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.”

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.

Tetlow said that Khalil’s goal in life is “to be a person of integrity, to matter to the world, and most of all, of course, to make his parents proud.”

She called Khalil’s family the “quintessential” immigrant story. They came to the U.S. from Egypt, and his father, Mostafa, started his own business, a limo company in New York City. Mostafa drove guests to Fordham and dreamed of sending his own children to the University. “That dream came true because of all of you,” Tetlow said.

Khalil is one of 48 Fordham Founder’s scholars whose scholarships are supported by the annual Fordham Founder’s dinner. This year’s dinner, held on March 20 at the Glasshouse in Manhattan, raised about $2.3 million for the Fordham Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship Fund. The University also paid tribute to this year’s Fordham Founder’s Award recipients: Robert D. Daleo, GABELLI ’72, and Linda Daleo; Thomas M. Lamberti, Esq., FCRH ’52, and Eileen Lamberti; and Vincent E. “Vin” Scully, FCRH ’49, who was honored posthumously.

Tetlow, who was speaking at her first Founder’s Dinner, told the audience that their support is why students like Khalil can achieve their dreams.

“For almost two centuries, we have dared our students to dream, to lift their hopes and their ambitions, all in New York, the city quite literally fueled by the power of dreams,” she said. “We bring together the best and brightest from every corner of the world, and we make them believe that they belong here. We create opportunities and transform lives, and we spin their dreams and talents into reality.”

‘Where Dreams Take Us’

This year’s Fordham Founder’s Award honorees were recognized for their many generous gifts to the University, from their financial support over the years to their leadership, guidance, and mentorship of Fordham’s students.

“Tonight, we celebrate everyone in this room, for your selfless and generous support that provides the promise of a Fordham education, a transformational Jesuit education, for our diverse and deserving students,” said David Ushery, the evening’s emcee. Ushery, an evening news anchor for NBC 4 New York, received an honorary doctorate from Fordham in 2019, and his wife, Isabel Rivera-Ushery, graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1990.

Ushery referred to the Fordham basketball teams’ recent successes, highlighting the excitement that captured the University community of late. He called on those in attendance to “echo that cheer and passion we heard this season, something I first heard at Rose Thrill.”

Tetlow said that she and the whole University community are grateful for the support of the honorees and all who support the dinner.

“For more than two decades, our Founder’s honorees and donors have worked to bring our students’ dreams to life,” she said. “Our students will follow in your footsteps, and they will make a difference to the world.”

Bob Daleo, former executive vice president and chief financial officer of Thomson Reuters, has served as the chair of the Fordham Board of Trustees for more than 10 years; his tenure will conclude on June 30. As chair, Daleo has played a critical role in the University’s growth and strategic advancement. He and his wife, Linda, support multiple educational institutions in New York City.

Armando Nuñez, the chair-elect of the Board of Trustees, thanked Daleo for “sharing his wisdom, insights, and experience.”

Daleo said that he was used to celebrating and recognizing other Founder’s Award honorees, “women and men, recognized for success in living the Fordham mission, each in their own way, giving of themselves, being men and women for others.”

“When we honor them, we celebrate Fordham,” he said. “We recognize the importance of its mission and its continued relevance in today’s world.”

Daleo called on those in attendance to continue to support Fordham’s work and its students as the University works toward its “third century” of educating students.

“This kind of support has never been more necessary for us to sustain the currency of our educational programs, build new infrastructure, and to support as many students as possible,” he said.
(Watch the Daleos’ Founder’s Award speech here.)

Providing Educational Opportunities

Thomas Lamberti, a Fordham President’s Council member, is a retired labor and employment lawyer who practiced law for more than 60 years. He and his wife, Eileen, have supported numerous initiatives at Fordham, including the Elizabeth A. Johnson Endowed Scholarship for women in theology as well as the vocal group Highbridge Voices, which performed at the dinner and has an ongoing partnership with Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Lamberti, a son of Italian immigrants, said that he believed his legacy was “to give the same educational opportunities that I had” to sons and daughters of immigrants. He also spoke of his growing awareness of the civil rights movement—and the effects of segregation in the South—while serving in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s at what was then Turner Air Force Base in Albany, Georgia.

He said that he and his wife, Eileen—whom he compared to St. Therese of Lisieux, since she “scatters flowers of love wherever life takes her”—returned to the South last year to visit Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, Alabama. In Birmingham, he was struck by a mural dedicated to the memory of John Lewis, the late congressman and civil rights leader. It featured a quote of his: “If you come together with a mission, and it’s grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.”

“I am asking you wonderful people that are here tonight who are dedicated to Fordham, let’s join that mission,” Lamberti said. “Let’s educate children, particularly Black and brown children from poor sections of New York, and let’s make their dreams come true.”
(Watch the Lambertis’ Founder’s Award speech here.)

Supporting the Next Generation

Vin Scully, who died in August 2022, was the beloved voice of the Dodgers for 67 years and announcer for Major League Baseball on CBS and NBC. He got his start at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, and was known as the “patron saint of WFUV Sports.” Scully left $1 million each to Fordham and Fordham Prep after he died.

“This award celebrates his life, his legacy, and the traditions and values he held so dear, and shaped how he led his life,” his daughter Erin Scully said upon accepting the award in his honor. “He learned these traditions and values while at Fordham University.”

Scully said that her father provided financial support and mentorship to students because he “knew the responsibility he had to nurture the next generation in those same values and traditions he had been taught.”
(Watch Erin Scully accept the award on behalf of her father.)

‘One of the Best Experiences of My Life’

Sharissa Fernandes, GABELLI ’23, told the more than 850 attendees that their support has helped her find her interests, passion, and a career. Fernandes said that when she started at Fordham, she wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to do, but through the support of mentors like Father Vin DeCola, S.J., Fernandes found success as a global business student at the Lincoln Center campus. She graduated in December and is about to join Deloitte, where she interned, as a cybersecurity analyst.

“Since freshman year itself, the Gabelli School has constantly placed a huge emphasis on conducting business with a purpose,” she said. “The University’s Jesuit values, morals, and ethics in carrying out business along with building strong relationships has been one of my biggest takeaways from the University that I am immensely grateful for.”

Fernandes said the University also supported her and her friends when they traveled to Washington, D.C., to “meet and interview Uyghur detention camp survivors.” She said that many of these opportunities were possible thanks to the support of the donors in the room.

“Being at Fordham, and a part of this cura personalis-driven education program, has been one of the best experiences of my life,” she said. “All of us here tonight owe a huge part of it to all of you, so thank you.”
(Watch Fernandes’ speech here.)

The night also featured a video recap showing where past Founder’s scholars have gone after leaving Fordham.

Madeline Felix-Tyler, a 2008 Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate, said she was among the second-ever group of Founder’s scholars.

“Through this program you have supported 140 scholars. These are students who would not have benefited from our fine Jesuit, Catholic education without your overwhelming support and yes, generosity,” she said. “I can tell you personally, you have impacted our career paths and our lives.”

Captivating Performances

The night also featured multiple performances. Highbridge Voices, a performing arts group made up of elementary to high school students from the Bronx, kicked off the evening with moving renditions of the songs “No Time” and “I’ll Be on My Way.” And Fordham College at Rose Hill first-year student Alexa Carmona performed the national anthem.

Joshua Screen, a Founder’s scholar and Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior, said that the theme of the evening, “Where Dreams Take Us,” inspired him “to share something very special with all of you—so naturally I wrote a song called ‘Our Story.’” Screen conducted a debut performance of the song with Valeria Fernandez, a first-year Fordham College at Lincoln Center student, and Cade Parker, a first-year Fordham College at Lincoln Center student who is also a Founder’s scholar.

