As they headed down the Grand Concourse, Yankees star Reggie Jackson came to bat with his team losing 9-2 and down to its last out. “We heard from the radio the Bronx faithful chanting, ‘Reggie … Reggie … Reggie,’” Father Parkes remembered.

“The next words we heard were Vin’s: ‘It sounds like the chorus of a Greek tragedy.’

“Billy said, ‘What would Scully know about Greek tragedy?’

“I said, ‘Billy, he graduated from Fordham Prep and Fordham University.’

“That took care of Billy. ‘I get it now,’ he said.”

The vivid memory was part of Father Parkes’ homily at St. Patrick’s Cathedral Wednesday morning, March 22, during a Mass in memory of the 67-year voice of the Dodgers, from Flatbush to Chavez Ravine, who was described as “your servant Vincent Edward.” For all those decades, from 1950—less than a year after graduation from Fordham, where he was one of the original voices of WFUV, the university’s radio station—until Scully’s retirement in 2016, those two roles, voice and servant, had been intertwined. While describing a baseball game, he would somehow find a way to weave in relevant references to poems or poets, philosophical observations, and reverential hints at his faith that were as understated as they were unmistakable.

Like when he reported that a player dealing with a minor injury was described by the team as day-to-day, and he added: “Aren’t we all?”

If ever there was a Fordham graduate to represent the achievement of eloquentia perfecta—perfect eloquence—Vin Scully, Class of 1949, is it. “He didn’t broadcast a game,” Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray once wrote. “He narrated it.”

But much of what was shared formally and informally at St. Patrick’s, more than seven months after his passing last August 2 at 94, had less to do with Scully’s technical brilliance as a storyteller than the depth of his faith and the kindness he showed to so many others.

For generations of Rams, especially those of us trying to feel connected to him in the 1970s, when the old WFUV studios were on the third floor of Keating Hall, worshipping his ability was easy, but relating to his success was hard. When the Dodgers left Brooklyn after the 1957 season, his storytelling was directed at an audience a continent away. The crowds he educated in Southern California, initially seated far from the action in the awkward configuration of a Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum built for football and track and field, were able to connect with him and the game through their transistor radios—“what bound us together,” Scully once remembered.

His work was highly regarded on a national level, and he was so much older than us. A quarter century older. We did have one connection: a control room that looked—and worked—much as it did decades earlier, but that was all. It was much easier to view him as the Voice of the Dodgers than the recent Fordham graduate standing on the roof of Fenway Park on November 12, 1949, prepared for a broadcast on the CBS Radio Network but not for the cold and wind, describing a Boston University–Maryland football game in a way that impressed Red Barber and opened the door of a lifetime.

It was just so hard to relate.

Until you met him.

Not the way you had met him at the age of 10, when he signed the cover of a scorecard outside Shea Stadium. Not when an initial visit to Dodger Stadium created the sudden requirement of finding an electronics store to purchase a radio to bring to the game, because you just had to. When the first real meeting finally took place, in July 1979, Scully didn’t have to extend his signature invitation to “pull up a chair,” because as the Dodgers took batting practice, there was plenty of room near him in the home team dugout.

So you dried your right palm against your hip as you recited the hesitant introduction you had rehearsed, saying you had graduated from Fordham and you were there to do a feature for The New York Times, and …

“New York Times?” he said. “I wrote for The New York Times.”

And that is how you learned about the brilliance you hadn’t known, how Vin Scully consistently made others comfortable by finding a connection. Scully explained that he became a campus correspondent, filing brief items from different Fordham events. As he shared his story hours before the first pitch, with the stands still empty and quiet as baseballs rocketed out of the batting cage nearby, his remarkable use of the language suddenly made sense. The words had been expressed through his fingers before they would come from his throat.

An anthology of great baseball reporting, filled almost exclusively with old newspaper and magazine articles, included one transcript: the play-by-play radio description from September 9, 1965, the night Sandy Koufax took a perfect game against the Cubs to the ninth inning at Dodger Stadium.

“Koufax, with a new ball, takes a hitch at his belt and walks behind the mound,” Scully said that night. “I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.”

The words read as if he had rolled a piece of paper into a typewriter and agonized over each one. The perfection that night had happened downstairs and upstairs. His appreciation and understanding of the language, and his eloquentia perfecta, developed and deepened by those eight years in high school and college at Rose Hill, had endured for the rest of his life and beyond.

