As the Parochial League season headed into March, even the most casual fan in town knew that Billy E and his boys hadn't lost a game. Not once. What’s more, with the exception of Bobby Felasco’s Evangelist club, the current incarnation of which had given the Heartsmen all they could handle in January, they’d not even been pushed that hard.
It's true that by 1967, the Parochial League was not nearly as deep as it had been prior to Syracuse’s suburban exodus, which had begun in earnest a few years earlier when the 15th Ward first began to fall. But that exodus was now accelerating and sapping the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods of much of their local color and flavor – not to mention basketball talent.
Be that as it may, Sacred Heart was the most physically imposing team in the Parochial League, and that might have held true even if the Heartsmen had been competing in the City or County League.
But, despite the league'e overall dilution of schoolboy talent, the fact that the Hearts were unbeaten in Parochial League play was still significant, especially to Billy E. The Hearts basketball program had only managed to pull off one undefeated season in its brief existence, and that was late in the previous decade when Gene Fisch and Richie Pospiech were lighting up the scoreboard and the humorless taskmaster, Adam Markowski, was the coach.
Billy had been an assistant on that team, and to many Polish old-timers on the West Side he would always live in Markowski’s shadow, and remain inferior to him, both as a strategist and a role model. Markowski, in their eyes, had been a dignified, disciplined, and even slightly feared leader. Billy, on the other hand, at least to a certain type of parishioner, was an imp, a jokester.
But the deeper he and his team got into the season, and the closer the Hearts came to finishing with an unblemished record, the more Billy E found himself fighting the urge to consider the broader implications of what an undefeated season might mean to his reputation, including what it might do to finally shut up shut up all those hard-liners and doubters.
Just as any good coach, Billy’s goal at any point that season was pretty simple: to prepare his team to win the next game on the schedule. It was never to run the table or, heaven forbid, finish the season undefeated. Those things would simply come in time if they handled their business.
Yet, Billy E was human. He had a normal, healthy ego, along with a full understanding of what a few people in the parish continued to say about him. Given that, the Hearts’ head man couldn’t help but want to bring home a big, fat 18-0 record to hang on the wall for all those Markowski-loving Poles to look at year after year, long after he’d gone.
There was another factor too: Billy E had a not-so-dirty little secret, and that was the fact he wasn’t even Polish. Billy was Russian. His parents’ people had emigrated from tsarist Russia two generations prior and he’d been raised in Syracuse’s Lower West Side in a working class and devout Russian Orthodox household. He’d also attended public schools his whole life, not Catholic ones, including Vocational High, which would eventually, of course, become Corcoran.
Billy’s family’s original church of choice was St. John the Baptist on Wilbur Ave. But St. John’s eventually became Ukrainian, so the Ewaniszyks migrated to a smaller and humbler Russian Orthodox church in town. He later began attending a tiny Polish National church, Holy Cross, in nearby Lakeland. There he met, fell in love with, and eventually married a warm-hearted Polish beauty named Bernice.
In time, Billy converted to Catholicism and he and Bernice began attending Sacred Heart every Sunday at 10 a.m., a weekly ritual that led most in their new parish to simply assume – incorrectly – that their new assistant coach was, like them, a Pole.
But back to basketball.
As the Parochial League season careened toward its conclusion, it became abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that three teams had proven a cut above the rest; Billy’s Heartsmen, Felasco’s Eagles, and the team from St. John the Baptist, a collection of North Side German, Italian and Irish kids coached by Frank Satalin, the soft-spoken and almost regally dignified mailman from Tipp Hill. Satalin had been the guy who, two decades prior, had come in, harnessed the exquisite talents of four African American kids from the 15th Ward, among them Ormie Spencer and Milt Fields, and, in the process, turned St. Lucy’s into an early ‘50’s superpower in Syracuse high school basketball.
With a handful of games yet to play, the Hearts stood at 13-0, Evangelist at 12-1, and Satalin’s Baptist squad at 9-4. Yet one particular Friday during that season’s stretch run would end up being about something more than just another night of Parochial League play. It would serve as a harbinger of a fundamental shift in the city, though few saw it as such at the time.
Because on Friday evening, February 10, 1967, two of the five Parochial League affairs – a doubleheader pitting Evangelists vs. St. Lucy’s in the opener and St. Vincent’s vs. Cathedral in the nightcap – would be held, not at one or two dimly lit and tiny parish-based gyms, as had always been the case, or even the stately War Memorial; instead, the four teams would meet in a shiny all-new City League gym, the well-lit and well-appointed facility at the just-completed Bishop Grimes, a regional Catholic high school in East Syracuse.
Acting head of the diocese, David Cunningham, Syracuse’s de facto bishop during Bishop Foery’s protracted decline in health, had doubled down in the two years since breaking ground for Bishop Ludden, choosing to build a second regional senior high school for the diocese – a bookend mate to Ludden, so to speak – this one serving kids in the city’s East Side neighborhoods and suburbs.
Bishop Grimes was, in fact, so new and so far off the beaten path, in a semi-rural section of Kirkville on the eastern edge of the county, that the following paragraph had to be inserted by the Post-Standard into that Friday’s story listing the Parochial League games on tap for the evening:
For those unfamiliar with the new Bishop Grimes High School, it’s suggested to travel James St. to Thompson Rd. and turn left. Then a right at the light at Exeter St. Continue to bear right onto the Kirkville road. The school is located on the left side of the Kirkville road.
The Diocese of Syracuse now had two brand-new and ultra-modern, regional Catholic high schools – one on its East Side, the other on the West – both shiny and bright, and both siphoning students from the ten Parochial League schools at an accelerating rate, luring kids and their families to still-underdeveloped areas beyond the city limits that carried the implied promise of a safer, more verdant, and less congested life than the one to which so many of them had grown accustomed, if not worn down by.
A new day had dawned, a day that, alas, had little regard for such quaint concepts as a league of parish-based, K-12 schoolhouses, the wheezing relic that, for all its legend and lore, now sat perched precariously on the increasingly frail shoulders of an aging, insular, and ever-dwindling army of overworked and underpaid nuns.
But enough of that. Once again, back to basketball.
