Billy E approached the 1966-67 season with as much anticipation as he ever felt over a team. He’d seen and been involved with a number of powerful Hearts clubs as both an assistant and head man, and had watched many a great player come and go. But he'd never been around a collection of athletes that so excited him the way his kids that year did.
Unlike the city's public schools, which were often so large a kid could develop over the summer without the knowledge of the coaching staff and show up for tryouts and blow people away, no such dynamic existed at Sacred Heart. With fewer than 80 boys at the high school level, most of whom Billy had known since they were in diapers, very few ever developed enough height, muscle or skill over the course of any one summer to ever knock his socks off the first day of tryouts.
Therefore, as eagerly anticipated as tryouts were for many wanna-be Heartsmen, especially the sophomores and juniors, most of whom had worked hard all summer long in anticipation of tryouts, Billy E’s core group of five or six kids – the players in whose hands his fortunes would rest that season – had been determined long before he ever sat down at the typewriter to hunt-and-peck a list of dozen or so names he'd then Scotch tape to his door.
Billy E’s five starters that Fall of 1966 read like something out of one of those classic Chip Hilton novels from a lifetime ago: five talented but very different kids, each one of them something of an age-old archetype.
Up front there was Tommy Sakowski, a hulking laborer’s kid, who at a chiseled 6’4” and 205 pounds was not only, arguably, the most imposing boy in the league, but hands down, its strongest.
At forward (and sometimes center) there was junior Pete Schmid, who at 6’6” was both tall and lithe, a quiet and slightly aloof kid from just west of the city whose offensive talents were so exquisite he probably could have played any position on the court better than the boy playing it.
At the other forward was 6’2” senior Jack Contos, a sinewy but powerful specimen with great athletic bloodlines, a kid who came to Sacred Heart from the public school system loving push-ups, chin-ups and, especially, lifting weights. Contos also possessed an explosive vertical leap, and his ability to soar to the basket was as gravity-defying and jaw-dropping as any kid in the city, black or white.
There was Joe Zaganczyk, a handsome, sensitive and cerebral backcourt man whose quickness and defensive skills often caused fans to overlook the apparent ease with which he was able to put the ball in the basket from just about anywhere on the court.
And lastly, there was Danny Van Cott, a dark-haired Dutch/Irishman from across the tracks, a son of Tipperary Hill, whose greatest asset may have been his self-confidence, a occasional strutting rooster whose ability to quarterback the team was more a matter of determination and tenacity than any definable skill.
One thing tryouts did do for Parochial League coaches like Billy E, however, was to give them a chance to try to piece together a capable practice squad and determine which sophomores and promising freshmen, if any, to keep. There'd always been an age-old debate among many coaches about what to do with talented but still-raw underclassmen. Do you give them a spot on varsity, let them practice with the school's best, and then sit on the bench during games to observe (and experience first-hand) the emotional intensity of Friday night Parochial League play? Or do you let them spend a year on the junior varsity, achieve some level of success, and continue to hone their skills in real-life game situations? That particular year, the one underclassman over whom Billy E had the greatest sense of angst was a rail-thin sophomore named Rich Dabrowski, a gangly kid who, like some promising yearling on a horse farm, appeared to make up for what he lacked in strength and body mass with an endless array of arms, legs, knees and elbows.
In the end, Billy chose Option A. He saw something in the skinny fifteen year-old and felt that, particularly on defense, he could be an asset, even if he never got into a game. Dabrowski was relentless on a court with an almost freakish reserve of energy; Billy knew that coming in, but what he saw over two days' worth of tryouts only reinforced that. Plus, by adding him to the varsity, Billy E would have someone who, along with fellow second-teamers like Leo Najdul, Paul Stepien, Jim Corbett, Tommy Godzac and Jim Pryzbyl, to name just a few, could relentlessly dog his starters every day in practice, and in doing so help them learn to perform under the kind of suffocating pressure the league was going to be throwing their way.
In time, that one decision – to have young Richie Dabrowski play varsity and forego a second year of JV competition – would not only help develop first-year starters Zaganczyk and Van Cott, the players he'd eventually guard in practice, it would pay dividends in ways few in the parish could have imagined at the time.
As the parade of practices progressed that Fall of '66, and as opening night drew near, Billy began to realize he had the makings of a championship team on his hands. But, in a way, that was already a given. Heck, anyone with half a brain could have seen that, based solely on the presence of Schmid and Contos. What Billy didn’t know was how his other three starters would bear up under the week-in/week-out grind of high-intensity Parochial League play – not to mention the burden of his own lofty expectations.
Yet deep down inside, Billy also sensed there was little reason to lose sleep over such things, particularly when it came to one of those three question marks: Sakowski.
If young Tommy Sakowski had played thirty or forty years later, in coach-speak he might have been termed a “project.” Always a mountain of a kid, even as a child, by the 8th grade he'd grown to 6’3” and tipped the scales at whopping 180 pounds. By the time he made the Sacred Heart varsity as a sixteen year old, he'd grown to 6’5” and weighed 200. While many kids that age still carry around the last vestiges of baby fat and the doughy softness of youth, Tommy Sakowski was pretty much the opposite. He was a rock, with shoulders broad and square, and a back that was a massive expanse of thick, youthful muscle.
