For years, even as race was emerging as, perhaps, the divisive issue in the U.S., there remained at least one city (or at least one series of locations within that city) where it still had little or no place, in fact, barely a toehold: on the countless courts – hardwood, blacktop, concrete and otherwise – that spread across basketball-crazed Syracuse like squares on a checkerboard. In the Salt City, if you were a schoolboy and you could play, and do so with or without the ball in your hands, that was all that mattered.
It was not, by any means or any stretch, the color of your skin.
Sure, many white boys played nothing other white kids, just as young Black players regularly squared up in pickup games against young men of their own color. But that was as much a product of convenience and physical geography as it was personal choice.
Even during the 1966 All City Championship – the much-discussed thriller won in overtime by the Parochial League’s St. John the Evangelist, a team of all-white Catholic boys, over the favored and mostly Black Corcoran Cougars of the CNY Cities League – whatever sense of racial tension that might have existed in the War Memorial that March night came, not from the players themselves, but from a number of the fans and a few administrators whose world, it seemed, was a larger, more practical, and far more cynical place than the one inhabited by young men who lived in the singular and joyous pursuit of playing and winning basketball games.
Even the two coaches on that particular evening, Bob Felasco and Ken Huffman, for the most part took the measure of the young men under them by one simple yardstick: how well they shot, dribbled, ran, passed and played defense. Whatever attention the two men might have paid to the skin color of any boy on the court was, at best, incidental.
Yet, at some point during the next season (1966-67) Syracuse’s longstanding slow dance with racial tolerance and acceptance, at least on a high school basketball level, started to unravel.
Some longtime followers point to Frank Broadwater’s unprecedented attack on referee Jerry Hoffman in the Lincoln Auditorium in January as the moment that lit the fuse. From that point forward, it seemed, on-court confrontations between young men in high school began to be framed not so much in basketball terms, but racial ones.
The truth is, that whatever role Broadwater’s meltdown and subsequent expulsion might have played, by the Spring of 1967, for many African American ballplayers in and around Syracuse’s 15th Ward, the issue of race was one that had been festering for quite some time. It was just that precious few outside their own Ward seemed aware of it.
For the vast majority of white Syracusans, race had never been an issue in town; but for just about every black player and fan, skin color mattered and always had. What's more, just a few dozen miles beyond the city limits sign in each direction, race regularly defined how a number of Friday night battles were called by the two officials. In the mostly rural communities surrounding the Salt City – all of them roll-up-the-streets, two-horse towns with wonderfully Upstate New York-sounding names like Cortland, Fulton, Oswego and Watertown – teams from large urban schools like Central Tech and Corcoran represented not just invaders from big, bad Syracuse, but Negro invaders.
As a result, what almost every CNY City League coach liked to call “home jobs” in those towns became more than a regularity. They became almost a given, especially when it came to the two most racially diverse clubs. As might be obvious, a home job was a game in which the hometown team got the benefit of every close call and, quite often, an alarming number of the not-so-close ones. What's more, if hometown refs were not hard enough to overcome, any team, Black or white, visiting those otherwise bucolic bedroom communities also had to contend with hometown fans, scorekeepers, clock operators, janitors and cheerleaders. It was incumbent, therefore, to not just beat such a team, but to do it handily in order to minimize the impact that any one call might have on the game's outcome – and that was particularly true when it came to teams of color.
But in a few of those communities, a home job meant more than just a bevy of poorly timed partisan calls. It was something far more sinister and insidious. It was an overt attempt by certain locals to tilt the scales of fair play to benefit their own. In often frigid and snow-covered Cortland, for example, the school’s athletic director, a former big league pitcher, developed a reputation for regularly ordering the doors swung wide open on whatever side of the court Central or Corcoran happened to be using that half, especially in the dead of winter. His intent, apparently, was to literally prevent those big city kids from warming up, while keeping their shooters as cold as possible.
And in Fulton, just northwest of Syracuse, a city that a number of African American players and cheerleaders contended was the most racist in Central New York, not only did the refs constantly favor the hometown Red Raiders, but an untold number of fans tried to exact a measure of impact on a game’s outcome as well. A few of those Red Raider crazies (or, as they’d come to be known by more than a few in the Ward, Red Racists) would regularly throw objects like pen tops, erasers, bottle caps, coins, and even half-eaten hot dogs at foul shooters, to try to distract them, especially in the later stages of a close game.
The most sinister student tradition in Fulton was one in which, using thumb, forefinger, and a taut rubber band, a Red Raider fan would whiz high-speed paper clips at any and all African American invaders wearing opposing colors. Worse, the bulk of the clips – which, when they made contact, stung with the sadistic malice of an Adirondack deer fly – were not fired from long distance or directed at those on the court, where they might strike anyone, even one of their own. Instead, most were sent thwacking from close range and aimed directly at the heads, necks, backs, arms and ears of the African American kids sitting on the opposing bench, just a few feet away.
In addition, a group of Fulton students would regularly set up shop on game night just behind the enemy bench and take it upon themselves to pour small dollops of salt into one hand whenever a boy got pulled from the game. From no more than a few feet away, they'd toss a dusting of the salt directly onto the player’s neck and shoulders that would produce a stinging sensation that smarted almost as badly as getting whacked with a well-directed paper clip.
The cumulative effect of the barrage of physical abuse, on top of what amounted to an unrelenting and vile stream of verbal taunts – being called “nigger,” “jig,” “coon,” and “spade” for two straight hours – invariably began to wear those kids of color down mentally and emotionally.
One time, when a couple of Central kids, Jay Dorsey and Jimmy Pugh, who’d driven the forty miles up Route 31 to support their Lancer classmates, were leaving G. Ray Bodley High, the two were pulled over by a Fulton cop, arrested, handcuffed, and hauled off to jail in the back of a squad car. When word got back to the Central coach, who was just about to board the team bus for the journey home, he told the driver they needed to make a quick detour downtown. At the Fulton lockup, the coach – hat and gloves in hand – negotiated with the officer on duty, pleaded with him really, to release the two students (one of whom, Pugh, was something of a budding militant, right down to his radical afro and the .45 caliber bullet he wore on a chain around his neck) into his custody without bail.
That release, however, carried with it the express promise that neither boy would come back through Fulton anytime soon.
Having negotiated that deal, the coach walked the two teens out the front door and into the night air, only to look down from the top step to find a large mob circling the team’s bus. The angry gathering, so cold on that frigid night that its collective breath hovered over it like an icy cloud, included dozens of what seemed to be Red Raider students and a number of adults, most of them yelling up toward the Central players, cheerleaders, managers, and driver, many with fists clenched, a few with baseball bats, and a handful carrying such implements as tire irons, chains, and, in one particular case, a large axe.
The Scarlet Lancers, who’d just earned a hard fought win over a tough-minded and physically strong team of Fulton boys, sat in their seats perfectly still and barely breathing, all staring out the window as the mob closed in on them. They were terrified, and had every reason to be. No matter how cool or tough you might think of yourself, when you were a teenager miles from home staring directly into the hate-filled eyes of those, many of them adults, whose main beef with you was the color of your skin, it was unnerving to say the least.
That’s why it should have come as no surprise that, on the night of January 20, 1967, Central Tech drove yet again to Fulton to play a game that Jack Johnstone’s club sorely needed, (Corcoran, Ludden and the Lancers, after all, each remained in a dogfight for the top spot in the City League), the game quickly grew ugly – and as ugly as most there had ever seen.
In fact, the contest soon devolved into such a non-stop parade of individual fisticuffs and on-court showdowns – a parade punctuated by one particularly massive, bench-clearing, Black-vs.-white brawl late in the second half – that with just under three minutes to go and Central up comfortably, the refs called the game. When they did that, Coach Johnstone and his Lancers were forced to sprint the length of the floor to their locker room on the far end of the gym amid a hail of boos, batteries, burning cigarette butts, whizzing, stinging paper clips and, of course, a shower of racial invective.
Yet, even as those twelve boys from Syracuse’s rapidly disappearing 15th Ward ran off the court with their hand over their heads or shielding their eyes, they did so unaware that in just three weeks, the race-fueled, inner city-vs.-farm war they’d just waged in Fulton would escalate to a scarier and even greater degree. Only this time, the site would not be in Cortland, or Oswego, or even Fulton.
