Pride Still Matters

Pride Still Matters

By Ryan Stellabotte

Chris Hodge has felt at home on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus ever since September 9, 2000, when he was a freshman on the Fairfield University football team, in town to play the Rams at Jack Coffey Field.

Chris Hodge, CBA ’04, was among the scores of former players who returned to Rose Hill on Sept. 21 to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Fordham football.
Photo by Ken Levinson

“I loved the history, the old stone gymnasium near the field,” said Hodge. “I could sense that it was a special place as soon as I got off the bus. And I knew that the campus was just minutes away from Manhattan, the business capital of the world.”

Fordham beat Fairfield that day, 34-7, breaking a 12-game losing streak and making a lasting impression on Hodge.

That Christmas, he received the coup de grace: a copy of When Pride Still Mattered (Simon & Schuster, 1999), David Maraniss’ bestselling biography of Vince Lombandi, FCRH ’37. As Hodge read about Fordham football’s golden era and the Rose Hill campus—a “calming preserve of natural beauty … of cobblestone paths, gray stone Gothic buildings and rolling greenswards shaded by graceful elms”—he grew convinced that Fordham was the place for him.

After completing his freshman year at Fairfield, the former star quarterback and three-sport athlete at Shawnee High School in Medford, N.J., transferred into Fordham’s College of Business Administration. He joined the football team in 2001 as a backup quarterback. That year, the Rams won their final five games of the season to finish at 7-4, their first winning record on the Division I-AA level. But it was just a warm-up for 2002.

Three years after going 0-11 during the 1999 season, the Rams posted a 10-3 record, won their first Patriot League title and advanced to the I-AA playoffs, where they upset Atlantic-10 champion Northeastern in the first round before losing to Villanova in the quarterfinals.

“Everyone had talked and dreamed about having that kind of year,” said Hodge, who played as a defensive lineman for the Rams that season and was named to the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll. “But nobody expected it.”

It was a renaissance year for Fordham football, one that featured an explosive offense led by quarterback Kevin Eakin, running back Kirwin Watson and wide receiver Javarus Dudley, who became the first Ram to be named a consensus First Team All-American since Jim Lansing, FCRH ’43, received the honor in 1941.

“Instead of being haunted by Lombardi and other ghosts of football past,” Jack Curry, FCRH ’86, wrote in the winter 2003 issue of FORDHAM magazine, “the 2002 Rams were infused with the spirit of Fordham’s glory days.”

In the locker room after the Villanova game, Hodge said recently, he and his teammates felt a “mix of sadness and appreciation for what we’d done. There was a sense that it was awful not because we lost, but because the ride was over.”

The Rams celebrate after beating Bucknell on the road and clinching the 2002 Patriot League title. James Foley, the father of Adam Foley (back row, center) took the photo.

On Friday, September 21—the night before Homecoming 2007—Hodge and several of his former teammates returned to Rose Hill to reminisce about their playoff run five years ago and to celebrate not just their championship season, but the entire history of Fordham football.

“I found myself in a conversation with Jerry O’Brien, who played on the team that won the 1942 Sugar Bowl, a couple of guys from the club teams of the ’60s and a guy from the first [Fordham] team to play in the Patriot League, in the early 1990s,” he said. “There were four different generations there, but we all have one bond. It’s a tremendous atmosphere.”

For Hodge, who graduated from Fordham in 2004 with a B.S. in finance and a minor in economics, that common bond extends well beyond the football field. When he wanted to learn more about his career options in finance, he spoke with New York State Supreme Court Justice Robert Holdman, FCRH ’86, LAW ’91, a fellow member of the Gridiron Club—the group of former players and fans who support Fordham football. Judge Holdman, who is now president of the club, put Hodge in touch with several of his former teammates and friends.

“I had never met these people before, but they all were generous with their time and advice,” said Hodge, an analyst with a Manhattan-based hedge fund. “And they did it because their former teammate asked them to helpa younger Fordham graduate.”

That sense of sacrifice and pride is what binds each Fordham football generation to the next, Hodge added.

“‘Each one, teach one.’ That’s how [Judge Holdman] describes it,” he said. “And then it perpetuates itself. It brings us all together, which is pretty remarkable, pretty great.”