His name was Andy. That was virtually all any of the Hearts players knew of him. He was an older gentleman, maybe somebody’s grandfather, probably in his late 50’s or early 60’s. He was tall and, most likely, a parishioner. He also always, at least during basketball season, wore one of those odd little Elmer Fudd hats, the ones with the earflaps and straps. His was a hideous red-and-black plaid thing of coarse wool that he consistently left cocked to one side with the flaps untied and dangling, one past each ear.
More than anything, though, Andy (whoever-he-was) possessed a set of pipes unlike few, if any, in the parish. His voice had a resonant timber pitched just a notch or two above the normal human voice, especially when in full-scale yell mode.
And make no mistake, Andy could yell. When the guy let out one of his patented bellows, it generated sound waves that not only carried for blocks but carved through any and all ambient noise like the proverbial hot knife through butter.
For that reason, it was Andy who, week after week, and year after year, served as the Hearts' unofficial timekeeper. Because, despite what the scoreboard clock might have read, no Sacred Heart home game could begin until Andy had stood, cleared his throat, and howled out his signature line – four words that trumpeted the beginning of yet another standing-room-only, Friday night tipoff in the Hearts' packed-to-the-rafters gym.
For Billy E, the official start of any Hearts season wasn't necessarily the first game on Father Sammons' Parochial League calendar each November. It was when his boys were playing at home for the very first time. It was after they’d descended the front stairs through the tunnel of friends, family and well-wishers that led down to their basement locker room, where they’d then change, lace them up, receive a pre-game pep talk, and say a group prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was after they’d, then, climbed back up the cold and dark stairs in the rear of the basement, when they’d risen to the landing, and when the first of them reached for the heavy metal door that suddenly burst open, as if by magic. And it was when that very first boy, whoever he was, stepped out and led his teammates into the bright glare of all that crackling, Friday night anticipation.
That's when the big Pole, Andy (whatever-his-name), stood erect and – hat pulled tight and straps down – tilted his head back, rolled his eyes skyward and, through cupped hands and with a firm back, shouted to the heavens in a voice that sent shivers through every man, woman and child in the gym, Billy E included. With lungs bursting with one big extra gulp, Andy would bellow joyously, so that all might know: “HERE...COME...THE HEARTS!”
At that point, the shoulder-to-shoulder throng of fans and parishioners, jammed together liked sardines into every nook and cranny, from stage to alcove, stood and exploded. And that explosion thundered. It rained. And it cascaded down upon those twelve kids in uniform as they dribbled on-court for their very first home basketball game of the school year.
That – at least for Billy E – was the point at which the Parochial League season really started.
* * * * *
In the movie, Big Hand for a Little Lady, which Billy and his wife saw at the Kallet Genesee theater a month or so prior, a settler in American West, a guy seeking a better life for his family, finds himself, along with his wife and young son, in a saloon in search of a hot meal. The settler, played by Henry Fonda, soon manages to get himself in a high stakes poker game with five other men, all of whom appear to have particularly deep pockets. A moment later, the pot sits overflowing, including every last dollar the pioneer and his wife have to their name. Suddenly, there’s a flurry of raises and the man, now out of money and unable to see or call the last bid, is confronted with having to either find a backer or fold.
As he moves around the saloon from person to person, and desperately pleads with them to let him borrow enough to stay in the game, he grasps at his chest and suffers a heart attack. Though she knows nothing of poker, the man’s wife, played by Joanne Woodward, is suddenly compelled to sit in and play out the hand.
Her husband’s money issue, however, remains.
Being a strong-willed and ever-resourceful frontier wife, the woman convinces the others to bring their hands with them and to follow her across the street to the bank. There, she asks the bank owner if she could borrow enough to finish playing her husband’s hand.
He asks what collateral she’s willing to put up. She says she has none. He then gives her a long-winded and deliciously righteous lecture on the beauty of collateral, and how he’s never lent a dime to any man who didn’t offer solid collateral in return. Finally, she shows the banker her five cards and says it’s all the collateral she’s got. The man, incredulous, looks up at the young woman, furls his brow, and barks at her to get out of his bank.