This time Central Tech’s war would be waged right smack dab in Syracuse, in a gentle little western suburb known as Westvale. This time, the ugly rancor and venom the Central kids had felt in a tiny farming community one county over would rise up in their own hometown – a place that had always been a hard-working, racially diverse and, until that season anyway, largely colorblind city.
* * * * *
By the middle of February, Corcoran, Central and the surprising Gaelic Knights of Bishop Ludden all remained in the thick of the City League race. With just three games left, Kenny Huffman’s Cougars – who’d been beaten handily earlier in the year by Jack Johnstone’s Central Tech Lancers (the game, after which, Corcoran forward Frank Karazuba had barely escaped with his life), and who’d subsequently nipped Ludden in their first go-round at the still-new Gaelic Knights’ home gym – held a slim one game advantage over the other two.
Central had, indeed, beaten Corcoran somewhat easily. But the Lancers had stumbled badly at home against Ludden in early January, in a game that would prove to be the final of Frank Broadwater’s productive yet checkered high school career.
And while Terry Quigley’s Ludden squad had looked oh-so vulnerable in losing to Corcoran in January, on a dozen or so other occasions the Knights looked as strong as any team in the city, as evidenced by the above-mentioned dismantling of powerful Central – on the Lancers’ home court, no less.
Yet, of those three, it looked at times like the leader, Corcoran, might have had the biggest and most glaring holes of them all. First off, they were the smallest of the three, and by a wide margin, with only one player over 6’0” tall, and then just barely – while its lightning-quick backcourt of Reddick and Harlow were smaller still.
What’s more, despite the sizable student population on Corcoran’s two year-old campus, and the hundreds of boys from which Ken Huffman got to try to piece together his varsity basketball roster that year, the Cougars possessed as thin a bench as, perhaps, any team in the league.
Despite its obvious lack of height, Huffman's starting five was a rock-solid unit. But behind his starters there were only two kids in whom Huffman had any real faith to speak of. And, in fairness, that faith was as limited as the minutes he doled out to each with the game still on the line. One of the two was a smallish but solid little ball-handler and shooter named Ben Frazier; the other was an athletic, deceptively strong, and almost comically undisciplined swingman named Walentin Mirgorod.
“Benny,” as Huffman called Frazier, was a kid from tiny Sodus, a farming crossroads on the southern rim of Lake Ontario, just a few miles north and east of Rochester. Frazier's mother, a single African American woman raising her kids in a virtually all-white farming community, had decided a few years prior to move her brood en masse to Syracuse’s 15th Ward so that they might be among African American kids their own age and develop a more worldly view of life than they might otherwise developed in Sodus.
Frazier’s first love, if not his only one, was the game of baseball. He played nonstop, from morning to night with his buddies, and he worked to the point that he eventually turned himself into a fine little shortstop, both with the glove and at the plate. What’s more, it turned out he had great instincts; something most coaches will tell you, you just can’t teach a kid. In fact, deep down inside, little Benny Frazier harbored a belief he might just be good enough to one day play pro ball. He, frankly, only fell into basketball by accident; because it turned out to be the only game that seemed to have any real currency in his new hometown. He liked it okay. But it wasn’t baseball, not by any stretch.
Unfortunately for Frazier, initially anyway, he was quickly seen by the others in the Ward as the "new kid" and was constantly picked on for being, not just new, but something of a rube. And even though his newness and whole country-boy aura would eventually fade, he’d forever remain something of an outsider to many of his age in the Ward.
Mirgorod, a senior, was likewise a transplant. Yet his point of origin was somewhere else entirely and his path to Central New York far more circuitous. Born into a dehumanizing postwar refugee (or “DP”) camp in Hamburg, he and his family migrated to Brazil while he was still a toddler. He then spent the next eleven years in South America learning to speak multiple languages (including his new native tongue, Portuguese), building his mind by reading, expanding his horizons intellectually, and eventually teaching himself to become not just a good player on the soccer pitch, but as good as any player in the area.
The Mirgorods eventually decided to move to America. They found a family willing to “sponsor” their entry into the U.S. (an imperative for any would-be immigrant in 1960), which meant guaranteeing not just housing for the Mirgorods for a full year, but a forty hour-a-week job for Mr. Mirgorod.
Fortunately, Walter had been trained as a mechanical engineer in Germany, so he soon found work as a diesel mechanic with L.B. Smith, a manufacturer of heavy road, farming and construction equipment whose global business, like so many in Syracuse, was absolutely booming as 1960 and a whole new decade unfolded.
Unlike Ben Frazier, who at least knew of basketball before moving to the Salt City, and who played some in Sodus, little Walentin Mirgorod knew nothing of Syracuse’s sport-of-choice. And unlike Frazier, who saw basketball as little more than a way of passing the time between the final out of the World Series and the first crack of spring training, twelve-year old Walentin immediately fell head-over-heels in love with the sport.
In fact, his love for basketball far eclipsed his feelings for soccer. The game consumed him. That first summer, every morning, he’d run ball-in-hand up to Burnet Park after a quick bowl of cereal, and practice for hours; shooting mostly, but also – just as soccer taught him – learning to dribble with either hand.
In fact, Walentin Mirgorod was so intent on turning himself into a bonafide, basketball-playing All American boy, and he so kept his eyes focused and his nose pressed to the grindstone that it took him weeks to realize there was a fundamental and very practical difference between the soccer ball he'd been using and the orange balls all the other kids were using.
It was during this time that Walentin got bestowed upon him the nickname he’d wind up carrying with him for the rest of his life. It came about one day that very first summer after one of the players in a pickup game, an Irish kid in a flattop haircut, asked his name and decided that "Walentin" was too much of a mouthful for him to handle. "Tell you what," the kid said. "From now on, your name's gonna be Wally. That's what we're gonna call you...Wally."
Little Wally beamed almost as though he’d just been awarded free ice cream for the rest of the summer. After thirteen years of places that had always, in one way or another, felt like stops in the road – in Germany, in Brazil and, now, in Syracuse – he’d finally felt, at long last, like he was in a place where he belonged.
Wally Mirgorod would eventually enter VO High and eventually leave when VO and Valley were shuttered and merged into a brand new school. He then migrated up Geddes Street to the all-new Thomas J. Corcoran High, where he turned himself into something of a minor celebrity by becoming the only kid in Corcoran who actually managed to play three varsity sports, while practicing with the varsity in a fourth.
He became a star on the soccer team. He made the basketball team, due in large part to his non-stop motor and uncanny nose for the ball, especially when corralling errant shots. And while he didn’t make the Corcoran baseball team at the conclusion of tryouts, he did fall in love with his new country’s unofficial "pastime" and became a rabid fan its most storied franchise, the New York Yankees. Wally 's love of baseball, in fact, led him to approach coach Bob Southworth one day and negotiate a deal to be able to practice with his team, where he got to show off his arm from right field, shag balls, practice base-running and, of course, sit on Southie’s bench during games – even though he was not, technically anyway, a member of his team.
In addition to three varsity sports in three seasons, Wally also did a little double-dipping during his time as a Cougar. Every Fall, in addition to a soccer uniform, he was also issued a varsity football uniform, even though the school's football coach did not require him to practice when it conflicted with his soccer commitment. Once a week, every week without exception, Walentin Mirgorod would then don a helmet, cleats and pads and serve proudly – smack dab in the middle of soccer season, mind you – as Corcoran's placekicker. In fact, though the All-City gridiron teams of the era did not name placekickers, per se, looking back, as adept as he was at drilling extra points and field goals (many of them from heretofore unheard of distances), there's little doubt that, had kickers been recognized for their contributions, Wally Mirgorod would have been All City in football at the same time he was earning that honor in soccer.
Ken Huffman was a fan of Mirgorod more for his drive and hustle than any in-game contributions he actually made. As a kid without the kind of feel for basketball that gets implanted in most kids in their early teen years (the age at which Wally Mirgorod was, in fact, first picking up the game), he had a tendency to be more than a touch tone-deaf on the court. He likewise lacked any instinctive awareness of such fundamental things as floor spacing, court sense and moving without the ball.
But Huffman loved the passion Wally brought to the game and that’s a big reason he kept him around.
