Fordham has and will continue lending full cooperation to the NCAA during their investigation, including following the NCAA’s bylaws to maintain confidentiality. Therefore, we’re unable to share any more details on the matter at this time.

I sat beside my parents on the crowded gym floor, impressed by what the president, Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., said about students who make the city their classroom. And I thought about basketball, too. As a Knicks fan, I knew that broadcaster John Andariese was a Fordham grad. I’d learn much later that his Fordham coach was Johnny Bach, the master of the “Doberman defense” who helped lead Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to three straight NBA titles in the early 1990s.

As the Rose Hill Gym turns 100 this season, it’s hard to imagine a better exemplar of its spirit than Bach, a Fordham grad of grit and class.

Bach was a decorated World War II veteran who bookended his Navy service with studies at Fordham. He enrolled in 1942, returned in 1947, and graduated the following year with a degree in economics. That final year, he starred on the men’s basketball team, earning team MVP honors.

He also encountered a 34-year-old Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37, in the gym. The Fordham grad and future NFL legend was coaching the freshman basketball team at the time. At the start of the season, he instructed his players to stand along the baseline, Bach recalled. “Fordham University and God have ordained me to coach you,” Lombardi told them, “and I want every one of you who is willing to be coached … to step across that line.” It was the kind of affirmation that Bach carried with him throughout his life, Bulls head coach Phil Jackson once said—an affirmation about being coached and being part of a team.

After graduating from Fordham in 1948, Bach played for the Boston Celtics before returning to Rose Hill in 1950 as head coach. It wasn’t a career change he took lightly.

“I think everyone who goes into coaching must have some apprehension,” he once told a reporter, “because it’s far more than basketball. It’s philosophy and discipline. It has so many demands.”

For 18 seasons, he coached the basketball Rams to more wins than anyone else in Fordham history. And he remained an enthusiastic coach and educator for 56 years, the final 25 in the NBA. He had a gift for making the game “come alive in terms that [everyone] fully understands,” to quote a 1993 Fordham Magazine profile of him.

A Proud Product of a Fordham Jesuit Education

After Bach died in 2016, Mary Sweeney Bach told a reporter that her late husband’s Fordham education was key to his success as a coach.

“He was very proud of being the product of a Jesuit education because he believed in the importance of … being spiritually honest, intellectually honest. He believed in the importance of education. That’s part of what made him the kind of coach he was,” she said. “It wasn’t just rah rah, go get ’em. He was so much into teaching the basics, the fundamentals, the values; it was the basics of life as well as the basics of basketball.”

She also said that her husband admired how Michael Jordan “elevated the people around him” on the court. Likewise, Bach left an indelible mark on countless athletes, including Jordan, who described him as a mentor, friend, and “truly one of the greatest basketball minds of all time.”

What connects Bach not only to our story about the gym but also to the profiles of alumni changemakers and to Fordham’s “Best for Vets” reputation is his passion for teamwork and for building up those around him.

“When you love what you do,” he once told this magazine, “it really isn’t a job.”

A new student fan section, the Shirtless Herd, fired up the fans and brought “Rose thrill” to the Rose Hill Gym, in the words of Keith Urgo, who has overseen the men’s team’s resurgence since becoming its head coach in spring 2022.

Because of the New Era Fund and Fordham-wide support, “the culture and outlook around the program have shifted dramatically in the right direction,” said Fordham’s interim athletic director, Charlie Elwood. As the final buzzer sounds for the Cura Personalis campaign, Fordham basketball walks off the court with big wins on the board. Here are five: 

No. 1: Historic Record.

Men’s basketball achieved its highest three-year win total since joining the Atlantic 10 in 1995. The highlight? Going 25-8 in the 2022-2023 season, tying the second-best season total in the team’s history and coming in just win one shy of the famed 26-3 season of 1970-1971.

No. 2: Surging in the Atlantic 10.

The men’s team tied for second in the final A-10 standings in 2022-2023 and reached the semifinals of the A-10 Tournament for just the second time.  

No. 3: New Women’s Coach Scores Big.

In the 2023-2024 season, her first season as head coach of the women’s team, Bridgette Mitchell led the Rams to the most wins by a first-year Fordham women’s basketball coach since 1993-1994.

No. 4: Ram Spirit Revived.

In a sign of growing enthusiasm for Fordham basketball, ticket sales for the men’s team games grew 113% from the 2022-2023 season to the 2023-2024 season.

No. 5: A Bigger Public Profile.

Fordham has been covered on CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, and PIX11, and in the New York Post and Newsday, because of the men’s team’s performance. The Feb. 23, 2024, home men’s basketball game against Duquesne marked the Rams’ first appearance on ESPN2 since 2008.