Back in the saloon, the woman, now with tears in her eyes and resigned to her fate, is ready to fold. That’s when the banker enters and, standing above the table of players, repeats that in his life he’s never once lent money without strong collateral. Yet, he continues, in all that time, and in all those years of taking the measure of a man and determining his level of financial risk, he’s never – ever – seen a finer or more solid piece of collateral than what this fine little lady is holding in her hand right now.
“Now, young lady,” the banker says, smiling warmly down at the woman and his face softening as he takes out a wad of cash and pulls up a chair – the men at the table now staring at him slack-jawed – “Let’s you and me play some cards, shall we?”
If Billy E were to go to a bank for a mortgage on his club’s chances in the fall of 1966, if nothing else he'd do so with collateral as strong as any coach in the city. Because for all he may not have known about his first-year starters – Tom Sakowski, Dan Van Cott and Joe Zaganczyk – and for how uncertain he remained as to how the trio might perform in the heat of Parochial League battle, what he knew of his two returning first-teamers was as solid as Sears. The two rangy and physical ball hawks he had back at forward, kids who played beneath the basket with a perfect balance of control and fury, represented basketball collateral at its finest; basketball collateral that was as bankable and loan-worthy as four aces or a royal flush.
Billy E knew it.
As a brand new Parochial League season sat perched and ready to unfold, the Hearts’ head man found himself the proud possessor of two brawny, springy frontcourt pieces the likes of which no coach in the city, much less the league, could come close to matching. What’s more, in junior Pete Schmid and senior Jack Contos, Billy’s pair of powerful-yet-lithe cornerstones were arguably as skilled, as strong, and as high-flying as any frontcourt duo in the history of Syracuse high school basketball.
While Schmid and Contos, both relative outsiders to Sacred Heart, certainly had their similarities, they both shared a handful of differences as well. Schmid was from Fairmount, just five miles or so west of the city and attended church at Holy Family. Contos, meanwhile, though a Frazer Park kid who grew up a quarter-mile from Sacred Heart, was a weekly communicant of St. Stephen’s, a Slovakian church two blocks from Sacred Heart in the opposite direction. Irene Contos, Jack’s mom, may have been a Polish wife-and-mother to the core, but in all matters of church-going and weekly worship, always deferred to John, her husband.
The head of the Contos household was a proud second-generation Czech who spent his days as a freight handler in the train yard on Geddes and Fayette Streets. And, as a Czech, he felt strongly that his family should worship, not in a Polish basilica (however regal), but at St. Stephen’s, a humble brick house of God with which he felt a cultural bond, and to which he proudly led his family every Sunday for nine o’clock mass.
Billy E’s once-in-a-generation frontcourt gems were, however, both as strong as bulls; Schmid naturally so, and Contos because no schoolboy in the city was any more obsessed with weight training and muscle building.
Schmid stood an imposing 6’6,” maybe 6’7, ” with long, massive arms and large, powerful hands. His shoulders, meanwhile, were so square and broad they looked as though, if forced, one might be able to land a small plane on either of them. Indeed, throughout the upcoming season, major college recruiters would come flocking to Hearts games and practices for a chance to get a glimpse at (and to talk to) the great Pete Schmid.
Contos, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as tall – maybe 6’2” or 6’3” – but he was in the opinion of many, and at least for that 1966 season, the best all-round athlete in the league. His mother, the former Irene Krupinski, remained, even then, on the short list as the finest female baseball player in the history of New York State. She, likewise, held the city scoring mark for woman’s basketball, having once tallied 46 in a game for Porter Junior High. Plus, Contos’ little sister, Theresa, would, in time, grow up to become a world-class team handball player, earn a spot on the ‘84 U.S. Olympic team, and gain entry into the Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame. So, in all honesty, while Jack Contos may have been the best athlete on the Sacred Heart team, and possibly the entire Parochial League, he didn’t even merit that distinction at his own dinner table.
But the two remained, as stated, very different young men.
Contos, in addition to possessing sublime on-court skills, was a garrulous and outgoing kid off the court; one who, in addition to lifting weights and working out religiously, loved to hang around Frazer Park after dark, talking basketball, girls and music, laughing, and sharing swigs from quarts of Stegmaier, a low-end Bavarian-style beer from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that went for just 59 cents a quart at Lynam’s Sunshine Superette. On the other hand, he also loved to hunt, fish and spend long stretches of time alone with nature.
