For Billy E, the anticipation of a Friday night Parochial League game was, in many ways, almost better than the game itself. Because every Friday morning, each game was still perfect and each boy’s shot still true. There were yet to be any bad turnovers or crazy, ill-advised passes. There’d yet to be even a single dumb foul or a single clanked free throw. There was only one thing: the chance, if not very real hope, for something oddly resembling perfection, schoolboy basketball style.
Unlike so many Parochial League coaches, players and fans, however, Billy didn’t necessarily follow a set routine on game day, as if not doing so might prove, somehow, harmful to his team's chances that night. He just didn’t possess that gene, or worry about such trivial things. He didn’t eat the same food in the same eatery or wear the same game-day tie every week. He didn’t necessarily drive the same route to and from Allied Chemical or, as a matter of superstition, tie his shoes, wind his watch, or open his Post-Standard the same way every Friday morning.
To the contrary, he just sort of let things happen in advance of that night's game and played things entirely by ear all day long. That was just who Billy E was.
The only constant was that each and every Friday Billy would always allow himself to be slowly consumed by thoughts of the game on tap, especially as the day wore on, the minutes ticked away, and the opening tip drew closer. On his way to the game, whether home or away, he’d also take one last opportunity to rehearse in his mind's ear what he was going to tell his boys in the locker room.
That same sense of heightened anticipation, however, was conspicuously absent from any and all Sunday games. There were very few games on Sunday, anyway. Sometimes they were a byproduct of snow days, other times the result of some scheduling conflicts that simply couldn’t be avoided. Or every so often, it was because someone in Father Sammons’ CYO office – most likely, the good Father himself – had deemed a Sunday afternoon game appropriate for reasons that were, and would forever remain, a mystery.
Sundays never really felt quite right for Billy; not for a regular season game, anyway. Sundays were for morning worship, for Pete’s sake, and then a good hard practice followed by a nice hot shower and a dive into the Sunday Herald-American. Sundays were for hot coffee, funny pages in color, and sweet pastries from the Harrison Bakery.
Each week at Sacred Heart, there’d always be a high mass at ten o’clock, a Sunday morning celebration of the Last Supper with all the pomp and circumstance the Catholic Church could muster. That was the mass Billy and Bernice Ewaniszyk, along with a number of his players, would attend week after week, followed by a nice and efficient two-hour practice; often a scrimmage that Billy would have asked the school’s young athletic director, Father Olszewski – known to most of the kids as simply “Father O” – to arrange with one of the stronger City or County League clubs.
Billy, who was a second generation Russian Orthodox, had transitioned over to traditional Roman Catholicism in the Fall of 1951. From that point on, he and Bernice rarely missed Sunday mass at their new church. High mass at ten was their particular favorite because it was the one during which all the candles on Sacred Heart's altar got lit and all the delicate clinks and aromas of Catholicism were in full bloom, including the sweet smell of all that incense being offered up to God as a companion to all those hypnotic Latin chants being sent His way.
High mass was also the one – at least at Sacred Heart – often said in his native tongue by Casimir Piejda, the proud immigrant Pole and parish pastor. At high mass at Sacred Heart during basketball season, Monsignor Piejda always made it a point to strongly suggest that all his players and cheerleaders – varsity, JV and grammar school – sit front and center, almost as symbols of Mother Poland’s promise of sustained greatness.
Not all Billy’s players would be there, of course, because not all of them regularly attended Sacred Heart. Jack Contos, for example, went to a different house of worship, St. Stephen’s, a nearby Slovak church on Geddes Street, because his father was an usher there. And Pete Schmid, who lived way out in Fairmount, always went to Holy Family, the relatively new church just down Onondaga Road from his family home.
But many of the other players went to ten o’clock mass every week and did, indeed, sit in the first row or two, just as Piejda suggested. There’d be the kids from Tipp Hill; Tommy Sakowski, Rich Dabrowski, Walt Kicak, Tommy Godzak, Jim Corbett, and even Danny Van Cott, the young Dutch/Irish youngster who lived with his family above Nibsy’s Saloon and who, as a headstrong eighth grader, promised Piejda that if he let him transfer from St. Pat’s, and let him play his high school ball for the Hearts, he’d attend mass at Sacred Heart every Sunday without fail. Those Tipp Hill Hearts kids generally walked to church as a unit, assembling one-by-one as they neared the tracks, much like they often did for school on weekdays, or at least from the early Fall to the late Spring.
Sitting up there as well would be Joey Zaganczyk, the handsome young shooter and sometime pop star. His brother-from-a-different-mother, Jimmy Pryzbyl, however, one of the scrawniest but hardest working of the “Chinese Bandits,” would not be there – at least not there sitting with his teammates. Instead, Pryzbyl, perhaps the most devout Catholic on the team, would be serving as an altar boy, something he'd been doing at ten o'clock mass since he first became a teenager, and something he'd do until the very week he left for basic training not long after his 20th birthday. Zaganczyk would have come to mass, as he often did, with the entire Pryzbyl family because, as on so many Saturday nights, he’d spent it at their home, watching TV, playing games, eating popcorn, drinking grape Kool Aid, and, eventually, sleeping in the spare bed in his best friend's room.
As well, there’d be any number of JV and grammar school players and cheerleaders on hand – all of them interspersed with the upper class players and cheerleaders to pray, draw closer to God, and, ultimately, be showcased by Piejda, the proudest and most stubbornly defiant Pole just about anyone had ever met.
Billy never sat with his team on Sundays. He and Bernice sat where they always sat; on the far right hand side of the pews, third row from the rear, directly on the aisle. That was not a matter of superstition. That’s just where they liked to sit.
But that particular Sunday was just a bit different. Because on that day, Monsignor Piejda took a moment before ending mass with his trademark blessing and sign of the cross to wish the varsity and JV kids the best of luck in that afternoon’s game, the one being held at Bishop Ludden to accommodate the Knights of Columbus fundraiser scheduled later that day in the school gymnasium.
Should they win, Piejda explained, they’d finish the season undefeated. He then blessed the players and told them that God and the Sacred Heart of Jesus would be with them in their quest for perfection.
No one dared applaud. It was, after all, February of 1967. And in 1967, even with the new relaxed rules in effect thanks to Vatican II, no Catholic ever dared clap in God's house, even to celebrate the union of two souls or acknowledge the strong possibility of an undefeated season by a team of boys playing their hearts out for the glory and honor of Jesus.
That’s not to say, however, that the congregation didn’t respond to Piejda’s well-wishes. And when he offered them, a low murmur began spreading through the assemblage as the realization dawned on those there that in less than three hours the solid young men in the front two rows would be trying to carve out a small piece of history – and not just for themselves but, in a very real way, for Polish-Americans throughout Central New York.
Billy E didn’t say a thing. He just sat there and smiled as the pastor gave his blessing. And his smile only brightened when Bernice patted him on his knee and looked into his eyes with pride.
That’s when the butterflies started. Those damn, stupid, pain-in-the-ass butterflies. The same ones that Billy had been feeling two nights prior, just before the Lucy’s game. And it was little wonder when you thought about it. Because when a man wanted something as badly as Billy wanted an undefeated season, it can often make him worry to the point of distraction and make him suddenly terrified that, somehow, he wasn't going to get the very thing he wants most.
The difference now was that he could finally admit to himself that he wanted it, and wanted it badly –and that, for the first time ever, it was so close he could almost touch it.
* * * * *
The game, of course, shouldn’t have been played at Ludden, at all. Billy E knew that better than anyone. But fate had intervened and, alas, nothing could be done. It was the 75th anniversary of Sacred Heart and, because of that, certain parish activities had been on the docket for months, including the Knights of Columbus fundraiser the Boss had mentioned in his sermon, the one slated for the school gym later that day.
Someone in the K of C leadership must have just assumed the gym was going to be available that particular Sunday, given that the vast majority of varsity and JV basketball games were held on Friday nights. How was that person to know that someone in Father Sammons’ office – again, perhaps even the old man himself – had decided to schedule the final game of the 1966-67 season, not on a Friday night, as was normally the case, but on a Sunday afternoon?
