Kenny Huffman saw basketball not so much as an end in itself, but a means to that end. That is to say, he viewed the game as a vehicle by which a man might teach those under him important lessons, and then watch as those lessons would often manifest themselves in honest-to-goodness, real-life, on-court situations (and, on a good day, the scoreboard as well); foundational, noble and character-defining habits that any young man would do well to adopt as his own, traits like loyalty, discipline, self-sacrifice, preparation, poise, anticipation, respect, responsibility, support of one's peer, open mindedness, fair play, and a willingness – if not an eagerness – to practice, learn and work as hard as you could for as long as God granted you breath.
That was the teacher and nurturer in Ken Huffman. But the former player in him was more practical; way more practical, in fact. The former bench player in him, the fierce, overachieving grinder, the gritty, hustling scrub he'd always been in his younger days, and a kid who still dwelt somewhere deep inside him, wanted to win as much as anyone, which is why his team’s loss in the previous season’s All City game still stuck in his craw – where it would stay, he’d later admit, for pretty much the rest of his life.
His ballclub’s gut-wrenching overtime defeat at the hands of Coach Felasco’s finely tuned quintet of seniors shouldn't have bothered him all that much. But the simple fact was, it did. It cut him deeply. Like all the game’s best coaches, Huffman didn’t feel as badly for himself as he did for his players. This was especially true of his seniors, kids like his starting frontcourt of Jimmy Collins, Bob Stroman, and Harold Broadwater, who’d all graduated the previous June and who’d never again be in a position to seek atonement or to capture their hometown's coveted, almost mythical crown. Huffman knew, as did many others who'd been there that day, that it was a crown that should have – or at least could have – been theirs.
Just getting back to the All City game in 1967 was going to be an uphill struggle, and Huffman knew it. Even though his teams had played in nearly half the All City games ever played, he had never focused on, nor given much attention to, the All City affair. He believed in his heart that the All City Championship was little more than a glorified exhibition played for pride. but little else of consequence. Instead, his focus was on the two crowns he felt should matter to any coach worth his salt: the Syracuse Central New York Cities League regular season title and the New York State Section Three championship.
There was no statewide title game in New York State in that era, only a handful of regional (or sectional) ones. Years prior, the Empire State high school athletic commission had divided the state into five geographic districts, or “sections,” and ruled that each of the five would conduct its own end-of-year tournament to determine which school in that section would, in the end, reign supreme. That was the prize Coach Huffman really sought each year; not the chance to grab bragging rights in some neighborhood saloon somewhere.
Beyond that, the 1966-67 season was going to be far more difficult for his Cougars than the one past, especially after losing the all-world Collins to graduation. What’s more, the only two kids with any real experience Hoffman was getting back from his championship ‘65-66 squad were his dynamic backcourt stars, Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow.
His other three starters, not to mention his key reserves, would be kids off last year's bench and products of this year's tryouts: a free-for-all/may-the-best-man-win competition held over a two day period. Huffman was fairly certain a few kids off his bench would emerge as starters, subs from like Frank Karazuba, a head-strong and whip-smart Ukrainian boy from a Russian Orthodox parish on the city’s West Side who was also a dead-eye shooter.
There was, likewise, Len Reeder, a powerful brick of a kid from the city’s 15th Ward, who had transferred from St. Lucy's of the Parochial League and who'd likely earn himself one of the two forward slots. A stoic young man of few words and even fewer facial expressions, Reeder couldn’t shoot a lick, especially beyond ten feet or so. But he was an exceptionally hard worker, a strong defender, and even at a diminished height for his position, a ferocious rebounder. What’s more, Reeder could sprint up and down the court harder, longer, and with greater sense of urgency than just about any boy roaming the hall of Corcoran High School.
As an academic institution, Huffman’s new workplace was entering just its second year of student life. Corcoran, where he began as a teacher and would later serve as an administrator, had been created when the Syracuse School Board opted to shutter two of their oldest and most-in-need-of-repair institutions and roll them into a single, state-of-the-art senior high school, grades 10-12. In February of 1965 – right in the middle of basketball season – all the kids from VO were relocated to Corcoran. In September of that same year, the kids from Valley joined them.