In its final four games, Billy E’s club was set to play, in order, St. John the Evangelist, Assumption, St. Lucy’s and St. John the Baptist. It should come as no surprise that in the very first of those – a rematch against Bob Felasco’s eternally scrappy Eagles; this time at the gym of another all-new school, Henninger High – the Evangelist kids once again came out with fire in their eyes and a sense of purpose. And, once again, they gave the taller and brawnier Heartsmen all they could handle before finally succumbing.
Fortunately for Billy E, just as in the first matchup, the one on Hearts’ court, once again Felasco and his Eagles had no answer for the guy so many kids in school called “Igor” – big Tom Sakowski – who somehow managed to play yet another “game of his life” to once again lead his Hearts to a hard-fought eight-point victory. The rematch, like the January affair, was far closer than the final tally might have indicated.
With, now, just two games remaining, Billy E was so close to an undefeated season he could taste it. A truly perfect team, he knew, would be quicker than his and armed with better ball-handlers and, perhaps, a more offensive-minded 6th man. Still, given where the Parochial League was after an almost magical four-decade run that now seemed to be nearing its end, Billy had a hard time imagining anything more perfect or fitting.
Also, one more win and his boys would clinch the Parochial League’s regular season title after finishing runner up the year prior to Felasco’s Evangelist club, a Parochial League team for the ages. What would await for them after that would be the league and diocesan playoffs, sandwiched around, of course, the All City Game.
But before all that postseason drama and uncertainty could play itself out, there was the little matter of the perfect season, about which no Hearts kid dared even speak, for fear of jinxing it.
The final two regular season games came down to an away contest for a share of the title against St. Lucy’s, a top-heavy club with a top-heavy roster from, arguably, the most cash-strapped parish in the city, and a home game against St. John the Baptist, currently the league’s third place team. St. Lucy's, based on talent and history alone, figured to be a breeze for Billy E's boys. But Baptist's, assuming the Heartsmen dispatched of Lucy's as expected, would spell the difference between an 18-0 mark and immortality and a 17-1 mark and being remembered in so many bars and taverns in town as just one more of the Parochial League's dozens of great teams over the years.
But Lucy’s came first. Billy E knew it would be a fool’s errand to overlook that ragtag collection of Lower West End kids. In their first meeting on in January, a game played on the Hearts home court, Billy’s boys had won by thirteen, in large measure because they pulled away at the end, when what was basically a three-man St. Lucy’s squad simply ran out of gas. But Billy had seen something in Lucy’s that night. No team in the league – beyond Evangelist, of course – had been so stubborn or played his team as tough in the face of such long odds.
One of the three Lucian cornerstones, an Irish kid named Mike Higgins, was a shooter with an elegant and deadly jumper and an uncanny nose for the ball. Billy E and Higgins went as far back as Little League, and for a while the young man’s parents had been talking to Billy about sending their boy to Sacred Heart so he could play for him. Higgins’ specialty was picking up the kind of “garbage” points that had recently become synonymous with the Celtics’ Bailey Howell, a talented NBA swingman from Mississippi State who regularly seemed to score a dozen points simply by grabbing offensive rebounds and/or picking up loose balls near his basket and converting them.
Another Lucian that year who could go toe-to-toe with just about anyone in the league – or at least would go toe-to-toe – was a youngster named Paul Maroney. “Red” Maroney was an Irish bulldog; a stocky, blocky, fireplug who simply did not back down from anyone, anywhere, regardless of size and stature, and a bright-eyed kid who, for all he lacked in talent, more than made up for it in toughness. Maroney wasn’t a great shooter, but he was a clutch shooter. If Lucy’s coach Bob Banack needed someone to hit a shot at any point in a game, there was a good chance that’s exactly who would take it upon himself to step up.
What’s more, Maroney always seemed to get the ball into the right teammate’s hands at just the right moment – which, for a team given to long stretches of disjointed and, at times, me-first play, served as a breath of fresh air, especially early in the season.
In the two teams’ first matchup, in fact, it was Red Maroney who carried the Lucians until his teammates woke up and realized they were in the middle of a game against the league’s first-place club, one that had the talent and depth to turn them into roadkill.
In that first go-round, amid the partisan roar of the Hearts crazies, Maroney had quieted them considerably by hitting all five of his first quarter shots, scoring all but one of his team’s points, a perfect shooting performance that allowed his undermanned Lucians to trail by just a single point as the first quarter buzzer sounded.
By far, the Lucians’ best player that season, however – and, possibly, the most sublimely talented player the league had seen in years – was a junior southpaw named Lloyd “Tookie” Chisholm, a soft-spoken, humble kid who'd led the Parochial League in scoring his sophomore year and was now doing the same his junior year, ranking just ahead of the Schmid in the league’s scoring race.
The 6'3" Chisholm had been one of five African Americans on the previous year’s Lucy’s squad, a team that placed third in the Parochial League, trailing only Felasco’s Eagles and Billy E’s Heartsmen. Of the five Black youngsters who’d worn the scarlet-and-white that season, only Chisholm remained.
One of them, a talented and slightly undersized freshman guard named Craig Caldwell with a childlike countenance, an impeccable court sense and some great ball handling skills had transferred to Central. A rail-thin jumping-jack with bad hands and a good heart named Lou Moore, whose jaw-dropping vertical leap allowed the young man to, literally, touch the top of the backboard, had been graduated. And Len Reeder, the junior forward with the cast-iron will and the heart of a lion, had taken his steely determination and transferred to Corcoran to play for Ken Huffman.
Tookie Chisholm was, therefore, the only Black kid remaining on a team with a long and glorious history in the Parochial League, dating back to the days of African American stars like Norman Reaves, Ormie Spencer, Milt Fields, Malchester Reeves and Carl Foy.
For many white kids in Syracuse, Tookie Chisholm – one of only four or five Black players in the entire Parochial League in 1967 – developed something of his very own mythology largely based on stereotypes, half-baked perceptions and, to be fair, ignorance.
