Author:
ramMan
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Date Posted: 00:51:11 11/16/04 Tue
Could we do what they did?
By Dan Firrincili
I was unprepared for the men of history who were waiting for me in the stands at Jack Coffey Field when I stepped through the turnstile Saturday to cover Fordham’s Patriot League football game against Lafayette University. On the drive over to campus, I was set on the 2004 edition of the Fordham Rams and their first-year coach Ed Foley. I was thinking about Tad Kornegay’s stellar beginning to his senior season – seven interceptions through six games. I was thinking about Fordham’s new sophomore quarterback, Derric Daniels, and his two Patriot League Offensive Player of the Week awards. I knew it was “Football Alumni Day,” but I never thought twice about the significance of it.
History was about to sneak up on me.
At Jack Coffey Field’s outside gate, a Fordham student wearing a yellow “Event Team” jacket handed me a white CD case with a clear circular film, through which, I was able to read in bold white letters: Football Returns to Fordham Nov. 7, 1964. Then a second student handed me what I thought was a program for the afternoon’s Lafayette-Fordham game. It was three pages long, but it wasn’t a program; it was chapter one of a history lesson.
The pages of that handout passionately announced the story of football’s return to Fordham University as a club sport in the fall of 1964. It talked about young men from Fordham’s past in the early ‘60s like Donald Ross, FC ’65, John Connolly, FC ’65, Bernie Muller, FC ’65 and Bill Burke, FC ’65, who led a student government campaign in the spring of 1964 that ran predominantly on a platform of reinstating the sport of football to the University. They called themselves the “’65 Spirit Party”.
When Ross, Connolly, Muller and Burke first walked on campus in the fall of 1961 – their freshman year at Rose Hill – they could feel that something was missing.
“When we got up there, the campus was dead. There was nothing to do in the fall,” Burke said.
The University needed a revival.
Fordham had parted with its football program in the days following the completion of the 1954 season. The sport was no longer affordable, the administration said. Fordham University’s football team, who in the winter of 1940 was invited to play in the Cotton Bowl and who, in the winter of 1941 played in and won the Sugar Bowl by a score of 2-0, was without football for 10 long years.
The “’65 Spirit Party” did something about it.
“Fordham had been iconic in New York with the Seven Blocks of Granite. Fordham had been a tremendous championship team,” said Ross. “So there was a longing to bring the team back.”
Father McMahon, the Dean of Fordham in the spring of 1964, was willing to take a chance. McMahon gave Ross, Connolly, Muller and Burke permission to go forward with the reinstatement project, but without the University financially agreeing to help in any way. The students delegated amongst themselves the tasks of erecting stands, stitching uniforms, printing tickets and formally scheduling other schools to compete against. The student body and its student government were working from the ground up.
“There was a reality of saying this may not happen,” quarterback Tony Rumore said recently in a commemorative special put together by Fordham’s public radio station, WFUV.
But there was something special about the class of ’65. They possessed entrepreneurial spirit; they were born fund-raisers. They were already booking the most popular musical groups to play on campus in previous years to reinforce their class treasury. They frequently held field trips to generate funds. The class of ’65 … they saved money.
The Rams won 21-14.
The class of ’65 fulfilled its dream on November 7, 1964: football returned to Fordham. The Rams beat New York University before a crowd of 13,200. No ticket went unsold. Rumore scored a third quarter rushing touchdown that was set up by Roger Dexter’s interception and the Fordham front line preserved the victory in the final minutes.
I asked those gentlemen what they were thinking about as they watched the 2004 version of the Fordham Rams battle Lafayette. (Fordham lost 35-20.) I told them how thankful the Fordham community is today for having what we have: a football team. I told them how thankful we are to be watching the fruits of their deeds.
I kept thinking to myself this weekend, “Could we ever do what they did? The answer I came up with more times than not was a simple one: thank goodness we don’t have to.
This space has failed to mention the acts of graduates David Langdon, FC ’65, and Rich Marrin, FC ’67, who undoubtedly deserve equal credit for believing in a sport’s ability to bring people together.
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