As a result, Father O, the new Hearts athletic director, had been forced to scramble and make provisions for his team’s eighteenth and final game to be relocated two and a half miles west, to Bishop Ludden High in verdant little Westvale, just a stone’s throw or so beyond the city limits sign.
That should have been Billy’s first clue that this was not going to be a typical Sunday, or a typical final game, for that matter – and the atypical nature of those two things would extend far beyond the fact that his team had chance to do what only three teams had ever done in history: finish a Parochial League regular season without a loss.
The day was beautiful, with a robin’s egg-blue sky awash with the kind of warming sunshine that could dry a sidewalk in minutes. Plus, the temperatures kept climbing as the sun crept higher in the sky, reaching as high as the low 60’s by noon, almost unheard of in Syracuse at that time of year.
The second reason that Sunday would be atypical was due to the game itself. But more on that in a moment.
On tap that brilliant and unseasonably warm day was a season-ending match with St. John the Baptist, a good but certainly not great team from the North Side. After all, Billy and his boys had traveled to Court Street a few weeks earlier and demolished Baptists, beating Coach Frank Satalin’s team by a whopping twenty-one points – on their court, no less.
It was yet another of those lopsided games, in fact, in which the Hearts starters knew they’d have to try to get their points, however many there’d be, in the first three quarters, and maybe the first half. Because they knew they weren’t likely to play much, if at all, in the game’s latter stages. Billy’s modus operandi had always been to use blowouts as a way of rewarding his Chinese Bandits with a little extra playing time.
Back in those days, there was one parishioner and supporter of the Hearts in particular who remained near and dear to Billy. The guy’s name was John Wysocki, a proud Pole who possessed a deep and abiding love for God, his family, his Church, his heritage, and the game of basketball, in approximately that order. Wysocki, a successful businessman, owned not only a highly successful tavern and restaurant, but also the area’s leading Polish funeral home. As such, he was constantly asking Billy what he might be able to do to help his boys out financially.
Billy would always respond the this question the same way: “New uniforms.” It's one reason why, in a league known for its well-worn and often shabby team uniforms, the Heartsmen were standard bearers – the Parochial League’s Beau Brummels, so to speak – with the brightest, whitest and least-frayed uniforms and warm-ups in town.
In retrospect, what Billy would later say he should have asked Wysocki for was a team bus. Sacred Heart didn't own its own bus; nor, for that matter, did any Parochial League team. Owning a bus of any vintage or condition, frankly, would have been a luxury that none of the league’s ten parishes had, and a luxury that none of them would have ever dreamt of. And without a bus, transporting a group of growing, teenage boys from place to place to play a basketball game in 1967 could, at times, turn into a logistical jigsaw puzzle for any head coach, especially in the middle of the work day or the heart of the work week.
That had long been one of the hidden benefits of Foery’s quaint-and-unique little parish-based league. For years, it had been possible for Parochial Leaguers – players, fans and coaches alike – to actually walk, not just to and from home games, but, often, to and from away ones as well.
But with the ongoing flight to Syracuse's suburbs and the dismantling of its 15th Ward, the city's high school population was becoming far more dispersed by the Spring of '67 and the concept of transporting students a far more critical consideration for school administrators everywhere.
That’s one of the many reasons why Billy E was such a big fan of Pete Schmid’s dad, a guy he’d gotten to know and like over the course of Pete’s three years. The elder Schmid, long before there was such a thing as a “helicopter parent,” had shown himself to be a second-generation immigrant who was deeply, deeply invested in his son's career. He went to every one of Pete’s games and a few of his practices as well, driving to all of them, often with Pete riding shotgun beside him, eyes fixed and trusty gym bag by his side.
That made Old Man Schmid something of a constant in Billy’s life, if not a good friend – because the senior Schmid was a licensed driver with a dependable and roomy car. As a consequence, the guy might be asked to squeeze as many as three or four long-legged teens into his sedan at a moment's notice, which he always did gladly.
Mobility was also likely one of the main reasons why Father O, the recently ordained priest from New York’s Southern Tier, had been named his new school's athletic director by the Boss, Monsignor Piejda. It wasn’t just that, like so many AD's in the Parochial League, Father O was young and energetic and loved basketball, or that he occasionally played pick-up games with the boys in the gym after school. It was primarily because he owned his own car, an ordination gift from his father, a brand-new, fully loaded, 1967 Pontiac GTO – in shiny jet black, no less, with customized hubcaps and a motorized convertible top.
In fact, that late-model ragtop of Father O’s was so nice, and so hot – at least “hot” in a teenage boy sort-of-way – that of all the pregame rituals practiced so faithfully by so many of that year’s Hearts kids, one of the most rock-solid certain was this: at some point every morning of every away game, senior Jack Contos would invariably knock on Father O’s door, ask him if he were going to the game that evening, and, if so, would he mind if he rode along?
Riding to away games with Father Olszewski was how Jack Contos learned to love a group called the Searchers, a Beatles-lite British Invasion band featuring a folky, harmonic sound and some truly soaring melodies. Father O loved to blast his new 8-track as he sped through town, top down, sunglasses on, the wind flying through his thick, dark hair. A song called Needles and Pins was the Searchers tune that Jack embraced most. It became, in fact, something of a game-day anthem for him.
Prior to that, Jack's game-day music-of-choice had always been the Beach Boys. Part of his game day ritual had always been to go home after school on the day of a game, lie on the sofa for a good hour or so, close his eyes, and crank up the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits to a volume on the RCA console that drove his mother just about as crazy as it got his juices flowing.
But that little ritual had been supplanted by the wrinkle that Father O's killer car and 8-track player had presented to him that very year – a breakthrough in audio mobility and sound clarity that, frankly, neither Jack nor the good Father had ever experienced before.
For Billy Ewaniszyk, part of the problem of a Sunday game was not being able to build up any anticipation for it, the way he could on Fridays at Allied, when he could allow the excitement to build slowly, hour-by-hour, then quicker and quicker as the hands on the clock crept closer to straight-up five and that glorious wail of the five o’clock whistle.
But Sunday’s, Billy had no pie waiting for him in a string-tied cardboard box like he did on Fridays during basketball season; a fresh-baked pie placed on his top step by the owner of Ma Tuttle’s, the wholesale pie manufacturer at the base of Tipp Hill. Dropping fresh pies off to key members of the Hearts family was something that the guy had been doing since the birth of the varsity program a decade prior and the glory days of Gene Fisch. That was when, while doing his deliveries, he began dropping off still-warm apple, cherry or pecan pies on the stoops of a dozen or so front doors in and around the parish – accompanied, in Gene’s case, by a $5 bill taped inside the cover as a gesture of his appreciation for all that Fisch, a first-generation immigrant and Nazi survivor, had done to do to bring glory to the Motherland and honor to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
On Sunday’s, Billy always found himself driving to games by himself. It was the weekend, after all, and almost every kid on his team could catch a ride from the old man, since odds were the guy wasn’t going to be at the factory or shop that day.
There was, as a result, no real sense of team on Sundays, no kinship, and no bonding moments – not at least until Billy E and his boys found themselves together in the locker room just a few moments before tip-off.
Notwithstanding, Billy wasn't ready at all for what he encountered that warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in Westvale. Because when he walked into that brand, spanking new Bishop Ludden gym well in advance of the JV game, and in search of the home locker room (the game, after all, was a home affair for the Hearts, despite their never having set foot in the place), what he encountered, quite literally, hurt his eyes.
Billy had never seen a brighter or more brilliant gym in all his life; one so awash with raw and radiant sunshine that the rays streaming through the squeaky-clean panes on both sides of the building looked as though they might have been delicate beams of powder, all a wispy mix of silver, yellow and white, and all those colors at the same time.
It was a gym that was a perfect metaphor for its city; a city that was constantly making new and shiny things better than any city in America, and then sending them out into the world; a forward-looking beacon of manufacturing might-and-muscle whose future, seemingly anyway, was as solid and bright as the glistening things it produced.
And all that brightness that washed over Billy that afternoon was only exacerbated by the reflection of all that sunlight off the all the frosted snow in all the open fields just outside the gym; off the highly waxed stacks of new and recently polished bleachers; and off the two opposing and still-new glass boards that hung suspended, as if dropped there by the angels above, on either end of the court.
