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18 FORDHAM summer 2007 19
Since 1882, Fordham football has played on some of the largest
stages in sports. Our history includes games before sellout crowds
at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, a Cotton Bowl appearance
and a Sugar Bowl victory, a No. 3 national ranking, the famed Seven
Blocks of Granite, the student-led resurrection of the sport at
Rose Hill with the club teams of the 1960s, and our most recent
highlight, winning the Patriot League championship in 2002. Through
the years, each team has shared a love for the game and the
University—a tradition that remains alive today.
125 Years of Fordham Football
By Jack Clary, FCRH ’54
The 1936 Rams: Vince Lombardi (left) squats next to Alex
Wojciechowicz (center) and Nat Pierce, three-sevenths of the seven
Blocks of Granite line that also featured John Druze, Al Babartsky,
ed Franco and Leo Paquin. Andy Palau (hands on knees) is the
quarterback, and the backs (from left to right) are Frank mautte,
John Lock and Al Gurske.
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20 FORDHAM 21summer 2007
Fordham’s football legacy has an enduring quality that stretches
back to the early 1880s, but its heart and soul rest in five
distinct eras that cover parts of the last 80 years. Though the
Rams have not been a national gridiron power since World War II,
any mention of a personal Fordham affiliation to a football fan
still produces a recognition of sorts, one that is inevitably
followed up by references to the Seven Blocks of Granite and Vince
Lombardi (FCRH ’37).
Such is one of the benefits of a successful high-profile
football program, and in Ford-ham’s case that began in the 1920s,
when Frank Gargan,
whose first coach-ing stint at Rose Hill was interrupt-ed by
World War I in 1917, returned and won 28 games in five seasons.
Just as importantly, he raised Fordham’s profile by moving some of
its games to the city’s renowned baseball parks, Yankee Stadium and
the Polo Grounds, with their 50,000-plus seating capacities. Thus
did New York City become a Fordham football town, and in turn
provide the visibility that “making it” in New York can bestow.
1929 Fordham’s profile got another huge boost when the Iron
Major, Frank Cavanaugh, succeeded Gargan as head coach in 1927 and
cultivated the first edition of the Seven Blocks of Granite.
Fordham was now solidly ensconced in the Polo Grounds, and despite
the Great Depression, began playing before tens of thousands
of fans each week. Those “Blocks” teams shut out 12 of 18
opponents in two seasons and only once did they allow more than
seven points to be scored against them.
The 1929 team produced one of three undefeated sea-sons in the
school’s history (the first came in 1886), but it also tied two
games, and those blemishes evidently cost the Rams a trip to the
Rose Bowl, the only postseason game of any note at that time. Seven
seasons later, in 1936, when the second version of the Seven Blocks
of Granite were so dom-
inant under head coach “Sleepy” Jim Crowley, a one-point loss to
rival New York University in the season’s final game cost the Rams
a trip to Pasadena again, making
hollow the rallying cry of “From Rose Hill to the Rose
Bowl.”
Those stumbles in no way diminished the im-pact of Fordham’s
football program. When the Associated Press began conducting its
popular weekly poll in 1936, the Rams were always ranked among the
nation’s top 20 teams until
discontinuing the sport during World War II. The opportu-nity to
play in New York before tens of thousands of fans attracted teams
from coast to coast, so the Fordham teams of that era rarely played
on the road. As David Maraniss wrote in When Pride Still Mattered:
A Life of Vince Lombardi (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Fordham’s
“contests on autumn afternoons were held in front of thunderous
crowds and covered by the most influential sportswriters in
America, who competed in prose and poetry to glorify the college
game in more than a dozen metropolitan daily newspapers.”
21
Coach Jim Phelan and his St. Mary’s College team made the
round-trip train ride from Moraga, California, to New York for 12
of 13 seasons until World War II, mostly because the New York
football writers gave Phelan celeb-rity status as he wove his
unlimited repertoire of stories
hour upon hour during each visit.
