That was how Fordham graduate Dan D’Uva, FCRH ’09, described the celebratory moment in Las Vegas on June 13, when the Golden Knights defeated the Florida Panthers to earn their first National Hockey League title.

“The Silver State is home to the greatest silver trophy in all of sports,” he quipped.

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D’Uva, who has been the radio voice of the Golden Knights since the team was founded in 2017, pursued broadcasting as a high school student and at Syracuse University before transferring to Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2006.

At Fordham, he majored in communication and media studies while working in the sports department at WFUV, the University’s public media station, which has been launching the careers of sports broadcasters since the late 1940s. For D’Uva, the experience led to his first job in hockey.

Here are five other things to know about the voice of the Golden Knights.

1. He’s living out his childhood dream.

D’Uva broadcast his first hockey game in 2000, when he was just a 14-year-old student at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey. In 2018, when the Golden Knights reached the Stanley Cup Final, he told The Record that he listened to a recording of that first game.

“I popped in that micro-cassette tape—it still works—and thought, ‘Gee, if you could have told this 14-year-old kid that he would be broadcasting the Stanley Cup Final for a team in Las Vegas, he’d be pretty pumped,’” D’Uva said. “He might not believe you, but he’d be pretty pumped.”

2. One of his mentors is Hall of Fame hockey broadcaster Mike “Doc” Emrick.

D’Uva was in high school when he first met Emrick, who was then the voice of the New Jersey Devils. In an interview with Off the Air, a WFUV Sports podcast, D’Uva said he and a friend, both aspiring broadcasters, would station themselves near the TV and radio broadcast booths at Devils games “to see who was off the air, who could we bother right now.”

That led to a relationship where “you pass along a tape and exchange some emails,” D’Uva said, noting that Emrick listened to a recording of D’Uva’s high school broadcast and generously offered some advice and encouragement.

Fast forward a few years, and their paths crossed again, this time at Fordham, where Emrick was the featured guest at a WFUV Sports workshop.

“I remember walking with Doc from Keating Hall to the Metro-North station … and I’m not sure what questions I asked Doc in that 10-minute walk, but I guess there was something in there that piqued his interest to the point where he recognized I wasn’t just doing this as a hobby and I was expecting to pursue this as a career,” D’Uva recalled on the Off the Air podcast. “And then we continued to see each other.”

D’Uva covered the Devils for WFUV Sports, including the opening night of their Newark arena in 2007. Two years later, when he applied for a job calling games for the Trenton Devils, the team’s minor league affiliate, he wrote to Emrick, who “called me right after he received the email and gave me a little bit of a pep talk.”

D’Uva got the job in 2009, the same year he graduated from Fordham.

“Doc’s just been a great person to learn from, a great friend, and I’m blessed to recognize him as a friend,” D’Uva said.

3. A Fordham alumni connection helped him gain hockey broadcasting experience.

When he was at Fordham, D’Uva got in touch with Phil Giubileo, GABELLI ’95, who at the time was the play-by-play announcer for the Bridgeport Sound Tigers, a minor league hockey team.

“He would invite me to go out there, and I could see how he was doing his thing and I could sit in what was Webster Bank Arena at the time and do practice tapes,” D’Uva told the Off the Air podcast. It gave him a chance to “get a feel for the professional game,” he said, “and that was thanks to Phil.”

One of the tapes he recorded in Bridgeport helped him get the job with the Trenton Devils, D’Uva said.

4. He carries forward the legacy of Marty Glickman.

In the late 1980s, Marty Glickman—the legendary New York Knicks, Giants, and Jets broadcaster—began working as an advisor to students at WFUV, coaching them while laying the foundation for the station’s current training program.

While D’Uva himself wasn’t trained by Glickman, who died in 2001, he listened to him on the radio growing up as a Jets fan in New Jersey and was inspired by his “tremendous admonition” to “have empathy” and always “consider the listener,” he told the Off the Air podcast.

D’Uva also feels a deeper connection to Glickman given their ties to both Syracuse University, where Glickman earned a bachelor’s degree and where D’Uva studied and has served as an adjunct professor, and Fordham.

“It’s great for me to have a connection to two great universities with so much history in sports broadcasting and so many alumni involved in this field,” D’Uva said. “I’m very proud of both of those places—I’ve got a section of the closet that’s dedicated to [Syracuse] orange and a section of the closet that’s dedicated to [Fordham] maroon.”