For years, Valley Academy had been located on Syracuse’s southern rim, in the heart of the valley that opened onto the Onondaga Nation, south of the city, land that had been designated as sovereign in a treaty from the previous century and carved out of earth most members of the Nation considered a part of their once-vast ancestral homeland. A number of Native American kids who lived near the Nation actually ended up going to Valley, as a result.
Vocational and Occupational High – or VO, as it was known to locals – meanwhile, had been an occupational trade school specializing in blue collar skill development, and was located near a working-class and increasingly dog-eared cluster of small frame homes on the West End, not far from St. Lucy’s.
VO had been the high school of Italian immigrant and one-time Nats owner, Danny Biasone. Current Sacred Heart coach, Billy E, had attended, as well. The school had also played host to the historic exhibition in which Biasone and Leo Ferris – then still in the process of fine-tuning their crazy idea – staged the very first game using a 24-second clock, a test run of their, at the time, radical idea to improve the quality and pace of play, not in some notebook or on a blackboard, but in a real-life, 48-minute, team vs. team contest.
Yet as a practical educational facility for the city’s now-flowering generation of upwardly mobile, post-war, college-bound Baby Boomers, the time for Vocational had long-since passed. Its reason for even existing was quickly fading into history.
What’s more, the school, due in large measure to rapidly shifting demographics in both the city and the neighborhood surrounding it, also boasted the second largest African American population of any high school in the city.
Corcoran, meanwhile, turned out to be a modern educator’s dream, if not a social scientist’s – though that probably was probably as much a matter of good luck and timing as anything. Nevertheless, for three or four years at the very start of its run, one of the city’s two new high schools (named for former mayor, Thomas J. Corcoran) was both an academic and cultural Shangri-La that looked down upon Syracuse from a lofty perch, a rugged, wildlife-rich ridge that ran along the southwest rim of the city.
The school was virtually perfect, boasting the latest and finest classroom technologies conceived around a series of bold and innovative new theories of design, light and space. Located on a patch of wooded acreage that featured a commanding view of the city, the school's two buildings were linked by a unique glass bridge for students and faculty that spanned what at the time was a clear running stream from which whitetail deer still drank daily and in which native trout still lived and spawned. The student body profile, from an ethnic, economic, and religious perspective, reflected – at least for that oh-so brief three or four year period – the very image of the city itself.
Perhaps it was by design – more likely it was just luck – but for whatever reason, when officials closed Valley and VO and married them into a single, modern high school, they ended up creating a student body that seemed, at times, almost utopian in its makeup. Corcoran High housed a delicate but harmonious blend of teens of all types and from any number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds – a mix of white, black and American Indian; a mix of rich, poor, and middle class; and a mix of Catholic, Northern protestant, Southern Baptist, Jewish, Russian Orthodox, and even agnostic. The actual percentage of the student body that each group represented, especially when viewed as a single snapshot, bore an uncanny resemblance to Syracuse itself.
Indeed, if you really wanted to see what the thriving little melting pot at the heart of this story looked like – the Syracuse, New York of 1966 – all you had to do was leaf through that year's Corcoran yearbook.
Demographic kismet aside, however, Corcoran’s chances that basketball season would rise and fall on the slender shoulders of two young African Americans who’d grown up together and who’d been playing alongside one another for virtually their entire lives: Reddick and Harlow.
In many ways, Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow were twin brothers of different mothers. The two lived near each other, first in the 15th Ward and later near St. Anthony’s on the South Side, where they both went to grammar school. They’d gone to school together, in fact, ever since kindergarten, and grown up playing together, learning to read and write together, spending hours at the Dunbar Center together and, quite often, eating and sleeping at one another’s house. It just seemed like the natural course of things that the two found themselves on the same team, lining up in the very same backcourt.
Yet, in one significant way Reddick and Harlow were as different as day and night. They’d been brought up by two men who were polar opposites; fathers who were, in many ways, symbolic of the yin and the yang of the African American experience in the 20th Century.
