the court. When he read the Herald-Journal or Post-Standard, he took note of how many times his team's players were referred to as Polish – as in “the Polish boys did it again” – noting at the same time that the Assumption kids were never referred to as Germans, and the Irish lads from St. Pat’s, even if they were mostly Irish, were only rarely identified as such – and that was because their team was nicknamed the Irishmen. But in the provincial 1950’s style of sportswriting, his kids were constantly being singled out on the basis of their nationality.
Krysiak couldn’t help but feel that by doing that, sportswriters were helping to stigmatize Sacred Heart athletes and engender a ghetto-like mentality among them. By referring to the Heart players, not as Americans, or even Syracusans, but as Poles, the writers were minimizing their place in the city’s hierarchy and subtly chipping away at the foundation of the enormous pride that was part of who they were; a pride that had been essential to their motherland's ability to withstand one threat after another and, ultimately, emerge from the war intact. Krysiak spent his life believing a man is what you tell him he is – especially a young man – and every time Sacred Hearts’ kids got singled out as being different from everyone else he knew a number of them took it to heart.
Casimir Krysiak refused to settle for anything less than excellence in life, particularly basketball. The first year of the program, without a high-school caliber facility of its own, the Hearts' varsity squad was forced to practice in the school’s grammar school gym, located in the bowels of the school building, and a gym that, as a result of how the concrete in the basement had settled, had a wooden floor that sloped at least three or four feet from one end to the other. What's more, the team played its home games at Frazier school, another woefully undersized gym that, while not sloping, could only accommodate only a handful of spectators.
Krysiak simply would not tolerate such inadequate facilities for his new varsity club and made it his mission to find a new court for practices and home games. He eventually focused on Vocational and Occupational High, an aging relic of a trade school just down Geddes Street from the parish. The VO gym was both new and spacious, having been constructed just two years prior to replace the school's woefully outdated facility.
City officials initially resisted the priest’s request to use VO's gym, giving him a number of vague excuses, most of which amounted to a lot of double talk. First they told him they'd have to charge him rent and had not planned or budgeted for such a thing. When Krysiak convinced them it would be okay to take his money, they told him they really didn’t want to rent the gym because it would require additional cleaning and sweeping before and after every practice and game. Father Krysiak then said he’d promise the gym would be cleaned every time the Hearts used it, and in fact the floor, gymnasium and locker room would be cleaner after practice and games than they'd been before them.
After much hand wringing, those officials told the priest they’d consider his offer and let him know of their decision as soon as possible.
Soon thereafter, Casimir made a special trip to Vocational. It was after school one day as he walked through the back door of the building and simply followed his nose. There, in the gym, he found a man in a pair of gray trousers and a gray shirt sweeping the floor. Father introduced himself and told the elderly janitor that Sacred Heart had been talking to the city about renting his school's gym, but didn’t want to inconvenience him in any way.
The old guy rubbed his stubble with his right hand and pondered the implications of another team in his gym; considering no doubt what impact it might have on him personally. At that point, Father Casimir discretely pulled out what he'd been carrying behind his back, and handed it to the janitor. “What’s this,” the old man asked?
He looked down at the neck of the bottle sticking out of the brown paper bag, and when he recognized what it was, his eyebrows raised slightly. “Just a little token of my parish’s appreciation for any – and I mean any – inconvenience that this might cause you,” he said. The priest then added, “And, of course, I’ll be back regularly to check on the team and to pay a visit – you know, just to see how things are working out.”
Two days later Father got a call from those same city officials, who told him Sacred Heart could use the VO gym for practice three days a week, and for any home games that did not conflict with VO's varsity schedule. They told him they'd spoken to the principal who had, in turn, run it by his janitor. The man said he had no trouble with the Hearts boys using the gym. They then added that the principal had been surprised to learn the janitor said he wouldn’t mind policing the gym personally and making sure the Hearts players cleaned up after themselves.
In fact, that janitor ultimately became so vigilant of Sacred Heart’s comings and goings that one Saturday – a day on which Vocational coach Kenny Huffman and his club showed up for an unscheduled practice only to find his own gym full of another team’s players – it was the janitor who regretfully informed him he’d have to wait an hour or so for Hearts to finish before he and his team could take the floor.
Though Casimir Krysia knew virtually nothing of the game of basketball when he started attending Sacred Heart games in the Fall of 1957, no one took greater pride in each victory or had a bigger piece of him die following each loss. And such pain was only exacerbated when he felt his boys had been treated unfairly by the refs for, perhaps, having done nothing more than be born with Polish surnames.
This sense of persecution came to a head on the day of the 1961 All-City game against Central. The All-City Championship was something new that the City and Parochial League officials had created to bring the champions of their two leagues together in a one-game affair just before the start of the diocesan and sectional playoffs. What was at stake was something meaningful in little basketball-crazy Syracuse: tavern bragging rights and, of course, the right to be called the finest schoolboy team in the city. Hearts did not play in the inaugural All City matchup the year prior, so this was the first time Father Krysiak's team had ever experienced any game of this magnitude. And of all the people in the parish, no one was any more excited than he.