“We can be our own writers for the stories we make,” the students sang. “The future’s looking much brighter, and with our light we can lead the way.”

At the end of the evening, the surprise closing act brought the audience to its feet: President Tania Tetlow joined members of the University Choir in performing “How Can I Keep from Singing?”

Shortly after Scully died on August 2, 2022, at the age of 94, Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci used the Latin phrase eloquentia perfecta, or perfect eloquence, to describe Scully’s gift and well-honed craft. “Freshmen at Fordham, including Vin Scully, class of 1949, take a seminar class taught by the most accomplished faculty called eloquentia perfecta,” Verducci wrote. “It emerged from the rhetorical studies of the ancient Greeks, codified in Jesuit tradition in 1599. It refers to the ideal orator: a good person speaking well for the common good. It is based on humility: The speaker begins with the needs of the audience, not a personal agenda. Vin Scully was that ideal orator. A modern Socrates, only more revered.

“He was an amazing firsthand witness and chronicler of history. … And yet never did Vin place himself above the people and events he was there to chronicle.”

In a career spanning seven decades, Scully described some of the most memorable moments in baseball. He was erudite and eloquent, with exquisite timing and an ability to frame the drama as it unfolded. He could weave anecdotes about the players, literature, and history into the flow of the game, interrupting himself to describe a pitch without losing the thread of his tale or his listeners’ attention. But he also knew when to go silent and let the magical moment—and the roar of the crowd— speak for itself.

He received numerous awards throughout his career, including induction into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, an Emmy Award for lifetime achievement in 1996, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016. “The game of baseball has a handful of signature sounds,” Obama said at the White House ceremony. “You hear the crack of the bat, you got the crowd singing in the seventh-inning stretch, and you’ve got the voice of Vin Scully.”

The Early Years

Scully was born in the Bronx after his parents immigrated from Ireland. He grew up in Washington Heights and attended Fordham Preparatory School. After graduating in 1944, he served briefly in the Navy before enrolling in Fordham College at Rose Hill, where he majored in communications. In 1947, he became one of the original voices of WFUV, the University’s radio station. He penned a sports column in The Fordham Ram, worked as a stringer for The New York Times, and sang in the Shaving Mugs, a campus barbershop quartet. For two seasons, he played outfield for the Fordham baseball team.

Five decades later, on May 20, 2000, Scully returned to Rose Hill to receive an honorary degree from the University and deliver the commencement address. He told graduates that the “four-letter words” he associated with Fordham were “home, love, and hope.” And he didn’t put himself above his audience: “It’s only me,” he said, “and I am one of you. … I walked the halls you walked. I sat in the same classrooms. I took the same notes and sweated out the final exams; drank coffee in the caf and played sports on your grassy fields.”

But Scully’s favorite place to be was behind the mic. He called Fordham baseball, basketball, and football games for WFUV. And in a 2020 documentary on the station’s celebrated sports department, he joked that he would even call games to himself while playing for the Rams. He recalled listening to games as a kid and being “so thrilled by the roar of the crowd that first, I loved the roar. Then I wanted to be there, and eventually I thought I would love to be the announcer doing the game.”

The Voice of the Dodgers

After graduating from Fordham in 1949, Scully spent the summer at a CBS radio affiliate in Washington, D.C., before he returned to New York to speak with the network about working there. Just a few days later, he received a call from Red Barber, the legendary CBS sports director and broadcaster, asking him to cover a college football game that Saturday. By spring, the 22-year-old Scully had joined Barber in the Brooklyn Dodgers broadcast booth. When Barber left to work for the Yankees following the 1953 season, Scully became the team’s primary announcer, a position he held when the franchise moved to Los Angeles for the 1958 season and kept until he retired in 2016.

The highlights of his career are too numerous to recount in full, but in 1955, he called the final out of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ only World Series victory. He described Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, calling it “the greatest game ever pitched.”

He was behind the mic for another perfect game a decade later, by the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax on September 9, 1965. That game was not televised, but Scully’s descriptive, evocative call of the last inning helped listeners see and feel the drama. “And you can almost taste the pressure now,” he said after the second strike against the inning’s leadoff hitter, Chris Krug. “Koufax lifted his cap, ran his fingers through his black hair, then pulled the cap back down, fussing at the bill. Krug must feel it too as he backs out, heaves a sigh, took off his helmet, put it back on, and steps back up to the plate.” Moments later, Scully said, “And there are 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.”

On April 8, 1974, the Dodgers traveled to Atlanta to play the Braves, whose veteran slugger, Hank Aaron, was one home run away from breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career home runs. In the fourth inning, Aaron stepped up to the plate with Scully behind the mic to describe a drama that would resonate far beyond the ballpark. “It’s a high drive into deep left-center field. Buckner goes back to the fence. It is gone!” Scully said, then let the crowd take the mic for 26 jubilant seconds before remarking on Aaron’s historic achievement: “What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.”

A dozen years later, Bill Buckner, the outfielder who watched Aaron’s recordbreaking home run sail just out of reach, would be at the infamous heart of another one of Scully’s most memorable calls. Now playing first base for the Boston Red Sox, Buckner and his teammates faced the New York Mets in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. They were up two runs and only one out away from breaking the so-called Curse of the Bambino, having not won a World Series since trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season. But the Mets staged a gritty comeback to tie the game in the 10th inning. Finally, the Mets’ Mookie Wilson hit a seemingly simple ground ball Buckner’s way. “Little roller up along first, behind the bag, it gets through Buckner!” Scully said, his voice rising. “Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!” Once again, he let the crowd roar—this time for nearly two minutes, as viewers were shown the replay of Buckner’s error, a delirious New York crowd, the jubilant Mets, and the despondent Red Sox. “If one picture is worth a thousand words,” Scully said when he returned to the mic, “you have seen about a million.”

The ‘Patron Saint of WFUV Sports’

Scully’s iconic style made him an inspiration for generations of sports broadcasters who followed in his footsteps at WFUV and at Fordham, including Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, the voice of the Yankees for the YES Network, who called Scully “the greatest broadcaster who ever lived.”

“Every game was a master’s class as he turned an inning into poetry. And as great as he was, he was just as nice. Class, elegance, and grace were all part of his humble but regal being,” Kay wrote. “His loss is heartbreaking as his golden voice is silenced, but he will live forever as an example of what to try and be on and off mic. RIP Mr. Scully, and rest easy knowing how much you made a difference to all who met you and had the joy of listening to you.”

In the 2020 documentary on WFUV sports, Hall of Fame basketball broadcaster Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, described what made Scully the best: “His vocabulary, his storytelling, his personality—everything. He just was perfect,” Breen said. “It made you … [want] to make sure you were always prepared anytime you went on the air.”

Bob Ahrens, WFUV’s sports director for 20 years before his retirement in 2017, said Scully always made time for the students. They usually interviewed him about once a year for the weekly One on One call-in show, and Ahrens said Scully hosted at least two workshops over the phone. “They can’t see him in person, and the control room is packed,” Ahrens said. “He loved FUV, he loved Fordham, and he was always willing to help out.”

In 2008, he became the first recipient of WFUV’s Vin Scully Award for Excellence in Sports Broadcasting, a lifetime achievement award that Breen accepted last fall and Kay took home in 2018. “To be given an award with Vin Scully’s name on it is beyond anything I could have ever imagined,” Kay said at the awards ceremony. “He is the patron saint of WFUV sports, he is the patron saint of anybody who does baseball play-by-play. He is the best at what he’s done.”