As impressive a physical specimen as he was, however, Sakowski came up well short in two other respects, especially early on: he was not at all fast, and his ability to move laterally was, to be kind, something of a work in progress. For a coach like Billy E, whose defense was predicated on quickness and beating your man to a spot on the floor, that presented a problem. In addition, he had what used to be called "lobster claws" – the kid's hands were stiff as boards, something that would prevent him from ever becoming a capable ball-handler, much less a good one, or from developing the kind of soft touch any great big man ultimately needs around the basket.
But what Sakowski could do, and do as well as any kid in the city, was listen. And work. And obey. So when Billy E asked the youngster to do something, he did it – no questions asked. If Coach Ewaniszyk wanted him to run sprints, he ran sprints, and ran them longer and harder than anyone. When Billy E told him to go in the game and start clearing people out of the way so that his teammates, particularly Schmid or Contos, could roam the lane more freely, the next thing you knew there'd be bodies flying, not all of them wearing the other team’s colors. The son of a construction worker-turned postman who’d developed his steely nerve and his pregnant sense of duty as a paratrooper during World War II, Tom Sakowski brought the same sort of lunch-bucket/whatever-it-takes attitude to the discipline of high school basketball.
The young man also believed he was in school, first and foremost, to learn. As a result, young Sakowski took learning as literally as any kid at Sacred Heart. To that end, he'd latch onto authority figures around the parish – usually men – and heed their every word as though it was coming from the burning bush itself. From Father O and Billy E to his grammar school coach, Paul Januszka, and Syracuse Police Officer Chet Piontkowski, the school's part-time crossing guard, Tommy Sakowski was a coach’s dream – not to mention a priest’s, teacher’s and cop's. Because when it came to his respecting his elders, obeying them, and modeling his behavior after them, the kid’s combination of mind and heart was not merely a blank slate, it was a sponge.
One day, near the end of his freshman year, Billy E went to his team before practice on March day and suggested to them – and, make no mistake, it was a strong suggestion – that, later that month, those who were not going to play baseball should try out for the track team. He explained that the discipline of running sprints and longer races, while also participating in field events like the high jump, broad jump and triple jump, would help develop the kind of skills they'd need on a basketball court. And after he’d said this, he turned and pointed to his resident, in-house ox and said, “And Sakowski, that for you is not an option. It’s an order.”
Of course, sprints were never far from the equation when it came to Billy E and his current power forward. Whenever Sakowski did anything wrong, Billy E made him run sprints, and do so as hard as humanly possible, often five at a time at full speed, and many times ten. If Sakowski committed a turnover – run sprints. If he missed an easy layup or committed a stupid foul – more sprints. If he made a mental mistake, got beat to the baseline, or lowered his head to try to take the ball to the basket – more sprints still.
It got to the point that the young man no longer had to wait for Billy to say a word. Even before his errant pass could be retrieved, Sakowski – knowing full well what was coming – was already halfway down court in a full-on gallop, eyes wide, cheeks puffed and arms pumping madly.
What the hulking man-child didn’t know at the time Billy demanded he run track in the Spring was that, in Frank Najdul, Sacred Heart didn’t just have a track coach; it had maybe the most intense coach of any sport in all of Central New York. Najdul was a wiry fireplug of a first-generation Pole who’d been approached to head up the Hearts' track team a short time prior by Father Krysiak. Like Krysiak, Najdul was a survivor of the World War II Nazi death camps.
It was in those camps that Najdul learned so many things that would shape his world view. He learned how depraved even good men could be, given the right – or wrong – circumstances. He learned that life and its many decisions had built into them some very real and often very dire consequences. Above all, though, he learned to survive.
At his very first camp, where he spent nearly a year recuperating from his injuries, Najdul slowly developed among the prisoners and guards alike a reputation for being the finest soccer player in the whole place – though the distraction of playing a boy's game did little to mitigate, and in fact may have heightened, his already pregnant sense of survivor's guilt. After all, he'd known so many friends and army buddies who'd died in the fight against Hitler that their faces and voices would regularly visit his thoughts and invade his already restless nights.
Among that first camp's prisoners, Najdul’s ability to kick a soccer ball turned out to be second to none. His kicks often had such blistering force and bent with such ferocity that at times they almost seemed fired by a cannon. As a goalie, despite a pair of severely bowed legs and a stature roughly resembling that of an icebox, his ability to block shots and stop would-be (and almost certain goals) from finding the back of the net could at times seem otherworldly. But perhaps the thing that separated Frank Najdul from every other man and guard in camp was the fact he was the most well-conditioned and intensely physical specimen in there. He was constantly doing push-ups and sit-ups, always performing isometrics and resistance training, and constantly running in place or around the yard, to try to keep his lungs stretched, his heart strong, and his veins open and pumping.
In his ongoing quest to become the finest soccer player he could possibly be, Frank Najdul read everything he got his hands on and talked to as many people as he could – both prisoners and guards. He became a virtual soccer magnet who picked up every last detail about the latest techniques being utilized by Europe's finest and most successful coaches. Doing so helped turn him into the leading authority in the whole stalag – an expertise that even the guards respected, and one that provided him more than a measure of currency with them. The Nazi guards assigned to his barracks, whose language he soon taught himself, he viewed (at least initially) as men just doing a job they'd be given, as opposed to how many of his fellow prisoners saw them – as Godless, soulless murders.