Maxwell “Sugar” Reddick was a street-smart, former Gold Gloves boxer who was, more or less, and in the vernacular of the day, a hustler. He'd held a series of jobs over the years, but never for long. He was a guy who had learned, out of necessity, how to get by financially on little more than his wits. He'd worked in (and partly owned) of a couple of taverns; he'd run numbers, both for Percy Harris and some equally dicey characters on the city's North Side; he'd done various “jobs” for people over the years and had always found a way to leverage some combination of market demand and human frailty to cobble together enough money to sustain him and his family – until, at least, the next month.
Frank “Pop” Harlow, on the other hand, while he too may have been a hustler, was not one in a street sense. To the contrary, he was a hustler as legitimate and above-board as any wage-earner in Syracuse. Pop, a stern but soft-spoken and devoutly religious man, truly believed the key to getting ahead in the world, and the way to create a better life for his wife, his son Howie, and his 13 other kids, was not so much to outwit, out-think, or out-hustle the next guy, but to out-work him.
Harlow held three jobs at the same time, and often worked twelve or more hours a day at some combination of them. He was with the city fulltime as a garbage man and then later as a sanitation department supervisor. He was a professional cleaner who started a family-run cleaning business that (utilizing the multitude of spare hands and cheap labor he found under his own roof) washed, waxed, vacuumed, buffed and shined professional offices and merchants’ shops in high-end locations like the State Tower and Chimes Buildings, seven days a week, always after hours, and often deep into the night. And, finally, Pop was one of the hardest working and most ambitious basketball referees in the city, a nonstop whirling dervish who could be found officiating everything from a regular season grammar school or junior high game to a CYO championship – varsity or JV – and often more than one in the same day.
Both men were politically astute and understood the value (and often priceless nature) of well-placed contacts, favors owed, and personal face-time. But, whereas Harlow often moved in all-white political circles, networked incessantly, and sought to operate within the existing framework of city politics and government, Sug Reddick more often than not found himself working just outside any such traditional framework, usually by a half step or so.
That said, the one thing united the two men and bonded fathers Harlow and Reddick on a higher and more meaningful plane was the deep and abiding love each felt for his son. And each was constantly supporting his boy’s various forays into Syracuse life, especially when it came to basketball. Around the family dinner table, Pop was always talking to Howie and his other sons about the game, referencing some up-and-coming player he’d seen or a nail-biter of a game he’d officiated, sharing, perhaps, some new and innovative offensive strategy or defensive tactic he’d just seen a coach employ.
Sug, meanwhile, a star athlete in his prime, who remained a gifted one deep into midlife, was constantly working with Joe and Howie on the courts at Kirk Park, not so much drilling them physically as honing their mental toughness. Basketball to Sug was less a game to be won than a battle to be survived. And in his world, which was rooted squarely in the often unforgiving streets of the city, only the strongest survived. And strength, at least to Sug Reddick, always started between a man’s ears.
While Pop and Sug were certainly different in temperament, approach and process, and came to the business of fatherhood with two entirely different mindsets and from two very different places, because their boys spent so much time together and whiled away so many hours at each other’s home, it was as though each boy absorbed an important part of his friend's father. As a result, Joe Reddick and Howie Harlow, two of the finest basketball prodigies their city ever produced, were able to glean knowledge and take kernels of wisdom away from both their "fathers." And in the process, each become a broader, more fully developed, and better prepared young man.
At this point, our story circles back to Paul Seymour, the gritty, fearless, now 34-year-old onetime Nat, who – at a time during which young Reddick and Harlow were still more wannabes than actual stars, and were still in the process of finding their sea legs on a basketball court – had returned to Syracuse, not in retreat, but in defiance.
Two years earlier, Seymour, worn down by years of pounding and a full step slower than he’d once been, had retired as a player/coach and had moved into coaching full time. He loved coaching, truly loved it, and was not only good at imparting his hard-earned knowledge, but had developed a passion for molding both players and teams. In fact, the previous season, Seymour’s first as head man of the NBA's St. Louis Hawks, he'd won the league's Coach of the Year award by leading his upstart Hawks to the second best record in the NBA and a Western Division title, before succumbing in the Finals to the powerful and now Bill Russell-led Celtics.