Tookie was so much better than anyone else in the Parochial League, or so went the mythology, because he was taller and his arms longer. He was better because he was older; as old, perhaps, as nineteen, or twenty, or maybe even twenty-one. And though he may have been talented, was the thinking among many in Syracuse's all-white parishes, he was lazy. Not only that, but he wasn’t smart and never bothered to go to class. Didn't have to, was the word. Oh yeah, he also may have had two or three kids already, and by different women. Heck, the guy might have even once killed a man.
The reality was, the 17-year old Tookie Chisholm, while long and angular, was still only 6’3” in his stocking feet, the same height as Jack Contos. And he was a good deal shorter and thinner than both Contos’ frontcourt mates, Tom Sakowski and Pete Schmid, along with at least a half dozen or so other forwards and centers in the Parochial League.
Also, he was anything but lazy or evil. Tookie was a good kid who loved basketball, lived to play it sunup to sundown, and regularly did so against the very best the city had to offer, including the S.U. stars-of-the-day, guys with names like Dave Bing, Jim Boeheim, Sam Penceal and Vaughn Harper.
Tookie’s mother had been a terrific ballplayer in her time, too; unlike his father, who was neither rangy, nor athletic, nor, as it turned out, given to sticking around all that much. As a lithe, former athlete, and one who still loved the game she grew up playing, and who longed to be in the company of those who loved it too, Onetha Chisholm, now a hairdresser and mother of four, befriended and hung out with many like-minded jazz-and-basketball loving cats from the 15th Ward.
She eventually became good friends with Al Nelson, the brawny 15th Warder who once made local history by breaking the Parochial League’s color barrier when, in 1948, he and his little brother enrolled at St. John the Evangelist and began lacing them up for Bobby Felasco.
For a while, Onetha even dated the gentlemanly Earl Lloyd, the first black man to ever play in the NBA, a prodigal, soft-spoken giant from Virginia who, alone for the first time in his life, found a home-away-from-home in Syracuse's 15th Ward. It was Lloyd who gave little Tookie his very first basketball and who helped him fall in love with the game that he, himself, played for money. And it was Lloyd who regularly left tickets for Onetha and her kids, so that they all might come to watch him and his Nats mates play such NBA rivals as the Celtics, Knicks and Pistons.
Nelson, in fact, was how Tookie eventually ended up at St. Lucy’s, even though he lived on the other side of town and had already enrolled at H.W. Smith, a public junior high just a two-block walk from his home. Onetha, her parents and kids had once lived on Renwick Place in the heart of the Ward, that tiny patch of Black heaven where Jackie Robinson had once stayed when he was a Montreal Royal and that Manny Breland and others continued to refer to as “Sugar Hill” for all it meant in terms of standing and status in Syracuse’s Black community.
But that was all before Urban Renewal and Interstate 81 began gobbling up block after block of the Ward, including, alas, Sugar Hill. Once that tiny symbol of African American achievement fell prey to Mayor Walsh’s wrecking ball and erased from the face of the city as though it never existed, Onetha and her family found themselves with no alternative but to pull up stakes and move to East Fayette Street, a mile or so east of the now-empty lot where their cozy little family home had once stood so proudly.
The elder Nelson, who’d recently taken the job as Lucy’s head coach, had watched Onetha’s baby boy develop over the years and watched the ease and skill with which the still-skinny beanpole handled and shot the ball. He convinced his friend to send her son to Lucy’s, where Nelson promised he’d mentor him and toughen him up a bit, making him a better all-round player in the process.
That's how a skinny, 110-pound 9th grader named Lloyd “Tookie” Chisholm began what would become his own personal, four-year/five-day-a-week sojourn from one side of Syracuse to the other. Each school day began with an hour-long hike from 1408 East Fayette Street, through the heart of downtown, and on to St. Lucy’s Academy on Gifford Street. Rain or shine, he'd walk those two-plus miles by himself, and march them even in the dead of winter, many times before the sun came up and, often, well after dark. Once in a while, he'd grab the Fayette Street bus and transfer to the Gifford Street one, but only if it was pouring and he had a spare quarter – which, of course, meant Tookie rarely rode to or from school, unless his coach happened to offer him a ride home after practice on a particularly miserable night.
To be fair, while much of the mythology surrounding Tookie was empty noise and the product of so many half-truths and fabrications, there was a meaningful part of it that was, indeed, based in fact. For one example, Tookie Chisholm once did the unthinkable. He hit a nun. Smashed her good, in fact. And while he did it impulsively, and perhaps – perhaps – understandably, it was something that, not surprisingly, got him immediately kicked out of school.
The way it happened was that Tookie, in a pickup a game at Thornden Park, had taken a shot in the mouth from Dave Bing, the S.U. All American, who at the time was, possibly, the best college player in the country. Bing’s elbow not only loosened two of the kid’s front teeth, it put a gash into his upper gum that in less than 48 hours got infected.
So, on Thursday of the following week, when Tookie showed up late for school yet again, a stocky and preternaturally nasty nun named Sister Maria Jose, the school’s principal and resident hard-ass, took umbrage over the star player's chronic tardiness. She called Tookie into her office and began yelling at him. At one point, as her face grew redder and her blood reached near-boil, she opened her meaty right paw and slapped the youngster hard across his swollen mouth, sending a bolt of pain through him that began in those two loose front teeth of his and quickly radiated up and down his spine.
Instinctively, Tookie retaliated. His mouth tasting of blood and his eyes blurry with tears, he swung wildly at the nun, catching Sister Maria Jose flush on the right side of her face sending her sprawling backward onto her desk, the rosary beads about her waist coiling for a moment above her like a charmed cobra.
Stunned for second, then terrified by what he’d done, Tookie slowly backed up and then, in a panic, quickly bolted out of the office, scurrying off in the direction of the parish rectory, where he started banging on the thick oak door of the priests' house until a somewhat put-off Father Nichols opened it in a huff.
“What’s the problem here, young man?” snorted Nichols, clearly miffed by the boy’s non-stop, machine-gun rapping.
“I did something real bad, Father,” said Tookie, tears now steaming down his face. “Real, real bad. I just hit Sister Maria Jose.”
The priest looked at the youngster for the briefest of moments before his eyes darkened and a scowl crossed his face. Without saying word, Nichols shoved past Tookie and strode off toward his parish’s red brick schoolhouse, Onetha’s baby boy behind him every step of the way.