Notwithstanding the minor contributions of Frazier and Mirgorod, Huffman’s Cougars were for all practical reasons made up of just five kids – five tireless iron-men ballplayers who were cohesive and interdependent cogs in a single basketball machine whose combination of speed, stamina, ball handling, defensive intensity and, for lack of a better word, heart had become the class of the City League.
The two weaknesses the Cougars had – design flaws so glaring as to appear almost fatal to any team hoping to play an up-tempo running game – were a decided lack of height and an almost criminal lack of depth.
These two flaws were laid bare one night as the season headed into its home stretch. The Cortland Purple Tigers, led by 6’5” Dave Stark, traveled up to Corcoran one Friday night to do battle with the Cougars.
Down in Cortland earlier in the season, the Tigers had given Huffman’s boys all they could handle, forcing them to stage a furious fourth quarter rally to eke out a heart-stopping win. Huffman, as he'd done time and again, played his five starters – and only his five starters – the entire game. And those kids managed to come through when it counted most.
But that had been in December, 1966. Now it was February, 1967. The days were growing longer and it was possible, even in Syracuse, to feel the coming of Spring.
Cortland, along with Ludden, had emerged as one of the two surprises in the league, largely due to the fact that Stark, their talented forward/center, was continuing to grow and develop as a player.
But that night on Corcoran's home gym, as any team invariably does, even the best of them, the Cougars suffered a collective letdown that seemed to infect every kid on the team. Reddick went ice cold, and while he scored fifteen, many of them came on foul shots as time was winding down. Harlow picked up three quick fouls and had to sit for an extended stretch. And on defense, Williams and Reeder, Huffman’s two high-octane/high-motor ballhawks, almost seemed to be playing as though they were sporting ankle weights. Reeder, in particular, seemed especially slow, almost as though the grind of always having to go up against taller and more offensively skilled kids had finally caught up with him.
As a result, Huffman’s small but gutsy frontline had no answer for Stark, who dominated Reeder, Williams and even Karazuba, possession after possession. During many of those possessions, banging in for muscular two-pointers and grabbing an embarrassment of offensive rebounds for easy put-backs, it was almost as though the big farm boy was alone in a gym somewhere, listening to music, chewing on a stick of Dentyne, and working a few random drills his coach had assigned him.
It got so bad, the broad-shouldered Stark scored every one of Cortland’s fifteen points to close out the first half and start the second, a jaw-dropping run of physical dominance by one youngster.
The one thing that ended up saving Huffman’s bacon that game was a strategy virtually every one of Reddick and Harlow’s coaches over the years had employed at one time or another, back to when the two were wowing crowds as seventh grade teammates. Both were not only quick, but among the finest ball-handlers in the city – if not the history of the city.
So – especially with no clock dictating that a shot had to be attempted within a certain time frame – it was a benefit to any team on the ropes (or one, such as Corcoran, lacking any real bench strength) to kill as much clock as possible by simply holding onto the ball and not giving it up, especially in the closing minutes of a game.
So that’s what Kenny Huffman chose to do for almost the entire fourth quarter. Take the air out of the ball. That would be the best way, he figured, to slow down Stark. So, with his team up by a single point with almost almost six minutes to play, that's what he ordered Reddick and Harlow to do.
The Cougars were reeling. Reddick had been unable to get his shot to fall. And Harlow had just picked up his fourth foul. So, under Huffman’s mandate to “put it in the icebox,” Reddick and Harlow – to the delight of the Corcoran partisans – staged one of their signature dribbling exhibitions as part of their team’s “triangle-two” offense.
In that loosely knit set-up, Reddick and Harlow were positioned out at center court, on opposite ends of the half-court stripe. What Karazuba, Williams and Reeder did, meanwhile, was far less important than where they did it. It was important for the three to focus on two things: spacing themselves evenly in the half court set to prevent any one defender from being able to guard more than one man, and to stay in motion as much as possible, though never near the ball and never, ever out near half court.
Instead, the three were taught to move back and forth, from baseline to baseline, and from one side of the free throw stripe to the other, picking for one another, remaining aware of their relative spacing, and feeling for openings that would create a passing lane for either Reddick or Harlow, should either get bottled up or need help.
Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow did the rest, dribbling in circles, back-and-forth and in-and-out, with one hand or the other – not unlike the legendary Harlem Globetrotters, Marques Haynes and Curly Neal, two colorful and charismatic African Americans who employed a form of masterful, inches-from-the-floor, ambidextrous dribbling as a way of entertaining crowds, flummoxing defenders and, of course, taking precious time off the clock.
Corcoran would pull the game out, of course. They were a well-coached club and, like most well-coached clubs, they hit their free throws when they needed to. Plus, Karazuba, their money shooter, hit two huge jumpers down the stretch.
But the final score, 61-58, as close as it was, didn’t really tell the story of the nail-biting nature of the game and, more important, just how vulnerable Ken Huffman's team had looked.
* * * * *
There is, perhaps, no city in the U.S. as relentlessly and unapologetically snowy as Oswego, New York. Located on an exposed stretch of Lake Ontario’s southern shoreline, Oswego is the port-of-entry in Central New York for a curious weather phenomenon known to meteorologists and locals alike as lake-effect, a form of snow that comes, not from the clouds above, but from the cold Canadian winds that howl across the much warmer Great Lake, picking up mass quantities of moisture as they go, which they then deposit in the form of large, almost horizontal snowflakes on the first piece of land they happen to encounter; in this case, that piece being the hearty lakeside community of Oswego, which is part-farm, part-working class and part-college town – a place that each winter averages a somewhat mind-numbing 137 inches of the white stuff.
That's a key fact to know in the context of this story, only in the sense that a Corcoran/Oswego game that had been slated for earlier that month had to be postponed after Oswego got blanketed, yet again, with nearly three feet of lake-effect in just twenty four hours. The makeup date, which had to be squeezed into the schedule, given that the season was nearing its end, was set for the night prior to Corcoran’s first-place battle with Ludden on Friday night.
That meant Kenny Huffman’s club, already showing signs of leaking oil given how many minutes he was asking of his starters, had to play back-to-back games in less than twenty four hours, the first of which required an hour and ten minute bus ride each way.
On the way to Oswego, just as the lake effect started to fall, Kenny Huffman worked his way to the back of the bus, where he sat next to Len Reeder, his young forward and the kid who’d had more than his hands full the previous game against the big Cortland star, Dave Stark. “Len,” said his coach, matter-of-factly, “I’m not going to start you tonight. I’m going to go with Wally, and Benny is going to be my first guy off the bench. I just wanted you to know. But be ready and stay loose. You’ll be in there the moment I need you.” With that, Ken Huffman patted Reeder on the knee, stood without saying another word, and simply made his way back toward the front of the big yellow bus, a horizontal dusting of large, billowy flakes now reflecting in its headlights.
Reeder just looked out the window into the snow and half-light and didn't say a word. He didn’t even change his facial expression. But deep down he was hurt. More than that, though, he was angry. No one on his team worked any harder than he did. No one. And no Cougar did what Coach Huffman asked any more willingly or with less reservation. He knew he was going to play that night, or at least knew he probably would. His coach told him so. But it still hurt. Starting was a matter of pride for Reeder. It helped define him as a man. He loved basketball. And he loved winning. But now he felt like he was being singled out and held responsible for the dominant game Stark had thrown up against his team less than a week prior.
Plus, of course, the whole state trooper thing in Maxie Reddick’s car was still playing on his mind. The ugly, barely-two-week-old incident had served him a cold, hard slap of reality, one from which he’d not yet fully recovered.
What Kenny Huffman did not tell Len Reeder was that he had a plan. A plan that involved keeping his powerful forward with the big motor and bigger heart as fresh as possible. So, while the Corcoran coach was being truthful when he told Reeder he’d be in there the moment he was needed, what he didn’t tell him was that, in light of Oswego’s record, he desperately hoped he wouldn’t need him – and that proved to be exactly the case.
The following night, while Reeder sat stewing in the Corcoran locker room and listening to his coach talk to a few of his teammates, he did so not having played even a single minute the night before. He’d gone from a starter logging virtually every minute of every game to a sub who, in the span of 32 minutes, never even took off his warm up jacket. That burned at him, made him mad enough to want to punch something – or, to put a finer point on it, punch someone.
