Get The Latest News!
Don't miss our top stories and need-to-know news everyday in your inbox.
Granite City High School (including the period from 1973-83 when there were two high schools, Granite City North and Granite City South) has won 15 Illinois High School Association state championships in its athletic history.
None of them had the impact of the school's first state title – the 1939-40 basketball team.
What that team accomplished has been the subject of a 2007 book entitled “Men of Granite”, which told the story of how the team brought the city together despite an air of prejudice that was present in Granite City back in that era.
The book is now about to be made into a film, and the film project was launched with a reception and celebration at the place where that basketball team learned and played the game, the Lincoln Place Community Center in West Granite, recently. The film will star Shirley MacLaine as Sophia Prather, who ran the center and stood up for the boys who played there when necessary, and William Hurt as Byron Bozarth, the team's coach.
Principal photography is scheduled to start within the next two months, with filming to take place both in Granite City and in Ohio.
“Dan Manoyan (the author of the book) contacted me about the story,” said Valerie McCaffery, one of the producers of the film project. “I read through the book and I thought it was a good story; it's the kind of story about a forgotten generation, a generation that overcame quite a bit and I thought it needed to be seen.”
The team was made up of many Eastern European immigrant children – Armenians, Macedonians, Slavics and Hungarians – that made up the population of the Lincoln Place community in West Granite. Their parents came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century seeking work and found it in the booming steel mills of Granite City.
Sadly, many of those who lived in Lincoln Place were not seen in a favorable light by some in Granite City. Prejudice ruled the town at the time and the immigrants who lived there and worked in the mills were not thought of very highly. The railroad tracks near then-American Steel Foundries in West Granite was seen as the dividing line between the “haves” and “have-nots."
“The people who lived there had to fend for themselves and had to assimilate into America,” McCaffery – who is of Armenian heritage herself – said. “None of them spoke English and it was hard for them to assimilate, but they managed to do that.”
“It's an interesting story,” said Chris Robinson, another of the film's producers. “It's a story that needs to be told. When I first read the book, I could tell there was a real passion for the game; the players on the team just wanted to play basketball.
“There's a real purity about the story in that all they wanted to do was play.”
The director of the project, Dwayne Johnson-Cochran, signed on to the project early on. “I was directing one film and producing another when Valerie called asking me to read the script,” Johnson-Cochran said. “Basketball was really big at the high school I went to (Chicago Leo), so the story of the team here really resonated with me.”
The team's story is still a major part of Granite City's history, one that has been shared from generation to generation. “My dad and mom would tell us some of the things that happened,” said Brian Hoff, the son of guard Ed Hoff, who had a reserve role on that team. “On the last play of the championship game (where the then-Happy Warriors defeated Herrin 24-22 at Huff Gym on the University of Illinois campus in Champaign-Urbana), my dad was involved in it. There were a few seconds to go and Herrin missed a shot. We got fouled and took the ball out of bounds.
“The ball was stolen on the pass, but Herrin missed a shot and we wound up winning the game. My dad was involved on that last play of the game.”
A Granite City native, Armand Kachigian, wrote the screenplay for the film. Like many in Granite City, he was aware of the story behind the team’s success.
“When the film rights were completed,” Kachigian said, “we hired a screenwriter in Pasadena (Calif.) to write the script. He had only written about 10 pages and he started asking around for another screenwriter. He contacted some folks from here, including John Manoogian (a Granite City native who heads up the speech and theater department at GCHS). He put him in contact with me and wrote up a first draft in 12 weeks.”
Like many in the town, Kachigian is excited about the prospect of the film being made. “I had moved to California to try to meet contacts in the movie business, and I wound up getting a big break writing a screenplay where the story is about my hometown,” Kachigian said. “I’m really excited to see the movie start filming.”
At least one person who has helped promote Granite City’s rich athletic tradition thinks the story of the Happy Warriors is comparable to another popular basketball story.
“It's a lot like 'Hoosiers', but it's a much better story,” said Gus Lignoul, a long-time Granite City resident and athlete who, along with Babe Champion, has been helping to promote the story. “It was the first generation of Europeans who immigrated to America and grew up here, and there's a really good story to it.”