But that all changed one night when he and a few other prisoners were caught with stolen a radio on which they were secretly listening to a BBC war update. Every man with Najdul that night was immediately taken out, lined up, and executed on the spot – in front of their fellow POWs. Only Najdul was spared, perhaps owing to his highly developed soccer skills and the dollop of currency that bought him with his Nazi captors. Yet being spared from the firing squad that night would end up haunting Najdul for the rest of his life, and it would forever change the man he'd be from that point forward.
His reprieve, however, did not spare him from being transferred the very next day out of his relatively cushy assignment into one of the most brutal internment facilities the world has ever known. The Nazi death camp at Buchenwald was almost like an Adolph Hitler fever dream, a veritable hell on Earth and an ethnic cleansing laboratory teeming with untold levels of human cruelty, suffering and death. It was there that Frank Najdul's daily focus stopped being something so mundane as soccer and became something far more compelling – infinitely more compelling, in fact – the business, if not mental gyrations, behind the act of day-in and day-out human survival.
Keeping himself as strong as possible, both physically and mentally – while being mercilessly starved, tortured and dehumanized – Najdul somehow managed to survive the atrocities and man-made hell that was Buchenwald.
Months later, after being liberated by a horde of the Allies' finest near the end of the War in Europe, he found work with the U.S. Army and spent four years as a civilian liaison in one of the many "displaced persons" camps located throughout the continent. Following that series of assignments, and with his sights set squarely on a new and better life in America, Najdul (now married and with small children) took his family and emigrated to the U.S., first in Kentucky, then later in Syracuse. It was there that he managed to get a job at the local Allied Chemical plant, a stroke of good fortune that allowed him to meet and befriend a humorous and engaging fellow Allied man named Billy Ewaniszyk.
As a track coach (and part-time gym teacher), Frank Najdul proved to be a relentless taskmaster. What’s more, as a non paid volunteer, he answered to no one but the voice that dwelt deep within himself – the same unsparing one that had helped him survive Buchenwald. Perhaps it was that very same voice that drove him to work his boys so hard. As a coach, Najdul was humorless and direct to a fault, fueled by a rigid and unforgiving sense of discipline, and demanding at all times of nothing less than full attention and maximum effort.
Adding to his steely aura of discipline was the fact that he spoke – or, as a few of those under him might have contended, barked – only small snippets of broken English.
For some reason that particular spring, Coach Najdul took a keen interest in Tom Sakowski, the hulking youngster from nearby Tipp Hill. Perhaps it was the boy’s strength and size, or maybe it was because Father O had asked his fellow death camp survivor to train him in a way that might help maximize whatever potential he had as a basketball player. Perhaps Najdul simply saw something in the youngster that reminded him of himself at that age.
Whatever the reason, Frank Najdul soon claimed the 6’5” 16 year-old Tom Sakowski as his very own pet project. To that end, he decided to make the kid, not a discus thrower or shot putter, as one might have reasonably expected, but a sprinter. A week into track season, Najdul picked Sakowski to be one of the four members of his 440-relay team, meaning he had to run one leg of a race that was, in essence, four balls-to-the-wall 110-yard sprints, one right after another. The high intensity event was simply not designed for lumbering giants with bad hands. It was designed for the four fastest kids on any one team, kids who all had to act in concert and as a single unit. Najdul didn't just add Sakowski to his 440 team, however, he made him his anchor man, meaning the young man had to run the crucial last leg against, often, the fastest runner on each team.
As one might expect, the Hearts’ 440-relay team did not win many races that first year under Frank Najdul. The overall team, though, did win every league meet, along with the Parochial League title. And over the course of Sakowski’s sophomore season, his 440-relay team kept getting better and better as their coach drilled them over and over again – especially the anchor man – on the mechanics of running faster. Najdul made his boys run sprint after sprint for hours on end. While, to a man, they often questioned whether they’d survive even one practice, much less a full season, in time they all started to shave fractions, if not full seconds, off their best time.
The constant practicing of handing the baton from one member to the next helped Sakowski's basketball skills in other ways, as the baton hand-off in a relay race requires both coordination and the ability to accept things softly yet firmly into one’s hand. Slowly, Tom Sakowski could feel it; he was improving both as an athlete and, more important, as a ballplayer.
In the end, though, all the losing began to wear him down. So, one day, weeks into his first season on the team, he went to his coach and asked if he could compete in some other event, instead of the relay. “These guys are just too fast for me,” moaned Sakowski. “I just can’t compete.” Frank Najdul glared up at the young man, his nostrils flaring and his eyes hardening. “You no quit! You no give up!” he bellowed through clenched teeth, moving toward the youngster, his finger pointing up at him. “You understand? You are anchor! You are anchor!! You run fast!!! You no give up, Sakowski!!! You no give up…ever!!!”
Over the course of that season, there had been a gradual evolution in how the kids on the team came to address their coach. Early on it was “Mr. Najdul.” For a brief time, it was “Coach.” But by the second month of the season he’d become “Pan Najdul,” or simply “Pan.”