It was so bright, in fact, it was all the Hearts coach could do to see ten feet or so ahead of him without having to shield his eyes. He actually, at one point, felt his coat pocket for his clip-on's, thinking he might want to attach his shades to his glasses to keep from getting a headache.
That’s when Billy heard a voice. He turned and saw who he assumed to be Father Charles Eckermann, the vice-principal of Ludden, striding toward him with purpose. Eckermann, a thick, squat man with dark, slick hair, and equally thick and dark-rimmed glasses, was heading his way, head raised and one hand out. If he was nothing else, the Bishop Ludden vice-principal was one politically savvy and well-practiced son of a gun, or so Billy told himself. He shook Eckermann’s slightly clammy outstretched paw and offered him a smile-free and workman-like, “Hello, Father.”
“Coach,” said Eckermann, “Welcome to Bishop Ludden! Pretty amazing, isn’t it?,” he added, glancing up and around. The stocky, barrel chested priest wasted no time, even as he continued to beam over the wonder of his new school's basketball facility, in getting down to business. “Look, I’m sure Father Olszewski, briefed you on our agreement,” he said, his voice growing markedly less chatty. “We’ll split the gate evenly and I’ll find you immediately after to give you your half of the proceeds. Sound good?”
It wasn’t a question, as much as it was a statement.
Eckermann didn’t say what the capacity of that new gym of his was, but Billy looked around and quickly figured it to be somewhere in the vicinity of, maybe, seven hundred people, perhaps as many as nine, if they squeezed in enough students and factored in the standing room area in front of the stage and over near the front doors.
“How much will you be charging, Father?” asked Billy in a tone that matched the priest’s, his left brain ready to do some quick calculations to get a rough idea of what the Hearts’ take might be.
“Father Olszewski and I agreed we’d charge a dollar for adults and fifty cents for students,” answered Eckermann.
The priest then cleared his throat, forced a smile, and once again stuck out a small, clammy hand to the Hearts coach, which Billy E once again accepted with muted excitement. “Well, Coach, I know you’ve got to get ready and you must have things to do,” said the roundish little school administrator, punctuating his best wishes with a cartoonish smile so forced it seemed almost pinned to his face. “That’s your locker room, through those doors just to the right of the stage. Good luck. And I’ll see you afterward.”
When he left, Billy just stood there for a moment, looked around, and drank in the dimensions and feel of the spotless and sprawling room in which he stood, a cavernous piece of real estate that would, in just a few hours, play host to his team’s final regular season game – the one for the Hearts’ shot at a little slice of Parochial League immortality.
There were only a handful of people in the gym at the time because, unlike almost every game to that point, Billy E had decided to get to the gym extra early; a full hour or so, in fact, before the start of the JV game.
As he looked up and around, Billy E realized that, as relatively new as the Hearts’ gym might have been, this place was newer. A lot newer. And the gym had a size to it that, while similar to his own, just felt bigger and less forgiving, not to mention less – and he struggled for the right words – broken-in.
There was, indeed, a sharpness to the edges of Ludden’s gym, as well as an almost antiseptic freshness to it – two hard-to-define qualities – that gave Billy E more than a moment’s pause. The gym was, in other words, almost the exact opposite of so many of the tiny, well-worn and wonderfully musty gyms into which his boys regularly ventured on Friday nights to wage battle and defend their school’s colors.
“Why do we have to play here?” Billy thought as he looked up at the immaculate new rafters and let his gaze linger, the afternoon sunlight washing over him and reflecting off his glasses. At that moment he also couldn't help but contemplate one final time the stubborn and unshakable fact that he and his boys had yet to lose.
* * * * *
He wasn’t eighty-one, or seventy-one, or even sixty-one. He was fifty-one. Yet Frank Satalin was considered the old man of the Parochial League. Not in a dismissive or over-the-hill sort of way, but rather, in a deferential and even cherished sort of way.
Satalin, who by 1967 was coaching his third different parish-based team in three decades, had emerged as the unofficial “Dean of Parochial League Coaches.” He’d won titles and dominated at both St. Pat’s and St. Lucy’s, playing two fundamentally dissimilar styles of ball in each. And he’d won a couple of titles, as well, at his current school, St. John the Baptist, along with one All City Championship.
But, even then, the respect that Frank Satalin was afforded by anyone who ever knew him, especially his peers, was not really based on basketball at all. It was based on his fundamental decency as a man.
Because Frank Satalin was one of the most genuine, principled and dignified men many in town had ever known. There was an inherent kindness to him that radiated from deep within, a kindness that, when mixed with his depth of character and his unyielding respect for his fellow man, made all those around him aspire to be on their best behavior, so as to not to disappoint the guy.
One of former players, in fact, a young man who’d been a nice little guard during his days at Baptist, once had to spend almost a full day with Satalin without smoking a cigarette in front of him, something that just about killed him. But he did it because he would have rather died than disappoint his former high school coach.
You see, Frank Panto had recently returned stateside from a year-long tour in Vietnam, which he'd done at a time when that ill-fated conflict had started to escalate into something far uglier than anyone could have ever imagined. A non-smoker when drafted, Panto returned to Syracuse with a nearly three-pack-a-day habit.
Chain smoking had become Frank Panto’s escape in the jungles of Southeast Asia, his way of steadying his ever-fraying nerves while trying to stay alive and, at the same time, deal with the constant suffering and death that continued to pile up all about him.
So when Panto returned home after his stint in-country and found himself trapped in a car for a ten-hour sojourn to and from Madison Square Garden with his ex-coach and a few ex-teammates to see the coach’s two sons play a big game for St. Bonaventure, he nearly lost his mind looking out the window of the backseat.
How does a young man who smokes roughly five cigarettes every waking hour of every day go a full ten hours, plus another two for basketball, and not smoke even one (except during a handful of infrequent yet extended bathroom breaks), and do it cold-turkey and at the drop of a hat?
By summoning up all the discipline that same high school coach taught him as a teenager back in the day, and because of his own powerful desire to simply never disappoint the man.
That’s how much respect Frank Satalin was afforded in his prime. And that’s why, to all but a handful of those closest to him, he was never “Frank.” He was, and would always remain, simply as a matter of principle and deference, “Mr. Satalin.”
Not bad for a guy who delivered mail for a living.
Yet, one thing had grown increasingly clear as the years continued tick by. Even though his dignity remained intact, and would do so throughout his life, and even though his lessons of love, character and discipline would remain timeless and resonate for whatever young man had been lucky enough to have played for him, by February of 1967 – even as the Summer of Love beckoned – the game itself, at least in the opinion of more than a few in town, had passed Frank Satalin by.
His was a philosophy born in an era during which basketball was still viewed as a competition consisting of two halves, and not just on the clock, but on the court as well; the half on which a team played defense and the half on which it ran its offense. That’s why, regularly during Satalin’s practices, those practices became half-court clinics and teaching opportunities, and why he regularly worked with his boys first on offense, and then later on defense, treating those two parts of the same game as two separate and distinct disciplines.
Bob Felasco, on the other hand, was one of the first of a new breed of coaches who saw the two as inextricably linked, and who believed that a team’s best scoring chances often arose from their having gotten the ball back by playing aggressive, suffocating defense and then immediately sprinting upcourt with it.
Satalin, on the other hand, continued to run three and five-man half-court weaves and stressed controlled and highly practiced patterns in half court sets. Felasco and his ilk, by contrast, liked to run hard and often, and liked to get their shots off before the other team had an opportunity to fall back and set its defense.
But there were two things about this Frank Satalin-coached team that were working against Billy E that afternoon at Bishop Ludden High School.
First was the fact that his 1966-67 Baptist squad was far from a typical one for the mailman-turned-coach. Some of the kids on that particular team were monstrous physical specimens. One in particular, Greg Duda, a muscular junior from East Syracuse who stood a full 6’4”, and maybe 6’5,” in his stocking feet, had great hand-eye coordination and was a solid shooter from inside fifteen feet. Strong as an ox, he was a kid, physically anyway, on par with even the mighty Pete Schmid.
