I was born one heartbeat on the frigid and still-dark morning of December 21, 1954, sixty-three years to the day Dr. Naismith first hung two peach baskets on opposite ends of a tiny gym in Springfield. So I guess you could say basketball and I not only share a bond, we share a birthday.
I’m a writer now, living in Chicago. But while life has moved me to different places, and done so many times over, I am – and I suppose always will be – just another scrappy, streaky, slightly undersized shooting guard from the West Side of Syracuse. Ask anyone who shares my background. Having the bustling, vibrant and mid-20th Century version of my hometown in your blood is a little bit like having a certain eye color. You may be able to hide it, but you’re sure as hell never going to change it.
Over a decade ago, I began writing a book about a now-defunct high school league in the Syracuse of my youth. My intent was to do one chapter on each of the ten schools of the old Syracuse Parochial League, all of which had been unlike any in the country, where Catholic grammar schools existed solely to feed what were, without exception, a handful of giant, sprawling and diocese-run high schools.
But in Syracuse things were different. In the Parochial League, the nuns and priests in its ten parish-based schools took kids as kindergarteners and taught them both intellectually and spiritually every year of their primary, elementary and secondary school lives, right up through and including their senior year in high school. It was a self-imposed, self-contained and self-reliant factory system of efficiency and impact; one that gathered thousands of young and impressionable minds one end and churned out an army of young Catholic men and women on the other.
What’s more, each of the ten Syracuse Parochial League parishes was a microcosm of a European village, with each “village” representing a different group of 19th Century American immigrants. Assumption was home to the German kids, Sacred Heart, the Polish kids, St. Pat’s and St. Lucy's, the shanty Irish kids and Most Holy Rosary, the lace-curtain ones, St. Vincent’s, the Italian kids, and so on, and so on – with each team from each parish adopting a style of play reflective of the group of immigrants who begat, nurtured and, in many ways, helped define it.
But as much as I was convinced the Parochial League would make great fodder for a book, as I began to do my research about that unique (and mostly all-white) league, I learned there was an equally compelling story in another part of town. It was the story of the kids of Syracuse’s mostly black and soon-to-be demolished 15th Ward, east of downtown, and the remarkable sense of place those kids, their families and their ill-fated neighborhood also shared.
And so what started as a story of one world morphed into a tale of two – or, more to the point, a tale of how two largely parallel worlds during a time of civil, social and religious upheaval collided and changed forever the small, booming Rust Belt town they both called home.
There was a downside to this realization, however. As it turned out, the more I peeled back the onion and the more I chased down leads, the more all the phone calls, leg work and (at times) conflicting oral histories became too daunting and labor-intensive to manage – at least to tell the story in a way I felt it deserved to be told. It was almost impossible, in other words, to separate fact from legend; to determine what was true and what was simply a product of individual, selective and often fabricated memories. As a result, I eventually took all I’d written, along with all my notes, and stuck them in a closet for over eight years.
And those notes and drafts might have stayed in that closet too, had I not just over a year ago experienced a life-changing event. One day in the shower I felt a small lump in my throat, so decided to get it checked. And when I did, and the mass was biopsied, it was determined I had cancer – or as my doctors called it, “Stage IV squamous cell carcinoma."
That was, as I said, just over a year ago.
Suddenly, my still-unfinished book gathering dust in that closet took on far greater import to me. And I realized if I wasn’t going to tell the remarkable story of the Syracuse Parochial League, no one might. But around that same time, as I lay there in my sickbed, I had a lightning bolt of an idea. I would still write my book, but do it in a way that would require less legwork, a do it in a way that might give me access to first-hand observers and de-facto editors that I might otherwise never meet or have access to.
I’d create a website – this website – on which I would upload individual chapters of my book, while soliciting corrections and anecdotes, and gathering photos, images and other artifacts from those with knowledge of the 1967 Syracuse All-City Championship, the game on which the story is built.
So that’s what I’m doing and why you’re reading this now. I plan to finish this labor of love of mine in real time, and share it with readers, chapter-by-chapter, month-to-month, until Floor Burns is done. What’s more, since my book will unfold and exist for a time online, I will be able to edit and modify it as I actually write it – even after it is officially “published.”
No, I won’t make money this way – after all, I’m now giving away something I once hoped to sell – but I will have the satisfaction of having the book completed and the story told accurately (and, God willing, compellingly).
(However, please note, I have included a financial donation function. If you’re inclined, and would like to help me offset the hundreds of unpaid hours and thousands of dollars I’ve poured into Floor Burns, I’d be grateful. But, if not – and I mean this from the bottom of my heart – feel free to read away, as well as share Floor Burns with anyone you feel might be interested.)
Thanks in advance, dear reader, for any help, financial support, photos and feedback you can spare. And if you’re of a certain age, and have Syracuse and/or the game of basketball in your blood at all, remember this is not my book. It’s yours.
Good reading and God bless.
M.C. Antil