In Polish, Pan is a formal address for an adult male. It is something said out of respect, much like calling a man “Sir” in English, or using the formal "Usted" in Spanish. So, while the dozen or so kids on the Sacred Heart track team remained scared to death of him, and lived in constant fear of their coach's freakish sense of discipline – especially when he'd suddenly single one of them out by kicking a soccer ball full force in his direction. (Najdul constantly kept a ball by his side that he would kick so hard and with such precision that it would regularly whiz by any instigator's noggin, often missing it by inches.). To a boy, those Hearts track men held Frank Najdul – check that, Pan Najdul – in the highest regard and they respected him like few adults in the parish.
As Najdul shouted to Sakowski in his thick Polish accent, telling him he should never give up, the young man in the dark-rimmed glasses mumbled dejectedly, “Yes Pan.” Then, slowly, he turned and began shuffling his way back toward the school, the building now haloed in a glow in the half-light of day.
Najdul peered at the youngster, his head down and his shoulders slumped, and at first his eyes hardened, but quickly they glared. “Run, Sakowski…RUN!!!,” the sawed-off death camp survivor bellowed. At that point, the young man sitting dead center in Najdul's crosshairs reacted as though he’d just been poked with a cattle prod, breaking once again into a full gallop, his cheeks ballooning full, and his arms, yet again, pumping madly.
As he sprinted, Tom Sakowski almost instinctively glanced over his shoulder warily because coming up behind him, and now running virtually step for step, was his coach, eyes blazing and his face just this side of scarlet. "You no give up!" the immigrant Pole roared, his spit flying. "You understand? You no give up...EVER!!!" “Yes, Pan…Yes, Pan,” Sakowski puffed as he pumped his way toward the metal door leading to the locker room in the school's basement. Najdul, meanwhile, just continued nipping at the boy’s heels, barking up at his project, who, in turn, just kept nodding his head up and down and respectfully panting, “Yes, Pan…Yes, Pan…Yes, Pan,” every step of the way.
* * * * *
As far as Billy E could tell, at least at first blush, the only non-Polish kid on his starting five, at least to begin the 1966-67 season, was going to be Dan Van Cott, a senior from Tipp Hill who four years prior had decided to take the bold step and cross the tracks to play, not for the head leprechaun, Bob Hayes, and St. Pat’s, but for Billy E and the Hearts. Van Cott was a good player, but hardly a great one; a kid who, like countless Parochial Leaguers, traded less on talent and shooting acumen and more on hustle, determination and a seemingly diminished capacity for pain.
Four years prior, as an 8th grader, Van Cott had told his stern, old-school carpenter of a father that, while he’d gone to St. Pat’s for grammar school, he didn’t want to go to high school there. He wanted to transfer. He wanted to go to Sacred Heart.
Bishop Foery’s idea for the ten parish-based schools that comprised the Parochial League, at least when he first envisioned them, was that there would never be any distinction between elementary, junior high and high school. A child would simply move, step by step, up an increasingly God-focused stairway that led to a point at which he or she would emerge a young Catholic adult and soldier of the Lord, and whatever landmarks might appear along the way would be ecumenical ones – like the child’s first communion, or his or her confirmation – not academic or chronological ones. And that child would make that journey with children of his or her own class, culture and background, not to mention his or her parish; children, in other words, known to that boy or girl since the days of kindergarten, if not diapers.
At the same time, that child would be taught by nuns and priests who would constantly nurture him or her along the way, getting to know him or her more deeply with each passing year, both academically and spiritually. Indeed, many of the priests might even have baptized the children they were now teaching and married their parents. Meanwhile, many of the nuns, at least the older ones, might have taught their mothers or fathers when they too were that child’s age.
But Danny Van Cott was not your typical kid and he was anything but a young man given to lock-step/one-size-fits-all thinking. “Dad, I want to go to Sacred Heart next year,” he said one day to the old man as he sat there watching Walter Cronkite. “I really, really do, okay? They have a chance to win the Parochial League just about every year and, I don’t know, I just want to play for ‘em. I think it would be really good for me.” It was a sunny morning in the spring of his 8th grade, just days after his grammar school season had ended, and the young man’s firm declaration – had many of his St. Pat’s schoolmates, teammates, friends and fellow parishioners known of it – would have cut them to the core.
So one day just three months later, Dan Van Cott, all of fourteen years old and on a mission to change the direction of his life, put on a white buttoned-down shirt and tie, brushed his teeth, worked a palmful of Vitalis into his dark hair and ran his small, black Ace comb through it, then walked across Erie Boulevard, underneath the viaduct, and straight to the front door of the Sacred Heart rectory. It was a trip of maybe three or four blocks, but for all it represented, and all it meant in terms of culture, history and personal growth, it might as well have been a journey of thousand miles.
Because St. Pat’s and Sacred Heart, though separated by no more distance that a strong armed boy might cover with a single throw, were as different as corned beef and kielbasa
On that hot July afternoon, young Dan Van Cott, who’d taken the initiative to set up the meeting, was on his way to meet Monsignor Piejda, the pastor of the parish and the de facto head of Sacred Heart school. He'd earlier spoken to the monsignor over the phone and outlined for him, at least generally, what he’d like to do the following school year. The monsignor, while skeptical, admired the young man’s gumption. I was not unprecedented, he told the kid, but it was rare for any student to leave one Parochial League school for another, except when the student’s family actually moved into the parish. This was especially true, the priest said, when the two schools were as close as St. Pat’s and Sacred Heart.