But there were two other oak trees on that year’s Baptist team as well, a fact that helped distinguish it as the tallest and brawniest in Frank Satalin’s thirty five years of coaching.
And in Paul Padden and Dave Cusano, the Dean of Parochial League Coaches had a couple of game-smart, heads-up guards who, while they may not have been the fastest kids on the block, had good lateral movement, deceptively quick feet, and an ability to run their team's offense as well as any of the league’s best playmakers.
The second thing Billy and his Hearts had working against them was less tangible and far more difficult to pinpoint. It was this: Frank Satalin, even as he was growing gently out of touch with the modern and ever-evolving game of basketball, still managed to, somehow, coach his boys to one major Parochial League upset each year. Ominously for Billy and his Heartsmen, such an upset had yet to occur that season – with, now, just one game left.
In addition, for all that Satalin loved his discipline and his set-in-stone offensive patterns, he was also unafraid to make bold moves when and if they were called for.
That’s why, during his very first year as coach at his alma mater, St. Lucy’s, despite everything he’d ever learned about how a team should always have a set offensive scheme and should then run its well-rehearsed patterns off that scheme, he did exactly the opposite. He took one good hard look at the group of colts they’d placed under him that first year, five young African American kids with strong legs, quick reflexes, and big hands – 15th Ward schoolboys all ready to take the world by storm with their joyous, breakneck style of play – and thought just how much those kids would upset the apple cart in a league so addicted, as was he, to staid, half-court sets, well-practiced patterns, and a decades-long tradition of walking the ball upcourt.
That’s when Frank Satalin decided to go against everything he ever believed and loosen the reins on his kids – especially the magical Ormie Spencer – letting those gifted sons of the Ward do exactly what God seemingly put them on this Earth to do; run.
That, as much as any reason, was why those Lucians that very first year under their new mailman/coach became the first-ever Parochial League team to go through an entire season undefeated. Frank Satalin knew his basketball and knew full well that every so often it was necessary to do exactly what the other guy least expected.
And, as it so happened, a short time prior he’d recently gotten a gentle nudge in that direction by a former player of his, a onetime Baptist guard named John Riley, who’d graduated five years earlier and who’d gone on to play at St. Bonaventure, Mayor Walsh’s alma mater.
Riley was classic gym rat, a slightly undersized ball-handler, passer and shooter who lived and died basketball. He was also handsome, charming and smart as a whip, and, for those reasons and others, he always ended up being the quarterback or on-court leader on whatever team he played on.
Much like his coach, he was a kid who didn’t so much command respect, he just got it. No parent, priest or teacher could dislike John Riley, and no young lady in the neighborhood near his humble frame home on Loma Ave could say she hadn't at some point dreamed of dating him, or maybe going to the prom with him. It was also safe to say that not one of his peers hadn't wondered, even in passing, what it might be like to actually be as handsome, as talented, and as well-liked as John Riley.
In fact, if there had been a Frank Satalin of Parochial League players, a guy respected and admired by almost anyone and everyone who ever met him, it was young John Riley.
One weekend, this same John Riley – who, after graduation, left Olean for a teaching job at Gates-Chili Junior High, near Rochester – came home for a visit. On his first night back, Riley happened to catch the first of the two Baptist/Hearts matchups; the Massacre on Court Street. He'd sat in the packed, wall-to-wall St. John’s gym and watched in horror as his beloved alma mater, under the watchful eye of his beloved high school coach, got manhandled by the Hearts – especially by Pete Schmid, the most powerful and talented Heartsman of all.
As Riley was leaving that night, chatting with some friends and former teachers, he made a mental note to go see Mr. Satalin before he returned to Rochester on Sunday. Two days later after mass, that’s exactly what he did. At the Satalin kitchen table, Riley sat drank cup after cup of percolator-brewed coffee, ate two man-sized slabs of coffee cake, and told his former coach and mentor that watching the game on Friday had been a bitter pill to swallow.
“Hearts is a good team,” Riley told Mr. Satalin. “And they’ll be tough to beat. But I really think it can be done. If anyone’s going to do it, though, it’ll be because they press ‘em all over the court, from end to end, and then run like heck on offense, and don’t stop fast breaking, even for a minute.”
He added, “I’ve watched ‘em. I just don’t think they’re quick enough, or handle the ball well enough, to deal with that sort of non-stop pressure.”
John Riley might have made a heck of a coach, if he’d ever gotten the chance. Because his onetime high school coach, who respected his former guard as much as any kid who ever played for him – a roster of luminaries that included not only the great Ormie Spencer, but his own two basketball-loving sons, Franny and Jimmy – took the young man’s words to heart.
As a result, that final week of February, given that his team had just had their clocks cleaned by these very same Heartsmen just weeks prior, Satalin decided to take his former player’s advice and work all week on the exact opposite of what he’d been trying to do last time he went up against Billy E, which was to sit on the ball for long, stretches to try to take as much time off the clock as possible. He’d also told his twin floor generals, Padden and Cusano, to walk it up slowly to try to mute the pace-of-play. And the last time he’d packed his zone even tighter than normal, to try to neutralize the Hearts down low and minimize their ability to score easy baskets from around the hoop.
But the only thing that such safe, careful, and oh-so predictable thinking got him was a twenty-one point humiliation.
This time, the gentle and mild-mannered coach had a little surprise in store for Billy Ewaniszyk and his West Side kids.
Sure enough, right off the bat, and the first time St. John’s scored a bucket that Sunday, Joe Zaganczyk grabbed the ball as it went through, turned to inbound it, and immediately froze at what he saw staring back at him, even through the glare of the midday sun: two long outstretched arms waving frantically not ten feet ahead of him, with another St. John’s defender on either side, both crouched in a defensive posture and both with arms wide and waving like hell.
St. John the Baptist’s starters, playing on the biggest court they would all season, and against a team that had just thoroughly thrashed them, were in a full-court press and dogging the physically superior Heartsmen from baseline to baseline, all before the game was even a minute old.
And because Zaganczyk naturally assumed he’d just casually in-bound the ball to teammate, Dan Van Cott, and then jog up-court alongside him, he almost reflexively allowed his internal momentum to carry his entire body forward ever so slightly, even while still out of bounds. The young Polish sharpshooter even raised his right foot a few inches off the ground, based on that assumption.
But when he turned and found himself face-to-face with three arm-waving and pressing defenders, before his young brain could register “full court press,” and before he realized he couldn’t just casually flip the ball inbounds, Joe Zaganczyk did what most kids would do. He double clutched for a half a second, he reflexively grabbed the ball just a bit tighter, and he let his slightly elevated right foot return from whence it came, if only to try to catch his balance. But as he did that, and as his inner momentum carried him forward, his white canvas sneaker hit the ground. That’s when he heard a ref’s whistle bleat and heard half the gym’s population explode. Zaganczyk looked down and realized his once-elevated Chuck Taylor had come down a good two inches across the end-line; a violation that gave the ball back to the Baptists.
As Zaganczyk hung his head in embarrassment, the Baptist partisans roared their delight. Meanwhile, Billy E immediately jumped from his seat, mostly out of habit, but partly because something inside him compelled him to. But the Hearts head coach didn’t say a word. Didn’t scream at the refs, or Zaganczyk, or even the rafters above. Nothing. He just stood there and stared at no one particular for a beat or two, before sitting back down and glancing over at his assistant, Paul Januszka, with an uneasy look that said without a word passing from his lips, “I got a bad feeling about this.”
Sure enough, things for Billy and his Heartsmen only managed to get worse as the first half unfolded – and did so in a way that, virtually, no one who’d been there for that game on Court Street five weeks earlier, and who’d witnessed that night’s unsightly pounding of Frank Satalin’s team by the Heartsmen, had a right to expect.
After leaving St. Bonaventure, John Riley had learned (and had, apparently, been experimenting with) what he called a 3-1-1 full-court trap, a full court press in which three men are positioned almost arm-to-arm about ten feet from the opponent’s baseline, followed by a stack of two roving defenders, one near the top of the key and the other out near the mid-court stripe, or as far upcourt as the deepest opponent. That Sunday morning over coffee and Sara Lee pastry in Coach Satalin's kitchen, Riley sketched the specifics of the 3-1-1 trap press on a piece of legal paper for his mentor, including all five player responsibilities and all five player movements, depending upon where the ball was, and how it got there.
