Ten years and more later, Muzamil Kaila can still call up the desperate and overwhelming feeling. “A lot of my childhood was spent lashing out,” he said Tuesday, recalling his own fury in middle school. At 22, he has the wisdom to look back and understand why. He is the Syracuse-born son of Sudanese immigrants. Kaila spoke Sudanese Arabic until he reached school age, and when he gradually forgot how to speak the language as a child — which happened when he embraced English as a classroom necessity — everything felt increasingly uncertain, both at school and at home. “I lost my sense of self,” Kaila said. His family didn’t have much money. He said there was often tumult in his house, and then he went to school and saw a lot of his peers walking around with expensive clothes or pricey phones or top-of-the-line sneakers that in his life, at that time, were items so unattainable they seemed like wishful fantasy. Muzamil Kaila over the engine of a car he’s working on, at his South Avenue garage. Credit: Mike Roy | Central Current He was a little kid. Those frustrations weren’t things you easily put into words. The result was a kind of desperate anger. Kaila was a sixth grader at H.W. Smith Middle School, a 12-year-old spiraling downward and fast, when a gym teacher named Joe Horan asked if he wanted to join a few other students at what Horan called his “men of strength” lunch club. Those meetings were held in a classroom whose relative quiet was a sweet change for Kaila from the tensions and pressures of the cafeteria. It was part of a program, Horan explained to him, called “Building Men.” Kaila said he had been “trying to be what society tells you have to be,” which meant doing what you had to do to be noticed, in whatever way you could. Horan had an alternative message about the quieter power of kindness and the strength of integrity. The support of the group became a counterbalance to the sense of unfairness and the boiling anger. In his life, Kaila said, “no man had ever had such a conversation with me in that way.” He felt the sincerity. He bought in. Of Horan, he says now: “I owe him big-time.” Kaila offered those reflections Tuesday at his Kaila Auto Solutions on South Avenue. He opened that automotive shop two years ago in a neighborhood garage that once was called Ed and Frank’s, named for a pair of legendary Syracuse mechanics. Horan is a regular visitor, and we were joined there amid one of the last April snowfalls of the season by Cameron Littlejohn, coordinator of the Building Men program in the city schools. Horan, retired as a teacher but still the full-time executive director of Building Men as a community nonprofit, said he stops by because Kaila — who now serves on the organization’s board of directors — “is one of the guys who’s been with me for a long, long time.” Joe Horan speaks to Syracuse teens as part of the ‘Building Men’ program: A pool appearance, amid sorrow, as a parental show of support. Credit: Courtesy of Joe Horan They will see each other again at 6 p.m. Saturday night, when Building Men marks its 20th anniversary with a sold-out gala celebration at Sky Armory. The gathering will include civic supporters, there to honor dozens of city schools graduates who participated in Building Men and then went on to forge successful lives in Syracuse and beyond. The central figure will be Horan, the founder, described by Littlejohn as “an all-encompassing genuine man,” which is hardly how Horan felt about himself when it began. In the mid-2000s, he was a coach and physical education teacher who had just gone through a divorce that made him question all the ways in which he once defined himself. He remembers countless hours walking around his empty house, staggered and depressed, until his sister Debbie made a recommendation that changed everything. She suggested he read a Jeffrey Marx book called “Season of Life,” written about former Syracuse University and Baltimore Colts football star Joe Ehrmann. The book described Ehrmann’s volatile but revelatory journey, how a ferocious and hard-partying defensive lineman — who had buried his own wounds and trauma in the pain and violence of football — was so shaken by losing his younger brother to cancer that he forced himself to peel away the emotional armor he had worn since childhood. Muzamil Khaila as a 12-year-old, with Building Men. Credit: Courtesy Muzamil Khaila In essence, Ehrmann discovered the entire structure of his life was intertwined with poisonous myths. He rejected prevailing American notions of masculinity, which he saw as built upon the pursuit of three forms of dominance: Athletics, sexual conquest and the stature linked to earning stacks of money. Ehrmann became a minister, an educator and a youth coach with a different message about the true meaning as a man. Looking back on it, he realized only a couple of coaches — from youth sports to the NFL — had changed his life in any positive or meaningful way. Most, he said, were transactional — looking for athletes who could help them win — as opposed to transformational, as in truly