Monsignor Piejda was a native Pole and first generation immigrant who, with his family, had moved to Buffalo after the turn of the century and begun his own Catholic journey as an Upstate New Yorker. Though he’d chosen to enter the priesthood, and had quickly advanced up the ecumenical ladder, he likely would have made one hell of a businessman, had he chosen to go that route. Because as much as he spent his days in the pursuit of saving souls, and fully embraced the spiritual component of the human experience, to Piejda there was also a significant portion of life that was, in a word, transactional.
If there was a better or more effective way to do something, you did it – especially if it didn’t compromise your morals and doing so might save and/or make you money. When Piejda first arrived for his assignment at Sacred Heart in 1939 from a Polish parish in nearby Binghamton, one of the very first things he did was crack open the Sacred Heart ledger and study the parish finances. Almost immediately, the priest noticed Sacred Heart was in debt and paying on a number of loans and mortgages, all of them attached to interest rates as high as 5%. He knew he could do better. So he pooled all the debt into a single number and then shopped that number around to banks in the area. Eventually, the monsignor was able to secure a loan from a nearby bank on Syracuse’s west side – and, mind you, this was long before personal debt consolidation had become common practice – and it not only consolidated Sacred Heart’s mountain of debt into a single loan, and accelerated its payoff schedule, but came at an annual rate of just 3.5%. Piejda then established a fund that took what the church saved each month in interest alone and placed it in a second interest bearing account, with the principal and accrued interest earmarked for a new marble altar; a magnificent showpiece that would serve as the visual and spiritual focal point for Sacred Heart, a church eventually considered so majestic by the Church officials in Rome that, some 60 years after the altar was first installed by Piejda, Pope John Paul II would personally designate Sacred Heart of Syracuse a Catholic basilica, one of only 70 or so in the United States.
Casimir Piejda, in other words, could be a cold and calculating businessman with a mind for numbers and an eye for the smallest detail. For that reason, if any Catholic anywhere knew a good deal, it was him. That’s why his nickname among so many students and parents was simply, “The Boss.” So when this strutting young buck of a Black Irishman named Van Cott from across the tracks sat down in front of the Boss that day, the stern, bespectacled and calculating Pole looked over his glasses and down his nose at the youngster as he would any would-be investment and framed everything he was about to glean around a single question; if he broke tradition and let this mutt from Tipp Hill into his school, would that kid end up providing Sacred Heart (and its basketball team) a solid return on its investment?
Dan Van Cott, for his part, was nobody’s fool, either. He might not have been a straight A student – in fact, far from it – but at the same time he was hardly an idiot. He understood full well the persuasive power of his rough-hewn Irish charm and he intuited the role that seduction, however subtle, can play in any courtship; personal, scholastic or otherwise. Besides, to his way of thinking, it wasn’t blarney if one truly believed it. Van Cott also instinctively sensed that when it came to stern, old-school and power-wielding taskmasters like Piejda, a little deference, good posture, strong hygiene and clear diction – not to mention the proper use of the Queen’s English – could go a long way.
So, when he started talking to the Monsignor that muggy July day in the summer of 1963, it was with his best foot forward. What’s more, he didn’t make the conversation about what he, young Dan Van Cott, might want from Sacred Heart. He made it about what Sacred Heart could offer a good Catholic boy, like him, if he were so fortunate to actually go there. Sacred Heart was a place that stressed excellence and winning, he explained to the priest. What’s more, it achieved those things more consistently than any other school in the Parochial League, and because of that, those things had become part of the school’s culture. And he thought being in such a winning environment – one that taught, and, heck, maybe even demanded, excellence – would maybe pay big dividends for him down the road, whether or not he ended up going to college.
The young man wasn’t an articulate speaker, but he was passionate about wanting to play for Billy E. The deeper into his conversation with Piejda he got, the more he heard himself verbalizing the thoughts he’d had rattling around his head for months about the school. As with so many young men of good-but-not-great skills, that confidence that instilled became the fuel that ignited something deep inside him.
Soon Van Cott was anticipating questions and answering them before Piejda even had a chance to pose them. Sure, some people at St. Pat’s will be upset, he offered, but I’ll handle ‘em as I see fit. And, yes, it might seem strange that an Irish kid from Tipp Hill would leave to go to Sacred Heart, but guys like Richie Dabrowski and Tom Sakowski live there, and no one says a word about them not going to St. Pat’s. So why should it be any different for me?
And finally, the granddaddy of all the priest’s likely high hard ones, fielded like a Gold Glover and fired across the diamond on a rope: And don’t worry, Monsignor, I promise, I’ll start going to mass at Sacred Heart every Sunday – plus, obviously, Easter, Christmas and the holidays, whether my family chooses to go or not. I’ll even serve mass, if you need me to – even though, you know, I’m probably a little old to be an altar boy. I really mean it, Father – I, I mean Monsignor – he said, pausing slightly to calm himself and catch a breath. If you let me come to Sacred Heart to play basketball, this will not only be my new school, it'll be my new parish too.