Schmid, by contrast, though a fine student and solid guy who'd earned the respect of his teammates for how hard he played and how intensely focused he seemed to be, kept the bulk of those very same teammates – in fact, almost anyone outside his immediate family – at arm’s length. Make no mistake, Pete Schmid was a friendly kid who had good friends on the team, particularly Richie Dabrowski and Leo Najdul, but he also possessed an intensely private side and, for that reason, seemed to let precious few, even his closest friends, get close to him.
Whereas Jack Contos grew up in the public school system, he was, nevertheless, a kid raised by a Polish Catholic mother and steeped in first-generation culture and traditions – not to mention, of course, the homemade Polish food his mother loved to cook. He also grew up not only using Polish idioms and phrases, but being spot-on with his Polish pronunciations and retaining an ability to both understand and speak a serviceable amount of Polish himself.
Pete Schmid, on the other hand, was not a Pole at all. In fact, none of the Hearts players – both the Poles and non-Poles – seemed quite sure where his people hailed from, since most never knew him until 9th grade, and since he never mentioned his roots, much less talked about them. The majority just assumed, maybe because of his last name, he was German – though years later one would say he thought Schmid’s family might have emigrated back in the day from Austria.
Either way, while Jack Contos was an open book who wouldn’t know a private thought if he tripped over it, Pete Schmid remained a young player (admittedly, a great young player) who carried with him – at least for a bunch of kids who knew little of the world beyond the aroma of the Red Star Fish Fry or the twin spires of their local church – a touch of mystery.
The two Sacred Heart forwards were different in at least one other way as well. Some teammates would contend years later that Schmid had come to basketball relatively late in life – perhaps the 7th or 8th grade – and had, therefore, learned it from the ground up, including the proper way to pass, shoot, box out, rebound and dribble. It was as though there was something textbook, almost mechanical, about his understanding of the game. Schmid, for all his greatness, didn’t play as if he’d learned the game at the street level, either on playgrounds or in local pickup games.
Some thought too that, since Schmid’s father used to drive him to and from school every day, not to mention to and from all his home and away games (until Pete was old enough to drive himself), that, perhaps, it was the stern and often exacting senior Schmid who had taught his son the game.
Jack Contos received no so such paternal (or, for that matter, maternal) tutelage. He was just a kid who, until he started lacing them up in college a few years later, had a game that was virtually all impulse and instinct. He began his basketball life as a ten-year old kid in Frazer Park and at the Boys Club, competing against players much bigger and older than he.
For that reason, he never bothered to learn the basics – at least not initially. He just hoped to fit in and let his athleticism and talent take it from there. As considerable as those things were, it wasn’t long before little Jack Contos was regularly being picked to play in games with boys four and five years his senior.
That’s why, at least for Billy E, one of Contos’ most unique and indispensable gifts was how he improvised and adjusted on the fly, able to tweak his shot in mid-air, often with a man in his face, or regularly split defenders and take the ball to the hole while contorting his body to avoid contact. Time and time again, the kid was able to soar in from the weak side, snatch a rebound, and either put the ball back up or lead his teammates on a blistering fast break the other way.
That’s also why Billy E always made sure that when the Hearts were facing a strong zone (and in bandbox gyms like St. Pat’s, St. Anthony’s, St. Lucy’s and Assumption suffocating zones were the order of the day), he always ran the offense through Schmid on the post, and left Contos to roam the weak side. Because away from the ball, Contos was free to do what he did best: adjust, create, and read seams in the zone before launching one of his patented aerial assaults on a potential rebound.
So while big Pete Schmid’s play in the pivot was the checkpoint through which the Sacred Heart offense ran, and one of the many reasons the big man regularly put up the gaudiest totals, it was Jack Contos’ offensive rebounding from the weak side that quickly became, especially among the Hearts crazies, the stuff of West Side legend.
* * * * *
The Syracuse of 1966 featured two daily newspapers. The Herald-Journal, the city’s afternoon paper, targeted the man home after a long day's work who wanted to sit down before dinner (which the little lady had, often, spent hours preparing), perhaps open a beer, and put his feet up to read what had happened in the world since yesterday. The Herald, due to the unusual nature of its morning deadlines, as much as it provided hard facts, it often placed a premium on an analysis of those facts.