What’s more, almost as a way of fanning the fire that raged inside him, he actually tried to focus his anger on the racist, hate-filled, middle-aged trooper who two weeks ago, but for the presence of the two white girls, might have shot him and his friend dead.
Len Reeder wanted to be mad. He was dying to be mad, in fact – even begging to be so.
This hadn't been part of Ken Huffman’s plan – getting Reeder's blood boiling – but it was something of a welcome fringe benefit. Ludden was going to be a handful, and Ken Huffman knew it. What he was hoping was that by giving Reeder a full night off in Oswego, the next night he'd be up for a challenge that was going to require every ounce of stamina he had.
Big John McAuliffe – “Showboat,” to his friends – was a 6’5” senior who, while not as physical, and certainly not as strong as Dave Stark, was nonetheless a terrific player, especially with the ball in his hands. He was leading the City League in scoring at that point, averaging just over twenty per game, while also leading his team in rebounds. Tommy McCarthy, a handsome, muscular blonde Irishman who’d cut his teeth as one of Bob Hayes’ Saturday morning “Little Leprechauns,” was, likely, the better all-round player. But Big John, with his deadly mix of size, touch and gentle bravado, remained the straw that stirred his team's drink.
Huffman’s plan was to box-and-one McAuliffe – a box-and-one being a specialty defense designed to stop one particular player on the opposing team: a defense in which four defenders operate in a box-shaped zone near the basket and one plays tight, in-your-face man-to-man against that player; more often than not, his team's top scorer.
Unlike a traditional box-and-one, Huffman wanted to play the defense in such a way as to deny McAuliffe the ball entirely – and to do so for the entire game. He wanted to dog McAuliffe all over the court, from end to end, rendering him a non-factor. If he and his Cougars went down, Kenny Huffman figured, it was not going to be because of John McAuliffe.
Which Cougar was Huffman going to assign with that unenviable, if not near-impossible task? The task of bird-dogging McAuliffe wherever he went? Which starter would he chose to guard a kid a full half-foot taller than he? A guy who was leading his league in scoring, and a young man whose ability to ring up two pointers from down low was topped only by his uncanny ability to drain them from the perimeter?
There was only one choice in Coach Huffman's mind: Leonard Reeder.
As he pulled out a stick of gum, stripped off the foil, folded it over and popped it into his mouth, Ken Huffman told his team to gather ‘round. He then took a moment and, in an understated voice, gave his team the shortest pregame speech he would ever give. “Guys, we’re gonna run like hell tonight. We’re going to defend like we’ve never defended before. In fact, we’re going to full-court press them right off the bat. And, Len, we’re going to box-and-one their big guy, McAuliffe. I don’t want him to even touch the ball, much less get a shot off. You understand?”
He looked directly into Reeder’s eyes and held his gaze. “You understand what I'm saying, Len?” he asked again.
“I understand,” answered Reeder.
“You know what to do," said Huffman matter of factly to the full team as he turned away. "And I have faith you’re gonna do it.”
With that, he lowered his head and started toward the door.
After a full beat, Reeder suddenly rose and began banging his fist on the locker behind him. A moment later, Wally Mirgorod stood and joined him, hammering the locker behind him in syncopated harmony with his teammate. Then Ben Frazier rose and did the same. Soon, every Cougar player was on his feet, banging the locker behind him, leaning forward and chanting louder and louder with each metallic echo, “Go…Go…Go…GO!!!”
As their coach reach the door, he turned in the direction of the noise and stood for a moment watching his team. Ken Huffman then raised his voice in an attempt to be heard, “We win this one tonight, boys, and the league is ours.” Then he softened his tone a touch, almost as though directing the rest of what he had to say to himself, as much as them: "I’ll see you out there.”
Thirty seconds later, as Huffman and Ludden coach Terry Quigley were shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries near the Knights’ bench, the locker room door burst open at the far end of the gym and out exploded the 1966-67 edition of the Corcoran Cougars, one of the most undersized and unlikely great teams the city had ever known.
Huffman had always liked Terry Quigley, and the feeling was certainly mutual. Quigley was a twenty-six year-old Southwest Side kid and a former high school star whose team, but for Huffman, might not even be competing in the City League. When Bishop Cunningham’s new regional Catholic school first applied for admission to the league, the Catholic bishop was turned down cold. The other CNY schools (all of them but CBA, a private Christian Brothers academy in suburban Dewitt) were publicly funded institutions and did not feel that a private Catholic school like Ludden represented who they were as a league and, therefore, wanted no part of admitting them.
Only VO Athletic Director, Ken Huffman – who in time would leave coaching and teaching entirely to become a full-time administrator (not to mention the City League's longtime AD) – saw the value of adding Ludden. If a chain was only as strong as its weakest link, Huffman believed, then Ludden would have the inverse effect. He viewed the addition of a school with the enormous athletic potential of Ludden as a trigger to strengthen the entire chain of City League schools.
For some time, Huffman had been one of the few educators in town who saw the writing on the wall for Foery’s increasingly anachronistic little basketball league. He knew that, sooner or later, many of those great Catholic ballplayers who for all those years had populated the rosters of those ten parish-based Parochial League schools would start migrating west and enrolling in Ludden. And when that sea change happened, Bishop Ludden would emerge as a true athletic superpower.
He also sensed that that all-new regional Catholic high school under construction just beyond the city limits sign was much closer to being a factor than anyone realized. Indeed, by the end of that very decade, the 1968-69 Bishop Ludden Gaelic Knights – the “Green Machine,” as they’d be dubbed by local sportswriters – led by Mark Wadach and Howie Harlow’s kid brother, Phil, would run the table, finish the City League undefeated, then waltz through the diocesan playoffs, not merely unbeaten but almost unchallenged. In the process, they’d come to be viewed by virtually anyone who’d seen them play as the single greatest high school team ever assembled in Central New York.
In 1963, Huffman already knew that by adding such a potential superpower, the intensity of City League play, not to mention the quality of players it attracted, would increase exponentially. That’s the message he delivered to his fellow athletic directors, and that’s the impassioned plea he made to them at one particular league meeting, even as bishop of the diocese, Bishop Ludden's new principal, and its new twenty-four year-old head basketball coach sat there shoulder-to-shoulder and looked on in silence.
That’s why Quigley had such deep and abiding respect for Huffman; not just because he’d been so insightful and so willing to look beyond his own self-interests and lobby on behalf of Ludden’s entry into the City League, but because he’d been so measured and persuasive and had been able to turn around a roomful of stubborn, old-school administrators in the space of thirty minutes worth of reasoned, respectful and well-articulated logic.
But back to the game.
The Corcoran faithful that frosty February night in Syracuse may have been on their feet, stamping and applauding as though they were, somehow, trying to make it rain – or, given the season, snow. But those fervent and throaty followers remained operating under the pesky little laws mandated by two equally pesky concepts: physics and nature. They were, in other words, a roaring throng entirely Earth-bound.
The Cougar players, on the other hand – as drained as they might have been from having to do battle three times in seven days, late in a grueling season – were sky-high and ready for the moment. To a man, it almost seemed as though each boy had been freed from the laws of physics and was now at liberty to run without even touching the ground. At the same time, each Cougar seemed to soar so high with each pregame layup that it almost appeared as though at any point two or three of them might throw down a thundering dunk, even if he’d never done so in his life.
Len Reeder, in particular, felt as fresh and as ready to play as he ever remembered. He even took a moment to look over his shoulder at the other end of the court to get a glimpse of McAuliffe, who was smoothly flicking up shots from the near corner in between his stretching drills.
That night on McDonald Road there was, indeed, a perfect storm of basketball fate brewing, even if no student, coach, teacher, fan, or even player there saw it coming.
The opening tip was controlled by Ludden, barely, as McAuliffe – all 6’5” of him – managed to tap the ball to teammate Jerry Behan, even though the Cougars’ 6’1” center Steve Williams, an explosive and cat-quick leaper, bolted skyward as if shot from a cannon and got his fingertips on the ball. Ludden, indeed, would go on to score on that first possession. But that would be the last time all night it would seem as though the Gaelic Knights deserved to be on the same court as Corcoran.