At the end of the memorial Mass, the Scully family shared a prayer, based on an 1848 meditation by St. John Henry Newman, that was described as “Dad’s North Star—his own personal mission statement.”

For 67 seasons, nine innings at a time, baseball became Vin Scully’s vehicle, and his gratitude, humility, and grace made him the link that defined the chain.

***

God has created me to do some definite service. He has committed me to some work which He has not committed to another.

I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connections between persons.

He has not created me for nothing. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore, I will trust Him; whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.

If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him.

In perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.

If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.

He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

—St. John Henry Newman

Malcolm Moran, FCRH ’75, has been the director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program and a professor of practice in journalism at IUPUI since 2013. He previously served as the inaugural Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State University after a three-decade career as a reporter and columnist atThe New York Times, USA Today, and other publications. As a Fordham undergraduate, he wrote for The Fordham Ram and was the sports director at WFUV, where he started One on One, now the longest-running sports call-in show in New York. His numerous honors include a 2007 Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame for his coverage of basketball and the 2020 Keith Jackson Eternal Flame Award, which recognizes individuals for lasting contributions to intercollegiate athletics.

On Oct. 31, administrators from both schools met at the Rose Hill campus with Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham, and the executor of Scully’s estate to accept the gift to the University and to speak to the importance of Scully’s legacy. “With this gift, we celebrate Vin’s talents and fundamental decency, and teach them to the next generation,” Tetlow said.

“He loved these schools, and this is a way for him to express his gratitude,” said the executor, Edward White, during the meeting. He visited both schools to go over the gifts, which can be used however each institution sees fit.

Also on hand to celebrate the gift were Ed Kull, Fordham’s athletic director, and Chuck Singleton, general manager of WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, where Scully worked as a student broadcaster before gaining renown as the Voice of the Dodgers, the baseball franchise that moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles in 1957.

Sometimes referred to as the Velvet Voice, Scully was beloved for his eloquence and iconic style as an announcer, and provided inspiration for generations of sports broadcasters. Scully served the Dodgers for 67 years, retiring in 2016. He was 94 at the time of his passing on August 2.

His many awards and honors include induction into the University’s Hall of Honor and into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, as well as a Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by President Barack Obama in 2016.

On Nov. 1, Scully was honored with a video tribute at WFUV’s annual On the Record awards dinner. On March 20, he will be honored with a posthumous Founder’s Award at the 2023 Fordham Founder’s Dinner, to be held at The Glasshouse in Manhattan, with Scully’s family accepting the award on his behalf. Two days later, on March 22, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, will celebrate a memorial Mass in Scully’s honor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 10 a.m.

In addition, the press box at Houlihan Park at Jack Coffey Field will be renamed in Scully’s honor, among other initiatives to honor his legacy, the University announced on Nov. 14.

Setting the Tone

The son of Irish immigrants, Vincent Edward Scully graduated from Fordham Prep in 1944 and went on to call baseball, basketball, and football games for WFUV—which was founded during his student years at Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“WFUV turns 75 this fall, and in the beginning, there was Vin Scully,” Singleton said. “Vin set the tone in 1947, and his influence echoes today in the quality work of WFUV’s talented young sports journalists.”

Scully kept up with Fordham over the years, taking interviews from FUV student journalists, hosting some workshops for them, and returning to campus as commencement speaker in 2000 and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University. His presence is also felt in Fordham athletics, since he played for the baseball team as a student.

In remarks after the meeting, Kull said Scully was “more than just a voice; he was an institution and a true master of his craft.”

“The impact he made on not only baseball, but the entire sports media industry, is humbling,” Kull said. “His story, with his Fordham and Bronx roots, continues to inspire our Rams and the entire Fordham family.”

A Bond with Fordham

Scully’s Fordham baseball career included a game against Yale, whose team included a future U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. When Bush was president, he met Scully for golf and later sent him a framed photo taken of them, White noted at the meeting.

“He frequently spoke very fondly of his experience at WFUV, and always felt that he was a part of the Fordham family … and wanted to contribute equally to Fordham Prep and Fordham University, which is exactly what he did,” said White, Scully’s business manager and friend for over 40 years, after the meeting.

“As a lifelong Catholic, he had a deep appreciation for the faith foundation provided at this exceptional Jesuit institution,” said White, senior partner with Edward White & Co., LLP, in Woodland Hills, California. He noted that Scully sponsored him during his own conversion to Catholicism. “He loved the foundation that he received, spiritually and academically. Every time he spoke of Fordham, it was glowing.”