That season, Seymour’s Hawks (at that time the NBA's most southernmost franchise) had selected in the NBA draft a sharp-shooting backcourt man out of Winston-Salem State Teacher’s College named Cleo Hill. Hill, a humble and soft-spoken, yet boundlessly joyful kid, by many accounts had been one of the most talented (if not the most talented) player in the country, a once-in-a-decade ball handler, shooter and passer who, even at 6’0,” could do just about anything on a court, and do it with either hand – including draining long range jump shots from all-but impossible angles. In fact, Hill had been such a star and force at Winston-Salem that, years later, when school officials set out to select the single greatest player in school history, they did not choose Hall of Famer and NBA legend, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe. They chose Cleo Hill.
Against Cincinnati in the season opener, Hill scored 26 in his very first NBA game under Seymour, raining in beautiful, arcing shots from all over the court and consistently finding seams in the Royals’ defense that he exploited for drives to the basket, a few of them breathtaking.
The problem, at least for some in St. Louis – fans and players alike – was not Hill’s ability. It was his skin color. It was rumored that St. Louis’ three biggest white stars of the day – Bob Pettit, Cliff Hagan and Clyde Lovellette – each of whom had averaged over 20 points the previous season, had gone to owner Ben Kerner about Hill. In that meeting, the three reportedly lodged all the stereotypical complaints about black players of the day; that the kid didn’t play any defense, took too many shots, and wasn’t smart or willing enough to grasp the team’s plays or offensive sets. Irked by what they considered constant Hill's freelancing, the three men, on their own, began to freeze the kid out.
Belying this rumor, however, particularly Hagan’s role in it, was a fact detailed year later in the seminal, fly-on-the-wall sports book about a season with the Portland Trailblazers, The Breaks of the Game, by David Halberstam. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reported that when St. Louis drafted another African American guard, Lenny Wilkins of Providence a year later, Hagan was one of the few white players on the Hawks to not only defend his new teammate, but support and (in time) befriend him. It would seem odd, therefore, that Cliff Hagan would be so closed minded about Hill and so open minded about Wilkins – especially since they were both, by all reports, not only gifted players, but affable young men of high character.
Regardless, what is not up for debate is the fact that Kerner, a prickly and mercurial owner who’d started the Hawks in Buffalo with then-partner, Leo Ferris, and who would later relocate the club twice (first to Milwaukee, and then a short time later to St. Louis), approached his defending NBA Coach of the Year and suggested that Hill’s role be greatly diminished. What’s more, Kerner strong-armed his general manager, Marty Blake, into trading the two other blacks on the St. Louis roster, Woody Sauldsberry and Si Green, leaving Hill as the club’s lone African American.
Seymour was incredulous as he stood in front of his owner’s desk that day, roughly three weeks after Cleo Hill had poured in 26 for him. “Bench him? Are you kidding me? The kid’s one of my best players,” protested the coach.
“I’m sorry,” said Kerner, almost dismissively, pulling on his cigar. “That’s the way it’s going to be. He’s just not right for us. He’s not…fitting in with the rest of the team.”
At that point, Seymour once again standing on principles he'd learned from his parents about equal opportunity and the dignity of all men, reached down and drew yet one more line on the sand.
His “it’s him or me” ultimatum was not only courageous, and not only came at great personal (and financial) risk, but it ended up being the last decision he would ever make as coach of the St. Louis Hawks. Always a man of principle more-than-willing to fall on his sword in the pursuit of what he felt was right, Seymour was fired before he even had a chance to grab the doorknob.
With little in the way of an alternative, the suddenly-out-of-work coach packed his bags and returned to his adopted home, Syracuse. There, faced with the necessity of continuing to feed his young family, he traded on his still-solid reputation and opened a liquor store in the West End – and also moonlighted selling real estate.