Blanketing Ludden’s guards from end to end in a suffocating, straight-up, man-to-man, just as their soft-spoken coach had instructed them to do, the Cougars – and, in particular, Reddick and Harlow – seemed to be playing at 78 RPM as opposed to Quigley’s club’s methodical 33 1/3 pace. Reddick and Harlow consistently beat their Ludden counterparts to spots on the floor and regularly cut them off, forcing the guards in green-and-white to give up their dribble time and again to look, often in in vain, for an open teammate.
The Corcoran defenders played the opening eight minutes as though possessed. Four times in the first quarter alone, Bishop Ludden turned the ball over in the backcourt, two as a result of ten-second violations (called when a team fails to advance the ball past half court in the allotted time), and all four turnovers led to points for Corcoran.
As the buzzer sounded to mark the end of the first quarter, the scoreboard at the northern end of the gym read “Home 22, Visitor 11.” Yet, truth be told, the game was not nearly that close. The numbers only hinted at just how in control those young Cougars felt and how staggered and glassy-eyed the Ludden starters were.
As those five Gaelic Knight kids sat there on their bench, squeezing water into their gasping mouths, and looking into their young coach’s pleading eyes, it was clear the first eight minutes had left them all in shock.
Outside of the opening tap and a single defensive rebound he’d grabbed, John McAuliffe had yet to touch the ball. Leonard Reeder had fronted him the entire first quarter, keeping one eye on the ball and one on him, even when he was some thirty or forty feet from the basket. In the second quarter, Quigley tried to change things up some by having Wadach, his best athlete, bring the ball up. He then had McAuliffe sprint to his own foul line, reverse, and then fire up toward half court where he'd hopefully take a pass from the advancing Wadach. But Reeder regularly foiled Quigley's strategy by running step-for-step with McAuliffe the entire time, often beating him to the spot, while at the same time using one arm to act as a shield between his opponent and the ball.
At one point, a Corcoran fan noticed McAuliffe look deep into Reeder’s eyes. He’d say years later than the angular, sharp-shooting Gaelic Knight almost looked transfixed by what he saw staring back at him. It’s possible, John McAuliffe had never seen a pair of eyes so locked in and so focused on a singular task.
Eight minutes of game time soon became ten, then twelve, then eventually fourteen. Yet, all the while, the league’s #1 scorer had still (outside of a few rebounds) not touched the ball, thanks to what almost appeared to be his own personal shadow, one that hovered over him like a 6’0,” 210-pound cloud. Even the Ludden faithful started to notice how intensely Reeder was dogging McAuliffe and began murmuring as seconds soon ticked into minutes, and those minutes continued to flow unabated. The closer that halftime drew, the more the game revealed itself to be what it ultimately proved to be, at least on that one night: a physical mismatch.
It’s not that John McAuliffe wasn’t trying. Lord knows, he was trying like hell. It's just that he was being guarded like no one had ever seen. At one point, perhaps on the direction of Quigley himself, one of the Ludden subs even came up behind Reeder and shoved him hard, as though trying to provoke the stocky Corcoran forward into a fight so that he might get tossed from the game. Reeder, either realizing what his opponent was up to, or not caring, simply turned around and smiled at the kid as if to say, “Nice try.” He then quickly turned back and began, once again, fixing his eyes squarely on the numbers on the front of his man’s Kelly-green jersey.
When halftime mercifully came, Bishop Ludden had not only failed to cut into Corcoran’s first quarter lead, they’d allowed the Cougars to almost double it. After trailing by ten at the end of one, the Gaelic Knights now trailed Corcoran by nineteen.
As Quigley was jogging to the locker room at halftime, disgusted with his team’s first-half performance, Jack McAuliffe, John’s father, a successful real estate exec who was never shy about unburdening himself of his opinions, bolted onto the floor and screamed at the Ludden coach to get the ball to his son. Johnny’ll get us back in this game, implored the elder McAuliffe with his gentle Irish slur, you watch. Just get him the ball.
Ray Flynn, a friend of the senior McAuliffe, and a guy who’d been an All Star and coach at St. Anthony’s, not to mention a key Syracuse University Orangeman during his playing days, pulled Jack McAuliffe aside and told his friend simply but as directly as he could, “Jack, please. Open your eyes. Can you not see what’s happening out there?”
What was happening was a living, breathing example of a street axiom that had just started making its way into Middle America, thanks in part to a new public service anti-drug campaign recently launched by the Ad Council: speed kills.
As though a nightmare, things somehow only managed to get worse for Jack McAuliffe’s firstborn and his hopelessly out-quicked teammates in the second half. During the opening few minutes of the third period, and fueled by their relentless and suffocating wall-to-wall press, the Cougars outscored the Knights 17-0 to open up an astounding thirty six-point lead. This was Corcoran's second game in less that twenty four hours, a game against, arguably, the second strongest team in the City League and a club that had come into the contest trailing Huffman's woefully undersized quintet by only one game in the battle for first place.
Yet, Terry Quigley's Knights didn’t score a single point in that third stanza until there were just over three minutes to play. A few moments later, Huffman finally throttled back and inserted his seldom-used subs into the game, en masse. Yet even they somehow managed to outscore their Catholic counterparts, upping the final margin to 88-49, the single most lopsided defeat in Bishop Ludden school history, a record that stood for over 60 years, and one that, as of this writing, still stands to this day.
Leonard Reeder, meanwhile, the kid whose fire, passion and commitment to duty set the tone for the evening, helped Corcoran take what could have been (and perhaps should have been) a nail-biter and turn it into one of the biggest blowouts in recent memory. In the locker room afterward, Reeder got the biggest hug of all from his coach, even though he ended up with just one measly free throw for the evening, despite having played every minute of the first three quarters.
Meanwhile, big John “Showboat” McAuliffe, the league’s top scorer, one of the finest pure shooters in the city, and a young man who for the past hour hadn’t drawn a single on-court breath without Len Reeder hearing, seeing, and even feeling it, touched the ball maybe five or six times tops and finished the game without having scored even a single point.
* * * * *
Kenny Huffman’s kids had done their job. Now all his Cougars (14-1) needed was a little help from the team they’d just vanquished – Bishop Ludden (12-3), in their upcoming season-ender against Jack Johnson’s Central Tech Lancers (13-2), and the title would be theirs. Huffman’s Cougars, of course, would still have to beat a game-but-overmatched Oswego one more time in their finale – this time on their home court – but he understood full well that if Ludden beat Central that Friday, his boys would officially wear the league crown, regardless.
For Central, it had been a deeply frustrating and, at times, rage-inducing year. Their spiritual leader and hardest-nosed player, Frank Broadwater, had been banned from scholastic sports for life for having assaulted referee Jerry Hoffman that first week in January. What’s more, in that same game, and perhaps what had set Broadwater off, was the fact that the Lancers’ finest all-round talent, Roy Neal, a skilled beanpole of a junior who’d eventually earn a full scholarship to play for Lou Henson alongside Jimmy Collins at New Mexico State, would pick up five fouls and be disqualified before the game was even thirteen minutes old.
Then, down in Cortland that same month, one of those bite-sized towns infamous for its disdain of any players from Syracuse, much less Black ones, the game had been called so one-sidedly by the refs, that even though the Lancers won by a safe margin, a few of the bench players looked down at one point in the second half and noticed tears welling up in the eyes of Coach Johnstone.
A former terrific player in his own day, Johnstone was a gentle and God-fearing white man, a young husband and relatively new father, not to mention a man of such high integrity and character that, for the rest of his days, he'd be regarded one of the most decent and admired Central New Yorkers to ever coach a high school basketball team.
He loved virtually every kid on that year’s Central squad almost as if each boy were one of his own. Consequently, he found himself emotionally distraught as he sat on a wooden bench in a packed Cortland gymnasium and watched a handful of adults – ostensibly, men in positions of moral leadership and authority – sacrifice themselves to the gods of victory and shred whatever trace of decency they might have still possessed by willfully bending the rules to favor their own, doing whatever it took to try to keep a group of “colored boys” from Syracuse from getting something for which they’d fought so hard and something they'd rightfully earned – a silly little victory in silly little basketball game.
