Once upon a time, Canisius versus Syracuse was a real rivalry in men’s college basketball. It isn’t like that anymore.
Tonight the old foes will meet again in Syracuse, at the JMA Wireless Dome. The game is notable nationally as Syracuse’s second in the post-Jim Boeheim era. To Craig Prosser, though, it means something more. Almost a half-century ago, he made a pair of free throws that helped to clinch the last Canisius win against Syracuse.
We take you now to Memorial Auditorium on Feb. 15, 1975, when the nation’s No. 1 song was Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good.” That night the Golden Griffins were very good. They beat Syracuse, 80-76 — and the Orange would not lose again until they reached that season’s Final Four.
The Orange came into the game at the Aud with a 37-game win streak against opponents from New York State, including their season opener at the University at Buffalo’s Clark Hall and their Feb. 4 game at St. Bonaventure’s Reilly Center.
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Canisius took a big early lead. Syracuse pulled almost even at the end. Then Prosser stepped to the line and hit those free throws.
“My claim to fame,” he says.
He has another one. Prosser had a small part in the 1979 movie “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh,” a basketball comedy with a disco soundtrack. The flick starred Julius Erving as Moses Guthrie, star of the fictional Pittsburgh Pythons. Prosser played Gunnar Boses, a forward on the Pythons. They are a terrible team later reborn as the Pittsburgh Pisces, a title-caliber club composed of players born under that astrological sign.
“ ‘The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh’ is not ‘Citizen Kane,’ ” the movie critic Gene Siskel offered at the time. “It doesn’t try to be, of course. It’s just a lot of great fun.”
Prosser had a lot of great fun being in a movie with two dozen NBA players, including John Shumate, a former Buffalo Braves forward, and Bob Lanier, the Buffalo-born Hall of Famer.
“It was a cool experience,” Prosser says, “but I was just one of the sidekicks.”
As it happens, I was sort of a sidekick myself on the night that the Griffs last beat the Orange. I pranced around the Aud in the Golden Griffin mascot suit as if I owned the place — which I sort of did, in the sense that I had a changing room of my own there. On the road, though, I had to change in the Canisius locker room. And when Canisius played at Syracuse the next year, I arrived at Manley Field House with the Griffs already on the floor for warmups.
I was standing outside the locked Canisius locker room, holding the oversized papier-mâché Griffin head with the fur suit stuffed inside, when I heard a voice call out: “Hey, Griff!” I turned to see Syracuse coach Roy Danforth leaning against the door frame of his locker room, smoking a cigarette. “Need a place to change?”
Syracuse won big that night, 80-51. (Prosser had 17 points to lead the Griffs.) Afterward I slunk into the Syracuse locker room to retrieve my clothes so I could change in the quiet of the losing locker room.
It so happens that my wife is a Syracuse graduate. When we were dating, I wondered if maybe she had been at that 1976 game, little knowing that her future husband was the one running around the court in a Griffin suit.
“No,” she said. “I only went to the big games.”
Ouch.
But Canisius versus Syracuse really was big back in the day. Syracuse led the series by just 25 to 24 wins after that last Canisius victory. Since then, though, the Griffs are 0-21 versus the Orange.
We have two wooden armchairs in the family room of our home. One carries the crest of Canisius, the other of Syracuse. Look closely at the crests and you will see that both schools were founded in 1870. They didn’t get around to playing each other in basketball until the mid-1940s. Canisius had the better of it in the early going, winning the first three games of the series and seven of the first nine. Canisius still held a 21-16 series lead in 1963. Then, a dozen years later, the Griffs won that game at the Aud with the help of Prosser’s free throws.
After he graduated, in 1976, Prosser next played for the minor-league Syracuse Centennials. Five of his teammates were former Syracuse Orange players: “I liked to ask them who was the last team they lost to before the (1975) Final Four.”
Prosser still savors that win to this day. He revels, too, in his brief acting career — a Golden Griff on the silver screen.
“I got residual checks for years,” he says. “A big check was $11. Most of them were, like, 96 cents.”
All he has left from that night at the Aud are memories.
“Those,” he says, “are priceless.”