Mike Watts, GABELLI ’14, who calls games for ESPN, Westwood One, and other networks, said that Scully inspired him to come to Fordham. “There is no WFUV sports without Vin Scully,” Watts said. “His name gave all of us credibility. To have the greatest at anything come from your school, your radio station, your program—it’s the light that all of us were following.”

‘Smile Because It Happened’

On October 2, 2016, Scully called his final game. Before heading to the playoffs, the Dodgers and the Giants—two teams with New York roots—concluded the regular season with a game in San Francisco. In the final inning, Scully said that he’d had a line in his head all year, a common, anonymous expression often mistakenly attributed to Dr. Seuss, he said. “The line is, ‘Don’t be sad that it’s over. Smile because it happened.’ And that’s really the way I feel about this remarkable opportunity I was given, and I was allowed to keep for all these years. … I have said enough for a lifetime, and for the last time, I wish you all a very pleasant good afternoon.”

—Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15, is an associate editor of this magazine. Chris Gosier and Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this article.

In the newsroom, Maya Sargent, a graduate fellow from Fordham’s public media program, sat at a computer editing What’s What, the station’s daily news podcast on current events, cultural news, and issues affecting the New York City area. Down a few seats, Sam Davis, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior, chatted with Bobby Ciafardini, the station’s sports director, about the guests they’d feature on One on One, the city’s longest-running sports call-in show. A few hours earlier, Jim O’Hara, FCRH ’99, associate director of technical operations, met with several students who would document the next day’s recording session with beabadoobee, a Filipina British artist, in the station’s intimate Studio A setting.

Elsewhere, Rich McLaughlin, FCRH ’01, GABELLI ’10, the station’s program director, met with General Manager Chuck Singleton to review the rundown for the station’s On the Record event, which would take place the following week. And music director Russ Borris was finalizing details for the station’s annual Holiday Cheer concert—a lineup headlined by venerable indie rockers Spoon and featuring Lucius, Grammy-winning blues prodigy Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and the Brooklyn-based band Say She She.

But afternoon drive host Dennis Elsas tuned all of that out when he stepped up to the microphone in Studio 1. “That is Beck and ‘Loser’ from 1994. And new before that: Arctic Monkeys, ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’—here at WFUV,” Elsas said, then quipped “I’m here!” with comic timing and a smile that traveled hundreds of miles across the airwaves. He cued up the next song, and as he hit play, said, “Member-supported and supporting each other, it’s WFUV.”

It’s the kind of scene that has played out, almost hidden from sight, in Keating Hall on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus for more than 75 years. Before Dennis Elsas, there was Pete Fornatale, FCRH ’67, who created the station’s first pop music show as an undergrad in 1964. Before Sam Davis, there was Malcolm Moran, FCRH ’75, who launched One on One as a student and went on to become a Hall of Fame basketball journalist; and there was Vin Scully, FCRH ’49, the late, legendary baseball broadcaster who was among WFUV’s original voices. Before Maya Sargent, there was Alice Gainer, FCRH ’04, the Emmy Award–winning anchor and reporter at WCBS-TV, New York; and Charles Osgood, FCRH ’54, former longtime host of CBS Sunday Morning.

A Unique Beginning

“1947 was quite a year,” Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., told the crowd of more than 200 attendees at WFUV’s On the Record event, held November 2 on Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. “Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and the transistor was invented. And at Rose Hill, New York’s first noncommercial, educational FM station signed on the airwaves. The University’s 25th president, Robert Gannon, S.J., remarked that ‘Fordham in her time has seen many beginnings. Today, we mark a beginning that is unique.’”

In mid-October, the University’s recently installed 33rd president, Tania Tetlow—who had her own unique beginning at Fordham as the first woman and first layperson to lead the institution—stood onstage in front of Walsh Family Library. “We’re here to celebrate 75 years of WFUV, the coolest thing about Fordham University,” she said during a station-organized concert that was part of the inauguration festivities. The station still trains “students who are learning journalism and sports broadcasting and everything about the industry,” and now, in addition to serving the city, it reaches “300,000 listeners in all 50 states—Idaho and Hawaii listen to WFUV—and we’re just so proud of what it is.”

Throughout its 75-year history, many things have changed. For starters, in the mid-1980s, the station became a professionally run NPR affiliate, with ample training and broadcast opportunities for students. Darren DeVivo, GABELLI ’87, now the station’s Saturday afternoon and weeknight host, was working at the station as a Fordham undergraduate at that time.

“When I got here, there was a general manager who was a paid Fordham employee. We had a chief engineer who was a paid employee from Fordham, and everyone else was students—program director, news director, music director, all student-run,” he said. “If you had some skills or had some abilities, you worked your way up.”

In 1985, Ralph Jennings, Ph.D., was hired as the station’s general manager. He brought a fresh vision to the station, working to create an authentic sound, filled with more consistent, impactful programming that would attract an audience and help the station receive financial assistance to support its growth.

“You’re bringing change to what had been a college station—there’s a mix of responses to that,” said Singleton, who started as the station’s first professional news director in 1987 and later served as program director before succeeding Jennings as general manager in 2011. “I think for a lot of alums and students at the time, there was a fear that the students would just be swept out.

But Singleton, who expanded WFUV’s coverage of community issues and helped develop its robust news journalism training program, said that WFUV strived to employ a different model. “It’s not the pure student station, it’s not the pure professional public station: It’s a professional, public station with a lot of public service impact, but one where students are a core part of this. And those opportunities [for students] are really core to the station’s mission.”

In the late 1980s, there was also a shift overall in the field of radio, according to Singleton. “You couldn’t offer a little bit of this and a little bit of that—it wouldn’t get you anywhere,” he said. “So there was new understanding that for a public radio station to attract a loyal audience, you had to be consistent in what you were offering.” Jennings and his team studied the market and found “holes that we could fill,” Singleton said, and at the time, that was primarily singer-songwriters in an “acoustic vein.”

“That format—by the early ’90s—I think it was the first sparks of what it is that we have today,” Singleton said. He noted that these efforts, in addition to technological advances like internet streaming, have paid off and allowed the station to expand its reach: WFUV went from having around 30,000 to 50,000 listeners a week in the 1980s to around 325,000 a week today. At times, the station has reached as many as 450,000 listeners.

Today, staff and students at WFUV are using new platforms like TikTok and podcasts to reach audiences beyond the radio dial. The station’s studios have even moved—from the third floor of Keating Hall to bigger, state-of-the-art studios on the lower level of the Rose Hill campus’ signature academic building. But despite all of its iterations and evolutions, WFUV’s mission and goals have remained consistent—to be a home of music discovery in New York; to be a training ground for the next generation of journalists, broadcasters, and behind-the-scenes wizards; and to provide the community with significant public service.

Home of Music Discovery

Throughout its history, WFUV has played a variety of music—from opera and jazz in its early decades to rock in the ’60s and ’70s. But it really found its place more than a quarter century ago, as commercial radio stations began making their playlists “tighter and tighter,” according to Singleton. That left less space for DJs “who had done great creative work”—FM rock pioneers like Dennis Elsas, Vin Scelsa, Pete Fornatale, and Meg Griffin, he said. Elsas, whose legendary career has included a famous two-hour in-depth interview with John Lennon of the Beatles, said that shift came for him after working in commercial radio for more than 25 years. More and more “shock jocks” were coming in and classic rock DJs like himself were being phased out. When he heard about an opening at WFUV in 2000, he jumped at the chance.