As one might expect, the incident triggered an immediate meeting of the parish brain trust, one in which 15-year old Lloyd "Tookie" Chisholm tried his best to plead his case to the Lucy's hierarchy: the school’s pastor, its athletic director, Father Nichols, and Sister Maria Jose, its principal and the ostensible victim.
The long and the short of the unseemly incident was that, following Tookie doing all he could to throw himself on the mercy of the "court," he was suspended for one day. The reason he wasn’t suspended longer or booted from school altogether was that it came out during the impromptu hearing that Tookie's action had been precipitated by the hard slap across his face by Sister Maria Jose, something that in the priests’ mind was an overzealous display of corporeal punishment, one that went beyond the traditional whack across the knuckles or the boxing of an unruly student’s ears – particularly in light of the young man's swollen and abscessed mouth.
Initially, the nun tried to deny slapping Tookie at all – much less doing so with force. But her roundhouse slap had caused the abscess in his upper gum-line to burst open, and, as he pleaded his case, the gruesome swirl of blood and puss that dribbled from his mouth and down his chin offered far more persuasive evidence than his words ever could.
With Sister Maria Jose suddenly on the defensive, the two priests began to view the boy’s actions in a softer and far more forgiving light. Even so, he had hit a nun, and he had sent her flying across a desk, so instead of letting him off scot-free, they imposed a nominal one-day suspension on him.
In a way, as word of the incident got around, it only added to the exaggerations and controversy that attached themselves to Tookie's life and story. One more interesting bit of negativity circulating among his detractors held that Tookie Chisholm was showing up at practice with beer on his breath. Not all the time, but on more than one occasion.
One other piece of information turned more than a few fans off to him, as well. Despite the fact that Syracuse was a hard-drinking town, even by Central New York lofty standards, and despite the fact that working class Catholics were, perhaps, its hardest drinkers of all, word soon spread that Chisholm was showing up at practice with beer on his breath. Not all the time, mind you, but on more than one occasion.
In fact, like so many other Parochial Leaguers, the young man did drink more than his fair share of beer. He and his buddies discovered they could buy three quarts of Topper, a low-end regional lager, for one dollar at the little market on Gifford Street; not enough to get them drunk, but certainly enough to take the edge off.
Regardless of the fact that drinking cheap beer had long been something of a rite of passage in the Parochial League, the fact that Tookie Chisholm was doing it proved to be one more piece of ammunition for those who wanted to demonize him.
The fact that Tookie wasn’t Catholic didn’t help matters either. Unlike a number of the other young black kids from the Ward who’d gone to Parochial League schools and/or grown to know Father Brady – young men like Al and Marshall Nelson, Ormie Spencer and Milt Fields, and even some who didn’t go to a Catholic high school, like Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow – Tookie never converted to Catholicism, even after enrolling at Lucy’s and becoming a Parochial Leaguer.
Instead, for a few months anyway, even though officially enrolled at St. Lucy’s, Tookie Chisholm continued to attend Sunday services each and every week at People’s AME Zion, near his former home. There he’d sit, pray, sing and listen to Reverend Emery Proctor preach his steely brand of spiritual brimstone and moral fortitude: at least he did until Mayor Walsh and his Urban Renewal boys opted to tear down every building on the block except People’s AME Zion. That simple pen-stroke of an executive order from City Hall may have physically saved the humble and unassuming little church from the wrecking ball, but in every other way it killed it. Because it killed everything living and good around it, including the homes of all the families who congregated there at least twice a week, and often more so.
And when everything around AME Zion fell – especially the houses and apartment buildings – despite protests from a broad coalition that included everyone from CORE and the NAACP to dozens of S.U. students and professors, along with thousands of Ward residents (including Tookie and Onetha), it made getting to the little church a bridge-too-far, especially since so many if them didn’t own cars and were forced to walk.
Before long, AME Zion, like so many businesses and institutions before it, was compelled to pull up stakes and move out of the Ward. In the church’s case, it was a move to a largely commercial block of South Salina Street, a relocation that fundamentally changed, not just the church, but its relationship with those who loved it. Because when People’s AME Zion left its home in the 15th Ward, it tore out the very heart of Syracuse’s proud and close-knit family of church-going, hand-clapping and Jesus-praising African Americans.
One of whom was Tookie Chisholm, the non-Catholic, beer-drinking high school baller with the oh-so feathery touch.
Even the young man’s nickname contributed to his complicated and near mythical status among many white basketball fans in town. He may have been “Lloyd” to sportswriters at the Post-Standard and Herald-Journal, but rarely did anyone who knew him, or knew of him, refer to him by his Christian name.
Instead, the lanky frontcourt star was simply, “Tookie,” the whimsical, almost childlike-sounding name that had been bestowed upon him by his mother’s mother when he was still laying on his back, chirping away and cooing in his crib.
Even that little kernel of background information about Chisholm, however, would turn out to be at least a touch confusing. Because, over the course of her life, every time his grandmother was asked how in the world she came up with “Tookie," she’d always say that even as a toddler “that boy was Tweety Bird.”
During his career at St. Lucy’s, Sacred Heart was, without a doubt, the one team against whom Tookie Chisholm loved to play. Which is something of a paradox because the young man hated to lose. And his Lucy's teams always lost to Billy E’s Heartsmen. Always.
But Tookie loved to play the Hearts because they were the one Parochial League team that consistently brought out his best, compelling him to push himself to his outer limits of his abilities each and every time he took the court against them.
In an odd sort of way, Tookie was jealous of those Heartsmen, of how sound they were fundamentally – how well-coached they were, and how things such as back screens, boxing out, extra passes, and backdoor cuts became almost second nature to them. Tookie knew the game. Knew how it should be played. It was how Sacred Heart played it. Not the way St. Lucy’s did.
Tookie had seen so many kids – kids with real skills – come to Lucy's and, despite their great talents, ultimately leave as less-than-great players. They didn’t understand the game or what it took to win consistently on Friday nights. Tookie did. People like Earl Lloyd taught him, as had people like Dave Bing and Jim Boeheim, among others. What he learned from those great players is that it wasn't so much talent, as it was teamwork that won the day.