However the priest's excitement quickly turned to rage as, in the first half, with over 6,000 people in the War Memorial, Krysiak watched as Cash Kowalski, the Hearts’ center and second leading scorer – and a boy who, like guard Gene Fisch and Casimir himself, had spent time in a series of Nazi concentration camps – was whistled for one, then two, then three fouls, all within the space of a few minutes. This was coupled by the fact that Central was having its way with Adam Markowski's Heartsmen, and were up twenty early in the second quarter. Father – who, again, knew nothing of the game and followed it only out of devotion to his home parish – began to boil and started barking at the officials.
Then, in the second half, on three successive possessions, one of the two refs whistled Fisch for traveling each time down the court. Still steaming from the first half, Krysiak, seated at the far end of the bench, really started giving it to the two officials, his voice getting louder and his gestures more animated with each tweet of the whistle. Finally, he was raging so openly and making such a scene that the dignified Markowski had to pull him aside and ask him keep it down so that he might communicate his displeasure in his own way.
But Father Krysiak, the hardened Holocaust survivor, was a proud and passionate Pole. And when one more call got made that he considered not only unjustified, but suspicious, he exploded, bounding onto the court and screaming at the ref who'd made the call. With thousands watching from the stands, he began chastising the ref for disrespecting Sacred Heart’s team and for taking his disdain for Polish people out on a bunch of innocent boys.
Years later, when asked about the incident, Father Casimir would contend all he got was a technical foul for his outburst, but at least two Hearts players remember play being halted for quite a while as the enraged priest was not merely thrown out of the game, but physically escorted away from the bench, screaming over his shoulder the entire time.
Whatever the truth of the situation, Casimir’s point had been made: no one – not even a referee, the ultimate symbol of basketball authority – was going to take unfair advantage of Sacred Heart, at least not on his watch. As the tension and pressures of the All City game momentarily took a back seat to the bizarre event the was unfolding in front of them, the Hearts players watched as their stern and proud little athletic director took his medicine and got escorted from the arena with his head not only beet-red, but held high.
Father Casimir Krysiak’s message was not lost on many of the Hearts faithful that day, and certainly it was not lost on the dozen or so kids in maroon and white who stood around their befuddled coach as their athletic director's shouts faded into the distance. Some things are worth fighting for, the fiery and basketball-illiterate priest seemed to be telling them, no matter what the price.
During another Sacred Heart contest, this one a baseball game at McArthur Stadium, a the small wooden cathedral to America’s pastime on the city's North Side, Father Krysiak sat in the dugout and listened in horror as the public address announcer continued to butcher one Polish name after another. McArthur Stadium – or "Big Mac" – was home to the Syracuse Chiefs, the AAA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers and its PA system was powerful enough to be heard well beyond the park and into the quiet working class neighborhood that wrapped itself around it. Yet that day, with each mangled pronunciation, Krysiak found his stomach tying itself deeper and deeper into knots.
Finally, in the third inning, after hearing one mangled pronunciation too many, Krysiak rose, bounded out of the Hearts dugout on the first baseline, and strode two steps at a time to the press box in search of the PA announcer. When he found him, the priest sat down next to the guy, introduced himself politely and explained he was going to start providing him phonetic pronunciations for every boy on Sacred Heart.
Before each at bat, Father Casimir would look into the guy's eyes and slowly pronounce the young man’s name. The PA announcer would, in turn, repeat it back to the priest like a first-year language student. For each batter, this call-and-answer exercise would play itself out between the two, and the process would be repeated, batter after batter, all the way through the lineup. After each practice run, when the announcer got the pronunciation as close to correct as he was likely going to, he’d nod as if to say, “I got it.” Then he’d key the mic and announce the hitter carefully, looking out of the corner of his eye at Krysiak as he did. Invariably, however, he continued to butcher a few of the names – or at least butcher them by the priest’s lofty standards – and each time he did so Father Krysiak would rub his brow, roll his eyes, and exhale just loudly enough to be heard.
Finally, the flustered PA announcer threw up his hands, sat back in his chair and shoved the microphone over in front of the priest. “Here Father,” he said with equal parts respect and frustration, “I’ve got a better idea. You do it.” And that’s exactly what Krysiak did; he introduced his team – both teams, in fact – for the remainder of the game.
That sense of identity and self worth – of knowing who you were, where you came from and, most importantly, where you were going – was central to just about everything Casimir Krysiak would do in his time as Sacred Heart’s athletic director. That’s why one time, a few days after the Parochial League banquet, the end-of-the-year awards ceremony that the league conducted each year at the Hotel Syracuse, he found himself compelled to give his students an impromptu history lesson.