“I felt at times challenged because while I was playing a lot of music that I was very familiar with, I was also learning on the job because we were digging way deeper into blues and some more esoteric music,” he said, adding that this allowed him to “expand my musical horizons even further.”

Elsas said that he believes the station’s tagline—Music Discovery Starts Here—fits its work in more ways than one. “You could discover new music, which you couldn’t necessarily find on any other station on the market, and I think it also gave us the opportunity to say you could rediscover old favorites,” he said, adding that he’s had his own discoveries at WFUV, including the pleasure of working with and mentoring students.

DeVivo said that he personally has enjoyed finding new music and sharing it with his audience. “A band like the Jayhawks is a good example, [or] singer–songwriter Freedy Johnston—I remember the day that the album came in, and I put it in and go, ‘Holy smokes! Why don’t we hear this on whatever commercial rock station, because these guys are great,’” he said.

WFUV’s national reputation as a home for music discovery can be traced to Rita Houston, who delighted in introducing listeners to artists from a wide range of genres—folk, blues, indie rock, hip-hop, electronica, and more—and who came to be regarded not only as a tastemaker in the industry but also a trusted mentor and friend to the stars.

For more than 25 years at the station, in her roles as a DJ, music director, and program director—and with her unerring ear for talent—Houston helped elevate the careers of countless artists, including Norah Jones, Brandi Carlile, and Mumford and Sons. When Houston died of ovarian cancer in 2020 at age 59, Carlile recalled how Houston was “the very first person to play my music on the radio.” She also helped Carlile feel accepted and welcome as a fellow LGBTQ woman. Carlile recalled a time when she was showing Houston photos, and a picture of her girlfriend popped up on her phone.

“‘Is that your plus one?’” Houston asked. “‘It’s OK to talk about it.’ She could immediately tell that I was uneasy with people in the music business knowing I was gay,” said Carlile, who was 22 years old at the time.

But Houston, who joined WFUV in the mid-1990s, didn’t stop at artists. She also helped launch the careers of WFUV employees, including McLaughlin, who succeeded her as program director, and Alisa Ali, PCS’14, the station’s midday host, who has helped carry forward Houston’s passion for supporting artists, particularly local musicians.

Houston is the reason Ali came to WFUV—and Fordham—in the first place. She was listening to WFUV, thinking about how she’d love to work there, when she heard Houston say that she was going to give a talk at the Museum of Television & Radio.

“And like any naive person, I was like, ‘I’ll just go see Rita and ask her if I could get a job there and she’ll give it to me,’” she said. So Ali went to Houston’s talk and waited around to chat with her after. “And I’m like, ‘Hi, I love the station. Can I work here?’” she said, smiling at the memory. “She’s like, ‘That’s cute. No, of course you can’t. You have no experience.’”

Ali said that Houston paused and asked her if she was a Fordham student, which was “the only way you could work at FUV” without having any experience in radio.

“I went home and looked up ‘how do you enroll in Fordham University?’” she said. “I was kind of at a crossroads in my life because I didn’t really like what I was doing. And since I never graduated college, I was like, ‘Well if I don’t get a job at WFUV, at least I’ll have a college education.’

“The day after I was accepted, I came back to the station. I was like, ‘Hi, remember me from the talk? I go to school here now. May I have a job now?’” Ali said. “[Houston] was like, ‘All right, kid. I like you. You remind me a lot of myself.’”

At that point, Houston was the midday host and music director, and Ali became a production assistant. She worked her way up to morning show producer and then host of The Alternate Side, which allowed her to discover and play new artists. More recently, as the midday host, she created a segment called “NY Slice,” which features local musicians from the tristate area.

“In New York City, we have so many opportunities to see huge bands, and I think a lot of these little bands get overshadowed,” she said, describing how she came up with the idea for the segment. “Local bands actually have it easier outside of New York City—it’s a disadvantage to be a local, small band in New York City. So I just want to support these people.”

That support has helped artists including Rén with the Mane and Blonde Otter. The two bands were featured on “NY Slice” and later chosen to perform at the October concert following the inauguration of Tania Tetlow. “I love you, Alisa Ali!” Rénee Orshan, the artist behind Rén with the Mane, said from the stage that night, adding that Ali and WFUV are the “only radio station” to play their music.

The concert also featured New Orleans’ legendary Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which has been celebrating its 60th anniversary with a national tour. The group marched down Old Elm Road with the horn section playing the gospel classic “I’ll Fly Away.” As they reached the stage, Tetlow, who grew up in New Orleans, added her own soaring voice to the mix to the delight of the crowd. She later said she was grateful to WFUV and to all the performers for helping her “feel at home here at Fordham.”

Greater Connection to the Artists

The inauguration concert was a prime example of WFUV tying its penchant for music discovery to its commitment to live music. O’Hara estimated that in a typical year, the station hosts about 200 sessions in Studio A and 20 to 30 live concerts and performances at venues throughout the New York City area.

“Live music really gives you a good insight [into]who the artist is,” O’Hara said. “You really get to understand a lot about them by hearing them perform their songs live,” and then listening to a WFUV host interview them in the studio. “It really presents a greater connection to the artists. I think that’s a great thing that we provide to our listeners.”

One of his most memorable sessions came in 2017, when Gorillaz, the Damon Albarn–led British band that doesn’t do a lot of live appearances, reached out to bring their “huge, full-scale tour” to Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. “When we first took the phone call about this, I was like, ‘Well, there’s no way this is going to happen,’” he said, laughing. “Along the way, I was expecting any one of a number of issues to be the deal breaker.” But those issues, ranging from bringing semi-tractor trailers onto campus to hooking up the band’s equipment to the building’s main power source, didn’t stand in their way. The session was a go.

“It was literally an all-day process—we got here, I think it was 7 a.m., and we didn’t leave until like 8 or 9 p.m.,” O’Hara said. “They took over the entire station. They brought the entire tour, what they would bring into Madison Square Garden. And I had just an assembly line of students, working the elevator out there, bringing stuff in, bringing cases back out. I think there had to be 30 members of their team. Every studio was filled up with something.”

But O’Hara said the takeover was absolutely worth it. “It was unique content—we were the one station that got to do that, so it was affirming as to who we are in the industry that we were offered that and were able to accomplish it,” he said. “It was just a really great source of pride for me.”

While Fordham students Allen Wang and Caitria Demeroto weren’t at WFUV for the Gorillaz performance, they’ve gotten their share of hands-on opportunities. The studio sessions typically range from two to four hours and include up to 10 students working on the production—three to four audio engineers, four to five videographers, and usually a few trainees—while the live performances at city venues also call for a mix of students and external contractors.

“There was a show for Phoebe Bridgers at Forest Hills Stadium, which is actually in the neighborhood I grew up in,” said Wang, a junior in the Gabelli School of Business. “So to go and be part of the backstage team, it was a very fulfilling experience. It was also really insightful to see how larger productions work in terms of production teams and sub crews and what their day is like.”

Demeroto, a Fordham College at Rose Hill junior, said she really enjoys the personal, intimate setting of Studio A, where she shot video of the session featuring Gang of Youths, an Australian alternative rock group.

“I think it’s just really authentic—and you feel very close,” she said. “And it definitely is a different sound than a recording. It’s so cool to see them, without any editing yet, and how they interact in their creative process—actually capturing that on camera is really great.”