5. He supports the next generation of sports broadcasters.

D’Uva not only supports the students at WFUV through his appearances on shows, including One on One, the longest-running sports call-in show in New York City, but he also serves as media consultant for the Chatham Anglers of the Cape Cod Baseball League.

D’Uva, who previously called games in the Cape Cod league himself, helped the team create what Bryan Curtis of The Ringer has called “The Cape Cod Finishing School for Broadcasters.” Each summer, two aspiring broadcasters call games for the team and receive coaching from D’Uva. Curtis described him as “a gentle but exacting mentor, as if [Vin] Scully were crossbred with Yoda.”

D’Uva’s message to aspiring broadcasters is simple: “Don’t be a pretender. You’re not acting the part of a broadcaster. You are a broadcaster.”

Recalls Schultz: “He brought Bob in and said, ‘This is Bob Ahrens. This is the man who’s going to take this department to the next level.’ It didn’t take too long before we realized that Bob was bringing our standards to a level that they had never been at.”

A High Standard for Success

Indeed, over the next two decades, Ahrens ran a sports department that’s been widely praised for training future broadcasters in a professional environment.

He insisted that the staff operate to pro standards, he says, not only because it’s good training but also because WFUV reporters are credentialed to cover the local pro teams alongside the rest of the city’s sports media. That mindset has paid off: During Ahrens’s tenure, WFUV produced the likes of ESPN host Tony Reali, FCRH ’00; CBS Sports’ Spero Dedes, FCRH ’01; and Ryan Ruocco, FCRH ’08, of ESPN and the YES Network, continuing Fordham’s long tradition of launching the careers of sports broadcasters.

In 2014, the station paid tribute to Ahrens by establishing the Bob Ahrens Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism. The award is given annually to a member of the WFUV sports staff who has excelled on and off the air and demonstrated strong leadership ability.

Ahrens retired earlier this year as the station’s executive sports producer, and now, as WFUV transitions to its next chapter, he is passing the torch to a familiar face: Schultz.

A Return to Rose Hill

Schultz says when he first heard about the opening at WFUV, he didn’t imagine himself as a candidate. “The first thing that popped into my head was, ‘They have to do it right, because he’s built such a legacy here that has to be protected and built upon.’”

But as he began to think about what he believed the ideal candidate would look like—an on-air background, teaching experience, and a connection to WFUV—he realized he had all three. His broadcasting career included stints with Army athletics, two minor-league baseball teams, and an ESPN Radio affiliate, and he’d taught at Marist College and the Connecticut School of Broadcasting.

He threw his hat into the ring and got the job, and since this summer he’s been working with Ahrens, who’s staying on through the end of the year as a consultant, to ensure a smooth transition.

“It’s always gratifying to see one of your former students get the job,” Ahrens says. “Rick was basically in my first group. It’s sort of like bookends.”

Schultz says that working with Ahrens has been helpful in ways both big and small, from learning how the station operations have changed since his own Fordham days to quickly tracking down a phone number he may need.

“It’s very important to me for the students to understand that I was in their position 20 years ago, and I know what it’s like to be sitting there and have someone new come in,” Schultz says.

“My message to the students over the past few months has been, ‘The great thing about WFUV is that this is your station.’” In other words, he’s there to help guide the students, not drastically change things. “I think when something’s working, you try as best as you can not to mess it up,” he says.

But Schultz says he’s also learning how to develop his own style and priorities. He says there’s room for growth in social media and video, and that he’d like to collaborate more with the news side of WFUV.

A “Perfect Fit” to Carry on the Tradition

Mike Breen, FCRH ‘83, the play-by-play announcer for the New York Knicks on MSG as well as the NBA on ESPN, says that Ahrens has been a “magnificent” mentor to members of the FUV sports department.

“He’s as dedicated to his job and to the students that he helped as anybody I’ve ever seen,” Breen says. “And because Rick came up through the system, and knows what the system’s about, it seems like the perfect fit for him to follow in Bob’s footsteps.”

More than 20 years ago, Schultz followed in Breen’s footsteps. As a high school student, he reached out to Breen to discuss the broadcasting business, and Breen told him about his experiences at WFUV and about Fordham’s strong tradition. Schultz says Fordham was the only school he applied to, and now, as he returns to Rose Hill, he’s reflecting on the icons who came before him at the station.

“It’s still kind of surreal for me to be sitting in this office looking at the portrait of Marty Glickman on the wall and the Bob Ahrens Award on the other side of the wall, and to be sitting here taking that next chapter of WFUV Sports,” he says. “It’s still something that really strikes you every day.”

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06