This came on top of the fight-filled, truncated game a few weeks prior against Fulton, an experience that had pushed a number of those Central kids – all of them African American – to the very brink. And this was happening while their neighborhood was continuing to disappear under the sweeping power of City Hall and the mayor’s merciless and relentless wrecking ball. Bad enough to endure all that, along with a constant barrage of racial taunts from rednecks in their out-of-town games. Now they also had to overcome the refs. Indeed, as Al Bullock, one of Central’s team leaders, would contend years later, in their eyes every game that season at some point or another seemed to become a “seven against five” affair.
That may have been something of an exaggeration. Certainly, there were a handful of racist refs working high school basketball games in and around Syracuse that season – just as there would have been in any town of comparable size. But the vast majority of those sanctioned to officiate City, Parochial and County League basketball games in Central New York were fair and decent individuals, good men who paid little or no attention the color of the kids on the court with them.
Still, a blatant and growing anti-black bias was, clearly, something a number of those Central kids were feeling as the Sixties continued to unfold and race emerged as the single most volatile and divisive issue in their hard-working and blue-collar hometown.
Of all the Syracuse schools in the City League that season, the all-new Bishop Ludden High School in Westvale, one of the very first suburbs in the city, stood in stark contrast, in terms of student body, to the other schools in the league. The twelve kids in Jack Johnstone's Central club viewed Ludden as a glistening paragon of white privilege with all the bells and whistles, one that sat in the middle of an idyllic, all-white suburb and one whose boosters comprised the heart and soul of what they perceived to be Syracuse’s “Irish Mafia.”
It was not lost on them that the mayor, the guy they held responsible for tearing down their neighborhood, was Irish; that the local heads of the Catholic Church were Irish; that the Ludden head coach and principal were Irish; and that the majority of Ludden players and parents, as well as dozens of cops and referees in town were Irish as well.
That’s why, after all, the founders of Bishop Ludden chose to refer to their athletic teams as the “Gaelic” Knights.
The fact that there were, likely, as many (if not more) non-Irish referees in Syracuse than Irish ones was of a little consequence to the kids who made up the city’s only all-black basketball team. What mattered in their young minds, was that Ludden had become the City League’s golden child, an exclusive, all-white country club whose parents, coaches and boosters regularly hung out after games, often in Tipp Hill saloons, and shared drinks and laughs with many of the refs who worked their games and who seem to have made it their unofficial job to put their thumbs on the scale of justice to help anyone who looked, talked and thought like they did.
Again, whatever the truth there may have been in those kids' beliefs – and, indeed, there were a handful of West End watering holes that served as post-game oases for Ludden fans, parents and coaches, not to mention more than a few thirsty referees – the simple fact was, by March of 1967, the Gaelic Knights had emerged as a deep and well-coached team that didn’t need anyone’s help to win a basketball game (despite the manhandling they’d just suffered at the hands of Corcoran).
Nevertheless, the perception of Ludden as a school of white privilege persisted.
It proved to be something of an irony, therefore, that Ludden's coach, Terry Quigley – though he had the proverbial map of Ireland written all over his face, and carried all the physical trappings of yet one more product of Bishop Foery’s little K-12 factory system that, year after year, produced young Catholic boy and girls with a sense of assembly-line purpose that would have made even Henry Ford proud – was, in reality, not a Parochial Leaguer at all. He was, in fact, a product of the Syracuse public school system.
As the youngest of seven, Quigley was still in grammar school when his father lost his job and the family was forced to move to far more modest accommodations. For him to get a full K-12 Catholic education, like his older brothers and sisters, would have required him to walk some two miles to St. Anthony’s on the South Side each morning. So, instead, Irene Quigley sent her baby boy to public school – the first and only Quigley child to do so – and enrolled little Terry at nearby Bellevue.
That eventually led him to Central High where, as a fiery, ballsy and slightly undersized ball-handler and captain, he led the Scarlet Lancers both on the court and in the locker room. As the only white starter on a collection of talented African American teammates, one that ruled the City League that season, he was playfully (yet with more than a touch of disdain) referred to by a number of his Irish and Italian friends as Central’s “Irish jig.”
Regardless, Quigley developed lasting friendships with many of his black classmates at Central and was, indeed, one of many Bishop Ludden insiders – like many the finest and most beloved high school coaches in the Salt City; guys like Bobby Felasco, Ken Huffman, Billy E., Lenny Mowins, Ray Flynn and Jack Johnstone – who always measured any kid on any court anywhere by the compassion, strength and character of his heart, not the color of his skin.
Terry Quigley had, in fact, gotten his job at Ludden because of Parochial League coaching legend, Bob Felasco. Felasco, as he'd be for the balance of his career, was regarded as the most respected and certainly most successful basketball coach in the city. For that reason, the new principal at Bishop Ludden went hard after him to leave St. John's and come to his brand new school for not just a better job, but a heftier paycheck.
Felasco, however, had a sweetheart of a deal at the local General Electric plant, one that provided him the flexibility to leave work a little early every day, provided he started a little earlier each morning.
And because Evangelists did not have a gym of its own and often (if not exclusively) practiced late on weekday afternoons and early evenings, and always did so in borrowed facilities, Felasco rarely, if ever, had to miss a practice. He, therefore, did not want to move to a job in which basketball tryouts and practices would be held every day after school let out, usually around 3:00 p.m., or so. Such timing would screw up his gentlemen’s agreement with GE.
As a result, he made the Ludden principal a recommendation. His JV coach at Evangelist was a real comer, he told the priest. He’d discovered him while refereeing a grammar school game at St. Brigid’s one afternoon and was drawn to his passion, the crispness of his offense, and how hard his kids played for him. Normally, Bobby Felasco refereed grammar school games to uncover and recruit great young players. This time, however, he recruited an adult – one he viewed as a great young coach with enormous potential.
That’s how Terry Quigley, at just twenty three years of age became the JV coach for Bob Felasco at St. John's, and how, at twenty four, he (on Felasco’s say-so alone, and without having to even submit to a job interview) became the first-ever coach of the Bishop Ludden High Gaelic Knights.
What’s more, even though Quigley was a product of the city’s public school system, he was a young man well-versed in Syracuse’s ever-growing activist sub-culture that constantly sought the advancement of peace, racial equality, human dignity and civil rights in town. He knew about that world because of his father. He, in fact, lived it after Tom Quigley lost his job years ago and the Quigley family had been forced to move into a smaller, more affordable home. Terry had watched as his parents, perhaps as something of a lifeboat in the rocky and uncertain waters in which they now found themselves, chose to deepen their commitment to their faith by volunteering a few days a week at Father Brady’s Foery Foundation in the Ward. They, likewise, became more ardent supporters of Brady’s Catholic Interracial Council, designed to bring Syracuse’s black and white worlds together so that they might, just maybe, learn to live in harmony. As such, the two came to know Brady less as a symbol of Catholic piety and Sunday morning proselytizing and more as a friend, confidant, and source of moral guidance and inspiration in their own lives.
In time, Tom and Irene Quigley developed such respect, and even love for Father Charlie Brady – the “Saint of Syracuse” – that, with the priest’s gentle blessing and deep humility, they named their new son, Charlie, after him.
From the very opening tip, Bishop Ludden's season finale with Central was as intense a game as many in the packed Ludden gym had seen all year. Even though the result would, in all likelihood, merely determine who finished second behind Corcoran – after all, no one on either club thought the Cougars would lose to Oswego – there was plenty riding on the outcome.
In Ludden’s case, it was a chance for Terry Quigley’s team to finish in a tie for second in only its second year of varsity competition – a towering achievement for any team, much less one built on the fly and competing in a deep and talented league.
Beyond that, after the Corcoran debacle Quigley had chosen to replace senior starter Jerry Behan with a sophomore speedster named Phil Harlow, Howie’s little brother, who was, likewise, a onetime son of the Ward. The 16-year old Phil, was, perhaps, not quite the ball-handler his brother was, and was not yet in Howie’s class as a defender. But he was every bit as quick, every bit as confident, and, above all, an even deadlier shooter.
He also became that night the first African American kid to ever start a game for Ludden, something that made him unpopular in one world and caused him to be kept at arm’s length in another. Unfortunately, plenty of Black kids and parents with roots in the Ward chose to call him an “Uncle Tom” – both behind his back and to his face – for turning his back on his people and going to a lily-white school like Ludden; at the same time a few Ludden fathers had openly called our their young coach, one of them asking Quigley one night over a few drinks how he could replace a good, hard-working kid like Behan "with that “fuckin' nigger?”