Launching Pad for Success

Paul Cavalconte, FCRH ’83, a longtime radio host, got his start as a Fordham undergraduate at WFUV before his career took him to WQXR, WNEW, and Q104.3. He came back to WFUV as a guest host in 2013.

“I owe my radio career to 90.7 FM,” he said from the stage of the inauguration concert last fall. “And this is a very, very proud moment for us. We have a unique training program in sports and journalism—some of the most famous voices in media have come through Keating Hall and out into the airwaves of the world.”

That’s a credit to the hands-on training the students receive at WFUV, which Robin Shannon, the station’s news director, described as “vastly different than a lot of other organizations.” Over the past two decades, Shannon and former news director George Bodarky, FCRH ’93, who now serves as the community partnerships and training editor for WNYC, helped to grow and enhance the training program that Singleton established in the late 1980s. Today, “we have a reputation in the broadcast world of training students in a way that is going to benefit newsrooms all over the country,” Shannon said.

A big reason for that is the work of Bodarky, who was honored at WFUV’s On the Record event in November for his more than 20 years of service to the station. From 2001 until last year, he helped train many Fordham journalists.

“The thing about George is that dozens, maybe hundreds of people could be giving these remarks right now, telling you how George changed their life, how George opened the door to what became their career and their vocation,” said one of his former students, NPR White House correspondent Scott Detrow, FCRH ’07.

Shannon said the journalism program is about giving students ample opportunity to practice their skills in a professional environment. “It’s not just opening a book and reading about microphones or reading about interviews— it’s learning the equipment, going out, and covering stories that people are talking about.” She said students are also “allowed to make mistakes” and, with her guidance, they can “explore and experiment and kind of see what works for them.”

For Liam Dahlborn, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, that opportunity to explore allowed him to develop his own role at the station—running the news department’s social media accounts. “That kind of position wasn’t really something that they were necessarily training for, but I was able to talk to Robin and talk to George, and be like, ‘This is something that I think we need to build on, the digital assets, now that we’re transitioning into a digital world,’” he said. “And they were really supportive of that.”

Dahlborn said that all the skills he’s acquiring at WFUV, which include writing a weekly subscriber newsletter, posting to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and launching the station’s TikTok account, will help him pursue a career in media when he graduates from Fordham.

“Being able to have this professional environment in college is something that’s very unique,” he said. “Being able to work in a newsroom that’s professional, that’s state-of-the-art—that’s something that I think you don’t really get at other universities. And to be in New York City, pretty much everyone who I’ve talked to in New York City knows of WFUV.”

Noah Osborne, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said that his experience at WFUV opened doors for him, including his most recent internship at BronxNet television.

“That wouldn’t have been possible without WFUV,” he said. “Having WFUV anywhere on a resume seems to be the big talking point. I feel like a lot of my communication skills were honed here—especially as a reporter, as an anchor, even as a podcaster.”

Osborne said that until he worked at WFUV, he hadn’t thought much about podcasting and how it can be a great way to communicate with the audience. “I feel like it’s just made my delivery of certain lines of the news just so much more authentic, a lot more conversational, a lot more relaxed. It definitely did build my confidence as an aspiring media person.”

On the sports side, the WFUV legacy runs back to Vin Scully, the late, legendary voice of the Dodgers, who is considered the patron saint of Fordham-trained sportscasters, an ever-growing group that includes NBA Hall of Fame broadcaster Mike Breen, FCRH ’83; Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, the voice of the Yankees; Chris Carrino, GABELLI ’92, radio voice of the Brooklyn Nets; Tony Reali, FCRH ’00, host of ESPN’s Around the Horn; Bob Papa, GABELLI ’86, the radio voice of the New York Giants; and Ryan Ruocco, FCRH ’08, of the YES Network and ESPN.

When WFUV shifted from a student-run station to a professional staff overseeing the students in the late 1980s, Marty Glickman, the former New York Knicks, Jets, and Giants announcer, came on board as a coach, schooling the young sports journalists in the art of play-by-play and other types of broadcasts. He hired a producer named Bob Ahrens, who took the sports department to the next level, helping them gain press access to all 11 of the New York– area professional teams.

It’s that tradition that current sports director Bobby Ciafardini looks to build on. “I like to think that a big part of the legacy that I’m hoping to carve out here is that we have expanded the programming to include a lot more of the video component and the streaming part of what we are doing these days,” he said.

For example, One on One, New York’s longest-running sports call-in show, was founded in the 1970s, but now, in addition to catching it on the radio, viewers can tune in to a livestream and watch video clips on social media.

“The students are … learning more now than ever because they are multimedia sports professionals,” Ciafardini said. “When Sam [Davis] goes to a game now, he’s not just going to get audio; he’s doing a standup and interviewing players in both capacities.”

Davis, whose roles include social media coordinator, Mets beat reporter, and on-air broadcaster for Fordham sports, said that he wouldn’t have gotten the opportunities WFUV offered him anywhere else. “I think that covering the professional New York teams—as far as I know, I don’t think there’s really another college in the country that does that,” he said. “With the fact that everything is video now, we’re getting a lot of hands-on experience … not just being on air … but also video editing and pushing that out on social media, learning what works and what doesn’t.”

Both the news and sports departments have grown more diverse in recent years and provided more opportunities to students, something that is a strategic goal of the station, according to Singleton. For example, the sports department, which has traditionally been mostly male, now has an all-female sports podcast, All In.

Breen, who received the department’s Vin Scully Award for Excellence in Sports Broadcasting last year, said that he’s proud of the students who are a part of the station’s legacy. “Every Fordham student who decides to join this amazing radio station feels a responsibility, a responsibility to uphold the standards that all the previous students and student broadcasters have set,” he said, noting that he and his peers certainly felt it during the 1980s. “You’ve not only upheld the standards,” he said, “you’ve raised them. And I say bravo.”

Companionship for People

Students who work at WFUV said that they were drawn to the station—and Fordham in general—not only for the chance to hone their technical skills but also to be part of its public media mission. That certainly was the case with Maya Sargent, which is why she applied to Fordham’s master’s degree program in the field. The program led her to a fellowship at WFUV, where she gets to tell the stories of a diverse group of New Yorkers.

“I’ve always kind of had that intrigue to learn more and find out more about communities, and New York feels like the epicenter of cultural engagement,” said Sargent, who came to Fordham from the U.K. “It’s such an eclectic mix, and I think that injects a lot of life into the media that we produce.”

That connection to local communities is something that Thao Matlock, co-chair of the WFUV Advisory Board, has found especially helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s a companionship for people, and I think it’s what kept a lot of us sane during the pandemic, especially the first part when it was all doom and gloom,” she said. “A lot of us tuned in to WFUV because it was great music—we just kind of hung out; there was no anxiety. And then, the news part, the COVID news, was very calm, very sane.”

That’s been a hallmark of WFUV for decades—giving its listeners the news and music they need to find community and a reason to believe, especially in trying times. WFUV DJs received responses similar to Matlock’s from listeners in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m a nurse,” read one March 2020 message. “Today I listened in, [and] for the first time all month, danced in my kitchen, relaxed for the first time in ages. Grateful to WFUV for helping us stay safe, stay sane, stay connected in these uncertain times.” Another listener said the station’s DJs kept her company. “Now more than ever, many of us, myself included, are alone, and music means so much in our daily mindset.”

Breen, who went on to become a Hall of Fame basketball broadcaster, recalled his time as a late-night DJ for WFUV. He was on the air on December 8, 1980, the night John Lennon was killed. “The phones rang off the hook, and they were talking about what John Lennon meant to them,” he said. “One gentleman told me how he was about to commit suicide, but John Lennon’s song stopped him. Another told me he had a drinking problem, and John Lennon helped them through that. And it was the first time in my life I realized what music meant to people.”