As for Hill, the very next year, haunted by gnawing and ever-growing self-doubt, and now without his mentor, Seymour, to act as a shield, he found himself unceremoniously released. In addition to the completely manufactured and richly undeserved perception he was a hot dog and ball hog, Hill had also unwittingly become a bit player in a protest a few months prior by a handful of fellow NBA “Negro ballplayers,” a protest conceived and spearheaded by Boston’s Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, both of whom were upset for having been denied service a St. Louis eatery. Even in many northern cities, such a protest in the early 1960’s would have been a dicey tactic for a young black athlete to employ. In St. Louis, however, such a public and visible protest was a deal breaker, if not a career-ender.
Hill was informed of his release by the Hawks’ new coach (their third since Seymour’s departure, months prior), who pulled him aside one day before the season and, knowing the kid’s alma mater, said to him with a wry smile: “Cleo, hope you're a good teacher.”
Suddenly unemployed, Hill called his former coach, finding him again at his liquor store. He told Seymour what had just happened. "Don’t worry," said his ex-coach. "Let me make a few phone calls and I’ll get back to you. Believe me, Cleo, some GM will jump at the chance to grab you."
But for two days, Hill heard nothing. He just sat by his phone in St. Louis and waited. Finally, as he would recount for producer Dan Klores on his documentary about the history of African Americans in basketball, Black Magic, Seymour called back, again from the office in the back of his store. With tears welling in his eyes, and in a voice that barely touched a whisper, Hill told the camera that all his ex-coach could find it in his heart to say was, “I’m sorry, Cleo. I had no idea Mr. Kerner was so powerful.”
Blackballed or not, Cleo Hill returned to his native Newark to live out his days. He did, indeed, become a teacher – and, by all reports, a good one. But he never played even one more minute of NBA basketball.
As for Seymour, his liquor store on 300 West Gifford Street – which was in St Lucy’s parish, a working class and mostly Irish parish that continued to grow more ragged and threadbare by the day, and near West Street, a largely industrial strip on the city's Near West Side – soon became a Mecca for Nats fans, regardless of what part of the city they called home. Their beloved Nats would, alas, be gone from Syracuse just two years later, sold to a handful of deep-pocketed investors who, just two short years later, would relocate their shiny new toy to Philadelphia and rechristen it the 76ers.
But thanks to Paul Seymour, liquor store proprietor, property owner, and West End merchant, those fans could stop in for a fifth of Schenley Reserve whiskey, Old Crow bourbon, or maybe Gilbey’s gin, and in the process take a step back in time. There, they could meet the shopkeeper as he worked the counter or took inventory, and make small talk or swap stories with him, reliving, if only for a moment, their hometown franchise’s glory days when gods like Dolph Schayes, Red Kerr, Earl Lloyd, Billy Gabor, Al Cervi and, of course, Seymour himself, not only walked the Earth, but ruled the NBA.
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Among the many street figures on the South Side who frequented Paul Seymour Liquors, in part to transact a little business and, perhaps, savor a bottle or two of the proprietor’s more modestly priced libations, and in part to talk basketball, was one Maxie “Sugar” Reddick. Sug Reddick had long admired Seymour, not just because he was an NBA All Star and local celebrity, but because he played the game with the kind of passion and mental toughness he’d been trying to instill in his son, Joe, ever since he took up basketball.
One day, Sug, who’d gotten to know Seymour, asked him if he wanted to play on his amateur team, the Olympians, an all-black team that operated out of the Genesee Street Boy’s Club and regularly competed in high-end tournaments around the state. The Olympians, Sug explained, while certainly not NBA-caliber, were regular favorites (and frequent champs) of the local Blessed Sacrament and Boy’s Club tournaments, two ultra-competitive, single-elimination tourneys held each year, one in the summer, the other in the spring, that consistently drew Central New York’s finest players, young and old.
Reddick also mentioned to Seymour that his team was in the process of creating a junior version of itself; one called, appropriately enough, the Junior Olympians. The boys he’d recruited, Sug said, would compete in junior tourneys around the area. And he added, with more than a touch of hope in his voice, that the team was looking for, you know, somebody who might be willing to coach them.
Seymour, who’d been leafing through a wine catalogue, looked up and smiled. “Look, Sug,” he said, “I’m sure you guys are really good, but I’m just not into playing right now. Plus, I really don’t have time to coach. But I’ll tell you what, I’d be happy to come by now and then to give the boys some pointers. You just stop by the store and let me know the next time you’re going to have a practice, or whatever. I’ll see what I can do.”