1937 Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s—until World War II
inter-rupted the sport at Fordham from 1943 to 1945—a who’s who of
college teams came to the Polo Grounds to play the Rams. They
included Oregon State, Oregon, Alabama, West Virginia, Michigan
State, SMU, Tennes-see, Purdue, Boston College, Georgetown, Holy
Cross, Vanderbilt, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tulane, Rice,
Indiana, Arkansas, and, of course, the University of Pittsburgh,
against whom Fordham played a record three consecutive scoreless
ties, in 1935, 1936 and 1937.
During the 1936 and 1937 seasons, the Rams posted a 12-1-3
record. Vince Lombardi was one of the Seven Blocks of Granite on
the 1936 team—the dominating group of linemen who helped the Rams
hold opposing teams scoreless eight times in two years. Fordham
posted its last undefeated season (7-0-1) in 1937 and was ranked
No.
3 in the nation. The Rams also made sports broadcasting history:
On September 30, 1939, Fordham participated in the world’s first
televised football game, defeating Waynesburg College, 34-7.
The bottom line for that era: an 87-20-12 record, plus
appearances in two major bowl games. The Rams lost to Texas
A&M, 13-12, in the 1941 Cotton Bowl, but defeated Missouri,
2-0, in the 1942 Sugar Bowl.
Those golden years of Fordham football not only produced
nation-wide popularity for the University, but
also showcased a galaxy of some of its greatest players,
in-cluding “Blocks” Alex Wojciechowicz and Ed Franco—the only Rams
to receive All-America honors twice. Both are enshrined in the
College Football Hall of Fame and among the dozens of Fordham
players from that era who went on to play professional football.
The golden years also pro-duced three Pro Football Hall of Famers—a
player, a coach and an owner. Wojciechowicz, who played for the
Detroit Lions and the Philadelphia Eagles during a 13-year NFL
career, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1968. Three years
later, his Fordham teammate Vince Lombardi, leg-endary coach of the
Green Bay Packers, received the honor posthumously. A third Fordham
alumnus from that era, Wellington Mara, never played for the Rams,
but went on
2-0was the final scoreof the Rams’ first intercollegiate
football game, an 1882 victory against Seton Hall. Two years later,
the student editors of the Fordham Monthly described the new sport
on campus: No game, they wrote, “requires more agility and
fleetness of foot, or more ‘nerve’ … no game brings into play all
the powers of mind and body.”
formed not one, but two of the most formidable lines in college
football history, helping the Rams hold opposing teams scoreless on
a regular basis during the 1929, 1930, 1936 and 1937 seasons.
7Blocks of Granite
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22 FORDHAM 23summer 2007
playoffs. A 3-0 loss to SUNY-Stony Brook cost the Rams a
second-straight NCAA playoff spot in 1988.
As the club team had done before them, the efforts of those
Division III players and coaches set the stage for Fordham’s next
upward move—to the NCAA’s Division
I-AA in 1990, as a member of the newly formed Patriot League.
While they struggled
against more mature opponents at that time, the Rams did show
the Fordham flag with games against Holy Cross in Limerick,
Ireland, and in Hamilton, Bermuda. In
the latter, Fordham beat the Crusaders for the first time since
1930.
2002 But it took until 2001 for the Rams to notch a winning
record at the I-AA level, this coming under Coach Dave Clawson.
They followed that 7-4 season by winning the Patriot League
champion-ship in 2002 and advancing to the I-AA playoffs, where
they stunned everyone outside Rose Hill by upsetting Altantic-10
champion Northeastern in the first round. Alas, the magic ended the
following week in a loss against Villanova.
Still, the beat goes on at Rose Hill under Coach Tom Masella,
and every game and every player is as much a part of Fordham’s
football tradition as were those players who
once competed before tens of thousands of spectators each fall
Saturday at the Polo Grounds … or the gutsy “volun-teers” in the
club years who played because they loved the game as much as they
loved representing their University.
To that, we say: Hail, Men of Fordham, Hail!
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to become one of the most influential owners in sports his-tory.
The longtime president and owner of the New York Giants was
inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997.