focused on the longterm outcome for every player on the roster, whether on the field or on the bench. Ehrmann serves today as president of the InsideOut Initiative, whose entire mission is reimagining the practice and priorities of the American sports culture For Horan, it was an epiphany. Whenever he learned Ehrmann — a Buffalo native — was speaking at a forum in Upstate New York, Horan would drive to the event. The two men established an ongoing connection, and Horan rethought his approach as a teacher, as a coach, as a man. Joe Ehrmann: Rebuilding the whole American ideal of masculinity. Credit: InsideOut Initiative It struck him that the absence he felt in is own outlook on life was exactly what haunted so many of the young men and boys he coached — all searching, on some interior level, for acceptance and stature. The desperation in that quest often led to youthful behaviors and decisions that could permanently damage their lives. In that sense, Horan said, his job was listening — and his students became the teachers. “I’m just so proud of him,” Ehrmann said Tuesday, in a Zoom interview. “Building Men” began with conversations with a few Syracuse middle school 12-year-olds, over lunch. It expanded into an entire program of service and community that is now in 19 city school buildings. While many successful athletes have taken part — including, for instance, Derrick Gore, who went on to play in the National Football League — Horan said the core participants are young men who all too easily get lost. “They’re worthy and gifted and brilliant,” Horan said, and what they desperately need is the understanding they are loved and valued, as they are. What Horan has accomplished is “truly extraordinary,” city schools superintendent Pam Odom said in a statement. “He has helped our young men discover their purpose, build confidence, and learn what it means to lead with integrity.” The outreach can take many forms — intramural sports leagues or field trips or community service or simply long conversations, in which kids who often feel unheard can find comfort in another. Wrapping it all together, Ehrmann said Horan’s greatest strength, demonstrated over 20 years, is a fundamental one: “The integrity of showing up,” Ehrmann said, which means you stick with a kid for as long as it takes, and over a sustained period you are selfless with your time — the most precious of all gifts in this busy, distracted culture. Littlejohn, who coordinates the program in the schools, describes that same great strength as “not forgetting.” His point is that with Building Men, once you make a connection with children enduring pain in their lives, those bonds no longer have to end in whatever limited sequence — whether a single school year, or even the few months in a short athletic season — you have with them as a teacher or a coach. The framework of continuity begins in middle school, then carries on. These educators who care about you are not going away, and the boys themselves “are at the forefront of making the decisions,” Littlejohn said. Horan’s focus has always been the city schools, though he said the same essential challenges hold true in any community of any income level, especially in a world where so many cultural messages pound home one message to children: “The most money wins.” His dream is expanding the program into other Upstate school districts. Muzamil Kaila at his South Avenue garage with Building Men founder Joe Horan and Cameron Littlejohn, who now coordinates the program in the Syracuse city schools. Kaila says the initiative changed his life. Credit: Mike Roy | Central Current The event Saturday, then, is a moment both for celebration and hopefully for acceleration. Don McPherson — the former SU quarterback who has spent decades trying to change self-destructive attitudes and assumptions about masculinity — will serve as master of ceremonies. The crowd will include Kaila, this 22-year-old SUNY Canton graduate whose childhood dreams of making it in pro basketball or football gave way to what he sees as the more gratifying reality of controlling his own destiny, as an entrepreneur. In addition to his garage, he also does a youth-oriented podcast called “Formless,” which involves lesson-focused interviews with businesspeople who have quietly succeeded without much mainstream applause. The idea, Kaila said, is “bridging informational gaps” — and in a sense, creating the same breakout moment of imagination for young listeners that Kaila experienced himself. He often updates the progress of those efforts with Horan, who routinely visits the garage just to see how Kaila’s doing, a decade after Horan first invited that skeptical 12-year-old to lunch. To Horan, their ongoing connection is based on 10 years of mutual friendship, trust and even flat-out love, which he understands — if you want it all to really matter — means the building never stops. The post Sean Kirst: After 20 years, that ‘Building Men’ is still rolling becomes the whole life-changing point appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less