Sports movies combine big dreams with steep challenges, high hopes with hard work, heartbreaking failure with inspiring success.

You can say the same thing about a Wisconsin author’s real-life quest to get a movie made about the Granite City High School basketball team that won the state championship in 1940.

It’s been nearly a decade since Dan Manoyan, a retired sportswriter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, started exploring the idea of adapting his 2007 book, “Men of Granite,” to the big screen. It tells the story of 10 basketball players, seven of them sons of Eastern European immigrants living with poverty and prejudice.

Manoyan, 68, of Kenosha, thought the movie was a goin 2015, after Milwaukee philanthropist Albert “Ab” Nicholas invested $1.3 million in seed money and a Los Angeles production company started hiring actors. The producer said Academy Award winners William Hurt and Shirley MacLaine had been cast in lead roles.

Four years later, Manoyan is in better spirits.

A three-day bench trialwas held in Milwaukee County Circuit Court last week as part of a civil lawsuit filed by Manoyan against producers with two California companies. It alleges “fraudulent inducement, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, conversion and civil theft,” according to the Journal Sentinel. 

The judge is expected to deliver a verdict this fall.

Perhaps more importantly, the movie appears to be back on track as a project of Arthur Sarkissian, a Los Angeles producer best known for the “Rush Hour” series, “Last Man Standing” and “The Foreigner.” He was born in Armenia.

“It’s going to happen,” said Conrad “Babe” Champion, 86, of Granite City, a retired health and P.E. teacher and baseball coach who has been helping to promote the movie for years and serves as a liaison between Manoyan and local residents. “I think it’s finally going to happen.”

Champion knew someof the seven Warriors basketball players, whose families 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.” 

The boys played basketball at a community center, renting tennis shoes by doing chores for manager Sophia Prather. The bespectacled former teacher fought bigotry while teaching English and other skills to the Eastern Europeans. She became known as “the mother of Lincoln Place.”

The GCHS basketball team’s 6-foot-3 captain was Hungarian Andy Phillip, a starter since sophomore year who helped persuade coach Byron Bozarth to give his hardscrabble friends a chance. Then Phillip made history in 1940 with fellow players John Markarian, Evon Parsghian, Andy Hagopian 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.

“(The Whiz Kids) were arguably the greatest basketball team in the history of Illinois,” Manoyan said in 2015.

Champion was 8 years old when GCHS won the state tournament. He remembers thousands of Granite City residents marching in a parade to Lincoln Place, which was normally off-limits to non-immigrants after dark. The celebration broke ethnic barriers and brought people together, he said.

Today, the team’s coaches and all but one player, Markarian, are deceased.

“Seven out of the 10 players went into the service for World War II,” Champion said. “They were not only heroes on the basketball court, they served their country.”

Manoyan worked for newspapers in Kenosha, Waukegan and Dallas before writing 20 years for the Journal Sentinel. He self-published“Men of Granite” so he would have full rights in case it was made into a movie. He has called the story “better than ‘Hoosiers,’” referring to the legendary 1986 high school basketball film with Gene Hackman.

Manoyan tried to drum up interest in Hollywood without much luck before connecting with Valerie McCaffrey, a Los Angeles casting director who had worked on dozens of movies, including “American History X” and “Babe. She was expanding into production, most recently on “Lost and Found in Armenia.”

McCaffrey grew up in an Armenian family that had moved to the United States from Turkey under many of the same circumstances as the Lincoln Place immigrants.

“The (Granite City) story spoke to me,” she said Tuesday, noting she also was drawn to the sports angle because she had played college basketball at University of Hawaii.

McCaffrey told Manoyan she needed a rough script to pitch the movie to investors, cast and crew. Manoyan recruited Granite City resident Armand Kachigian, a foot doctor and aspiring screenwriter, who was willing to work on consignment. Kachigian had won $500,000 on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

Eventually, McCaffrey contracted with the Los Angeles company OutPost Media for services such as hiring crews and managing budgets. Producers scouted possible filming locations in Granite City and elsewhere and decided to shoot most scenes in Cleveland, Ohio.

By July of 2015, producers had announced that MacLaine and Hurt would play Prather and Coach Bozarth in “Men of Granite,” under the direction of Dwayne Johnson-Cochran. But the project collapsed weeks later.

Manoyan filed his civil lawsuit in 2017, naming producers at McCaffrey Productions and OutPost Media as defendants.

At the bench trial last week, Valerie McCaffrey accused OutPost executives of paying themselves lavishly for doing very little, using money for personal expenses and outside projects and failing to secure Ohio tax credits or other financing, the Journal Sentinel reported. OutPost maintained that McCaffrey and her staff were too inexperienced to produce the movie.

On Tuesday, McCaffrey called the decision to end production “heartbreaking” and used the word “bamboozled” to describe what happened to her and others at the hands of OutPost.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried,” she said. “I was sick to my stomach. I worked on this for over three years, and I didn’t get a penny for it. … I work very hard, and I work honestly.”

Manoyan said he wanted to file a lawsuit immediately, but Nicholas, the philanthropist who lost the $1.3 million, chose to let it go and move on.

Nicholas was well-known in the Milwaukee area. He played basketball at University of Wisconsin-Madison, began his career in insurance and banking, founded a successful investment firm in the 1960s and created several charitable foundations before he died in 2016 at age 85, according to his obituary.

After Nicholas’ death, Manoyan obtained legal standing from his son to file the lawsuit.

Manoyan sent Sarkissian, the “Rush Hour” producer, a copy of “Men of Granite” about a year ago, and Sarkissian apparently liked it.

“He has agreed to produce the movie,” Manoyan said Tuesday. “Right now, he’s looking for a screenwriter and director. That’s the first step. … I really think that we’re in good hands now and that we’re going to get moving.”

Sarkissian couldn’t be reached for comment, but his assistant verified that his company is “developing” the project.

That puts Champion over the moon. The success of the seven basketball players from “the other side of the tracks” nearly 80 years ago remains a source of pride for all Granite City residents, but particularly those of Eastern European descent, he said.

“I probably get five phone calls or personal contacts a week, and people will say, ‘What’s going on with the movie?’ People have not forgotten this story.”