Tookie also regularly studied strategies and on-court movement, almost as a coach might, especially on the pro games televised on ABC on Sunday afternoons. He never missed one of those weekly black-and-white broadcasts, often a knock-down/drag-out affair pitting Bill Russell’s Celtics, the league’s gold standard, against Wilt Chamberlain’s 76ers, a franchise just a few years removed from its glory days in Syracuse. Watching those NBA games, week after week, Tookie learned not to just follow the ball, but to follow how the best players – guy like John Havlicek – moved when they didn’t have it, paying careful attention to all the things they did to try to create openings for themselves and their teammates.
That kind of smart, technical basketball might have been a part of St. Lucy’s program years ago, but by 1967 it had given way to a more selfish brand of play, one that relied as much on raw talent and streaky shooting as it did training, teamwork and discipline.
In Tookie Chisholm’s mind, one such Lucy’s player who embodied that kind of “shoot first/ask questions later” mentality was a tall, handsome white boy from the Lower West End named Bob Bregard – “Gepper” to his friends and family – who was not just the cockiest kid that Tookie played with at St. Lucy’s, but, without question, the most stone-cold gunner he'd ever seen.
Gepper Bregard never met a shot he didn’t like and would take any shot from any spot and at any moment, regardless of how many teammates were open and what the situation warranted. Even years later, Chisholm would remember being a freshman at Lucy’s and screaming out to Bregard, a senior, for the ball because Bregard was being double teamed twenty or so feet away while he was virtually alone and unguarded under his own basket.
Even though Bob Bregard’s “let it fly” brand of ball had slowly infected the style (and quality) of play at St. Lucy’s, that season’s starting five under new coach Bob Banack had developed a strong rapport and played almost every opponent tough – or at least they did until crunch time in the final quarter when the thinness of their bench would betray them and, time and again, they’d run out of gas a few strides shy of the finish line.
That season, however, Lucy's young coach found an ingenious way to up the level of competition for his boys in practice. In doing so, Banack helped his team improve greatly, while mitigating much of the competitive edge that Billy E’s “Chinese Bandits” had long afforded him.
Banack worked at Niagara Mohawk, the local power company whose race-based and discriminatory hiring practices had been boycotted two years prior and turned into a burning issue lby, among others, Father Brady, CORE and hundreds of 15th Ward residents. One day, Banack recruited one of Niagara Mohawk's very first full-time African American hirees following Brady's successful boycott to scrimmage his boys. Dave Sims was a young and bull-strong 6’5” lineman from California who could play a little bit, and Sims subsequently offered to bring along a few of his work buddies. In return, Banack promised Simms he and his friends would end up getting some regular exercise, while helping his boys improve by the simple fact they'd now be facing grown men, rather than a bunch of physically overmatched teenagers, none of whom was good enough to start.
What’s more, like Sims – “Sweaty” Dave, to his fellow linemen – those four or five guys he started regularly bringing to practice with him were all twenty or thirty-something former high school or college players who were fast, strong and knew damn well how to play the game.
Suddenly, what had long been one of St. Lucy’s biggest weaknesses – the absurd thinness of its bench and lack of anyone to push its starters – became one of its greatest strengths. In the process, kids like Tookie Chisholm, Red Maroney and Mike Higgins became not just better individual players, they slowly began to evolve into a stronger and more cohesive unit.
The Lucians’ record against that year’s best teams didn’t necessarily reflect it, but by mid-February Coach Banack’s boys were, all of a sudden, no longer a group to be trifled with – especially as the march toward the playoffs intensified.
It was one of the many things that made Billy E uneasy as the final Friday of the regular season neared; along with, of course, the suddenly heightened focus that many in town – even a few of his own – were starting to place on his team’s gaudy 16-0 record. An undefeated team in the glare of the spotlight, one sporting a big, fat target on its back, was getting ready to do battle with an improving team led by a special player, and a team that at that point in the season found itself with, quite literally, nothing to lose.
In Billy's mind, the game had all the makings of a disaster.
Sure enough, from the moment the Hearts left the visitors locker room that Friday night, you could feel it in the air, almost as though it had a taste and texture. The atmosphere in that dog-eared Gifford Street gym even made the hairs on more than a few of those Hearts kids’ necks rise and stand at attention as they left their locker room. The setting may have been underwhelming – it was, after all, just little old St. Lucy’s, a ratty relic of a bygone era that might have looked at home with a couple of peach baskets nailed to either wall, and a court on which most of Billy E’s boys had been playing since grammar school – but the vibe was undeniably electric.
The hundreds of Lucy’s parishioners who’d crammed into the gym and who sat shoulder-to-shoulder, wedged in like so many sardines, were roaring at levels that were nerve-racking, even to a bunch of kids who’d been playing in front of boisterous, rowdy crowds their entire lives.
But who could blame those St. Lucy’s crazies? Their team had a chance to knock off the dreaded Heartsmen and ruin their perfect season. Moments like that just didn’t happen every day on the Lower West End.
The denizens of the scarlet-and-white loved their boys with all their hearts – almost as much as the most talented Lucian of all loved them. More than a half a century later, in fact, long after time, fate and poor health had turned him into a shadow of his former self, Tookie Chisholm would still be displaying proudly the high school class ring he'd earned years prior as a Parochial Leaguer. Because in that little Catholic enclave of working class white folks, crazy-strict nuns, and sage (and, at times, remarkably forgiving) priests, Tookie had found something he’d never really found before; a loyal, extended family, and people who not only loved and accepted him, but who demanded more of him; people who held him – a one-time racial, cultural and religious outsider – to a higher standard than he’d ever been held to, before or since; people who, despite all his flaws, still believed in him and his ability to lead their boys to Friday night glory.
As the two teams ran through their pre-game drills, and the two coaches exchanged pleasantries and good-lucks over near the scorer’s table, it was all Tookie could do to contain himself. He’d never been so ready to play a game and never prouder to be sporting the colors of St. Lucy’s, including the bold “S L A” emblazoned on the flap across the back of his scarlet-trimmed, white cotton warm-up, a piece of uniform embroidery that would fly up behind him like Superman’s cape every time he exploded upward to ram home one more monstrous pre-game dunk, a thundering display of power, hand size, and verticality that was a rare sight, indeed, in the Parochial League and the sound of which caused more than a few of the Heartsmen to look over their shoulder at the other end of the court.