The Post-Standard, on the other hand, the city’s morning paper, had tighter deadlines and less time for perspective. It was a down-and-dirty vehicle designed for the guy inclined to eat a quick breakfast and down a cup or two of coffee before racing out to catch the bus or jump in his car for work.
To that end, whereas the Herald featured any number of longer-form pieces, the Post was basically the news equivalent of a bowl of chips, small delectable items – especially in the local and sports sections – that dared anyone who sampled one to not at least try another.
A good deal of the Post’s local section each morning featured stories of no more than an inch or two, often consisting of single sentence that had been culled from the police blotter. The beauty of such stories, however, was not so much the declarative sentence or two upon which they were built, but the headlines that graced them.
When four teenage boys, for example, snuck out one school night to the Ainslie Inn, where they then proceeded to not merely down a half dozen shots of tequila, but light each on fire, one boy had the unfortunate occasion to spill one of those shots down the front of his shirt. The next day, the simple two-line story in the Post-Standard, ripped straight from the blotter, carried the seductive headline, “Flaming Youth in Bar.”
Another time, when a morbidly obese woman was arrested because she’d removed her clothes to skinny dip in Burnet Park pool, the next day’s one-sentence recap of the situation – a simple declaration of a rather extraordinary fact – was heralded by the delicious and assonance-rich headline, “Huge Nude in Pool.”
The sports pages of the Post were similar to its local pages, except for one thing. Instead of culling the bulk of its stories from the police blotter, the sports desk had a network of “eyes and ears” throughout the city, all of them authorized to phone in scores of games and provide bare-bones details of them. The downside of this network of amateur reporters, of course, was that it was fraught with human error and extremely vulnerable to, shall we say, impishness.
One evening, for example, Chris Grover, an Irish Catholic high school kid from the West Side, netted 31 in a CYO game. Yet, because his coach had called in the game’s results from his favorite watering hole, a place teeming with full throated regulars, their garbled conversation, combined with the music blasting on the jukebox in the background, were undoubtedly complicit in the makeup of the next day’s small headline. It read: “Goldberg Scores 31.”
Then one summer, right around that same time, two South Side boys became central figures in what turned out to be one of the most thoroughly entertaining summers of sports reading in Salt City history – at least for those in on the joke. Clark Cavanaugh and Tommy “Butt” O’Connor were a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of black-Irish kids from the South Side, down near St. Anthony’s. And, as much as Cavanaugh and O’Connor loved playing basketball, what they loved even more was lying in the shade, drinking beer, and playing cards for hours on end.
One day, Cavanaugh was asked by the leader of McKinley Park to phone that afternoon’s Summer Recreation League results. The park leader spelled out to the youngster that it was critical he use the park leader’s name, otherwise the Post reporter would simply ignore whatever he was being told. That’s when Cavanaugh got what he considered to be a brilliant idea.
Two days later, at least according to the following morning’s Post-Standard, Clark Cavanaugh rang up an impressive 33 points in a hard-fought Syracuse Summer Rec League win for his team, McKinley Park. Then, the game after that, he rang up 39 more, while his friend and teammate, Tom O’Connor, chipped in 19 and snatched a game-high 27 rebounds.
Once or twice a week, all summer long, Cavanaugh and his lanky, easy-going sidekick – after yet another languid afternoon of cold ones, belly laughs and card games – would stop by the pay phone in the McKinley pool house and drop yet another dime on the Post-Standard. There, they’d spell out the details of yet another summer league game in which they, once again, both starred and managed to prevail.
Those one-sentence stories with headlines like catnip were, ironically, how Billy E first became aware of Jack Contos. Billy always fancied himself a Post-Standard man. The Hearts’ coach rarely, if ever, bothered to read the Herald-Journal. But he read the city’s morning paper religiously, especially the four or five pages that constituted its daily sports section.
He’d long been aware of Contos’ school, Porter Junior High, because he himself had grown up a West Ender and had had more than a few friends graduate from there. Maybe that’s what first drew his eye to all those one-inch stories trumpeting some boy named Contos. Plus, he’d happened to hear the name around the neighborhood; John Contos was friends with Toby Lukacs, one of Billy’s buddies from the Old Port, and a fellow member of his Happy Hearts social club.
So, once Billy began noticing one-inch story after one-inch story about yet another win for Porter, and yet another passel of points for a kid with the last name Contos, he got intrigued.
