One of the greatest moments in Granite City history came a bit more than 75 years ago on the floor of then-Huff Gym (now Huff Hall) at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
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On that floor, a team that overcame long odds and questionable treatment by some in their own community brought home the city's first Illinois High School Association state championship.
The members of the 1939-40 Granite City High School basketball team – who went by the name Happy Warriors – remain part of the fabric of the city's history. Names like Phillip, Parsagian and Eftimoff are still recalled by many long-time city residents who remember the glory the team brought to the hard-working steel town in the days right before World War II.
The two surviving members of that championship team who still reside in Granite City – Andy Hagopian and John Markarian – were part of a reception held at the Lincoln Place Community Center in West Granite Monday evening to celebrate the impending start of the filming of “Men of Granite”, a movie that is based on the book of the same name and tells the story of that immortal team.
“It's interesting that people are talking about it today,” Markarian said. “It feels really good that a movie is going to be made about us. It's something we hadn't been anticipating.
“Of the team of 10, we had seven ethnic Warriors on there – Armenians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Slavs,” Markarian recalled about the many players with Eastern European backgrounds that made up the team. “All we had back then was basketball to play; today, kids have much more things like soccer, little league baseball, for recreational opportunities.”
“We didn't realize the magnitude of what we had accomplished,” Hagopian said. “We didn't celebrate what we did very much; we saw it as a job that had to be done.”
The team was the subject of some prejudice by some of the more well-off citizens of Granite City at the time, and the team was aware of how they were perceived by some. “No one from (the) uptown (portion of the city) would come here,” Hagopian recalled. “After we won the championship though, things started to change.”
One of the reasons the team got along so well was the presence of Sophia Prather, who lived among the residents of what was called Hungary Hollow at the time and constantly stood up for those residents. “Miss Prather could be very strict,” Markarian recalled, “but she also realized how what kind of kids we were. We'd be playing basketball, in some cases, without any shoes because our families couldn't afford them.
“We would do some things around the community center to keep it clean and orderly, and in return, Miss Prather would get shoes for us. She also ran the Sunday school here and it was a very important thing for many of us.”
The team's coach, Byron Bozarth, was very interested in helping out youth in the city. “Coach Bozarth was a good man to play for,” Hagopian said. “He almost never lost his temper and he was really interested in all of us; he wanted to see us succeed.”
How the story of the team became a book and now a movie came from a break in a shift author Dan Manoyan took while he was working for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel one evening. “I was looking around the library at the office, and I found a book called 'March Madness', which was a book about the history of the IHSA basketball tournament,” Manoyan said. “I found the story of that basketball team, read it, and thought it would make an interesting story.
“One time, when I was in St. Louis covering an event, I realized just how close I was to Granite City and decided to look around at the town. I met people, made contacts and talked to all the players I could find and I realized what kind of story it was.”
To Manoyan, the story of the 1939-40 Happy Warriors is a much better one than a similar story, that of Milan, Ind., a small town whose basketball team won the Indiana state tournament in the early 1950s, a story that later became the basis for the film “Hoosiers."
“To me, the story of this team is 10 times better than the one in 'Hoosiers',” Manoyan said. “It brought the community together and was the catalyst for a change in Granite City. It helped Granite City become a much better community.
“It's simply an amazing story.”