Billy E remained confident but wary. After all, his team was undefeated for a reason. They possessed the strongest and most complete player in the league, Pete Schmid, along with a deep bench, and a starting five of tall, brawny and skilled kids whose collective lack of quickness, if not foot speed, could never be fully exposed by a court as intimate as St. Lucy’s. So, indeed, he had plenty of reasons to feel confident.
Yet, something about that evening – especially as he watched Chisholm warming up in front of him and felt the electricity being generated behind him by the throbbing horde of Lower West Enders – gnawed at him. Billy E, the consummate showman, jokester and barroom ringmaster, was suddenly feeling some unexpected butterflies. He stood there, hands in pockets, working on a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit, contemplating what he had quietly but most assuredly come to realize was going to be a war.
Sure enough, on the opening tip, Tookie bolted skyward, reached up toward the lights, and got his left hand on the ball at its near-peak, a half a tick or so before the taller but more deliberate Schmid. He tipped it to Red Maroney, who in turn whipped it up ahead to Joe Murman on the right wing for an open 16-footer that the youngster drained clean.
Just like that, mere seconds into the final Friday of regular-season play in the 1966-67 Parochial League season, the white bulbs on the ancient, dusty scoreboard on the far end of the gym flashed “St. Lucy 02, Visitor 00.” Meanwhile, the crowd behind Billy howled its delight and the creaky, wooden bleacher beneath him shook with the rumbled exultation of hundreds of stomping, salt-stained and still-wet rubber boots.
As Hearts brought the ball down for the very first time, Tookie hunched over and eyed Schmid, almost like a big cat might lie in wait for its prey. He had an idea he’d been hatching in anticipation of this moment; something he’d picked up earlier that week from Dave Sims, Coach Banack’s buddy from work.
Sims that particular day had fouled Tookie hard early – literally punched him in the stomach, in fact, when he went up for his first shot of the afternoon – an overt statement that not only hurt, but planted a seed of doubt in Tookie's mind that caused him to subsequently flinch the next three or four times he went up. Tookie thought about that, and thought about what such a hard, early foul might do to get Schmid off his game – as great as it may have been. Tookie Chisholm had been playing against Pete Schmid since both were 9th graders and he’d seen first hand how dominant the German could be.
But Tookie also viewed Schmid as a disciplined and highly mechanical player who always liked to color within the lines when it came to basketball. To Tookie’s thinking, his was not the kind of game that immediately translated to the rough-and-tumble ball he’d personally grown up playing in Kirk, Wilson and Thornden Park.
So, the very first time Schmid pump faked and went up, Tookie did much the same thing that Sims had done to him. Only, instead of driving his fist into the powerful Heartsman’s stomach, like Sims had done to him, he elbowed him hard in the ribs near the right baseline, something that elicited a throaty groan and ignited a spark of rage in Schmid’s eyes. The big forward hit his two foul shots, and Tookie did, indeed, pick up his first foul. But the message he hoped to send had been delivered, and it had been received loud and clear.
Despite their 7-9 record, St. Lucy’s – or at least Tookie Chisholm – wasn’t going anywhere for the next 32 minutes. And if Schmid and his Heartsmen wanted to keep that stupid little perfect season of theirs intact – on Tookie’s home court, no less – it was going to take every last ounce of everything they had.
For pure shooters, thanks to its matchbook size, the softness of its backboards and the almost comical looseness of its rims, there was no court in the entire Parochial League any more forgiving than the little gym on Gifford Street, just down the block from Paul Seymour’s liquor emporium. St. Pat’s was certainly in St. Lucy’s class as a favorable shooting venue, at least from the perspective of the two baskets. The difference was, though, the respective heights of the two ceilings.
At St. Pat’s, the forgivingness of its baskets was more than offset by its infamously low ceiling, a built-in height restriction that constantly forced any shooter to change the arc of his shot, especially from deep in the corner or out near the top of the key.
St. Lucy’s, on the other hand, had no such limitations. The ceiling was plenty high and the place relatively well-lit, at least compared to the other Parochial League gyms; something that, coupled with the well-worn nature of its spongy, wooden backboards and its decades-old rims, made it pure heaven for a shooter.
That’s why, a full decade prior, it was the gym where three of the deadliest shooters the league had ever seen – Richie Pospiech, Gene Fisch and Chuck Bisesi – combined to put up an astounding 111 points between them as the Hearts held on for a nail-biting 110-104 victory over the Lucians, the single highest scoring game in Parochial League history.
And this cold and snowy February night proved to be much like that record-breaking affair ten or so years earlier. It seemed as if neither the Heartsmen nor the Lucians could miss early on, especially two kids for whom high-scoring games were anything but a given; Joe Zaganczyk, the good-looking, Beatle-loving guard for the Hearts, and Mike Higgins, the St. Lucy’s kid with the sweet stroke and the uncanny knack for coming up with loose balls. Both youngsters were solid players, but hardly spectacular. And both proved to be something of a coach’s dream, consistently making precious few mistakes and more than their share of heads-up plays. Neither was the kind who was going to make any opposing coach lose sleep, though. Not like, say, Pete Schmid or Tookie Chisholm could.
On this night, however, those two youngsters found themselves in a groove. It was one of those times in a player’s life when everything he seems to throw up somehow finds the mark. In the first period alone, the two teams combined for 47 points in just eight minutes, with Sacred Heart emerging with a slim 25-22 lead.
In Zaganczyk’s case, he found himself with a little extra spring in his step because the upcoming weekend promised to be the very kind for which he lived, one full of the three things he loved most in the world: basketball, music and girls. There was the St. Lucy’s game on Friday, the gig at S.U. on Saturday with his band, Richie and the Strangers, and then another game on Sunday afternoon, against St. John the Baptist to close out what, in all probability, was going to be an undefeated season. Young Joey Zaganczyk, for all he may have lacked in home life and a sense of being loved, more than made up for in deliciously male pursuits.