That’s how he became so well versed in the exploits of a 9th grader from the West Side who continued to carve up the public-school competition and who regularly notched as many as 18 or 19 points a game – roughly half what many junior high teams were averaging.
A few weeks later, along with his JV coach, Paul Januszka (and thanks to groundwork laid by Toby Lukacs), Billy E found himself in a sport coat and tie and seated in the front room of the Contos family home on Wall Street. He was chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Contos about sending their only boy to Sacred Heart. As he sipped the tea Irene Contos had prepared, Billy told the Contoses of the quality education Jack would receive from the nuns and priests at Sacred Heart, as well as the school’s growing reputation for basketball excellence.
Jack, for his part, had never really considered Sacred Heart before. He’d just figured he’d go to Central, like most of his Porter teammates. But as he sat there and listened – and chewed on the idea of being able to walk two blocks to school instead of riding the bus for nearly a half an hour each way – on the spot he simply blurted out, even as Billy was still in mid-sentence, “Okay.”
No discussion. No “Give us a moment.” And no “Let me think about it. There wasn’t even a one-on-one in hushed tones with the old man in the other room.
Jack’s mind was suddenly made up. It was made up, in fact, before Billy E even had a chance to take a second sip of his tea or Januszka could take even one bite out of his second Oreo. If young Jack Contos was nothing else, he was uncomplicated. Plus, he didn't take much in the way of convincing, especially when confronted with sound reason and irrefutable logic – combined, of course, with the knowledge he'd able to go to school just a few doors down from his favorite place in the whole world: the beautifully musty weight room at the West Side Boys Club.
As for Schmid, no one was quite certain how a kid from way out in Fairmount came to attend Sacred Heart – and, indeed, just a few years later Schmid’s kid brother would end up at West Genesee, a public school a mile or two in the opposite direction. Regardless, Pete Schmid just simply showed up one day at Sacred Heart and sat down, ready for his first class.
Ironically, however, it would not be an official Hearts game at all, but a pickup game, that would cement the legend of Pete Schmid in many minds and become an almost mythical moment in Sacred Heart – if not Parochial League – history.
During Christmas break the year prior, Father O had opened the gym for a handful of kids to play during the holiday break. A few ex-Heartsmen, along with a few current ones, including Schmid, showed up, along with players from a few other local schools. One such kid was a tall and brawny North Sider who was, likewise, a Parochial League starter. At one point, someone on Schmid’s team tossed one up that missed and caromed high off the rim. The beefy North Side kid who’d been guarding Schmid and playing him physically, went up and snatched the rebound loudly with both hands.
However, just as he was doing that, and just as his leap plateaued, Schmid took a half-step, squatted slightly, and catapulted, his eyes fixed on the ball and his arms outstretched. As his opponent held the orange sphere above his head in anticipation of a quick outlet and fast break the other way, Schmid met him as his downward descent began and, likewise, grabbed the ball with both hands. But Schmid didn’t wrestle it away. He just kept reaching skyward toward the rim, the ball now in what might best described as joint custody. The other kid, in other words, didn’t let go. He held on and did so for all he was worth – or at least he tried to.
Then, to the amazement of everyone, the big burly Parochial Leaguer who just a nanosecond prior had been heading downward, somehow reversed course and began inching his way back up toward the basket, slowly losing control of the ball as he did.
Then, just inches from the rim, the brawny kid let go entirely, while Schmid, now in full possession, kept going up, rising above the rim. He then simply opened his fingers and released. The ball fell through softly. As the hulking Parochial Leaguer crashed to the ground beneath Schmid and quickly rolled to one side so as not to get stepped on, no one said a word. There was just an eerie sort of stunned silence throughout the gym.
Finally, one of the Hearts kids let out a spasm of a laugh, while arching a disbelieving eyebrow. With a huge smile, he said, “What the (expletive)? Seriously, Pete. What the (expletive) was that???”
Pretty soon everyone in the Sacred Heart gym – except Schmid and the burly North Sider at his feet – was in stitches, a few of them rolling on the ground laughing, almost to the point of tears.
No one had ever seen anything like it. And while the moment was over in a flash, it would remain in their minds forever. Because what Pete Schmid did that cold, winter afternoon, his otherworldly strength and skill on display for all to see, gave everyone in the gym something to share and embellish for the rest of their lives; a story that, to a man, every one of those boys would tell time and again in the days, weeks and even years to come.