The irony for young Danny Van Cott would turn out to be, of course, the fact that in St. Patrick’s, he was already a communicant of one of the most collegial, neighborly and interconnected parishes in the city. Yes, the basketball teams at St. Pat’s were rarely on par with the powerful clubs Adam Markowski and Billy E seemed to field every year. And, yes, the court at St. Pat’s – a gym in name only, and one that, for all intents and purposes, was little more than an oversized broom closet with spongy, wooden backboards and rims so soft they could have doubled as pillows – certainly couldn’t hold a candle to the shiny new facility at Hearts, with its bright lights, its freshly painted orange rims, and its polished floor and spotless glass backboards. But the reason for the difference between the two basketball programs was not one of passion or desire. It was one of money. It was one of available and in-house talent. And, above all, it was one of culture.
The Poles in Syracuse, you see, much like Syracuse’s many Germans, were less concerned with cultural integration than they were with maintaining the sanctity of the culture that they and their forbearers had brought to America. That’s why, even as many Irish and Italians continued to work to weave themselves into the fabric of American society, so many Poles, like the city's many North Side Germans, wanted to do the opposite. The Eastern European people on the West End worked diligently to keep the traditions, the food, the language and the spirit of the motherland alive. Masses were still said in Polish. Many families still spoke nothing but Polish at home. A few nuns and priests still taught classes and exacted various measures of discipline in an often curious mix of English and Polish. And throughout the West End, the Poles (and other Eastern Europeans, such as the Ukrainians) opened up and supported any number of neighborhood “social clubs,” into which one might step on a Friday night and suddenly feel transported back in time and place to an 18th Century village pub in Eastern Europe; warm and always welcoming establishments that doubled as beer gardens, family restaurants, community centers, and polka halls, all smelling of some beguiling mix of sauerkraut, floor wax and Bavarian style pilsner, while bearing names like the St. Louis Club, the PAC (as in the Polish American Citizens club), the Polish Home, the Polish Legion of American Veterans (or PLAV), the Polish Falcon Club, and the Ukrainian Club.
What’s more, the same passion those Poles put into keeping their culture strong and alive, they put into supporting their boys and funding their sports team. That’s why Sacred Heart’s new gym was built with money raised solely by and for parishioners, some of it from the fund Piejda had established for the new altar. That’s why the Heartsmen constantly sported the newest, finest-made, and most well-maintained uniforms in the league. And that’s why in the 1960’s, while virtually every other school in the Parochial League found itself locked in a death struggle with the siren call of the city’s growing ring of suburban idyll and backyard bliss, as a parish Sacred Heart felt no such threat. It was accepted, at least once Gene Fisch christened the program and put it on the map, that any Polish boy from the parish, even a boy with marginal talent, would stay home and honor both the Lord and his family’s homeland by suiting up for the Hearts.
No such ethos existed in Tipperary Hill, however. As warm and collegial a neighborhood as it might have been, by the mid-1960’s the area was becoming more a place to be from, than a place to be. The solid but largely unremarkable houses that lined the parallel streets north of Burnet Park, many of them humble two-family units, were built close together and ran up and down the sloped streets, a good many of which fed directly into to a winding perpendicular cross street called Wilbur Avenue. Wilbur, for decades, had been home to a highly trafficked trolley line that in its day served as the primary mode of transportation for any number of working men on Tipp Hill, as well as virtually every downtown shopper. Each morning, one could see hundreds of working men, some with hard hats on, some with tool boxes or tool belts in hand, almost all with a lunch pail or thermos under one arm, trudging down one of the streets of Tipp Hill to catch the trolley for another day’s worth of hard labor and modest pay. The same thing would repeat itself every afternoon, only in reverse.
While in time Tipp Hill would become something of a tourist stop, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, in the 1960’s (an era pock-marked by gaping national wounds like Vietnam, Urban Renewal and the nonstop barrage of race riots, student protests and assassinations), the neighborhood – just like virtually every working class part of town – had become more a last-stop before suburbia than an actual target destination.
But Tipperary Hill, while it represented a robust Irish enclave, was hardly the city’s only cluster of Irishmen back in the day. Wilbur Ave, if one were to travel south, emptied into a small but vibrant strip of shops, taverns, churches, union halls and social clubs that lined Geddes Street. And if one took Geddes south, it would begin to rise, slowly at first, but then steeper and steeper before emptying into a magnificent cluster of upscale and well-maintained homes with freshly painted shutters, flower beds and porches full of homey touches like rocking chairs, hanging swings and potted plants; well-appointed abodes that overlooked the valley and the many working class families beneath them. Bellevue Hill, at the top of Geddes Street, was home to Most Holy Rosary, the parish of some of the city’s most successful and well-heeled Irish families. Those men, women and children of Most Holy Rosary comprised the bulk of the city’s “lace curtain” Irishmen and women. Down below, however, in clapboard, earthy places like Tipp Hill, Skunk City and the near South Side around St. Anthony’s, such Irish families were anything but lacy. They were “shanty,” and Syracuse was a city, in many ways, built by and for its legions of shanty Irishmen.
As handsome, as charming, and as driven as he was, Danny Van Cott was one such Irishman. He knew it, even if he never realized it, much less verbalized it to anyone. He understood full well that he wasn’t a kid of privilege or a boy for whom college was some foregone conclusion. His father was not a judge, lawyer, doctor, or banker. He was a carpenter who liked his drink; his mother a strong willed but respectful working class girl raised by two working class people. The young man lived above an Irish tavern back when living above one meant living above a smoky alehouse full of tired, bent and sore men; men fighting like hell to hold onto whatever hope, dignity and sense of humor they could muster; men with familial roots that traced back not so much to a country, but to a county within that country; often bright but undereducated and overworked shift workers whose lives were a constant struggle and financial juggling act; men who were in that bar to do three things in reverse order: talk, laugh, and drink.