He sometimes glimpsed Scully’s kindness and generosity—as well as his fame—while traveling with him, along with Scully’s late wife, Sandra, and his own wife, Mary White, who also attended the Oct. 31 meeting.

“Wherever we went, he was so well received, and so appreciated and so loved, and people would oftentimes stand in line to see if they couldn’t get his autograph or if they could have a photograph of him,” White said. “He was very thoughtful and compassionate to everyone. Whether he was speaking to a parking attendant or a most senior person [in politics]or in the commercial world, he treated everyone equally.”

During his trip to New York, White attended another event with a small Fordham connection—a Nov. 1 ceremony in which another client of his, the late singer and actress Lena Horne, a 1997 Fordham honorary degree recipient, became the first Black woman to have a Broadway theater named after her.

It was a joy to see where Scully attended school, White said. “He was truly a wonderful, giving, loving human being. We all loved him. We miss him indeed.”

On June 10, 1967—a time of mass protests against the Vietnam war and rising violence in the struggle for racial justice—the 41-year-old U.S. senator from New York reminded Fordham graduates that they were entering “a world aflame with the desires and hatreds of multitudes.”

He urged them to hear the voices of “the dispossessed, the insulted, and injured of the globe,” to heed their own revolutionary responsibilities, and to remember the difference that one person can make. And he quoted from his June 1966 “Day of Affirmation” address at the University of Cape Town during the height of apartheid in South Africa:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

“It was electrifying,” recalls William Arnone, FCRH ’70, who heard the speech from the back of Edwards Parade. Later that year, Kennedy’s staff came to Fordham to recruit students. “They said, ‘You can study politics or you can do it,’” Arnone says. “Next day, I showed up. I was hooked.”

He and several other Fordham undergraduates worked as constituent case aides in the senator’s New York office, fielding inquiries from New Yorkers in distress.

In the four-part Netflix series Bobby Kennedy for President, released last year, Arnone describes taking calls from single mothers in Harlem who struggled to protect their children from rats—and to get their landlord to help.

“I would get the name of the superintendent and the landlord,” Arnone says in the film, “and I would call them up: ‘This is William Arnone, I’m calling on behalf of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. There are rats in Mrs. Smith’s apartment, eating her children’s toes. What are you going to do about it?’ And I would get the same answer, ‘You mean Robert Kennedy cares about Mrs. Smith’s kids?’ ‘Yes.’

“Invariably I get a call the next day: They have an exterminator, no more rats. ‘Thank God for Mr. Kennedy.’”

In mid-March 1968, Kennedy launched his campaign for president, running on a platform of economic and racial justice, and an end to the war in Vietnam. “We all fed him things to use in the campaign,” recalls Arnone, who was ecstatic when Kennedy shared his story about the rats during a campaign speech. “But then he would send me notes and say, ‘Good job, you helped her. But we have to have the solution that’s systemic.’”

Kennedy’s campaign lasted less than 90 days. Shortly after winning the California primary, he was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died on June 6.

Two days later, Arnone was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan for Kennedy’s funeral Mass, after which he rode on the private train that carried Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington, D.C., for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

“It was just a nightmare, but it was poignant” seeing the hundreds of thousands of mourners who lined the tracks to bid Kennedy farewell, he said.

Arnone went on to a career focused on the elderly and retirement issues. He is the chief executive of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank, and he remains inspired by Kennedy.

“He was fierce, passionate, and understood vulnerability in a way that was authentic, and it changed my life. His whole goal was to bring people together and try to avoid class warfare, avoid violence,” Arnone says. “To me, that’s the message for today.”

A thousand delegates from Catholic schools across the world congregated at the Lincoln Center campus and nearby locations for the World Congress of Catholic Education, hosted by Fordham from June 5 to 8.  

“I cannot overestimate the importance of a Catholic education and your work in bringing that gift to the widest audience possible,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in his welcome message. “The schools and educators you represent do holy work every day, and in that work, they transform the lives of young people around the globe. Those young people in turn change the world.”

The four-day conference, sponsored by the Graduate School of Education’s Center for Catholic School Leadership and the Office of International Catholic Education, examined global education issues in collaboration with bishops, universities, and religious congregations throughout the world. 