Fordham football’s golden era ended during World War II. The
University re-instated the sport in 1946, after a three-year
absence, but the old saw that “you can’t go home again” proved true
for the Rams. The following nine seasons
brought only sporadic success (an 8-1 record in 1950 was the
highlight), sparse crowds and too much red ink. The sport was
dropped after the 1954 season.
1964 Ten years later, in 1964, a gutsy group of students revived
the sport on a club level. Led by Don Ross (CBA ’65), Dave Langdon
(FCRH ’65) and Bill Burke (FCRH ’65, LAW ’68)—and abetted by the
dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill at the time, George McMahon,
S.J.—the club team was a model of class and efficiency, propelled
by huge doses of pride in Fordham’s football tradition and the
desire to play a sport they loved, even if they had to build and
maintain the program themselves.
They hired former All-America end Jim Lansing (FCRH ’43) as head
coach in 1965. He not only gave the team
proper direction, but stayed as head coach for two seasons after
the club team was elevated to Division III in 1970.
For six seasons, from 1964 to 1969, the club program flourished
with a 23-13-1 record, and just one losing sea-son. It was
consistently ranked among the nation’s top club teams. Geography
was no deterrent. The Rams played games in New Orleans, Washington,
Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, as well as at sites in the
Northeast. The team’s steady success proved to the University that
a varsity program
could be sustained, though that message really had been sent on
November 14, 1964, when the team ended its first season with
a 20-14 home victory over NYU, in a revival of the once-great
New York City football rivalry. It was estimated that some 15,000
spectators came to Rose Hill for that game and sat on temporary
bleachers the club had rented for the occasion because there was no
football facility.
From 1970 to 1989, the University played at the Divi-sion III
level, the NCAA’s lowest varsity designation. That era wasn’t
adorned with the glory of the pre-war teams, nor the Division I
status the post-war teams enjoyed, but it did signal that Fordham’s
football tradition still was alive and flourishing, even in a
diminished capacity. The teams of that 19-season era had a 95-86-6
overall record, pro-ducing nine winning seasons. The 1987 team won
the Lib-erty Conference with a 9-1 record and made the NCAA
Date Opponent Time Sept. 1 at University of Rhode Island 1
p.m.Sept. 8 University at Albany 6 p.m.Sept. 15 Columbia University
6 p.m. Sept. 22 University of Dayton (H) 1 p.m. Sept. 29 at Colgate
University* 1 p.m. Oct. 6 Lehigh University* 1 p.m. Oct. 13 at
Georgetown University* 1 p.m.Oct. 20 at Lafayette College* 1
p.m.Oct. 27 at Marist College 7 p.m.Nov. 3 Holy Cross* (FW) 1
p.m.Nov. 17 Bucknell University* 1 p.m.
Bold indicates home game * - Patriot League contest(H) –
Homecoming (FW) - Undergraduate Family Weekend
are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
Alex Wojciechowicz (FCRH ’38), the center of the Seven Blocks of
Granite line, who played 13 seasons in the NFL; Vince Lombardi
(FCRH ’37), whose name graces the Super Bowl trophy; and Wellington
Mara (FCRH ’37), who won four NFL titles as the longtime owner of
the New York Giants.
by Matt Fordyce (FCRH ’03) led the Rams to a stunning 29-24
upset victory against Northeastern in the first round of the 2002
NCAA Division I-AA playoffs. The Rams were 10-3 and champions of
the Patriot League that season.
3Fordham alumni 5
field goals
—Jack Clary, FCRH ’54, was a sportswriter and newspaper
columnist in New York and Boston for 15 years before becoming a
freelance author. He has written some 65 books on sports. He is a
member of Fordham’s Athletic Hall of Fame and a recipient of the
Mara Family Award, presented by the Fordham Gridiron Club.
watched the resurrected Rams club football team defeat NYU by a
score of 20-14 at Rose Hill on November 7, 1964.
15,000 spectators
Photos and images courtesy of Fordham University Archives.
Tickets for home games may be purchased online at
www.fordham.edu/athletics or by calling (718) 817-4300.
2007 FOOTBALL SCHEDULE