Riley had learned the “3-1-1 trap,” along with its sister fast break, in part by watching the powerful UCLA Bruins of John Wooden win an unexpected national title in 1965, and in part from a high school coach he’d recently gotten to know in Rochester. Using a combination of those two strategies, one defensive and one offensive, and both in harmony, Riley had witnessed a few clubs on different levels win games that, physically anyway, they had no right winning.
The reality was, few teams at any level, even the strongest, were truly ready for such a non-traditional defense, especially when played fiercely, nonstop, and from one end of the court to the other.
That’s why so few at Ludden that Sunday, including Billy E himself, could have envisioned, or were prepared for what was about to take place.
When combined with the blinding glare, the tightness of the rims, and the cold, unforgiving nature of the surroundings, the first half that brilliant Sunday afternoon would turn into the worst half of basketball that any Bill Ewaniszyk-coached team had ever played – and, perhaps, ever would play.
None of the Heartsmen’s shots were falling. And often – unlike in most Parochial League gyms, where a misdirected shot might land on a spongy rim, deaden, and then fall to one side or another just a few inches away – the misses that day were springing a full four-to-six feet to either side of the rim, or straight back, often arcing high above all those young bodies jockeying, just as they’d been taught, for rebounding position under the basket.
Even the Heartsmen’s foul shots had to be spot-on perfect that day or they’d rattle around like marbles in bathtub before bouncing out, almost as though flung by some unseen catapult. And every time another shot would rattle in and out for Billy E’s boys, they’d get disproportionally tighter about letting the next one fly, even from up close.
It wasn’t just the Hearts’ outside shooters who were having fits. Schmid and Jack Contos, two powerful kids who scored a bulk of their points from down low, often on tries only a few feet from the basket, also got caught in the sway.
One time, late in the second period, from the second position on the right hand side of the lane, Schmid went up and timed his leap perfectly following a teammate’s missed free throw, grabbing Sakowski’s failed attempt and flicking it back goal-ward, just inches above a sea of stretching, straining, would-be rebounders. Unfortunately, Schmid’s soft put-back, which looked true from the moment it left his hand, hit back iron and ricocheted straight back from where it came, almost as though some sort of invisible seal had been placed over the goal. Only, by then, Schmid had returned to Earth and could only look up in disbelief that his cupcake of a follow-up, one that looked so spot-on perfect when he launched it, had somehow failed to find its mark.
Another time, just a moment later and with halftime drawing near, Contos made a steal and sprinted ahead of the pack. As the muscular young Slovak exploded upward, it almost looked like he might want to dunk the ball, since he’d elevated so high. Instead, Contos laid the ball softly over the front of the rim. And, just like Schmid’s try, the perfectly normal looking shot clanked off the back iron and immediately bounced straight back like a compressed rubber ball.
Only this time, unlike the previous miss, Contos’ errant shot resulted in a four-point swing. Because trailing the play, Cusano quickly ran down the ball, grabbed it, spun, and fired it up ahead to Tom “Tick” Taylor, a brawny teammate who, alone under his own basket, turned Contos’ gimme into an uncontested two-points the other way.
As the Baptist faithful raised their hands in joyous exaltation and roared in a rapture of delighted disbelief, the Hearts followers simply sat stunned on their side of the gym, although a handful, including two of the Sacred Heart cheerleaders, buried their faces in their hands, as though they couldn’t bear to watch anymore.
Only one of the Hearts fans remained loud, her exhortations uttered with the piercing clarity of a church bell. That was Irene Contos, the former star baseball and basketball player, and the mother of Jack.
After her son’s missed layup, a frowning Mrs. Contos stood up from her vantage point on the west side of the gym, arched her back, cupped her hands, and spit out in a loud yell at the top of her lungs, “Dupa Jas!!!” It was a Polish phrase directed at her oldest child. It was a phrase she’d begun using years before, back in Jack's little league days, as a play on his name, a phrase she always uttered in her native tongue and one she reserved only for those occasions on which, because of something the idiot boy had done, seemed more than appropriate.
In Irene Contos’ version of Polish, “Dupa Jas” translated, roughly anyway, to “Jack Ass.”
As the halftime buzzer mercifully sounded for Billy E, the two new scoreboards at the opposite ends of the gym read in glowing, 40-watt certainty, “Home 27, Visitors 35.” It wasn’t so much that the Hearts were down at the half, or how much they were down, it was how they were down. They weren’t just losing. They were being outplayed, out-quicked, out-shot, out-rebounded and out-hustled. Most of all, though, they were being out-coached. St. John the Baptist, the team they’d just slaughtered weeks prior, was sticking it to them.
In the locker room at half, as upset as he might have been, Billy had no intention of launching into another tirade. He’d done that less than 48 hours earlier on Gifford Street, and once before that to a slightly lesser extent. And while it had worked against Bobby Felasco’s club in January and later against an inspired group of Lucy’s kids, this time it would have felt forced and even a bit practiced.
Besides, every boy looking up at him knew exactly what the score was – literally and figuratively. So, instead, Billy E approached his team like he had all year, as a teacher and strategist, one whose role was more to guide and inspire, than to scare.
He and Paulie Januszka had been talking on the way to the locker room prior to halftime and both agreed in those few moments that to beat the crazy press Baptist was throwing at them it was important to get the ball over the top of it (or, maybe, through it). And to do that, Januszka suggested, it was going to require getting it to Schmid flashing up from half court to some place near the top of the key, probably to one side of it or the other. Schmid was a fine ball-handler, especially for a big man, and he was quicker than either of the two kids rotating in the two rear positions of the 3-1-1 trap.
That was all Billy needed. He nodded to Januszka as they walked and took it from there. A slight wrinkle on that agreement was exactly the message Billy delivered to his undefeated yet now visibly dazed boys when he reached the locker room. After all, he still believed in his kids. Hell, he’d been through too much with them not to.
Sure enough, even though Baptist scored the first three points of the second half to stretch its lead to eleven, the Hearts came roaring back, based in large part on the strategy Billy E and his JV coach had devised on their way to the locker room, a strategy Billy had subsequently sketched out for his team on a yellow note pad that he’d dug out of the bottom drawer of the desk in the coach’s office.
With Zaganczyk finally finding the range from the outside and Schmid – as Billy outlined – flashing up from half court to meet the ball and then either passing to a streaking teammate on either wing or faking a pass and beating the trap with a hard, quick dribble across the ten-second line, the Hearts finally found a rhythm. Within minutes, Baptist’s surprising eleven point lead had been whittled to two.
And when Contos corralled an errant Hearts jumper and scored on put-back from just inside the left baseline, their eleven point lead had disappeared altogether.
The Hearts side exploded – people standing, screaming, pounding their feet–making that shiny new gym in the suburbs sound almost like a tiny, dog-eared Parochial League one, somewhere deep in the heart of the city.
With just four minutes gone in the second half, the undefeated Heartsmen suddenly had Baptist dazed and in a chokehold. What’s more, they looked poised and ready to squeeze the life out of those brash, overachieving North Siders.
From the Hearts side of the gym, the old guy with the Elmer Fudd hat, the guy whose signature call – “Here come the Hearts!” – had been known to shatter glass and send cats scurrying, jumped from his seat, pumped his fist, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “That’s my boy, Jack!” To which, Irene Contos, standing, howling and stomping herself just a few rows in front of him, turned, looked up and beamed in a voice that likewise pierced the throbbing roar, “No, sir. That my boy, Jack.”
As many Hearts fans around the two laughed, they did so in part because the exchange was amusing, but mostly because they felt such collective relief over the fact their boys had finally answered the bell and were now playing like the team they’d grown to know and love all year.
From his seat on the bench, Frank Satalin signaled for a time out. He wanted his kids to take a moment and catch their breaths. He also wanted to tell them that the game was only tied; they weren't losing. Beyond that, he wanted to remind them of how they'd built their lead in the first place. What they needed to do now was make some adjustments, just as the Hearts had done.