Mike Higgins, on the other hand, had two things going for him that night: one being his hot hand, the other being the fact that Billy E had suddenly become so intent on trying to stop Tookie Chisholm, he was creating all sorts of opportunities for anyone willing and able to take advantage of them. Mike Higgins – the kid with the feathery touch and the uncanny knack for finding cracks in any defense – had suddenly become a beneficiary.
What Billy E had done midway through the first quarter, after Tookie scored six quick and relatively easy points, was put his team into a box-and-one he’d been working on that week in practice. He began alternating three of his relatively quick and athletic guards to dog the silky St. Lucy's star all over the court, while their teammates remained planted under the goal in a collapsible, defensive box. The three, Billy’s quarterback, Danny Van Cott, along with Leo Najdul and Richie Dabrowski, two of his most active and hyperkinetic Bandits, were then instructed to deny Tookie the ball and keep him as far away from his basket as possible. Wherever the Lucy’s scoring machine went on the floor, inside or out, one of their teammates would then immediately jump out (or down, or over) and double team him whenever he came anywhere near them or their quadrant of the box.
While that tactic may have slowed Tookie down some, he fully understood the extent to which it was creating openings elsewhere on the court. Not only did Mike Higgins have the luxury of, now, looser coverage, but a teammate more than willing to get him the ball when he was open. In the second quarter, as a result, during which big Tookie took (and made) only two shots the entire eight minutes, Higgins enjoyed the finest quarter of his basketball life, scoring twelve rapid-fire points to keep his Lucians hot on the heels of the Hearts, 53-51.
As the first half buzzer sounded and Billy E angrily strode off toward his locker room, he could barely think above the deafening roar and the non-stop pounding of so many winter boots, a jarring cacophony of sound and vibration that had spurred the kids in scarlet-and-white to play their best half of the season and was now driving him to distraction, while threatening to serve as the unofficial soundtrack of, quite possibly, the biggest Parochial League upset of all time.
A few miles to the West, that very same night, a bunch of Bishop Ludden and Central Tech kids, both Black and white, would be throwing haymakers at one another in a mix of anger, frustration and race-based fear, while one of them, a senior named Barry Thornton, would find himself having to disarm a schoolmate hell-bent on mayhem by forcibly separating him from the hatchet he’d been carrying.
But those things, even if Billy E had known about them, would have been of little consequence at that moment. In the beating heart of Syracuse’s Lower West End, he had his own set of problems, and they stemmed from the fact that a bunch of hustling, clawing and scratching ragamuffins – along with one uniquely gifted kid who made his way from the other side of town each and every school day – were refusing to acknowledge they weren’t as good as his boys and had no right being within spitting distance after sixteen minutes of play.
In the locker room, Billy exploded. He raged. He spit fire, nails and hot lead, all at the same time, lighting into his sweaty, panting and brawny charges – especially the starters – with uncharacteristic intensity, hitting them straight between their eyes and doing so with both barrels. He particularly took them to task for their shoddy defense and their almost criminal lack of effort.
It wasn’t true, of course, but the Hearts’ coach had a point to make. His Heartsmen were in trouble. If they didn't wake up, their undefeated season would gone be forever – and not just for this year, or the next, but for as long as God granted them breath.
Billy didn’t say those exact words, but that was his message. The Hearts kids – each of them sitting there in that dingy, smelly little locker room with a small ring of hearts on their chest – knew full well that unless they got serious over the span of the next sixteen minutes, they would all someday look back on this night as one in which they let something special, historic, and, perhaps, even magical, slip through their fingers.
To that end, Billy decided to change things up a bit in the second half, at least to start. He decided to slow the pace markedly, if only to limit the occasions Lucy’s would have for putting the ball into that damn Chisholm’s hands. He told his boys he wanted them to work the ball around more and be more selective about where and when they shot. Also, to look for Schmid more as he alternated between the high and low post. “Boys, we’re getting away from our offense. I want less freelancing out there and a lot more ball movement.”
“Let’s not blow this now. We’ve worked too hard and we've come too far.” When he was done, Billy E called his boys together as a show of unity, touching hands in a huddled circle, like he always did, and then sent them back out to try to right their listing ship.
The third quarter played out much like Billy had hoped. With the Hearts more deliberate on offense and working the ball around more than they had at any point in the first half, the pace visibly slowed. In fact, after lighting up the scoreboard like a proverbial Christmas tree for the first sixteen minutes of play, the two clubs combined to score fewer third quarter points than the Lucians alone scored in the second. Nevertheless, like a mongoose at the neck of Billy E’s powerful club, the Lucian kids refused to quit and refused to stop attacking. As a result, at the end of three periods of play, they trailed by just six, 68-62.
That’s when Bob Banack, Billy’s opposite number, made a coaching decision of his own. Banack had been a nice player for Lucy’s during his schoolboy days, but had never known how hard coaching was until he actually gave it a try. It wasn’t the X’s and O’s he found so hard. It was the losing. Coming up short on the scoreboard as a player had certainly hurt, but he was just one of five out there and could always find some measure of solace in some aspect of his own performance. As a coach, however, he was responsible for everything that occurred in a game, at least from his team’s perspective, from preparation and conditioning through strategy, execution and, of course, results.
The first time he ever experienced the sick feeling that losing can impart in a coach was in his very first game as Lucy’s head man. It was an away affair just a year prior against a solid St. John the Baptist team. In that game, his boys lost on a last-second tip-in of a missed free throw. It had crushed him, left him so emotionally devastated that he almost tendered his resignation the next day for fear of ever having to feel that way again. Decades later he would still remember the name of the seldom-used Baptist's kid who’d put a dagger through his heart by tipping in the game winner that night.
But what was important about that game was that, in losing it, Bob Banack came to realize what a special player he had in Tookie Chisholm. His team had trailed that evening by double figures heading into the final period – in a hostile environment, no less. But during that fourth quarter, his big southpaw simply took over the game, much to his coach’s wonder and awe.
Scoring seemingly at will, Chisholm turned a twelve-point deficit into a four-point one within a few minutes. Finally, with just twenty seconds to go and his team down two, Tookie scored a tough basket by following up a teammate’s missed shot with a sweeping, snatching rebound. Then, faking right, he dribbled left along the baseline and hit a magnificent reverse lay-up on which he was also fouled so hard he got knocked to the ground and hit his head.