To the outsider, Tipp Hill was little more than the quaint place with the funny traffic light, the only one of its kind in the country, a urban oddity hung there on a permanent basis because decades earlier the city fathers had grown tired of continually replacing the ones Irish vandals in the neighborhood – reportedly a bunch of Tipp Hill teenagers, among them Pat “Packy” Corbett, who years later would become Onondaga County Sheriff – broke time after time by pelting them with stones as they sat under them drinking beer, swapping stories and laughing at the very thought of tomorrow.
This unique signal had been originally installed as a gesture of community goodwill by Syracuse manufacturer, Crouse-Hinds, a company on the North Side that by the 1920’s was producing virtually every traffic light in the country. The man who drove the train behind Crouse-Hinds’ goodwill, however, was not an exec, but a lifelong Tipp Hill resident; City Councilman John “Huckle” Ryan, who requested and received a special dispensation to have the green-above-the-red traffic signal erected in the heart of his beloved section of the city – on the corner of Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue – in honor of Syracuse’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration of 1925.
Yet, once the festivities ended, and once the city workers got around to finally replacing the green-over-red stoplight with a more traditional red-on-top one the Tipp Hill stone throwers went to work, breaking one replacement after another, probably seven or eight in all. They kept it up too, day after day, week after week, until one day the city fathers threw up their hands and granted the green-dominant traffic signal permanent status. Tipperary Hill’s one-of-a-kind streetlight has stood ever since as a beacon for Irishmen and St. Patty’s Day revelers the world over.
To those on the inside, Tipp Hill was much more than a quirky light – however famous. It was home. It was the land of large Irish families, some with a dozen kids or more, many with at least one or two sets of Irish twins, that is, two siblings born more than nine months apart in the same calendar year.
It was also the land of the eternal nickname, a neighborhood where a young boy could earn a nicknameand carry it with him though his entire life, regardless of where life led him, often to the exclusion, if not the complete dismissal of his given name; quintessentially Irish monikers that many times, at least on the surface, seemed to have little or nothing to do with anything, yet somehow managed to capture the essence of the boy’s spirit, distilling it down to an (often nonsensical) syllable or two; Packy, Jocko, Ziggy, Boone, Huckle, Gunga, Bocko, Moon, Cranky, Booch, Bozo, Mush, Blower, Duke, Pulp, Chow, Peaches, Corky, Flip, Buckwheat, Smokey, Cletis, Pug, Nibsy, Meathead, Cue Ball, Paddle Dogs, Groucho, Caveman, Tookie, Dink, Zemo, Melvin, Arm, Sticker, Little Melvin, Squirt, Horse, Hucko, Hector, Dinty, Hoodoo, Humpy, Codge, Doc, Stinker, Red, Wolf, Stubbs, Bonez and Elmo, to name just a few.
One Tipperary Hill boy, Pat Maroney, was known to virtually everyone in the neighborhood as Elmo, after the nosy neighbor kid in the hit comic strip, Blondie. Yet, among his best friends, those who really knew him, those who regularly drank beer and played basketball with him at Burnet Park, he was simply Mush – meaning the young man not only had a nickname, but in time even his nickname earned a nickname.
In fact, Tipp Hill’s penchant for bestowing nicknames on young and still-growing things was so ingrained and such a rite of cultural passage that one family, the Coffeys, who lived at the bend on Burnet Park Drive, went so far as to nickname their two house cats. Around the home, the Coffey’s one cat, whose real name was Pat, eventually started to be known as Pete, while everyone the Coffeys knew – family and friends alike – simply started calling Mike, their other cat, Otis.
Yet, despite the dramatic social change, if not full-out unrest, that serves as backdrop for this story, there remained in Tipp Hill a bond as unmistakable as it was unshakable. In fact, the sense of community in the city’s highest profile Irish enclave was so palpable – and remained so palpable – thatit felt like that sense of community could have been sliced and sold by the pound at Gridley’s, the small, clean and white-tiled market that served ever-so-humbly in the shadows of Tipp Hill’s world-renowned traffic light.
St. Patrick’s parish was not nearly as secure financially as its neighbor, Sacred Heart, if only because so many of its communicants were working class folks with large, and sometimes sprawling families to house, clothe, educate, entertain, protect, police and feed. Its red brick church on Lowell Ave was a nice, well-maintained structure, and like Heart’s majestic hand-cut stone one, just a hop, skip and a jump from Nibsy’s, the saloon above which Danny Van Cott and his family lived. It was not ostentatious, by any means, certainly not from the outside. But inside, the apse featured an ornate, delicately hand-painted and vaulted ceiling that belied the church’s otherwise modest exterior, along with a collection of stained glass windows that, while smaller than those in almost every other league church, were still magnificent, including a few that bore the conspicuous imprint of a proud green shamrock.
St. Patrick’s school on Schuyler Street, adjacent to the church and first opened to students as a grammar school in 1909, was, likewise, utilitarian in design. What was noteworthy, however, was its color. The building’s unique yellowish bricks and its dark green trim gave St. Pat’s something no other Parochial League school ever had; a building whose colors reflected those of its basketball team. Indeed, to walk or drive by it, especially just as the evening sun was setting over Lowell and the upper reaches of Tipp Hill, was to behold in all its glory an otherwise humble building emblazoned in the glowing gold and green of St. Patrick’s, the school and the team.