At this year’s conference, delegates representing more than 85 countries and 200,000 Catholic schools were present. Several years ago, Gerald M. Cattaro, Ed.D., executive director of the Center for Catholic School Leadership and Faith-Based Education, led the U.S. delegation at the 2015 World Congress in Rome.

“The world conference of Catholic education presented Catholic education at its best as a gift to all nations,” Cattaro said. “This year, we gathered at Fordham to share our vision for the future: to provide sustainable Catholic education, modeling the pedagogy of Pope Francis—pedagogy of heart, hands, and mind in an effort to better serve the marginalized, the poor, refugees, and those on the peripherals. In other words, to teach as Jesus did.”

The conference began with a 5:30 p.m. opening Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, attended by Archbishop Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States; Father McShane; and several other clergy and faith leaders. Over the next two days, the guests attended lectures and panels presented by key figures in education, including Marc Brackett, director of the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence, and Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, S.J., president of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar. Archbishop Angelo Vincenzo Zani, secretary of the Vatican Congregation of Catholic Education, presided over all the conference events.

Guests were invited to attend eight available “labs,” where guest speakers discussed their innovative teaching methods. Topics included creating more inclusive schools and protecting children against abuse. To accommodate all of the international guests, each lab topic was presented in English, Spanish, and French.

A Crisis of Compassion

One of the first labs, “For a new format of education, adapted to change, and grounded in a culture of dialogue,” featured TED Talk speaker Kiran Bir Sethi, Ph.D., the founder of an internationally-recognized teaching strategy, and Kari Flornes, Ph.D., a Norwegian philosophy professor who spoke about the importance of teaching empathic communication to children.

“For 15 years of our children’s lives in schooling, we tell them that their education will be incomplete if they do not learn about photosynthesis, quadratic equations, the height of Mount Everest, or even grammar,” said Kiran Bir Sethi, who founded the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, in 2001. “But in those same 15 years, we struggle with finding the time to get our children to care about inequality or child rights or compassion … or even love.”

Sethi’s solution is a four-step formula—FIDS (feel, imagine, do, share) for kids—that taps into children’s creativity, compassion, problem-solving skills, and collaboration. It is currently used in more than 65 countries to encourage students to solve local challenges like bullying, she said.

“We ask them to actually go in teams to implement the solution. And finally, we ask them to share—we ask them to share their story of change with the world to inspire others to say, ‘I can’ [too].”

In 2017, Sethi met Pope Francis in Vatican City and signed an agreement that introduced FIDS and her global movement, Design for Change, to more than 460,000 Catholic schools across the world.

The second speaker, Karni Flornes, an associate professor at Bergen University College in Norway, emphasized the importance of educators using empathetic communication in their classrooms.

Aspects of empathetic communication include teaching non-violence and no-hate speech in all subjects, speaking about controversial issues in the classroom, and actively coexisting with people who look different from themselves.

“[Children] have to practice dialogue between people of different views and learn it’s possible to live with diverse opinions,” Flornes said. “It’s not always possible to reach consensus. But it’s possible to live together without violence.”

She said that parents can also use empathic communication by seeing and following their children’s initiatives, sharing their personal experiences with them, and giving praise and showing recognition.

Sharing Global Ideas at the United Nations

The World Congress of Catholic Education conference culminated with a Saturday morning convocation and program at the United Nations general assembly, moderated by Cattaro.

In his introductory remarks, Archbishop Bernardito C. Auza, the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations, said that society needs to be based on “humanism”—a concept that starts at home with the family. Educators must bolster that idea by building spiritual values in students, he said.

Later, a global panel of leaders presented problems and solutions in their native countries, including how to effectively teach sustainability in classrooms and educate students in local prisons. Jaime Palacio, a lay missionary from Peru, spoke about the challenges of educating children in the Amazon. Educators need to listen to the needs of the Amazon community, he said, and help them defend their land and culture. Another panelist—Jose Arellano, executive director of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines—considered ISIS’s recruitment of uneducated Muslim children in Asia. One way to prevent this is peacebuilding through education, he said, like the Madaris Volunteer Program in the Philippines.  

In a video message played at the United Nations, Pope Francis also addressed conference participants. For 12 minutes, he spoke about the future work of Catholic schools, expressed his gratitude toward Catholic school educators, and greeted the millions of students who study in Catholic schools worldwide.

“Young people, as I said at World Youth Day in Panama, belong to the ‘today’ of God,” Pope Francis said, “and therefore are also the today of our educational mission.”

— Jeanine Genauer contributed reporting.