Rams recapturing the spirit of 1971
THE ceaseless roar has been the greatest of all gifts across this beautiful basketball winter at Rose Hill in The Bronx. The thunder, deafening and daunting and delightful, has been the soundtrack, filling the 98-year-old gymnasium with joy and hope and possibility, spilling beyond the doors and windows, covering a campus with belief.
Fordham is celebrating its greatestever season this weekend, the 1970-71 team led by coach Digger Phelps and star player Charlie Yelverton that went 26-3 and made the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 and filled Madison Square Garden on back-toback Thursday nights, beating No. 14 Notre Dame in one game and losing in overtime to second-ranked Marquette in the other.
“I still say it was the greatest single year of college basketball New York has ever seen,” Phelps told me a few years ago. “We really had the city falling for us. We had it going so well. It was incredible.”
But as magical as those twin Garden performances were, it was what happened back home, back in The Bronx, back in Rose Hill Gym, that Digger and everyone else who remembers those Rams recalls best. There, the Rams were virtually untouchable, because the students wouldn’t let the opponent breathe, let alone think about winning.
“I told someone that year then when we take the team photo, the whole student body should be in it,” Digger said, only half-joking.
Fifty-two years later, that same energy has returned to Rose Hill. For a quarter-century, Fordham had become an unwitting sales pitch for all of the other Atlantic 10 schools; if you’re a New York alum of Dayton or Massachusetts or Richmond or Davidson, no need to plan a road trip. Just look at the schedule and see when the Flyers or Minutemen or Spiders or Wildcats are playing Fordham. Plenty of good seats available. Not now. Not this season. Not thanks to a bright first-year coach named Keith Urgo and a couple of tough fifth-year seniors named Darius Quisenberry and Khalid Moore and a team that learned how to win in November and December and now has an absolute puncher’s chance of taking down the A-10 championship next month at Barclays Center.
“The other night we had 1,100 students,” Fordham athletic director Ed Kull said. “They were taking their shirts off. They painted their faces.
They were chanting in unison, organized. I say this sincerely: the students have won two games for us. No exaggeration.”
It is a magnificent moment for Fordham, and a reminder that this doesn’t have to be a one-shot fluke, a one-and-done joy ride. There is a genuine opportunity to parlay this magical season into something real, something lasting, which for all the happiness the 1970-71 team engendered is something even it could never achieve.
Fordham hoops didn’t vanish for the past 52 years. Tom Penders had some excellent teams. Nick Macarchuk brought the Rams to the 1992 NCAA Tournament. Dereck Whittenburg went 27-21 in the A-10 across three seasons before it went sideways for him, and Tom Pecora was elevating the talent base before the plug was pulled on him.
But there was always something missing, starting inside the gym. Even in prosperous seasons the level of student engagement wasn’t what it was in 1970-71, and what it has been in 2022-23, with every seat filled and every second of the game a gleeful joyride. New university president Tania Tetlow has been a regular spectator inside a gym where decades have sometimes passed between presidential visits.
The new landscape of college basketball also presents a perfect portal for Fordham. Its two best players are transfers. It takes a forward-thinking coach — and Urgo seems like the model — to maximize that brave new world. And Fordham has innate advantages, too: Where better than New York for a grad-transfer to finish off a college career? The integration of the main and Lincoln Center campuses is something that only now is available to all students, and ought to be a huge selling point.
A few years ago the administration at LoyolaChicago decided to spend a week embedded at Gonzaga, one Jesuit school observing what had allowed another to become a sustainable college basketball power. Kull took a tour of Loyola’s campus Wednesday before the Rams’ latest heartstopping win and it was hard not to walk away impressed.
And also hopeful. “They’ve built and they’re invested,” Kull said of Loyola, “and right now I truly believe we are in a time when Fordham has its athletic mission aligned with its board of trustees, and aligned with the new president. I really think we are getting aligned that same way.”
There always, of course, is the bottom line. For all its charms, Rose Hill Gym is a relic; even in 1971 it was often referred to as “the rockpile.” There is an enormous — and wistful — what-if attached to that era.
Early in 1970, proud Fordham man Vince Lombardi agreed to head a committee that would raise funds to build a new arena. There is little doubt that, given time, Lombardi would’ve done just that. But within a few months Lombardi had cancer. In September 1970, a month before Phelps’ team began practice, he died.
The new arena remains unbuilt. And worse, the site of the arena — a huge (and largely unused) parking lot just as you enter campus — has sat empty as 13 different coaches have driven past it day after day, decade after decade. Building a new arena is no easy thing, and at Fordham there is a need for a lot of alumni help. The trick is convincing the deeper-pocketed basketball fans to see it as an “investment” rather than a “donation.”
There is also the matter of Urgo, and it is impossible not to think about Phelps — who didn’t want to leave Fordham, but had little choice when his dream job, Notre Dame, unexpectedly opened up in 1971. Urgo is another first-time coach who will surely attract interest elsewhere, though he does have deep familial ties to Fordham and seems genuinely happy here.
Still, commitment is a two-way street.
“We are always quick to say that athletics helps the whole campus,” Kull says.
The other night, a last-second shot by a Fordham women’s player, Anna DeWolfe, led SportsCenter and was replayed on “Good Morning America.”
“How much are things like that worth?” Kull asks. “I think they’re worth a lot.”
The roars at Rose Hill don’t have to be an anomaly, something to be fondly remembered 52 years from now, the way the 1970-71 Rams are. Those roars really can be an everyyear thing. If you happen to love basketball New York, it is the only way to root.