You see a lot of maroon walking around the boroughs these days, a lot of baseball caps with a solid “F” on the front, a lot of sweatshirts and windbreakers with the head of a ram on it.
Says the Fordham alma mater: And in the years that are to be / May life and love be true to me.
And it isn’t terrible to be good at sports, either.
“People have wanted to have something to cheer about for a long time around here,” Fordham basketball coach Tom Pecora said. “The people who care about this university show support in a lot of bad times. It’s good to see what happens in the good times.”
Pecora has watched what the success of Fordham’s football team has meant to the denizens of the campus, to the students and the alumni, both the recent ones, who suffered through a lot of hard athletic times and the older ones, who fortify so many of the city’s businesses and institutions.
He has seen Joe Moorhead, Class of ’96, disprove Thomas Wolfe, seen him go home again, seen the old Rams quarterback return to Rose Hill and inherit a 1-10 mess of a program, seen him start this season 10-0, seen him take this 11-1 gem — one of the few things we have to feel good about in New York sports, truth be told — and lead it to a home playoff game this Saturday against Sacred Heart.
“It’s good to be relevant at the water cooler again,” Pecora said.
In an autumn devoid of New York baseball, when both football teams have scuffled, when the pro basketball teams might be accused of tanking if either of them owned a draft pick between now and 2037, we are left with a couple of encouraging things. The Rangers are playing better. In Queens, St. John’s has an awful lot of interesting young players getting to know each other.
And in The Bronx, there has been this wonderful little football story, which has brought the wonders of Saturday afternoon back to the former home of the Seven Blocks of Granite. Brought football back to a basketball school that in truth hasn’t been much of a basketball school, either, during the lifetime of most of the student body.
“It makes you realize what’s going to be possible here,” Pecora said. “And you can see how much the alumni and the fans are hungry for that.”
This is Year Four for Pecora, and after a rough tour of the wilderness there is finally a sign the plan he has put in place is close to bearing fruit. The Rams are 2-2 heading into Tuesday’s Battle of The Bronx at Manhattan, they are young (one senior), and they feature the most exciting freshman to play at Rose Hill in years, Christ the King’s Jon Severe, who has scored more points after four games than any freshman in school history.
Beyond that, there is help on the way. Pecora got a huge commitment a few weeks ago from Dobbs Ferry native Eric Paschall, a highly regarded 6-6 forward who will join Severe to give the Rams a 1-2 punch that has been absent for a team with one winning season since 1992 and is still smarting from a two-season, 5-51 run, from 2008-10.
And unlike the football team, which plays in precisely the league it should be playing in (the Patriot League), an FCS gathering of philosophical equals, the basketball team competes in the rugged high-mid-major Atlantic 10, a conference with a few like-minded schools (Duquesne, St. Bonaventure, La Salle) but a preponderance of others that are either deep-pocketed state schools (Rhode Island, UMass) or well-financed basketball legacies (Saint Louis, Dayton, VCU, Richmond).
“We’ve put most of the pieces in place,” Pecora said. “We’ve expanded the recruiting base. We’ve upgraded talent. We’ve developed young players, and improved the game-night experience. That was all necessary.”
And all prelude.
“Now,” he said, “we have to win.”
He sees the rewards to be reaped, sees it every day as the football team prepares for its big moment Saturday, and whatever lies beyond. And he knows how fragile what he’s building can be; the other day, in practice, Severe went up for a layup and a well-intentioned walk-on stepped in late trying to draw a charge.
When Pecora’s heart started ticking again, he thanked the kid for his hustle and his grit.
“And please,” he said, “don’t do that again.”