Chuck Singleton, general manager of WFUV, said September 11, 2001, was another time when the power of music and the strength of the WFUV community were evident to the team at the station. “That day, as we reported on [the terrorist attacks], we were there for people. … I have a whole folder of letters and emails that people sent us that in their own, individual way, said, ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’”

Never Stopped Moving

Rich McLaughlin, who got his start at WFUV as an undergraduate just over two decades ago and is now the station’s program director, said putting all the pieces together—the commitment to music discovery, training young journalists, and providing a compelling public service to the community—is what makes WFUV “completely unique and dynamic.” “Not only do we take part in training that next generation of media professionals, but we really rely on our students to help push WFUV forward into the future,” he said. “And that’s one of my favorite things about working here because I find when it comes to social media, when it comes to music, when it comes to just general technology, our students, they know as much or more than some of us.”

One way to make sure the station remains unique and dynamic is to continue to diversify—both the musicians it plays on air and the staff it employs, Singleton said. For example, three years ago, Houston helped spearhead the station’s EQFM initiative to take on the issue of gender disparity in the music industry. It has a goal of 50% representation of women and gender minorities in music programming, events, and online features. Those efforts help the station continue to grow and reach new audiences, McLaughlin said. “Wherever there’s a platform that a WFUV listener is looking to listen to the station, or consume our content—wherever they are, we want to be.”

That spirit of innovation has run through the station since 1947, he said. “It’s really important that we maintain that heritage and the tradition that we have and take that with us as we move forward. I think you can do both—you can change and think about things differently from a content standpoint, from a technology standpoint, and still take into consideration the station’s history and legacy. I think that’s what the station has done all along.

“WFUV is celebrating 75 years—it’s never stopped changing. It’s never stopped moving. And that’s why it’s still as relevant as it is today.”

—Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15, is an associate editor of this magazine. As a Fordham undergraduate, she was a WFUV sports reporter, host, and producer from 2012 to 2015.

Correction: An earlier version of this story, including the version that appeared in the winter 2023 print edition of Fordham Magazine, mistakenly indicated that Chuck Singleton “initially developed WFUV’s coverage of community issues.” In fact, he expanded coverage that began more than a decade earlier. Thanks to John J. Robb, FCRH ’76, who served as WFUV’s founding public affairs director from 1974 to 1976, for helping us set the record straight. 

It was a voice he honed as an undergraduate at Fordham, where he majored in communications and was one of the original staff members of WFUV, Fordham’s public media station. During a major league career spanning 67 seasons—from 1950, when he joined the Dodgers, to 2016—he described some of the most memorable moments in baseball with poetic simplicity and exquisite timing.

He had an uncanny ability to frame the drama as it unfolded—and he was known for the wisdom, humor, and humility he conveyed to people, on and off the air.

Here are some of his most memorable calls and heartfelt words of gratitude and wisdom.

Don Larsen’s Perfect Game: ‘The greatest game ever pitched’

On October 8, 1956, the defending champion Brooklyn Dodgers faced their Bronx rivals, the New York Yankees, in the fifth game of the World Series.

Scully split the TV broadcasting duties that day with Yankees announcer Mel Allen, who kidded his colleague in the top of the second inning when a foul ball zipped by the broadcast booth. “Vin Scully played baseball at Fordham, but even so, he flinched just a little on that one,” Allen said. “Forgot to bring his glove with him today.”

Scully may not have had his glove in the booth, but he certainly had poise and a bit of poetry. He took over from Allen in the bottom of the fifth and guided fans to the game’s final, dramatic out, when Yankees pitcher Don Larsen completed a perfect game—retiring all 27 Dodgers he faced. It’s a feat no pitcher had done before and no pitcher has done since in the World Series.

As the final batter stepped to the plate, Scully conveyed the sense of nervous anticipation throughout the ballpark: “Yankee Stadium,” he said, “shivering in its concrete foundation now.” And when Larsen struck out Dale Mitchell to end the game, Scully said simply, “Got him! The greatest game ever pitched in baseball history, by Don Larsen. A no-hitter, a perfect game, in a World Series.”

Sandy Koufax’s Perfect Game: ‘29,000 people … and a million butterflies’

Nearly a decade later, on September 9, 1965, Scully was behind the mic for another perfect game, this one by the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax, who had already pitched three no-hitters in his illustrious career. The game was not televised, however, so Scully’s evocative call of the final half-inning helped listeners see and feel the drama.

“And you can almost taste the pressure now,” he said after the second strike against the inning’s leadoff hitter, Chris Krug. “Koufax lifted his cap, ran his fingers through his black hair, then pulled the cap back down, fussing at the bill. Krug must feel it too as he backs out, heaves a sigh, took off his helmet, put it back on, and steps back up to the plate.”

Moments later, Scully said, “And there are 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.” And in the middle of the inning, he made this poignant observation: “I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.” Listen to the entire ninth inning:

Hank Aaron’s 715th Home Run: ‘What a marvelous moment for the country and the world’

On April 8, 1974, the Dodgers traveled to Atlanta to play the Braves, whose veteran slugger, Hank Aaron, was one home run away from breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career home runs. In the fourth inning, Aaron stepped up to the plate with Scully behind the mic to describe a drama that would resonate far beyond the ballpark.

“It’s a high drive into deep left-center field. Buckner goes back to the fence. It is gone!” Scully said, then let the crowd take the mic for 26 jubilant seconds before remarking on Aaron’s historic achievement: “What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.”

1982 NFC Championship Game: ‘It’s a madhouse at Candlestick’

Scully was best known as a baseball broadcaster, but he also covered golf and football for CBS, and on January 10, 1982, he called one of the most memorable games in NFL history. In the final minute of the NFC championship game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the Dallas Cowboys led the hometown 49ers 27-21. With the ball on the Dallas six-yard line and a trip to the Super Bowl at stake, San Francisco quarterback Joe Montana took the snap and rolled right. “Montana looking, looking, throwing in the end zone,” Scully said. “Dwight caught it! Dwight Clark!” Scully let the crowd roar for nearly 30 seconds before returning to the mic: “It’s a madhouse at Candlestick, with 51 seconds left,” he said. “Dwight Clark is six, four; he stands about 10 feet tall in this crowd’s estimation.” Watch the clip and listen to Scully’s call. 

National Baseball Hall of Fame: ‘I want to sing, I want to dance’

On August 1, 1982, Scully received the highest honor a baseball broadcaster could receive—the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, to honor a broadcaster for “major contributions to baseball.”

He was 54 years old at the time and not quite at the halfway mark of his career, as it turned out. He still had 34 seasons ahead of him—and numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he received from President Barack Obama in 2016.

His acceptance speech in Cooperstown, with his wife, Sandi, and children looking on, is a prime example of his humility and gratitude. “Why, with the millions and millions of more deserving people, would a red-haired kid with a hole in his pants and his shirttail hangin’ out, playing stickball in the streets of New York, wind up in Cooperstown? Why me indeed?”

He didn’t have an answer, he said, but “I do know how I feel: I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to laugh, I want to shout, I want to cry. And I’d like to pray. I’d like to pray with humility and great thanksgiving.”

Game 6 of the 1986 World Series: ‘If one picture is worth a thousand words, you have seen about a million words’

On October 25, 1986, Scully was at Shea Stadium in Queens, where the New York Mets hosted the Boston Red Sox in Game 6 of the World Series. The Red Sox were up two runs and only one out away from ending the Mets season and breaking the so-called Curse of the Bambino—at that time, the Red Sox had not won a World Series since trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season.