For Sacred Heart, the 1966-67 Parochial League campaign – beginning with their season opener against Most Holy Rosary – would all come down to collateral. And thanks to the pair of aces he held, twin forwards Pete Schmid and Jack Contos, rock-solid collateral was something Billy E knew a little something about.
Sure enough, on Friday, November 25 – the day after Thanksgiving – and just one game into the season, those Rosary Heightsmen having been reduced to roadkill, 61-48, Billy E’s Heartsmen found themselves, as he sensed they might, off and running. And, once again, in neighborhoods, dining rooms, playgrounds, taverns, bowling alleys, social clubs, rectories, convents and schools throughout Salt City, another Parochial League race was officially on.
* * * * *
Kenny Huffman, a bookish and methodical planner, loved this time of year because it gave him a chance to take a few moments in the teachers’ lounge each day to put pen to paper and chart out the key returning players for each City League club. Using that list, along with whatever he may have remembered or heard about each club’s JV squad the previous year, he’d then study and attempt to suss out just how powerful (or vulnerable) each of his eight opponents might be.
Still, no matter how often he performed the exercise, no matter how hard he squinted, or how vigorously he tried to sand down the rough edges, it always came out the same. His paper-thin and undersized Cougars were going to have their hands full if they wanted to somehow – even magically – pull a rabbit out of their hat. Getting past Jack Johnstone’s talent-laden and high-flying Lancers of Central Tech was a tall order. (Central Tech was the name city officials had bestowed upon Central two years prior, following their shuttering of VO, which until then had always been the city's go-to school for mechanical and industrial arts training.)
In addition, at least according to Huffman’s rough calculations, there was upstart Bishop Ludden, the shiny, modern and all-new Catholic high school that the Syracuse Diocese (at the gentle arm-twisting of Bishop Foery’s no-nonsense first lieutenant and heir-apparent, David Cunningham) had built in 1963 just beyond the city limits in what was Syracuse’s first true suburb, a leafy little patch of heaven called Westvale. To Kenny’s eyes, the Gaelic Knights of Ludden looked formidable after just three years in existence and two season’s worth of solid play under fiery head man, Terry Quigley.
The key for Kenny in the upcoming season – unlike Billy E, who’d entered unsure of his backcourt – was going to be his kids up front. With sharpshooting Frank Karazuba one of his three new starters, likely to play well in a hybrid guard/forward role, it would come down to how well his other two frontcourt starters would hold up against the powerful front lines of tall and deep opponents like Central and Ludden.
Steve Williams and Len Reeder both had one huge strike against them in any matchup against the teams Huffman expected to challenge the Cougars for league supremacy: neither boy was tall. Williams might have seemed 6’1” or 6’2” on a good day. But Reeder, as strong and as hard-working as he was, wasn’t a whole lot taller than 6’0,” if that.
The two kids, both African Americans from the West Side projects near VO, shared more in common than just height challenges. Interestingly, the handful of things they shared were the exact things that gave Huffman hope as he stitched together his thoughts that drizzly afternoon in the teachers lounge.
Both Williams and Reeder were soft-spoken kids, at least to the extent that when either spoke at all – which was rare – it was softly. Neither said much of anything, unless spoken to. That was especially true when they were in the company of the likes of Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow, both of whom were gregarious and well-spoken young men.
Williams and Reeder, on the other hand, were almost stoic in their approach to school, basketball and, frankly, just about anything. They rarely chatted up girls in the hall. They almost always did what they were told to do by someone in authority. When other kids on the team wanted to go out after school or practice, or visit friends on the South Side, Williams and Reeder rarely tagged along, choosing instead to walk home together in the opposite direction.
Neither kid had much of a shooting touch. The left-handed Williams, in fairness, wasn’t awful, but he certainly wasn’t good. Reeder, on the other hand, might have qualified as an unmitigated disaster as a jump shooter. He was prone to extended stretches where his clunky looking shot lacked even trace elements of trajectory, spin and rhythm. And he always seemed to have the ball squarely in his palms at release, as opposed to his fingertips, something even marginal fans will tell you is the kiss of death for a shooter. Both Williams and Reeder could really finish, however, and were fearless on the receiving end of the last pass of a fast break. As a result, both were outstanding as wingmen on a full-court offensive blitz, especially with the opposing defenders focusing so heavily on stopping the man in the middle, the kid with the ball, be it Reddick, Harlow or Karazuba.