It was one of those times, however, when who Frank Satalin was as a man was far more critical than anything he might have been saying to his team. If nothing else, the full-time mailman and part-time coach from the simple frame house on little Willumea Drive was a role model for every last one of those boys of his. He never panicked. He never shouted or yelled. In fact, he rarely complained at all about even the worst in-game calls. That’s why he'd never received even a single technical foul in all his decades of coaching high school. He chased nothing on a basketball court that wasn’t worth chasing. He simply let the game and its many fates come to him.
Screaming was beneath Frank Satalin, as was berating any fellow human being, especially a referee, for simply trying to do his job the best he could. To his thinking, if a ref wasn’t good at his job, it wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of the guy who gave him the job in the first place.
The old man’s sense of serenity and inner peace was not lost on his boys, especially at ear-splitting moments like now.
As his kids gathered round him, and with crowd frothing and howling above, Satalin leaned in and calmly told his boys to watch Schmid coming up for the ball from center court and to try to take away his lanes – both the dribbling and passing ones – once he got it. He also took a moment to reassure them and tell them all how well they were playing.
Lastly, he reminded them that the Hearts just exerted a ton of energy trying to get back in the game. Because of that, he explained, they were now vulnerable. In other words, now was not the time to retreat. Now was the time to make them pay for burning up so much energy just trying to catch up.
With just eleven minutes to play in the 1966-67 Parochial League regular season, the only thing standing between Billy E’s Heartsmen and a piece of history was a brawny collection of North Siders and their gentlemanly coach. The Hearts' path remained clear, and their goal was now so close they could all taste it – especially, following the resumption of play, when Baptist’s best player and their leading scorer, Greg Duda, picked up his fourth foul and was compelled to take a seat.
Yet Frank Satalin would soon be proven right. Sacred Heart had, indeed, fought so hard to come back that they’d drained all but a precious few drops of gas from the tank. As a result, they were a team that had little or nothing left, despite their unblemished record, a haughty distinction that now began to hang over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.
In fact, when Duda went to the bench with his fourth foul, it only helped to highlight what the Baptist head man had try to explain to his young charges about making them pay. Rather than replace his offensive bedrock with a kid of comparable size and stature, Satalin did the exact opposite. He went small. He swapped out the massive, hulking Duda for a quicker, smaller ball-handler with fresh legs – a fired-up boy who, like his teammates, could smell upset. It was in the air, hovering up there somewhere above them all, amid the glare, the sunshine, and all that squeaky newness.
It was ironic that the final few minutes of the final game of an historic Parochial League season would boil down to a single matchup between Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist. In many ways, those two schools, just a few miles from each other in the city, had been linked for as long as the former had been a part of the league.
And that link between the two, a faint thread that stretched as far back as the early 1950’s and all the way down to little Olean and the campus of St. Bonaventure (again, the alma mater of Mayor Bill Walsh), was visible for anyone who knew what to look for.
It all started with a forty-something gym rat originally from New Jersey, a dark-haired Irishman named Eddie Donovan, a former Bonnies great who'd taken over the reins of his alma mater and served as its head coach from 1953 to 1961. He’d also coached the NBA’s New York Knicks for a few seasons immediately thereafter. Yet Eddie Donovan’s strength would turn out to be less about his ability to coach young men and more about his ability to bird-dog and flush out under-appreciated talent from a vantage point somewhere in the stands.
By that 1966-67 season he’d already started to piece together what would emerge as, arguably, the single most selfless, Zen-like and storied roster in basketball history. As the new general manager of the perennial saddest of sacks, the woeful Knicks of the NBA, he’d personally scouted and drafted, among others, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Cazzie Russell, Dick Van Arsdale, Dave Stallworth and Phil Jackson. He’d also traded for Dick Barnett, one of the smartest players he’d ever watched play.
What’s more, in few short months, he’d go on to hire as coach a Brooklyn Jew from the streets of New York, a former Rookie of the Year for the old Rochester Royals named Red Holzman, after which he'd then soon trade for strong but largely ignored former player/coach from the Detroit Pistons named Dave DeBusschere.
So when it came to basketball, it was hardly a stretch to say Eddie Donovan knew a thing or two about bird-dogging and corralling under-appreciated talent.
As coach of the Bonnies, therefore, he was as much as about flushing out overlooked high school talent as he was about winning games – because, for him, the former always led to the latter. So, when he took the reins of the St. Bonaventure program, two of the first kids he ever recruited were two Upstate New Yorkers who he’d seen and fallen in love with, Larry Weise from East Rochester and John Connors from Syracuse. The two became not only teammates and roommates, but good friends.
Flash forward to the Spring of 1961. Weise, who’d been a great star in Olean, was named – shockingly, some would say – to replace Donovan as head man of the Bonnies. After all, he’d only been coaching the JV team at East Rochester High and, when named, was just 23 years old.
Being so young and inexperienced, without a scouting crew already in place, or a well-known brand name to use as a recruiting chit, Weise instead relied on friends and former teammates throughout the state for lines on kids who might be flying under the radar and who might, therefore, be gettable. One such friend was his old roommate, John Connors, who after graduation had moved home to Syracuse.
Connors told him about a whirling dervish of a kid named Gene Fisch, who he’d seen play a few times, a kid who’d been tearing it up for a small Catholic school on the West Side of the city called Sacred Heart. He told Weise that the Parochial League playoffs were starting in a few days and that he should drive to Syracuse to take a look at the kid for himself.
Weise, however, said he was busy that weekend, scouting kids in nearby Buffalo. So, instead, he dispatched his freshman coach and assistant, a guy named Fred Handler, to Syracuse to check out Fisch.
The star of the playoff game that Handler saw that night at the War Memorial, however – and the best kid on the court all evening – was not Gene Fisch. It was a second sawed-off little sparkplug who happened to catch his eye, a kid playing for the other club and one who gave the lightning quick Fisch fits all game long, from start to finish.
What’s more, that kid was the clear leader of his team, St. John the Baptist, who'd swept the floor with Fisch's bigger and stronger Sacred Heart club.
The kid who'd caught Handler’s eye was named John Riley, that's what Weise told Connors over the phone the following week. Said Riley was tough as nails, could shoot a bit, and had an incredible court sense. That was the kid he wanted for the Bonnies, Weise told Connors, not Fisch.
He added that Handler also came back singing the praises of two other St. John’s kids; a junior ball handler and heads-up ball hawk named Fran Satalin and a lanky, sophomore swingman, Satalin’s little brother, Jimmy.
That’s how, in three successive seasons three consecutive St. John the Baptist players – John Riley in 1962, Fran Satalin in 1963 and Jimmy Satalin in 1964 – ended up going to St. Bonaventure and ended up playing varsity basketball for the good old Brown Indians of Olean.
And it all started because of an impromptu scouting trip to see a young first-generation Pole named Gene Fisch playing for a tiny, mostly Polish Catholic Academy named Sacred Heart.
So here it was a full five years later almost to the day of that life-changing scouting trip. And, once again, here were Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist squaring off with something on the line that ran a whole lot deeper than the simple outcome of a single Parochial League game.
For Billy E and his Heartsman it was a chance to grab a piece of local basketball immortality.
And for Frank Satalin it was about school and personal pride, to be sure. But more than that, it was about the thoughts and prayers of father/coach for his son and former player, even in the heat of his most anticipated game of the year.
Just three weeks earlier, you see, Jimmy Satalin had undergone brain surgery for a life-threatening aneurysm that had forced him to leave his fellow St. Bonnies starters – including All American center, Bob Lanier – and sit on the sidelines for the full five months of the season. He watched helplessly as his teammates continued to defy the odds and battle game after game against bigger, deeper, and far more moneyed programs to try to bring home a little glory, if not a national title, to their tiny campus in the sleepy little town nestled deep within that wooded and far-off stretch of New York State’s fabled Route 17.
So if Frank Satalin’s thoughts had occasionally drifted beyond the four walls of that sun-drenched gym that Sunday afternoon, he could be forgiven.
Nevertheless, the Dean of Parochial League coaches continued to lead his boys as if they were playing for first place, and continued to be the aggressor against a vastly superior Sacred Heart team in ways that, frankly, few in the stands had ever really seen from him before.