The guy at the head of all things basketball in Tipp Hill was a no-nonsense Irish police officer named Bob Hayes, who was, in many ways, as much a symbol of his neighborhood as its vaunted traffic signal. He was a beat cop. He was a former Parochial League star. He knew virtually everyone and their parents – and, quite often, their parents’ parents. Bob Hayes lived and breathed the game loved by countless Syracusans, the game by which so many of them chose to define themselves.
A tall, sturdy block of a man with a thick barrel chest and a brown flattop haircut so angular and severe that, when fresh, it looked as though it might cut diamonds, Hayes did not give up a smile easy. What’s more, he had at his disposal a stare so stern, so penetrating, and so devoid of anything resembling a soft underbelly that, when directed at you, could send chills down your spine.
But the thing that separated Bobby Hayes from virtually every other coach in the Parochial League was that his day job was not one that afforded him a great amount of latitude or flexibility with his time. He was not an executive or a businessman, after all, or a shop-owner, or a salesman, or even a teacher. He was a cop; a hard-working, constantly-on patrol, crime-fighting cog in a machine bigger and far more important than he. And his job, a sometimes messy one with countless loose ends, jagged edges and blurred lines, often kept him busy long after his shift had ended.
Yet, despite that, and despite the fact he regularly had to deal with elements from the dregs of city life, Bob Hayes remained in his heart an idealist, a patient but demanding teacher who was fully engaged in Bishop Foery’s Parochial League notion of churning out young Catholic soldiers. Hayes’ goal, however, was not to mass produce soldiers. It was to mass produce ballplayers; Catholic ones, to be sure – often undersized Irish ones – ballplayers whose understanding of the game went beyond merely keeping their arms raised and their feet moving on defense, but relied upon the countless subtle and often unseen things the best and most successful players constantly did throughout the course of a victory.
To that end, and given his deep and abiding passion for nurturing young athletes, early in his tenure as head man at St. Patrick’s, Hayes established what he called Little Leprechaun Basketball, a Saturday morning training camp and biddy league in which kids as young as the 4th and 5th grade would spend a few hours each week learning the game from the inside out. The idea was to plant seeds and develop skills at an early age, while imposing a level of discipline, situational knowledge, court awareness, and game understanding they’d likely never get from pickup games at Burnet Park or the Boy’s Club, much less in one-on-one matchups in their driveway.
Hayes not only organized and managed the Little Leprechaun league (and coached and often refereed its games), but weekday nights after his shift had ended he’d go home, often dog-tired and still in uniform, and two-finger type onto a sheet of mimeograph paper a simple, bare-bones newsletter based on his memories of the previous weekend. Then, Hayes would run it off on the school’s mimeograph machine and hand it out the following Saturday morning – one to each Little Leprechaun and sometimes his mom or dad.
All the traditional numbers were there in Hayes’ newsletter, of course: wins, losses, game scores and points scored. But he used his little weekly publication in ways that helped engender a style of play that would eventually become known throughout the city as Parochial League ball. He made it a point to reward the smallest of things a boy had done the week prior; things most casual fans wouldn’t have noticed and things that would never have shown up in any box score in any paper. He’d include a small item congratulating a boy for taking a charge or boxing out well, or for a particularly solid back-pick that he’d set the previous Saturday. A nice pass that found an open man was occasion for the highest praise from Hayes, often leading off a story in the following week's Little Leprechaun newsletter.
Bob Hayes understood that for all the great and near-great players that St. Pat’s had developed over the decades, it was still operating from a talent pool that was, by design, finite. Besides, it was not like mothers were breeding strapping, 6’5” Irish boys on Tipp Hill to keep his team stocked with Parochial League All Stars. For that reason, no team under Hayes was likely to ever have any more than one or two kids who could score consistently under pressure. Everyone else on his team was going to have to be a cog, a role player; a boy whose playing time would be dictated not by how well he could shoot, but by how intensely he defended, how consistently he boxed out, how fearlessly he set picks, how regularly he found the open man, how crisply and smartly he passed the ball, and perhaps above all, by much much passion and willpower he showed, and by how consistently he tried to out-hustle every other kid on the floor with him.
That was the purpose Hayes rough-hewn Little Leprechaun newsletters served: to bring glory to the little, winning things that he knew he could teach a boy to do on a basketball court.
Danny Van Cott had, himself, been a Little Leprechaun just a few years prior to that sweltering afternoon when he sat down with Monsignor Piejda to talk to him about coming to his school. In fact, Van Cott may just have been the poster child for the brilliance of the retail-level pipeline that Hayes had created and tapped into on Tipp Hill. He was an Irish kid from an Irish neighborhood – an Irish kid who lived, dreamed and slogged away at his homework above a noisy tavern, no less – who, while he may not have had all the requisite talents to be an All Star, had learned enough Parochial League-style basketball under Bob Hayes, and been schooled in how to succeed without having one conspicuous offensive skill, that he could transfer to a school brimming with high-end talent, like Sacred Heart, and one day wake up to find himself not just a member of its starting five, but the trigger man for its offense.
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