The voice is as crisp and as clear as ever, still capable of delivering a summer night on a frosty December afternoon. Vin Scully is on the telephone from California, his home for the past 56 years.
But he is talking about his other home, and about the football team that has allowed a man five days past his 86th birthday to feel like a letter-sweatered sophomore all over again.
“Not long ago I was talking to a woman whose son is at Fordham,” says Scully, Fordham Prep Class of ’44, Fordham U. Class of ’49. “And she said that following the football team this fall has been some of the most exciting times of her life. And I thought, ‘Imagine that. Imagine little old Fordham doing that for her.’”
Scully, of course, has been calling Dodgers games since 1950, not long after he played baseball for the Rams and helped found WFUV, which has grown to produce an army of the best broadcasters in the field, all of whom reflexively and proudly trace their professional lineage to Scully.
“As happy as I am for the football program,” he says, “I’m even happier knowing that its success has probably done a lot for the young men and women who work for FUV, which is a marvelous training ground.”
Told that Michael Watts, a junior who’s done the team’s football games this year, has drawn a lot of praise for his work, including from some of the school’s bold-faced list of alums, Scully says: “Yes, yes. That’s what you like to hear.”
Scully is a child of The Bronx, raised on the city’s teams and its rhythms, his ear always fastened to the radio as a boy. He fondly recalls the Rams team from his days as an undergrad, even though they coincide with the beginning of the end of Fordham’s era as a major-college power, culminating with the canceling of the program in 1954.
“There was a terrific player, Joe Andrejko – A-N-D-R-E-J-K-O,” he says, ever the perfectionist, offering help with a tricky surname, “and he was drafted by the Eagles, and after he took his physical the team told him, ‘Take a year off and come back next summer, you’ve been beaten up too badly.’ That’s kind of where Fordham was in those days after the War.”
He laughs, and that leads to another story: In the fall of 1946, four games into a winless first postwar season, the Rams traveled to State College, Pa., to tangle with Penn State. The Nittany Lions had their way with the ragtag Rams, winning 68-0. This was just as Fordham’s president, Father Robert Gannon – “G-A-N-N-O-N,” Scully helpfully adds – was facing the fact that Fordham’s time to run on equal footing with such football factories was nearing an end.
“So he called Bob Higgins, the coach at Penn State, and said, ‘We are re-prioritizing things here and if you wouldn’t mind, we’d like to cancel next year’s game.’ Higgins was sympathetic but he said, ‘Father, we have a lot of athletes who have never had the New York experience. It would mean a lot if we could still give that to them, just once.’”
Then Higgins made a pledge: If you let the game at the Polo Grounds go on, we promise we won’t beat you 68-0 again.
“And he was true to his word,” Scully says. “They won 75-0.”
As a junior, Scully made acquaintance of the new quarterbacks coach, an alum from the Class of ’37 named Vince Lombardi. Later, when Lombardi became the most famous of all Fordham men Scully would often broadcast his games.
“He would always call me ‘Vincent,’” Scully says of his brother Ram.
All these memories rush back in a flood as Scully awaits Saturday’s game between Fordham (12-1) and Towson (10-2) in the second round of the NCAA FCS Division playoffs. He’s delighted at how the school has embraced the team, how his alma mater has offered a small beacon of success in an otherwise bleak New York sporting autumn.
“Instead of playing in front of 70,000, you play in front of 6,000 on campus, and that’s just a wonderful thing,” Scully says. “Everyone feels a part of it.”
And Scully feels he’s quietly doing his part, too. Back in the era of the Seven Blocks of Granite and beyond, Fordham played in the 1941 Cotton Bowl (losing 13-12 to Texas A&M) and the ’42 Sugar Bowl (winning 2-0 over Missouri), and there came to campus a rallying cry: “From Rose Hill to the Rose Bowl!”
“Sadly,” Scully says, “that never came to pass.”
But Scully himself will serve as the Grand Marshal of this year’s Tournament of Roses parade.
“And I’ll proudly ride under the Fordham banner,” Vin Scully says. “How do you like that?”