As for Billy, he simply hitched up his pants, pushed his glasses back up his nose and went back to work. His kids had pulled even and now it was almost as though the scoreboard had been reset to zero and the clock reduced to just ten minutes of game time. Whoever won the next ten minutes, in other words, would win the game.
Billy E, admittedly, was surprised when Satalin chose to replace Duda with a small, quick guard rather than one of his two remaining oak trees. Just as he was a little surprised that he continued to have his now significantly shorter team press the Heartsmen all over and have his boys still sprinting upcourt each and every time they got the ball. Yet he told his players, especially Schmid, to keep doing what they were doing. It was working, dammit.
Problem was, Billy E had no fuel gauge on hand and no way of knowing just how close to empty his starters’ gas tanks had grown, worn down by a long season, the weight of so many expectations, their inability to get any shots to fall with any consistency, and all the extra work they were being forced to do just to get the ball upcourt. These things had all conspired to sap Billy's boys of what, in horse racing terms, might have been called their finishing kick. They were running on fumes. But their coach had yet to recognize it.
As play resumed, once again Schmid flashed up toward the ball. Once again, he received it. And once again he lowered his head and dribbled hard to the right to get across the timeline. However, after having done that same move so many times that quarter, Paul Padden had anticipated what Schmid was going to try to do. He jumped directly in the big man’s path as he neared mid-court and planted both feet in a way that would have made even Bob Felasco proud.
Schmid barreled into Padden who, in turn, went sprawling toward his own bench. From his backside and at ground level, the young St. John’s guard looked up just as the ref standing above him blew his whistle and slapped an open palm against the back of his neck, indicating an offensive foul on the Sacred Heart big man.
Padden jumped up screaming and clenched his fist in celebration. Like every one of those Baptist kids, he wanted to win that game as much as he’d ever wanted to win any game he'd ever played. But as he was celebrating, and as the crowd was roaring it mix of delight and disbelief, he caught his coach’s eye and, in a flash, amid all the pride that his coach was feeling for his heads-up play, Padden also saw an ever slight hint of disappointment for how he reacted to having made it.
Screaming and pumping one’s fist was not a dignified, Frank Satalin sort-of-behavior in any walk of life, much less on a basketball court, and Padden knew it. His coach had taught him by example, time and time again, over the years. Padden quickly caught himself, cleared his head, and popped over to the sideline to inbound the ball, his game face now, once again, squarely back in place.
That’s what made the second charging call he drew on Schmid just a moment later all the sweeter. The ball still went over to his team. Pete Schmid still picked up a key foul. And the Hearts were denied yet another scoring opportunity by their gutty, outmanned opponents from the North Side.
But this time there was no celebrating on Paul Padden’s part. There was no scream nor was there even a single fist pump. There was only a workmanlike focus on the task at hand. That’s why, when Padden popped up and caught Frank Satalin’s eye this time, he saw all the pride, and even the faint trace of a smile, but none of the disappointment.
Meanwhile, as the thundering cheers continued to flood down from the Baptist side of the gym, on the Hearts side there was only a slightly mumbled, slightly grumbled and very real sense of frustration as two cold, hard truths began to sink in. Just as quickly as they’d lost it, St. John the Baptist had somehow managed to rebuild its lead back up to a full seven points. And on top of that, the Hearts’ best player, Pete Schmid, was now headed to the bench – like Baptist’s best – with four fouls.
When all was said and done, and when the bleeding finally stopped for the Hearts, Frank Satalin’s St. John the Baptist boys had managed to rip off twelve consecutive points from the middle of the third period to the early moments of the fourth. In the process, they’d somehow, and to many fans' disbelief, turned a 40-40 tie into a 52-40 lead with just under four minutes to play – against the mighty Hearts, no less.
Those Baptist kids had looked the dragon straight in the eye, even as it was coming at them with full-throated fury, all claws bared and snorting fire, and they'd not even flinched.
John Riley’s suggested 3-1-1 press (and his frenetic, if not relentless, fast break) had not only worked, it had managed to do what many Parochial League observers had considered almost impossible. It had so unnerved Billy E’s powerful and undefeated Heartsmen, and so knocked them off their game, that by the end of the contest, they were team chasing the ball around like headless chickens and eliciting a touch of Catholic-school sympathy from many in the stands, just as Baptist had done a few weeks prior.
Ironically, once again Billy found himself in a position to give his Chinese Bandits some minutes in a blowout. The irony, however, was the fact that this time it was not Sacred Heart on the giving end of that blowout. It was them on the receiving end.
To his credit, Billy E never stopped coaching. He kept yelling at his kids, and kept trying to lead them, as if he and the Hearts were playing with the sense they could still somehow win, even as their most talented players sat there on the bench, a dazed look in their eyes, and a few – like Zaganczyk – with their heads hung low in abject shame.
The knot in Billy’s stomach may have been as big and as tight as an ironworker’s fist, but he didn’t let it show. He couldn’t. Just like the whole Friday/good-luck/weekly routine thing that he eschewed as a matter of principle, showing such emotion – such disappointment – was simply not part of his makeup. He was a glass half-filled guy and would remain so until the Good Lord called him home.
Meanwhile, in the stands the Hearts fans were torn. Many wanted to simply leave and go home, if only to spare themselves the ignominy of having to watch any more of the carnage. But far more felt compelled to stay, perhaps out of appreciation for all the things those twelve kids had done for them all year long. After all, they were twelve young men who for four straight months had stoked their Polish pride, filled their Polish hearts with joy, and given their Polish spirits one thrilling moment after another.
There was one thing, at least, on which almost everyone on the Hearts side of the building could agree: it was no longer time to cheer or even feign excitement. For practical purposes, the game was over. For that reason, the vast majority of those Poles and Hearts fans simply sat there and watched in some degree of silence, their hands and voices stilled, perhaps looking ahead, instead, to the upcoming Parochial League playoffs, that remained on tap for the coming Friday night.
The only voice that could still be heard distinctly was that of Irene Contos who, despite the score, simply couldn’t bring herself to give up. Maybe it was the competitive athlete she’d once been and that still dwelt deep inside her, the one whose heart still beat with the fire of a lioness protecting her cubs.
At one point, as the Hearts were working it around, down fifteen and with the second hand of the clock continuing to spin unabated, the ball found its way into the waiting hands of Jimmy Pryzbyl, one of the most intense but offensively challenged of Billy’s Bandits. Like so many average and below average players up and down Parochial League rosters, Pryzbyl had a gnawing habit always taking one dribble before letting a shot fly; perhaps using that little quirk as a psychological crutch or, maybe, a trigger mechanism.
Regardless, when the ball came his way and found him wide open in the right corner, Irene Contos watched the wiry, rail-thin Polish boy look up and take aim. Then, just before he pulled the trigger, the senior stringbean lowered his head and Irene, still entirely into the game, instinctively bolted up from her seat and screamed out in a voice that rose above the relative quiet like a cawing raven taking flight.
“NO!!! DON’T DRIBB…!”
Before Irene could even get the word “dribble” out, once again Jimmy Pryzbyl's quirky little pre-shot routine got the better of him and one of the Baptist subs, a barrel-chested kid with long arms, had time to take two giant steps toward Pryzbyl, stretch his right hand high and swat the ball onto the Ludden stage, where it caught in one of the two, large curtains draped on either side and fell back to earth.
Irene just stood there for a moment, crestfallen, with the same look she might have worn had Pryzbyl’s shot attempt been for all the marbles instead of just another lost moment in an entirely forgettable game. Contos exhaled loudly, shook her head from side to side, then plopped down on her dupa without even looking, a disgusted expression on her face.
Turning to the guy next to her, a stranger to whom she’d yet to speak even a single word, Irene offered through another exhale and still-furled brow: “That boy and his one extra dribble…Ugh.” She balled her fists tightly and shook them as he spoke, as a sign of her frustration. The first lady of the Contos household then, almost to herself, added, “What can I say? He’s a good kid, but let’s face it. He’s One-Dribble Pryzbyl.”
As the game was winding down, it had become such a laugher that, frankly, both men on both benches stopped coaching, at least to some degree.
