SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — At the corner of West Genesee Street and North Clinton Street in downtown Syracuse, Chris Murray stands 30-or-so feet in the air on a boom lift. He wears black headphones and carries an 11×17 picture, one he’s already spent hours staring at. He’ll study it for a few more before lowering his machine for a quick break.
“I’ll be down around 1 or 1:30,” Murray shouts. It’s currently 11:30 a.m.
Murray sports his signature backward hat and a brown shirt that nearly matches its tone. As people gather around him, admiring his work, Murray stays unfazed. His headphones are blasting whatever keeps him locked in. He’s done this before, and he’ll do it again.
“It’s me telling my story to the city, to newcomers,” Murray said. “It’s just me giving a little piece of my backstory and what’s very important to me.”
Murray’s working on his newest project — a painting that tells a tale spanning years in the Syracuse community. A goat appears in Murray’s work, and it’s overlapped with Carmelo Anthony, Gerry McNamara, Felisha Legette-Jack and Lawrence Moten, among many other figures who have made Syracuse a basketball haven.
From Norfolk, New York, a college town two and a half hours north of Syracuse, Murray relished in Syracuse basketball. He grew up with family and friends in Syracuse and attended games in the JMA Wireless Dome, then the Carrier Dome, before studying at Rochester Institute of Technology. There, he watched SU men’s basketball win its only national title as a freshman in his RIT dorm room.
“I have a lot of ties to the players, the coaches,” Murray said of his relationship with Syracuse basketball. “Coming from where I come from, we don’t have pro teams, so SU sports, SU basketball is everything.”
Despite living in Philadelphia and growing up in Norfolk, Murray has worked in Syracuse before. The goat mural, helmed “SU G.O.A.T,” is his second mural in the city after he unveiled one honoring legendary SU basketball coach Jim Boeheim last year.
To the left of the contraption Murray stands on, a table holds two IKEA bags, each filled with 75-100 spray paint bottles. A few yards to his right is Glazed and Confused, a donut shop where Murray often starts his mornings. Paul Valenti, the shop’s owner, has seen his progress firsthand over the last month.
Valenti is an avid Syracuse basketball fan and a graduate of the university. Murray’s project is intended to draw people to Syracuse’s historic past. But Valenti hopes it can remind the community of the sport’s importance and potentially boost support around the Orange, despite their recent struggles.
“People stop and check it out,” Valenti said of Murray’s mural. “It adds a little bit of a cool factor when people come into town.”
The Orange haven’t reached March Madness since 2021, their longest drought since the 1960s. McNamara takes the reins from Adrian Autry after three abysmal seasons. Boeheim’s still involved with the program, and Anthony attends most home games, now more than ever, with his son, Kiyan Anthony, entering his second season on SU’s men’s basketball team.
That’s Syracuse basketball. That’s what Murray’s trying to portray. When he completed his mural of Boeheim, he said Boeheim’s “like a superhero walking amongst you.”
But to most of the younger Syracuse community, especially SU students, Boeheim’s era is of the past.
Michael Greifenstein, a senior at Syracuse, has yet to see the Orange reach the NCAA Tournament. He said he might not be at Syracuse if he knew it would be that way before committing.
“I figured we’d be there at some point,” Greifenstein said. “Maybe make it deep into the ACC Tournament, and it just has not gotten there to this point.”
People like Murray remind Greifenstein and Syracuse of what could become. A piece of its past.
On Friday, Oct. 9, Murray officially completed the mural. It took more than half a year to agree with the city on the plans. Murray said it wasn’t easy and even makes him want to step back from creating public art in Syracuse.
But as Murray reflects on his past, from playing basketball with friends in Norfolk to attending games in the Dome to painting this mural, he can only smile. Like most kids growing up, Murray said he wanted to play in the NBA. If not that, college hoops. He didn’t reach either, but he keeps doing his part to promote basketball in Syracuse and honors those who made him fall in love with the sport.
“It all comes full circle,” Murray said. “These murals that I painted in the city, yes, they are basketball-themed murals, but how I look at it for me, my friends, my family, it’s just me telling my story.”