As Tookie casually got up, rubbed the back of his neck, exhaled, and then casually sank his free throw to give his team a one-point lead, Bobby Banack sat on the bench and felt like a man on top of the world. His boys had just gone into the enemy’s den and snatched a most improbable directly victory from the jaws of defeat.
Or so he thought.
A year later, the losing had become easier for Bobby Banack. But only a little. Nevertheless, the memory of how his big forward had taken over that St. John the Baptist game a year ago now burned in his brain as his players huddled for the start of the final period, all of them awaiting instructions as the possibility of an epic upset hung in the balance.
The difference was, in that game a year ago, Tookie Chisholm had taken it upon himself to assume control. This time it was Banack’s turn. And the coaching decision he made that snowy Friday night against Sacred Heart – a team trying its ever-loving best to clinch the Parochial League title and keep its perfect record intact – and the message he delivered to his overachieving and dog-tired kids was as simple as it was direct: Get the ball to Tookie.
And the message to his best player? Tookie...Do your thing.
Which is exactly what Tookie Chisholm did, playing the final eight minutes against Pete Schmid and his undefeated mates as though it might just be the final few minutes of basketball the Good Lord would ever grant him. Inside. Outside. Jump shots. Put-backs. Steals. Rebounds. Blocked shots. Breakaways. No look passes. It didn’t matter. Tookie was a raging fire on both ends of the court and Billy E was at a loss to stop him.
That didn’t prevent him from working the sideline, though, and barking out orders and screaming out beefs about terrible calls in a way he’d never, ever done before. But Billy couldn’t help himself. He was mad and terrified at the same time. Fate was slipping through his fingers and he could feel it. And, frankly, so could just about everyone else.
When big Tookie drove hard to the basket from the left baseline – blowing right by Najdal in the process – and then, cut off by Sakowski, exploded backward for a arcing fall-away off one leg from a ridiculous, almost impossible angle, it seemed, indeed, that something fated and for-the-ages had been written in the stars that blanketed a dark and frigid Syracuse.
On that unlikely shot, with Lucy’s down five, Chisholm was angled so far behind the basket he was forced to arc the ball high over the large wooden backboard, from well behind it, all while falling into the crowd of fans standing shoulder-to-shoulder along the baseline. The fifteen-foot Hail Mary, which seemed higher than it was long, somehow found nothing but the bottom of the net as the Lucy’s fans roared in joyous disbelief and those nearest to Tookie hugged and patted him on the back.
In one of the most unlikely Parochial League games ever played, St. Lucy’s, who that season had found a way to lose more games than they won, had just cut the powerful Hearts’ lead to just three with a mere hundred and sixty three ticks of the clock remaining.
What’s more, the scruffy and paper-thin St. Lucy’s squad of Bob Banack found itself in possession of the absolute best player on the court – maybe the city – a kid who was playing with a passion few had ever seen. Even if a decade later, when the Post-Standard would publish its list of the 200 greatest Parochial League players ever, Tookie Chisholm, despite leading the league in scoring for two consecutive years, would not even be listed among the finest players in St. Lucy’s history.
The reality was, Tookie Chisholm was as good as anyone, anywhere – and particularly on that night. No one knew that better than Billy. So, when that unlikeliest of all shots came off big Lloyd’s fingertips and arced over and from behind the backboard, before catching in the soft netting below, the men, women and children watching suddenly felt they were witnessing a miracle in their humble little gym, and that the only certainty was that the windows were slammed shut and, now, all bets were off.
Fortunately for the Heartsmen, they had their own brand of magic brewing. Joe Zaganczyk, the genial, good-looking Polish kid from the broken home, who’d started the game like a house afire, still couldn’t seem to miss. Indeed, he was in the early stages of the almost magical weekend he’d been dreaming about in class all week long.
Even as Billy tried to signal time out after Tookie’s arcing prayer from behind the backboard, Van Cott inbounded, whipped the ball ahead to Contos, who spun and found Zaganczyk wide open on the left wing. Zaganczyk’s sixteen-foot jumper was so pure that it audibly snapped the net, which then wrapped itself around the rim so tightly play had to be stopped. Summoned from his office with a twelve-foot step ladder, the Lucy’s janitor had to climb up and untangle the net, which given the tightness of the wrap, took him more time than most expected.
Billy used the unexpected break in lieu of the time out he’d been trying so desperately to call. The Hearts coach gathered his kids around and looked each of them in the eye. “All right, boys,” he barked above the roar. "This game’s ours. And anyone who doesn’t believe that can have a seat next to me for the rest of it – or the rest of his damn career, for all I care.” None of the Hearts kids said a word. Hands on knees, they simply stared up at their coach, who was as serious as they'd ever seen him.
Billy E continued. “They’re running out of time out there. Just stick to our game plan. That’s all we have to do. Eventually, they’re going to start fouling us. Just keep your heads about you out there. Understand? No bad passes. Keep moving on offense. And find the open man. He’s there. Just, just find him. Also, when the time comes – and it will come – make your foul shots. You do that, and I promise you. This one'll be ours.”
And that’s exactly what those Sacred Heart kids did. Especially Zaganczyk. He not only kept moving and kept finding the open man, just as his coach told him, but he ended up hitting all six of his free throws down the stretch to finish with a game – and career – high 29 points.
As for Tookie, he netted 25, twelve of them in the game's final eight minutes.
Mike Higgins, meanwhile, hit enough outside jumpers and found a sufficient number of seams in the defense to end with a season-high 24 points.
As the final buzzer sounded, Billy E let out a massive sigh and walked over to shake Bob Banack’s hand. He wanted to congratulate the Lucians’ young head man on how well-prepared his team had been and for how gallantly they fought.
As he reached Banack, and as the scoreboard above the two read, “St. Lucy’s 83, Visitors 89,” a thought flashed through Billy's mind. He thought this one just might turn out to be the very tonic his boys needed to refocus themselves. Nothing, after all, like a good old-fashioned nail-biter late in the season to ensure a team, however deep and powerful, will continue to listen to its coach and take nothing for granted.
That, at least, was what Billy E told himself.
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