In Frank Satalin’s case – even as the Baptist fans were cheering for what would soon prove to be one of the wildest upsets and most unlikely games in Parochial League history, and even as many of them were pinching themselves, trying to come to grips with the notion they were about to beat the most powerful team in the city, the mighty Heartsmen of Sacred Heart – his mind once again drifted elsewhere. He thought of Jimmy laying in his hospital bed down in New York City, still reeling from his brain surgery, his bandages still wrapped snugly about his shaved, sliced and stitched-up again noggin.
He looked around, too, and took in the gym that he knew in ways that, frankly, his opposite number, Billy E, simply did not. After all, he had a relationship with that wonderful new facility that stretched back to the summer of the previous year.
That summer, Satalin and fellow mailman, Don Blaich, had co-sponsored and run a week-long basketball camp at Bishop Ludden for grammar school boys. The latter was, of course, the longtime ref who’d been working with Henry Ponti that fateful day when Ponti made that hotly debated call in the previous year’s All City game that had disqualified the great Jimmy Collins of Corcoran and turned the tide for the eventual victor, St. John the Evangelist.
But as he looked around the gym, the thoughts triggered were not of Don Blaich, or basketball, or even the boys he so loved to teach how to play the game the right way. No, the thoughts that came over him were of his pretty wife from Tipp Hill, Virginia Ryan, who had supported him in just about every way a woman could support a man. That included getting up every day that summer before the sun to make, cut and wrap some eight or nine dozen bologna, roast beef, chicken, egg salad, tuna fish and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for dozens of young boys whose parents had forked over $20 each so that their son might be able to attend her husband’s weeklong clinic and learn basketball from one of the city’s best coaches.
That’s who Frank Satalin thought of as he slowly looked around the gym that sunny day at Bishop Ludden: of his devoted wife who loved him, and of his sick son who needed him.
Then he did what any good Catholic father would do when confronted with such a moment of humbling and divine realization. He said a silent prayer and thanked God for all He’d given him, including His most recent and unlikeliest gift of all, that day’s win over Sacred Heart.
As for Billy E, the grim realization of the dream being over had long since sunk in and he was surprisingly okay with it. It hurt, to be sure. But it was, after all, just one game. His boys had still won the Parochial League regular season title and would be favorites to win the playoffs as well, which were now just a few days away. That’s what Billy chose to focus on as he sat there and waited for the clock to run down to zero. That’s what, Billy reminded himself, really mattered in the larger scheme of things. Not the loss.
Yet, make no mistake, part of him was so mad for all that had just slipped through his fingers that he wanted to punch something, and punch it hard. And that little kernel of truth did not bode well for at least a few in town, but in particular, Charles Eckermann, the somewhat boxy, doughy and smarmy Ludden assistant principal who, before Billy could leave, and before he could get himself a cold beer to wash away the bitter taste, he had to see about settling up their account and getting Sacred Heart’s half of the gate.
After Billy told his boys how proud of them he was, and that they shouldn't hang their heads because they still had plenty of work to do, what with a playoff game against St. Vincent’s just around the corner, he left the locker room, slipping one arm into one sleeve of his overcoat as he did. He made a beeline for a hallway down which, he sensed, he might find the assistant principal’s office. No sense waiting for Eckermann, thought Billy. I want out of here, and I want out of here now.
A few straggling Hearts fans milling about offered their coach some pithy bromides about getting ‘em next time and shaking it off, but he only half listened and only half acknowledged them. The only thing he could think about was getting out of that place with all its new-school look and new-school smell.
He ran into Eckermann down the hall. The priest was all set to greet him with one of his automated, plastic smiles, but then remembering that Billy’s team had just lost, instead offered him a lukewarm, “Sorry about the game, Coach.”
Billy E shrugged and then, not wanting to be rude, quickly added, “I appreciate your concern Father. I really do. And thanks. But I really need to be on my way.”
Even as he was saying that, Eckermann reached into his inside pocket and took out a folded and worn letter-sized envelope containing what was clearly a stack of bills. He handed the envelope to Billy with another one of those plastic smiles of his, a smile for which Billy, frankly, had lost all patience.
Without saying a word and without even looking at the priest, Billy opened the envelope and began counting. It didn’t take long. There was just $117.25.
Billy E made no effort to hide his disgust.“What’s this?”
“Your cut,” replied Eckermann, his smile becoming more plastic and more forced with each passing moment.
“Gimme a break,” shot back Billy. “There were at least 600 people in there today, probably closer to 700.”
“Well, yes,” said the priest. “But, you see, I had to deduct for the janitor and, of course, the lights and water. Certainly, you can understand that.”
Billy looked at him hard. “That wasn’t the deal,” he snapped. “Our deal was we split the gate 50/50. You take whatever it is you have to take to cover your expenses out of your half. You got that? The other half’s ours. That was the deal. There was no damn janitor in the deal!”
Billy E was steamed now. For the most part, he’d been able to swallow his anger, having just lost the biggest game of his life. But now that anger was boiling so hard he felt it might choke him.
“Gimme my money,” he raged, his eyes growing wide and his pointed finger now just inches from the priest’s nose. Eckermann’s back was flush against one of the grey lockers in the hall, his spine completely erect and immobile. But for an old high school friend of Billy’s from VO, a guy named Tony De Rose, intervening, things might have turned ugly – at least uglier – especially considering the fact that a Russian Orthodox layman was now seconds away from laying out a Catholic priest – in his new fancy, schmancy school, no less.
De Rose, a West Ender who’d bought a house in Westvale a few years back, had been at the game simply because his old high school buddy was coaching it. But quickly surmising what was happening, he raced up to Billy, grabbed his friend and pulled him away, creating a few feet of breathing room between him and the priest, who then called Billy an "asshole."
“Give…me…my…money,” repeated the seething coach directly into Eckermann’s face, even as De Rose held his arm in a good, old-fashioned Lower West End vice grip.
His pasted-on smile now but a memory, Charlie Eckermann, without even making eye contact with the coach or his buddy (whose two sons, ironically, were both students at Ludden), quickly turned and announced meekly over one shoulder, “Wait here.” He then walked quickly toward his office with a new-found sense of purpose and more than a touch of relief.
None of Billy’s kids, of course, took the loss well either. But none was any more deeply impacted than Joe Zaganczyk, the young man for whom this weekend was supposed to be a triple header of teenage possibility. The Lucy’s game on Friday was great, of course, because his team had won a thriller and he’d scored more points than he ever had in his life. And the S.U. frat party on Saturday night had been equally fabulous, because his band had the entire house rocking and because he’d had more than a few moments with a handful of pretty college girls.
But this destroyed everything and made it seem, at least to Joe, as though those two other things never really happened, or maybe happened to some other lucky schoolboy.
What’s more, Zaganczyk blamed himself entirely for the loss, believing that if he’d been better, or shot better, Sacred Heart might have been able to pull out a win. Joey Zaganczyk, in fact, would end up feeling so ashamed by his play in the seventeen-point loss that he'd pretend to be sick the following morning so that his mother would let him stay home. That way he wouldn’t have to face his friends and schoolmates, every one of whom he felt he’d let down with what he’d consider to be, even decades later, the single most God-awful performance of his basketball life.
That’s also why, even though he’d gone to ten o’clock mass that morning with the Pryzbyl family and then ridden to the game with them, he told Mr. and Mrs. Pryzbyl afterward to take Jimmy and go on without him. He said he wanted to walk home alone because he needed some time.
And that’s exactly what Joe Zaganczyk did. He walked the three miles from Westvale to his house in the West End by himself, even as a number of those from the parish – people who’d been at the game and who’d seen him play – pulled over on Fay Road or elsewhere and asked the young shooter and wanna-be pop star if he needed a lift.
On that brilliant, sunny and unseasonably warm afternoon, one of the most magnificent in anyone's memory, even though no one on Sacred Heart could find the range at any point, much less find it for an extended period of time, Joe Zaganczyk scored 20 of his team’s 53 points, the highest total on either side of the ledger.
Pete Schmid chipped in with 14, though those 14 points represented a season-low and one of his most paltry totals since moving into Billy E’s starting lineup midway through his sophomore season.
No other Hearts boy that day managed to score even double figures.
* * * * *