It was probably something of a brush off. Yet, brush off or not, the very next day after school Sug Reddick showed up at Seymour’s store with three of his Junior Olympians in tow; his 12 year-old son, Joe, Joe’s classmate and friend, Howie Harlow, and a tall, beanpole of a kid from the neighborhood who was maybe a year or two older named Jimmy Collins, a soft-spoken, youngster with sleepy eyes, sloped shoulders and an easy gait. The three, Sug told Seymour as he introduced them, represented the cream of the Junior Olympians’ crop.
It wasn’t long later that Seymour found himself in the occasional pickup game with the boys, often Reddick and Harlow; sometimes at Kirk Park on the South Side, sometimes at Thornden Park near the S.U. hill, and sometimes at the local Boy’s Club, at the base of campus. Such games weren’t common occurrences; and probably took place only a handful of times. But what they may have lacked in frequency and regularity they more than made up for in their impact on the boys’ view of the game.
What was noteworthy about those games – besides, of course, the fact they pitted a former NBA All Star against a bunch of junior high school kids too young to either drive or shave – was the fact that, in them, Seymour never pulled his punches. While he regularly played at half speed against the boys, he never – especially on defense or when going for a rebound – was above getting physical, or mixing it up.
Sometimes, with his free hand, he’d hook the kid guarding him as he drove to the basket, which shielded the ball and allowed him to utilize his superior strength and size, a paralyzing maneuver that neutralized whatever edge the kid may have had in quickness and foot speed.
Sometimes, when going up for a rebound, he’d shove the boy attempting to box him out, even though the kid had established his position, muscling him directly beneath the basket and toward the baseline, which allowed Seymour to then use the backboard and rim to seal the kid off from the business side of the goal; a cagy, veteran move that, in the process, took what had been prime rebounding real estate and magically turned it into real estate that, along with a dime, might have gotten the kid a phone call.
Sometimes, too, especially when one of the youngsters had an open look or easy layup, Seymour would use his body or hands to jar the boy, sometimes to a great and even alarming degree, which disrupted the kid’s rhythm and made him flinch reflexively – a reaction that he’d eventually start having time and time again, often at the mere intimation of contact by the old man with the blue eyes and the crew cut.
And, of course, there were times when Seymour, lacking any better option, simply and openly hacked one of the kids as he pursued a loose ball or attempted to block a shot.
At such times, the skinny young victim would invariably stop playing, believing he’d been fouled, and stand there looking at the old guy with a pained expression on his face. That’s when Sug, from one sideline, would start barking. “That ain’t no foul! Ain’t no damn foul! That’s how the game is s’posed to be played! That’s how the pros play it!!!” Sug would then fix his gaze on the kid, often his young son, and say, “C’mon, boy. C'mon. Play the game. Play the game!!!” The elder Reddick would then exhort, clapping his hands loudly and repeatedly, machine gun-style. “And don’t whine! Do not start whinin’ now, boy! You hear me? Just get the ball back! And play the game!”
It's why those casual pickup affairs, as infrequent as they may have been, left a deep impression on the developing minds of the three boys. Because later on, maybe three or four summers later, while attempting to hold their own in some of the intense evening games at Thornden Park against the likes of S.U. greats, Dave Bing and Jim Boeheim, or every so often NBA stars like Hal Greer and Chet Walker – games with five or six teams of young men waiting to play, and games in which you either won or went home for the evening – to a man, the three boys’ singular goal became simple survival. And when it came to survival, as they learned firsthand from Seymour, a man does what he has to do.
So that’s how the boys started playing the game once an aging, broken-down white guy with bright eyes and a crew cut first elbowed one of them in the ribs and, in the process, opened all their eyes. Because after Paul Seymour showed them that between the lines a great player does whatever he can to gain an edge, everything changed. From that point forward, Joe Reddick, Howie Harlow and Jimmy Collins, three of the finest basketball talents their city would ever produce, never saw or played the game the same way again.
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