With their season on the line, the Mets staged a gritty two-out comeback to tie the game in the bottom of the 10th inning. And then, after fouling off pitch after pitch, the Mets’ Mookie Wilson finally hit a seemingly routine ground ball toward first baseman Bill Buckner.

“Little roller up along first, behind the bag, it gets through Buckner!” Scully said, his voice rising. “Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it!” Once again, he let the crowd roar—this time for nearly two minutes, as viewers were shown the replay of Buckner’s error, a delirious New York crowd, the jubilant Mets, and the despondent Red Sox. “If one picture is worth a thousand words,” Scully said when he returned to the mic, “you have seen about a million.”

Kirk Gibson’s Walk-Off Home Run: ‘In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened’

On October 15, 1988, Scully was in the booth at Dodger Stadium to call the opening game of the World Series. The Oakland A’s led the Dodgers 4-3 with two outs in the ninth inning and their star reliever, Dennis Eckersley, on the mound. When injured Dodgers star Kirk Gibson emerged from the dugout to pinch hit with the tying run on first base, Scully set the stage masterfully.

“All year long, they looked to him to light the fire, and all year long, he answered the demands—until he was physically unable to start tonight, with two bad legs: the bad left hamstring and the swollen right knee. And with two out, you talk about a roll of the dice, this is it.”

Gibson gamely fouled off several pitches and worked the count to 3-2 before connecting on a backdoor slider. “High fly ball into right field, she is gone!” Scully said, as Gibson hobbled around the bases. Scully then let the crowd roar for 67 seconds before adding: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

Fordham Commencement: ‘It’s only me, and I am one of you’

On May 20, 2000, Scully received an honorary degree from Fordham and delivered the commencement address. “It’s only me, and I am one of you,” he told the Class of 2000. “I walked the halls you walked. I sat in the same classrooms. I took the same notes and sweated out the final exams; drank coffee in the caf and played sports on your grassy fields.”

“This world … will try very hard to clutter your lives and your minds,” he told them. “Leave some pauses and some gaps in your life so that you can do something spontaneously rather than just being led by the arm. And, above all, dream. Don’t ever stop dreaming. Dream for yourselves and dream for us, because out of your dreams will come hope that we will have a better world and a better moral climate.”

Final Innings: ‘Smile because it happened’

On October 2, 2016, Scully called his final game: a contest between the Dodgers and the Giants in San Francisco. He told a story about Giants announcer Russ Hodges’ famous call of the 1951 pennant-winning home run by Bobby Thomson. Willie Mays joined him in the booth at one point, and so did many members of his family, including 16 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his wife, Sandi. “What a way to celebrate your last game,” he said, “having your family here with you.”

In the final inning, Scully said that he’d had a line in his head all year, a common, anonymous expression often mistakenly attributed to Dr. Seuss, he said. “The line is, ‘Don’t be sad that it’s over. Smile because it happened.’ And that’s really the way I feel about this remarkable opportunity I was given, and I was allowed to keep for all these years. … I have said enough for a lifetime, and for the last time, I wish you all a very pleasant good afternoon.”

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.”

Fordham graduate Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, the lead voice for the NBA on ESPN and ABC, and the voice of the New York Knicks on MSG Networks, received the Vin Scully Award for Excellence in Sports Broadcasting. And Norah O’Donnell, anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, was honored with the Charles Osgood Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.

Fordham’s public media station, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this fall, also paid special tribute to two people: the late Vin Scully, FCRH ’49, longtime voice of the Dodgers, who helped define the station in its early years; and former news director George Bodarky, FCRH ’93, who helped shape the careers of hundreds of young journalists during his 20-plus years at the station.

In the ‘Same Breath as Vin Scully’

Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, voice of the New York Yankees for the YES Network, presented Breen with the Scully Award. He recalled sitting in the Rose Hill campus center cafeteria in the 1980s, eating french fries and talking with a fellow Fordham undergraduate about their post-college aspirations.

“There was a young man from Yonkers sitting there in a hideous reindeer sweater, and across from him was a young man from the Bronx, sitting there in a snorkel coat,” Kay said to laughter. “And we sat and talked about our dreams. And the kid in the reindeer sweater, who’s Mike Breen, said, ‘You know what, I really want to be the voice of the Knicks.’ And I sat there, and I said, ‘You know what, I really want to be the voice of the Yankees.’ … But since Mike is Tommy Topper, he didn’t just become the voice of the Knicks, he became the voice of the NBA.”

Kay saluted Breen for his remarkable career, which began at WFUV and includes calling 17 NBA Finals, the most of any broadcaster. He said Breen’s achievements and his character are why he “deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Vin Scully,” the award’s namesake, who always “carried himself with elegance and grace and class.”

“You could go to anybody, in any part of this industry—there is not one person, not one person that has anything bad to say about Mike Breen. So he and Vin Scully go together,” said Kay, a 2018 recipient of the Scully Award. “He’s that sort of guy. He just treats people the way he’d want his children to be treated. And that’s special in this industry.”

Breen, who became only the second Fordham graduate to receive the award, said it was a high honor because Scully was “the gold standard.”

“When you’re an aspiring broadcaster, you dream about a lot of things, but you never imagine receiving an award named after Vin Scully,” he said.

Breen said that as an undergraduate at WFUV, he did a little bit of everything at the station and learned the value of hard work. In addition to covering sports, he served as a late-night and overnight music disc jockey, which he said gave him “one of the most memorable nights of my entire life.” Breen was on the air Monday night, Dec. 8, 1980, when news broke that John Lennon had been shot and killed in Manhattan.

“I was told by one of the seniors, ‘Take phone calls, take requests, and just play Beatles music all night,’” Breen said. “And the phones rang off the hook, and they were talking about what John Lennon meant to them. One gentleman told me how he was about to commit suicide, but John Lennon’s song stopped him. Another told me he had a drinking problem, and John Lennon helped them through that. And it was the first time in my life I realized what music meant to people.”

Breen said the experience, and his background in news, made him a more versatile broadcaster, which helped him throughout his career. He also said that he wouldn’t be receiving the award without the support of so many people, including Kay, with whom he has had “43 years of the best friendship a man could have”; his MSG broadcasting partner, Knicks legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier, who attended the dinner; and his wife, Rosanne.

“When you’re an announcer as long as I’ve been, you’re fortunate to have so many great partners,” he said. “I always believed announcers should never publicly say who their favorite partner is, but I’m going to break that rule tonight. And Clyde, unfortunately, you’re number two. You see, the best part about tonight is I get to share it with my favorite partner: my wife, Rosanne.”

Breen said those relationships and others have helped him and his family get through a particularly hard time recently after his house was destroyed in a fire. The Vin Scully award is the latest for Breen, who also has been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a recipient of the Curt Gowdy Media Award.

‘A Fierce Journalist’

CBS News senior national correspondent Anthony Mason, who served as emcee for the evening, described his colleague Norah O’Donnell as a “fierce journalist” when presenting her with the Charles Osgood Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. The award is named in honor of the 1954 Fordham graduate and WFUV alumnus who for many decades was the host of CBS Sunday Morning.

“We, her colleagues who sit next to her, have come to recognize a certain look Norah gets in her eyes when a senator or some such official is dodging or ducking or weaving or whatever,” he said. “And this steely veneer comes across Norah’s face. That’s when the question comes out that hits right between the eyes.”

