Book Revisits Epic Game and Life Pre-81
By Jeff Kramer
Author M.C. Antil had a problem. He set out to write a local basketball history on the long-defunct Syracuse Parochial League, the colorful 10-team affiliation of Catholic high schools and its outsized contributions to the game. But what happens when — after hundreds of interviews — you come to understand that the most important player was the construction of a 1.4-mile viaduct that was cleaving the town in two? And what if that epiphany leads to hundreds of additional interviews and a whopping 1,600-page manuscript?
The conventions of book publishing typically demand tough creative choices to trim so much material, but Antil is no conventional writer. He and his editor, Pete Alson, a relative of Norman Mailer, demolished expectations and produced a behemoth of their own, a five-volume set that uses a single high school basketball game as a lens to tell the larger story of how Interstate 81 decimated one of America’s most eclectic and successful urban neighborhoods.
“That was our city,” Antil said emphatically during a recent book signing at the Onondaga Historical Society. “It’s my soul on these pages.”
The Chicago-based freelance writer grew up in Westvale and attended Christian Brothers Academy. He began his project in 2003, got bogged down, abandoned it for eight years, got cancer in 2014 — and then got serious. He dove in again, this time releasing excerpts online as he worked. The tactic generated interest, feedback, free fact-checking, more angles and, most importantly, motivation to keep going.
“At some point this was no longer writing a book,” said the 67-year-old author, now fully recovered. “It was a spiritual journey.”
If you wish to experience Antil’s spiritual journey beyond the five free chapters posted online at floorburnsbook.com, you’ll have to pay for the privilege. The book — “Floor Burns: Love, Passion and the 1967 Syracuse All-City Championship” — sells on that site for $89.95, plus shipping. It’s also available in the Historical Society’s gift shop, the DeWitt Barnes & Noble and at Doyle’s Books, an independent bookseller in Fayetteville.
It’s a price that so far 250 Syracusans, most of whom came of age in the heyday of the Parochial League, seem happy to pay. Assemblyman William Magnarelli bought a set at the signing.
“Those were good years,” Magnarelli told The Stand, concisely capturing the nostalgic vibe of the crowd of approximately 45 people.
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Better for some than others. Dolores Brulé, 91, lived in the 15th Ward as the bridge went up. The Nob Hill woman was the first Black student to attend a Catholic High School in Syracuse — Cathedral — until she was told by the Mother Superior she’d be better off “with your own kind.”
Brulé, who is in the book and was the only African-American at the talk, said she sees the 81 overpass as the consequence of pre-existing racism more than the cause of racism in Syracuse. That said, the bridge has provided handy justification to make subsequent race-based planning decisions. She cited the closing of Central Tech High School and replacing it with Fowler, a windowless, doomed-from-the-start institution erected in a waste field, as an example.
“The racism is what allows (81) to exist so governments can make (similar) decisions — because who’s going to care?” she questioned.
Of course, the ravages of “urban renewal” in the post-war era are not unique to Syracuse, but that’s a point Antil embraces. He hopes the universal aspects of the story, particularly in the Rust Belt, will lead to a miniseries. An audiobook is in the works.
Antil describes his book as a mosaic of stories, all building toward the epic 1967 All-City Championship between Corcoran High — a big, new and racially-mixed city school — versus the Parochial League champion Sacred Heart, a neighborhood fixture with 19 boys in its graduating class. Some have compared the book to “Friday Night Lights,” which used a small town high school football team in Texas as a backdrop to explore larger issues in American culture, including racism and economic hardship.
Still, at its core, the history is a tender ode to a bygone Syracuse and a tragic chronicle of its transformation into a less cohesive city, all hastened by an ugly overpass. Focusing on the basketball game works as both “an explanation point on Syracuse’s Golden Age” and a metaphor for wrenching change — change that was especially destructive to African-Americans and their descendants uprooted and isolated by the span.
Antil writes in the forward: “…into that void would step a new generation of working poor, many of them African-American, whose own unique and vibrant neighborhood had been plowed under in the name of progress, and whose quest for a small piece of the American Dream was going to be far more complicated than the people they displaced.”
It’s a happy accident that the tome arrives just as plans are being finalized to most likely raze the viaduct and replace it with a manicured boulevard. While Syracuse can never bring back the overlapping neighborhoods and parishes — Polish, Jewish, African-American, German and others that encircled downtown — it does give Antil’s work a relevance beyond pre-viaduct nostalgia.
As Brulé reflected after the talk: “I was there when they built it, and I might live long enough to see it come down.”
Jeff Kramer is a reporter and columnist for The Stand. He has contributed to newspapers for many, many years in Syracuse and elsewhere. To contact him with story ideas, call (315) 420-2619 or email jeffmkramer@gmail.com