Father’s dying wish was for son to make movie about Granite City’s 1940 basketball team
Author Dan Manoyan died last year, leading many people to assume that his book on Granite City’s 1940 state championship basketball team would never be made into a movie.
Enter Randall Manoyan, Dan’s son.
The 31-year-old attorney traveled from Chicago to Granite City on Saturday to hold a community meeting and assure residents that he’s going to work to fulfill his father’s dream.
“It meant a lot to my dad, so it means a lot to me,” Randall Manoyan said earlier this week.
Dan Manoyan was a longtime sportswriter who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and retired from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He self-published the book “Men of Granite” in 2007 and spent more than 10 years talking to producers, investors and others about adapting it to the big screen.
At one point, a film-production team even started hiring actors, but the project fell through and ended up in court.
Dan Manoyan, 69, died of cardiac arrest on April 20, 2020. Randall said the seriousness of his father’s heart problems led Dan to bring up the movie’s fate several weeks prior.
“I promised him that I would make sure this film was made,” Randall Manoyan said.
Poverty and prejudice
The “Men of Granite” story revolves around 10 players on the Granite City High School Warriors basketball team in 1940, including seven who were sons of Eastern European immigrants.
Their families had left Armenia, Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Hungary in the early 1900s to escape genocide and oppression. They moved to Granite City to work in steel mills and lived in a neighborhood called “Lincoln Place,” facing extreme poverty and prejudice.
Dan Manoyan’s father also was an Armenian immigrant.
About 40 people attended Saturday’s meeting and open house at the Granite City Sports Hall of Fame. Many had ties to Lincoln Place.
“Everybody was very excited and positive,” said Conrad “Babe” Champion, 88, of Granite City. “They all want (the movie) to happen. They feel it is a wonderful story, and it’s not just a basketball story. It’s about the people in Lincoln Place and how these boys grew up.”
Champion is a retired health and P.E. teacher and baseball coach who has been helping to promote the movie idea for years and served as a liaison between Dan Manoyan and local residents.
Remembering Andy Phillip
Also at Saturday’s meeting was Bobby Galvan, a Mexican American who grew up in Lincoln Place in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Galvan played soccer and other sports at the same community center where the Eastern Europeans on the 1940 basketball team honed their skills. Except they had to rent shoes by doing chores for manager Sophia Prather, a former teacher who taught English and fought bigotry.
“I remember when Andy would come into town (in later years), and he’d go down to Blubby’s or one of the bars, and we would all sit around listening to him tell stories,” said Galvan, 67, of Glen Carbon.
Galvan was speaking of Hungarian Andy Phillip, the team’s 6-foot-3 captain. He helped persuade Granite City High School boys basketball coach Byron Bozarth to give his friends from the “other side of the tracks” a chance to play.
Phillip won the state championship with fellow players John Markarian, Andy Hagopian, Evon Parsghian and Sam Mouradian.
After graduation, Phillip went on to play basketball at University of Illinois with a squad nicknamed the “Whiz Kids.” He later served in World War II and spent 11 years with the NBA, becoming a five-time All-Star and winning an NBA title with the Boston Celtics.
Despite the 1940 team’s accomplishments, Galvan agrees with Champion that the “Men of Granite” story is about more than just basketball.
“It’s about these families coming here from other countries and trying to survive,” Galvan said. “... People in Lincoln Place took care of each other, and they kept their traditions alive.”
Big disappointment
Dan Manoyan thought a “Men of Granite” movie was a sure thing in 2015 after Milwaukee philanthropist Albert “Ab” Nicholas, now deceased, invested $1.3 million in seed money and a Los Angeles production company started hiring actors.
Producers announced that Academy Award winners William Hurt and Shirley MacLaine had been cast as Bozarth and Prather under the direction of Dwayne Johnson-Cochran.
“Then I got this call out of the clear blue sky, and (a producer) said, ‘We’re out of money,’” Dan Manoyan later told the BND. “I was like, ‘What?’ I thought they were a week away from filming. It was devastating.”
Dan Manoyan filed a civil lawsuit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 2017 against producers with two California companies. It alleged “fraudulent inducement, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, conversion and civil theft.”
A judge later ruled in Dan Manoyan’s favor, according to son Randall, but one of the defendants filed an appeal, so the case is still pending.
By 2019, a movie based on “Men of Granite” was being “developed” by Armenian-American producer Arthur Sarkissian, who is best known for the “Rush Hour” series, “Last Man Standing” and “The Foreigner.” But the film never got made.
Randall Manoyan said Saturday’s meeting showed him that Granite City residents take pride in their town and its history and they will support his efforts to get its inspirational 1940 story on the big screen.
“We’re just getting started,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure that the people who care about this story and have cared about it for many years know that we are serious about continuing the project and that my dad’s goal of making it into a film is going to be attained.”
This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Father’s dying wish was for son to make movie about Granite City’s 1940 basketball team."