Quigley had watched Harlow develop all year long in practice, slowly blossoming under his tutelage. Harlow was now not only ready for the job, he might have developed in a few short months into the second or third best player on the entire squad. Besides, the young Ludden coach saw in Mark Wadach and Harlow two sophomores who could, for the next two seasons anyway, serve as the cornerstones on which he would build the entire future of Bishop Ludden basketball.
In Central’s case, it was any number of things that were causing the hearts of those kids in scarlet-and-sky blue to beat fast as they sat in the visitor’s locker room and laced up their Chuck Taylor high-tops. There was the memory of the Frank Broadwater game, which had also occurred against Ludden, a game in which the Lancers prematurely lost both their best player and their spiritual leader, the first one for the remainder of the game, the second for the remainder of his career.
Then there was the deep sense of pride those Central kids took in basketball, a game that, more and more, was emerging as a city game, one influenced by a wave of young African American players just like them – as evidenced by Texas Western’s stunning upset of Kentucky in the NCAA Championship a few months prior, a game in which a team of all-Black starters (five kids lured by Don Haskins to El Paso from various cities up north) out-quicked, out-hustled, out-shot, out-defended, out-rebounded and generally out-played an all-white team led by a man, Adolph “Baron” Rupp, who Black fans in the Ward and beyond viewed as the very symbol of white supremacy in the college game.
Then, of course, there was the whole Ludden “Irish Mafia” thing.
Just as Ludden wanted to win the game for reasons that went far beyond where they might appear in the following day’s sports pages under, “CNY Standings,” Central had more riding on the outcome than just sole possession of second place.
The first three quarters of the game turned out to be as bitterly contested and as hard-fought as most had anticipated. Ludden jumped out early and led 21-18 after a quarter. In the second, the Central five caught fire. Senior swingman Bob Elliott began finding the range from the outside, Roy Neal started establishing himself down low, and in just eight minutes of game-time the Scarlet Lancers managed to put up an astounding 25 points – an average of over three per minute – to go into the locker having turned a three-point first quarter deficit into a five point halftime advantage.
But in the third, Phil Harlow, the newly installed sophomore, took charge, running his team from the point and giving his Gaelic Knights a lift they desperately needed. What more, Wadach began rebounding with ferocity. He also scored on a couple of tough put-backs in traffic that took what could have been empty trips and made them pay off in timely baskets.
More than anything, though, Big John McAuliffe, the silky and sometimes laconic 6’5” shooter who’d been throttled almost to the point of asphyxiation one game prior by Len Reeder, began reminding everyone there why, despite that big, fat goose egg, he was still leading the league in per-game average.
McAuliffe went toe-to-toe with Neal the first eight minutes after halftime and refused to blink. In fact, he got a hand on one of Neal’s shots on the defensive end, and made a key steal. Then, calling for the ball down low on three straight trips, he proceeded to put on a clinic of inside moves on offense that few who’d witnessed him play over the course of that season had ever seen him make before.
By the end of three quarters, despite being outscored 25-17 by Central in the second, Ludden managed to return serve, not only shutting down the red-hot Lancers but outscoring them, 15-8. Going into the final eight minutes of regulation, as a result, Ludden found itself clinging to a slim, one-basket lead, 53-51.
Something else began happening that third quarter as well. The Central kids, for whom the second period was such a breeze when, seemingly, everything they threw up somehow found its mark, were suddenly becoming frustrated as a team, almost to the point of becoming unglued.
Ludden’s defense, led by the muscular Wadach, an unexpectedly intense McAuliffe, and a resurgent Tommy McCarthy, along with a pair of close calls that happened to go against them, sent the Lancers to the bench after three quarters visibly agitated and barking over their shoulders at the refs.
The frustration that had been slowly mounting in Jack Johnstone’s team all season now began bubbling just beneath the surface. That a team of virtually all-white kids, many from upscale, leafy-green neighborhoods, who not only had the raucous crowd on their side, but also, apparently – at least in the minds of a few of the most frustrated 15th Warders – the refs as well, was not something any of them could easily swallow.
To make matters worse, Terry Quigley’s Knights came out confidently in the opening moments of the fourth period, seemingly hell-bent on putting the game away. McAuliffe hit a quick corner jumper from the right side, low-scoring Terry Quigg did the same, only from the left wing. Then, without warning, as Jerry Dunham, the Central lead guard, brought the ball past half court, Harlow reached in and made a lighting-quick swat-and-steal, sprinting ahead of a visibly upset Dunham for a breakaway that ignited the partisan throng – their roar, literally, shaking the bleachers and rattling the windows – and upped Ludden's lead to double figures with, now, just five minutes to play.
Central coach Jack Johnstone jumped to his feet and signaled time out. He needed to try to settle his team down. His kids were cracking right before his eyes. Even more than the score and the crowd and the dwindling amount of time on the game clock, the young men in scarlet now needed to, somehow, overcome themselves and the frustration that threatened to choke the very life out of them as a team.
To counter their momentary implosion, Johnstone had his kids start pressing all over the court, a move that for all it pressured Ludden defensively, created multiple opportunities for easy baskets, especially with Phil Harlow – Howie’s blossoming little brother – now running the show. The harder Central scrambled and pressed, the more desperate the situation grew, and the more Harlow – an African American playing for, of all teams, Ludden – handled their pressure and fed one teammate after another for easy hoops, the more the Central kids' frustration began to boil.
With just over three minutes to play and Ludden up by ten, Jerry Dunham was fouled in the act of shooting and went to the line. Dunham was a good kid and a hard worker who was trusted by Johnstone to quarterback his team's offense. But as he stood at the foul line, the inevitability that the game was all-but-over weighing on him like an unseen weight, from beneath the basket John McAuliffe, the game’s leading scorer with 22 points and a kid who’d found some measure of vindication for his previous game’s no-show, did something befitting any young man whose nickname among was “Showboat.”
He looked at Dunham, gave him a wry smile, and did something few noticed but Dunham. He winked.
Years later, McAuliffe would admit it was something he shouldn’t have done; the impulse of a young man caught up in the moment – and, one supposes, a teenager basking in the personal vindication of a big win following what had been an embarrassing loss.
Regardless, when he saw the wink, Jerry Dunham saw red and snapped. He slammed the ball at his feet and bolted toward the much taller McAuliffe with rage in his eyes, fists clenched and flying. The moment Dunham did that, the collective frustration of the entire Central team, a frustration that they’d been bottling up all year long, even as it continued to fester, spewed forth in a tidal wave of pent-up anger.
Most of the Central five starters started throwing punches at anyone near them in green-and-white, while all seven members of the Lancer bench, along with the team’s manager, bolted forward and joined their teammates on the far end of the court, near the stage, and began delivering haymakers of their own.
Senior Bobby Elliott, the most muscular and physically defined of the Central kids, squared off with Tommy McCarthy, a quiet but tough-as-nails Tipp Hill kid of similar size and stature. The showdown between the two swingmen became the signature confrontation of the melee. But, truth be told, the entire southern half of Bishop Ludden’s home court was a virtual maze of smaller skirmishes – each one a Black vs. white affair.
On the Ludden side, only Wadach, who tried his best to play peacemaker, and Harlow, who’d known almost all the Central players since when they were kids together in the Ward, didn’t throw a punch.
And on the Central Tech side, the same could be said of sophomore Cleve Hughes, the light-skinned African American youngster who’d, quite possibly, saved the Corcoran player Frank Karazuba’s life that day in the Central parking lot, a day on which Karazuba – the only white kid on the court – had lit up the Lancers for 28 points in what would prove to be his team’s only loss of the regular season.
Order was eventually restored, but it was, without question, fragile. One could feel the tension still crackling in the air. To their credit, the two refs realized each team needed more than a simple moment or two to cool down. They sent the two squads to their respective benches and called their coaches over near the scorer’s table, but not so near they could actually be heard by anyone in the stands or on either bench.
The ref’s intent was to just kill some time and let some of the adrenaline and anger in the room dissipate, let the kids cool off a bit. It was, indeed, a prudent and wise course of action.