At the banquet, during which the Hearts’ players were awarded the lion’s share of the trophies given out for things like sportsmanship, scholarship and athletic excellence, the league’s executive director, Frank Sammons, had made an offhand comment about how many trophies the Polish kids were winning. It was not a malicious comment, but it was said in an Irish whisper and with a touch of humor, so it drew some polite laughs from many in the room. As the attendees chuckled, Krysiak looked around his table and noticed the faces of some of the young Sacred Heart kids seated there, apparently unsure whether or not they should laugh, if only to be polite. The priest immediately sensed the kids weren’t sure if the crowd was laughing with them, or perhaps at them.
Afterward, Krysiak immediately walked up to Sammons and told him he did not appreciate his comment at all. He told him his kids had earned those trophies through hard work and hours of practice. He then turned away in a huff.
The next day at school – one of the last days of the school year, and one that should have been spent prepping for finals – Father Casimir asked his students to close their books. He said he wanted to tell them a story. It was about World War II. And over the next twenty minutes he proceeded to tell his class of young Polish boys and girls about the Battle of Britain and the heroic contributions of Polish Air Squadron 303, a little-known group of airmen who played a critical role in turning back Hitler's incursion into England.
The priest told the students how in the early weeks of the Battle of Britain, London was taking a beating at the hands of the powerful German Air Force and the city was growing more and more vulnerable as Hitler's bombers continued to pound away. Father Casimir told them about how the Polish airmen had gone through the most extensive training in the Allied army, and yet despite this, how they had remain sidelined even as the war dragged on – and how they were enlisted only when things started to get desperate for Winston Churchill's vaunted Royal Air Force.
He told them about the fateful day that the Polish boys of the 303rd were being told through a translator that, since they did not know English or how to operate the sophisticated British planes they would be flying, they'd all have to go through even more training and schooling.
At that very moment, even as the RAF officer was explaining that to the roomful of Polish flyers, a squadron of German warplanes appeared on the horizon, flying low and taking dead aim. Without even asking permission, and at a moment’s notice, the Polish boys exploded out of their desks, ran out of the classroom, jumped into the British planes they supposedly didn’t know how to fly and proceeded to put on an aerial display that was not only breathtaking, it repelled the Germans before they could do any significant damage to the air field. It also brought an immediate end to any and all talk of the need for more training.
Father Krysiak then told his class how those Polish boys helped turn the tide of the Battle of Britain by not only emerging as the best pilots in all of Europe, but by showing such a level of courage that many RAF fliers subsequently began to think of them as, perhaps, suicidal. He told his class that, due to their determination and breathtaking aerial skills, even though Polish Air Squadron 303 had joined the Battle of Britain a full two months after it had started, and was often forced to fly planes woefully inferior to the mighty German Messerschmitts, no squadron in the Allied army registered more kills than that collection of Polish boys.
As he spoke, and as the classroom grew quieter, Krysiak began detailing the exploits of one member of the 303rd in particular, a young sergeant named Stanislaw Karubin. He told them about the time Karubin was engaged in a dogfight with a German aviator and ended up closing in on the tail of his technically superior Messershmitt, just a few feet or so above the tops of the trees. However, when he tried to fire on the German to finish him off, he realized he couldn’t because he’d run out of ammunition. However, instead of pulling up and returning to base, Karubin did the opposite. Now, completely unarmed and with little more than his own guts and guile, he opened throttle and attacked. Gaining slowly on the German, Karubin elevated slightly and then soared at breakneck speed just inches above the Messerschmitt's hatch. The Hearts kids' eyes grew wider as the priest spoke about the German pilot who, perhaps surprised at the sight of an enemy aircraft so close he could (literally) reach up and touch it, instinctively reduced his altitude to avoid a collision and, in doing so, caught a single treetop, spun out of control, and crashed violently into the forest.
Father Casimir added that the reason not many people have ever heard of the Polish 303rd was because when Churchill invited them to participate in a victory parade through the heart of London, they declined since the Prime Minister's invitation did not include any other Polish unit. And then, just six years later, and with the war essentially over, it was determined that neither their courage nor their skills were required any longer. As a result, the Polish 303rd was quietly and unceremoniously disbanded with not so much as a thank you.
The point of the story, said Krysiak, was that without the contributions of those brave sons of Poland, the Germans might have destroyed London and the entire war – indeed, the entire world – might have turned out differently. And because of that, he said, it was important for every young Polish person in our new country to be proud of his or her heritage and to understand that we have as much right to be called Americans as anyone – if not more so. Many of us, after all, had relatives who fought and died for the very principles on which this country was built. "We have earned our place here," the priest cried as he balled his fists. "Never forget that!"
When he finished he looked around at the sea of young faces beneath him, all of them staring at him without blinking. And as he did that, Father Krysiak suddenly realized it had grown so quiet he'd become vaguely aware of the pounding of his heart and the sound of his own breath.
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