Villanova, Loyola show Catholics’ hoops love
The Rev. Michael Steltenkamp is betwixt and between. Loyola-Chicago plays Michigan on Saturday in the Final Four. And he doesn’t know for whom to cheer.
It should be so simple. He is a Jesuit who always roots for Jesuit schools. More than that, he got his masters of divinity at Loyola-Chicago. He briefly taught there, too. And, like the rest of the world, he is smitten by Sister Jean, the
98-year-old nun and team chaplain. Oh, but he is a professor of theology at Wheeling Jesuit in West Virginia, whose favorite son is John Beilein, Class of 1975. And Beilein is the Michigan coach.
“He’s our man at Wheeling Jesuit,” Steltenkamp tells USA TODAY. “He is an incredible representative of the place. So maybe I’m leaning a touch in Michigan’s direction.”
And that’s saying something, considering Steltenkamp earned his doctorate at Michigan State.
Perhaps it is fitting that the national semifinals will be played on Holy Saturday in San Antonio, named for St. Anthony of Padua. Loyola-Chicago and Villanova are Catholic schools, the first time with multiple Catholic schools in the NCAA tournament’s Final Four since
1985 with Georgetown, St. John’s and Villanova.
Michigan is a state school, of course, but Beilein played at Wheeling Jesuit and coached at Le Moyne and Canisius, also Jesuit schools. Kansas is a state school, too, and it also offers a religious connection.
James Naismith was famously KU’s first coach. The school hired him originally, though, as chapel director and associate professor of physical culture. Years earlier he’d invented basketball at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., now Springfield College.
YMCA stands for Young Men’s Christian Association and Naismith evangelized the values of sport at a time when many religious people thought rough competition was incompatible with Christianity’s ethos of turn the other cheek. Naismith, who was born on a farm on the outskirts of Ottawa in 1861, competed in football, rugby, lacrosse and gymnastics at Montreal’s McGill University. He earned a degree in physical education there and then entered the Presbyterian College of Theology, also in Montreal, before his providential move to Springfield.
No longer ‘tool of the devil’
What would Naismith have thought of a Final Four featuring two Catholic schools and his own KU? Michael Zogry, associate professor of religious studies at Kansas, thinks he’d be thrilled.
“It’s interesting, in his autobiography he talks about how proud he is that so many churches had chosen basketball for their social, recreational activities,” Zogry says. “Remember, when he was in school many people thought athletics were the tool of the devil. It was a real hard sell that you could express your faith through athletics. But he saw, by the end of his life, a validation of his perspective.”
Over time, Catholic churches chose basketball as the signature sport of the Catholic Youth Organization — CYO was their version of YMCA — and the reason was simple. All you needed was a gym and a ball.
Mark Russell, the political satirist, remembers basketball as a big deal in his parish and at his Jesuit high school. “I was 18,” he says, “before I found out Protestants played basketball.”
As providence would have it, Russell’s late sixth-grade teacher, Sister Frances Niland, was Beilein’s aunt.
The late Al McGuire was a product of CYO hoops and he’d go on to play for St. John’s and coach a national champion at Marquette. McGuire was a basketball philosopher who spoke in New York-inflected aphorisms.
“You can always tell the Catholic schools,” he’d say, “by the length of the cheerleaders’ skirts.”
Basketball is a ‘religion’
Catholic immigrants clustered in big cities in the late 19th Century and found a majority culture that was not always welcoming. “No Irish Need Apply” meant for jobs, but in some cases it might as well have meant colleges, too. The Catholic school system, including higher education, was founded to serve these Irish, Italian and Polish immigrant communities.
State schools and mainline Protestant colleges typically had more money and many Catholic colleges latched onto basketball as their signature sport. Today, only Notre Dame and Boston College stand as Catholic schools playing football at the FBS level.
When Villanova, which plays football at the FCS level, won basketball’s national championship in 2016, Nova was the first Catholic school to do so since, well, Villanova in that 1985 tournament.
“In the Big East, basketball is to our schools what football is to the SEC — it’s a religion,” Villanova coach Jay Wright says. “Hmm, well, we are a Catholic school, maybe I shouldn’t say it like that.”
And then he lets go a big, hearty laugh.
Loyola-Chicago is among 28 Jesuit colleges in the United States. Twenty play Division I basketball, five play in Division II (including Le Moyne and Wheeling Jesuit), two play D-III and one NAIA. Follow @Jesuit_BBall to learn about them all.
Deanna Spiro, director of communications for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, is among several who run the Twitter account. “We’re very proud,” she says, “that all 28 Jesuit schools play men’s and women’s basketball.”
Steltenkamp, the Jesuit who finds himself leaning toward Michigan against Loyola — which might qualify as a some sort of heresy — thinks better of it in the end.
“Flip a coin,” he says at last. “I’ll be happy either way.”
Steltenkamp dearly wants to see Beilein win a title, but Loyola coach Porter Moser, a graduate of Creighton, is Jesuiteducated too. And if Loyola were to win the national championship as a doubledigit seed, well, that would be seen far and wide as some sort of sporting miracle.
Forget the Gatorade. Moser’s players could douse him with holy water. And just imagine his Ramblers cutting down the nets — turning water into twine.