But after nearly five full minutes without resuming play, Elliott, the Central senior who’d been squaring off with McCarthy all game long and who’d been one of the few who'd seen McAuliffe wink at Dunham from beneath the basket, stood up and began to walk toward the Ludden bench. No one was sure what he was doing. The refs made a start in his direction, but then stopped when he held out his hand to McAuliffe, as if proposing the two shake as a gesture of peace. McAuliffe reached out to accept the gesture, the Central senior closed his hand into a fist and sent it crashing into McAuliffe’s jaw, knocking the long, lanky Irishman back into the laps of those seated behind him.
The melee not only restarted, but it did so with even greater intensity and far more venom than the first time. Elliott, who was now steaming mad and swinging wildly at anyone and everyone he could get his hands on, somehow managed to rip off his jersey in the fracas and was now throwing punches shirtless and wet with sweat.
From out of the second row of the bleachers jumped Alex DeLucia, an assistant football coach for the Knights, and one of the toughest sons-of-bitches the city had ever produced. DeLucia made a beeline for Elliott with a look in his eyes that, alone, might have caused many a brave man to cower in fear. But McCarthy beat him to, literally, the punch and was on Elliot like an animal fighting for his life. Other adults popped out of the stands too and joined in the fracas, the vast majority Ludden supporters who, at least on the surface, seemed to have vengeance on their minds.
The Central kids were hopelessly outnumbered and each one began swinging less out of anger, and more out of some innate sense of self-preservation, if not all-out survival.
In the opposite corner of the gym, on the far end of the top row of the bleachers, Central senior Barry Thornton sat and watched in pain. Thornton was the kid who earlier that year had met Jake Gaither when the Hall of Fame coach had flown from Florida to Central New York to scout a couple of kids, including Thornton’s buddy, Frank Broadwater. But Gaither came to town thinking he was going to be watching a couple of Black teammates play a football game; not one Black one and one white one. Thornton had been that white kid; the friend of Broadwater’s who’d lined up alongside his buddy on the Central line; the kid with the iron fist and a jaw seemingly made of stone; the kid who loved to brag he never threw the first punch in any fight, but threw plenty of last ones.
Barry Thornton was, in a word, and even by 15th Ward standards, a badass. He lived for fist fights, or so it seemed, but as a teenager only rarely fought out of sport. A kid from Winkworth, arguably, the single most upscale neighborhood in town and home to the most exclusive country club in Syracuse, he’d started at Bishop Ludden as a freshman but got expelled that same year by Father Charles Eckermann, the vice principal, after being unjustly accused of a theft he didn’t even know about, much less commit.
Barry Thornton, for all he relished a good fight, and as much as he remained a badass known far and wide for his willingness to go at it with anyone, anywhere, and at any time, only liked to fight when there was something important at stake – usually, and more often than not, a matter of principle to him or some affront to the moral yardstick he seemed to have hidden somewhere deep inside his soul.
Thornton took the blame for the theft at Ludden, bit his tongue, and transferred to the largely Black Central Tech in the virtually all-Black 15th Ward because, in his heart, he didn’t believe in ratting out anyone, even those who may have lacked the courage of their convictions or the fortitude to stand up and take responsibility for what they'd done.
The year prior, for example, at the onset of some racial trouble on the North Side when one particular Italian gang, the Crushers, began attacking African American male students they’d encounter, usually when they were alone or badly outnumbered, Barry had one such moment of divine but pugilistic clarity.
In the basement of the War Memorial on a night on which the city school district was sponsoring a school dance with a parade of local bands, two deejays, refreshments and, of course, a huge dance floor, Barry happened to be making his way to the men’s room in the far corner. As he did, he saw a circle of white kids who he immediately recognized as Crushers. In the middle of the circle was a solitary African American kid, Sam Noel, who Thornton knew a bit from school, though not enough to ever acknowledge in the halls, much less talk to.
Noel was a monster, over six feet tall and maybe 300 pounds or more. But he was not firm at all; in fact, he was somewhat flabby, and not an athlete by any stretch. He was a shy kid, almost painfully quiet, the type who tried to go about his business at school without attracting too much attention.
Barry walked up to the circle and said to one of the kids on its outer ring, “What’s going on?” When one of them said, “We’re trying to explain to this big dumb nigger here that he’s not welcome at our dance and that maybe he ought to go home to – like, you know, the jungle.” A few of the other Crushers laughed, thinking that, in the broad-shouldered and baby-faced Thornton – this hulking and smiling white kid who’d just popped up out nowhere and asked them, all nice-and-friendly-like, what was going on – they’d found themselves a kindred spirit.
But rather than a kindred spirit, those Crushers stumbled into their worst nightmare; a fearless street-brawler – if not a pathological and brutally skilled one – who was not going to fight against Sam Noel because of the color of his skin, but with him for that very same reason – that, of course, and the fact the kid was hopelessly outnumbered and looked, at least to Thornton, like he was scared to death and might, at any moment, pee his pants.
Barry Thornton quietly moved through the ring of Crushers, walked up to Noel and then turned so that the two schoolmates were standing back-to-back and looking outward at the North Side Italians. He then fixed his eyes on a few of the most vocal of them, smiled menacingly, and with both arms extended and all ten fingers beckoning them forward, said to them without actually uttering a single syllable: “Whenever you’re ready...”
That Friday night, as Barry Thornton watched the uncontrolled and increasingly violent melee in the Bishop Ludden gym from his vantage point high atop the bleachers on the far northeast corner of the building, he felt torn. He was cut off from the action by dozens of horrified parents and students, most of them Ludden supporters. What’s more, he went to Central and liked a lot of the kids on the Scarlet Lancers’ team – even played ball with a few of them.
But he’d also started high school with many of the kids on Ludden and knew a few of them so long they were actually toddlers together. He even had a sister who went to Ludden. So rather than try to elbow his way through the crowd and put himself in the middle of the melee, where the fighter in him would have to choose one side or the other, Barry Thornton just sat there and watched, simultaneously sad and frustrated at the spectacle playing out beneath him.
That is until one particular schoolmate from Central – an African American junior who decades later he’d refer to as a “bad kid” and a “punk” – sitting a row or two ahead of him, got up and began shoving his way toward the rumble and the turgid mass of mini-battles that continued to play out at the opposite end of the gym. In one of his hands, Thornton saw the glint of something that sent him bolting forward as if propelled by a catapult. In the kid’s right hand was a small wooden-handled hatchet that he’d been concealing in his coat pocket, a hatchet he’d apparently snuck past the ticket takers and into the gym, perhaps for just such an occasion.
Moving like a cat, Barry was on the kid before anyone in that section realized what was happening. With his strong left hand he clamped onto the junior’s left shoulder, and then simultaneously with his right grabbed the kid’s opposite hand, the one that held the hatchet. He then squeezed both as hard as possible as a way of impressing upon the young man the importance of what he was about to say. “Give me that thing,” Thornton said quietly but sternly into the kid’s ear.
Perhaps the kid recognized the voice. Perhaps he felt the power emanating from the two thick hands that held him upright and had him so frozen in place that he was barely able to breathe, much less move.
Whatever it was, prudence won the day and the kid slowly opened all five fingers of his right hand as a simple gesture of concession. The hatchet, almost unnoticed, quietly transferred ownership and both men slowly exhaled. “Now,” said Thornton in an equally soft voice. “Get outta here and don’t come back. Remember...I know where you live.”
The young Central junior not only didn’t come back, he didn’t even look back.
As for the game itself, order was eventually restored. This time, however, the two officials ejected Elliott and McCarthy, the two kids whose fight near the Ludden bench had reignited things.
Unlike the refs in Fulton and at Central earlier that year, however, the two referees in Ludden that evening allowed a Central game interrupted by a bench-clearing brawl to continue to its conclusion.
There were only two minutes to play and, indeed, something about that second brawl seemed to take much of the starch out of both teams, at least basketball-wise. It was almost as though Ludden and Central, both of them now reconciled to the result, wanted to just leave basketball behind them and get home.
Syracuse was changing, and one didn’t need the benefit of time or perspective to appreciate it.
Anyone at 815 Fay Road that starry night in March of 1967 could see it and feel it. Any clear-thinking Syracusan who’d witnessed the rage on display in that shiny new gym in what heretofore had always been a safe haven from the country’s growing violence and racial division could sense that nothing – nothing – was immune any longer to what was happening in cities all across the country. Not even something as pure and innocent as Syracuse high school basketball.
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