They had at least a few physical differences. Williams was rail thin, for example, and looked as if a strong wind could blow him over. He was all arms and legs with not a whole lot of beef in between. Reeder, was not only physically solid, he was strong as an ox. Built more like a running back than a sprinter, his center of gravity seemed so low and his legs so thick and muscular that, to look at him, one got the sense that to topple Len Reeder over, anything short of an act of God or a nuclear device was probably not going to do the trick.
The two young men also had a entirely different relationship with gravity. Williams could, in a word, fly. And it wasn’t so much how high the kid could fly as how quickly. Just like some cars can go zero to sixty in seconds, Steve Williams could go from complete standstill to in possession of a rebound in a heartbeat.
Many times, players significantly taller, stronger or better positioned than he would come up empty after a miss because Williams’ trigger mechanism was so much faster. It was as though the young man didn’t have to bend his knees before elevating, and didn’t have to make any physical adjustments. If a ball coming was off the glass or rim, he didn't have to think. He didn't have to steel himself. He just simply dis what he did better than any other kid in the city.
Len Reeder, on the other hand – and as Kenny Hoffman confided on more than one occasion to a handful of friends – would have trouble jumping over a phone book.
But like Williams, Reeder was a terrific and relentless rebounder. But unlike Williams, who got caroms over and before other players, Reeder got them because he was virtually impossible to get around, and because when he leaned on someone, suddenly that person became much less willing or able to do things he’d always found easy – like jumping and getting position.
The combination of Williams’ lightning quick leaping ability and Reeder’s rough-hewn mix of tenacity and brute strength gave Huffman – despite each being notably, and perhaps even conspicuously, undersized – not just two of the most unlikely rebounders in the City League, but two of the trustiest.
Two other things united the Corcoran forwards. First, they were both tireless defenders and, indeed, both seemed to enjoy defense more than they did offense – especially when charged with denying a man the ball. And second, both Williams and Reeder were largely unfazed by contact. Despite the differences in their body types, both players seemed to view hard physical contact, be it incidental or intentional, as an accepted (and acceptable) part of the game.
In Williams’ case, it was as though having spent his entire life as a skinny beanpole doing battle against much bigger, beefier kids – young men who could, and often did, bowl him over as a matter of practice – he got used to it. If some opponent elbowed him in the coconut or sent him flying like a duckpin, the kid wouldn’t pout. He wouldn’t call a foul. He wouldn’t try to retaliate. He’d simply treat it as a matter of course or fate, pick himself up, dust himself off, and jump back in the fray.
It was a seemingly minor personality trait, but it was one that would prove to be a godsend for Kenny Huffman. Because while many bigger and more talented kids would momentarily lose themselves in fits of anger, or sulk and even wilt in the face of hard contact, his rope-thin starting forward wouldn’t blink.
Reeder, too, was a young man entirely comfortable with physical contact; though in his case it was because he’d grown so used to it from the other side – the giving side. If hard contact was a disease, Len Reeder might have been rightly classified as a carrier. Where Reeder and his huge lower half went, flying bodies just naturally seemed to follow.
Ken Huffman knew he didn’t have a stacked hand heading into the 1966-67 basketball season, certainly not compared to his previous year’s club. But he liked the hand he held just the same. A big part of that was, of course, his starting backcourt – the once-in-a-lifetime pairing of the sublimely gifted Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow. And a big part, too, was the extent to which young Frank Karazuba had matured physically and gotten stronger over the summer, and the extent to which the kid could now, at least in Kenny’s eyes, shoot as well as anyone he’d ever coached.
But the most unexpected part – and the part he felt just might be the most important of them all, particularly as he went about the business of building this year’s Cougars – was his pair of silent-but-deadly undersized defenders and rebounders, Steve Williams and Len Reeder. That’s why, at least in private, Kenny Huffman always called the two his “glue,” and why the more he watched his boys practice, and the more he realized how much better this year’s Cougars seemed to defend and rebound with them setting the tone, the more he began to believe there there, indeed, might just be a rabbit in that hat of his.
* * * * *