O’Donnell wasn’t able to attend the dinner, but she sent video remarks that were played at the event. “I am so humbled and honored to receive this year’s Charles Osgood Award,” she said, “and thank you to Fordham University, where my mom went, and WFUV for your commitment to journalism,” which she said is more than “just a calling.”

“At its best, it has the power to make real change in the world that we live in, to give voice to those who feel like they have been silenced,” she said. “It is a privilege to do what we do.”

Mason said he was honored to participate in the event.

“I am what they said in radio, a ‘first-time, longtime’—I’m a first-time host [of On the Record] and I’m a longtime FUV listener and fan,” he said. “I became a fan somewhere around 25 years ago, when I moved out to the suburbs so we could raise our kids, and literally my car and my 45-minute commute and WFUV were my sanctuary from my crazy job.”

Honoring the ‘Patron Saint of WFUV Sports’ and an Influential Mentor

This year’s On the Record also featured two special tributes to broadcasters who helped shape the station and carry on its legacy—Scully and George Bodarky.

Scully, who died in August at the age of 94, was remembered through a video tribute produced by the WFUV sports department.

“Vin Scully is our patron saint. We revere Vin Scully. The ground he walks on is just golden,” Kay said at the dinner. “And we miss him … but his memory lives on, and one of the great things about Vin Scully is that his talent, which is exceptional, probably is only surpassed by the person that he was.”

Veteran sportscaster Bob Costas, who received the Vin Scully Award in 2013, took part in a panel discussion at the dinner. He said that one of the best things about being honored by WFUV was finding out about it from Scully himself.

“Everyone who won, they found out from Vin Scully—no one at Fordham told the winner until Vin had called them, and you heard that unmistakable voice, and he concluded his very gracious and warm comments always, ‘So Bob, welcome to the club,’” Costas said. “And joining any club of which Vin Scully is the charter member is a very good thing.”

Bodarky, the community partnerships and training editor at WNYC, was honored for his more than 20 years of service to WFUV, during which time he helped shape the careers of hundreds of young journalists, including NPR White House correspondent Scott Detrow, FCRH ’07, who presented him with the award.

“The thing about George is that dozens, maybe hundreds of people could be giving these remarks right now, telling you how George changed their life, how George taught them about broadcasting, how George opened the door to what became their career and their vocation,” he said.

Detrow said one lesson from Bodarky that has always stuck with him is that it is a privilege to tell people’s stories.

“He was talking to a student reporter one day, and he said, ‘What kind of interviews do you want to do?’ And the … student said, ‘I want to interview important people, I want to interview famous people,’” Detrow said. “And George said, ‘Those are actually the most boring interviews to do. They don’t want to tell you that much. What you want to do is interview people who have compelling stories—bring their stories to life, tell people about them.’ And I never forgot that.”

Bodarky said the honor wasn’t just for him but for all the journalists who came through the station. He asked those who had worked with him during their time at WFUV to stand up and be recognized.

“You are my success,” he told them. “You are the reason that I’m standing here tonight.”

Bodarky credited his mentors, including WFUV station manager Chuck Singleton, for helping him get his start in journalism as a Fordham undergraduate after he thought he wanted to pursue a law degree.

“This honor is also shared with my mom,” he said, “a single mother who raised two boys on her own, who always taught me to fly high and believe in myself, who I think without knowing it, taught me the importance of working hard, caring for others, and picking yourself up and dusting yourself off when times get tough.”

Bodarky said he’s grateful for the role he’s been able to play in so many journalists’ careers.

“When someone tells me that I played a role in their journalistic achievements, that they hear me in their head, guiding them when they’re on the air, writing a script, or doing an interview—that makes me feel present when I’m not present and that gives me the feeling of success,” he said.

The Next Generation

WFUV also recognized two young journalists, both of whom graduated from Fordham last May. Abigail Delk, FCRH ’22, received the WFUV Award for Excellence in News Journalism, and Alexander Wolz, FCRH ’22, received the Bob Ahrens Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism.

Singleton said that Delk not only produced award-winning feature stories for Cityscape, the station’s weekly public affairs show, but also “effortlessly managed her peers as editor.” Wolz was recognized for helping to turn all of the station’s sports “shows into digital, streamed programming, most notably New York’s longest-running sports call-in show, One on One.”

Breen said that Wolz and Delk are examples of students who are not just carrying on but enhancing WFUV’s legacy.

“Every Fordham student who decides to join this amazing radio station feels a responsibility to uphold the standards that all the previous students and student broadcasters have set—I felt it, I know Michael felt it,” Breen said, referring to Kay. “And I’ll say this to you two, and your fellow current students and broadcasters who are here tonight, you’ve not only upheld the standards, you’ve raised them. And I say bravo.”

Singleton said that this year’s dinner raised more than $137,000, bringing the total raised since WFUV launched the On the Record program to more than $1.1 million. That funding supports the station’s student training program, which this year includes more than 130 students.

“Vin Scully’s death marks the end of an era,” said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham. “As members of the Fordham family, we grieve the loss of a wise and decent man who always spoke to our better natures—on the field and off. I know the University and WFUV communities join me in keeping Vin’s loved ones in our hearts and prayers today.”

Sometimes called the “Velvet Voice,” the iconic broadcaster was known for his elegant and evocative yet plainspoken approach to broadcasting. Listeners felt like they were joining a friend each broadcast as Scully welcomed them in with his usual greeting: “Hi everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be.”

“We have lost an icon,” Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten said in a statement. “The Dodgers’ Vin Scully was one of the greatest voices in all of sports. He was a giant of a man, not only as a broadcaster, but as a humanitarian. He loved people. He loved life. He loved baseball and the Dodgers. And he loved his family. His voice will always be heard and etched in all of our minds forever.”

Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, voice of the Yankees for YES Network, wrote in a statement that we “lost the greatest broadcaster who ever lived.”

“Every game was a master’s class as he turned an inning into poetry. And as great as he was, he was just as nice. Class, elegance and grace were all part of his humble but regal being,” Kay wrote. “His loss is heartbreaking as his golden voice is silenced, but he will live forever as an example of what to try and be on and off mic. RIP Mr. Scully and rest easy knowing how much you made a difference to all who met you and had the joy of listening to you.”

In a career spanning seven decades, Scully voiced some of the most historic calls in the game, including Don Larsen’s and Sandy Koufax’s perfect games in 1956 and 1965, respectively; Hank Aaron’s 715th career home run to break the record set by Babe Ruth; and Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series.

He received numerous awards throughout his career including an induction into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016.

“The game of baseball has a handful of signature sounds,” President Obama said at the White House ceremony in 2016. “You hear the crack of the bat, you got the crowd singing in the seventh-inning stretch, and you’ve got the voice of Vin Scully.”

Scully’s career began at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. He graduated in 1949 and is known as the “patron saint” of WFUV Sports, getting his start at the radio station as a student at Fordham College at Rose Hill. His work has inspired generations of students to become sports broadcasters.

He received an honorary doctorate from Fordham in 2000 after giving the commencement address and a lifetime achievement award from WFUV that is now named in his honor. Scully was inducted into the University’s Hall of Honor in 2011.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president emeritus of Fordham, called Scully one of Fordham’s “greatest heroes” as he awarded Scully with the Ram of the Year award in 2014.

“From the heart, I want you to know you are for Fordham an example of a man for others, a man whose life has been a life of integrity, of service, of great devotion to the University,” Father McShane said at the ceremony. “You could not be a better ambassador for us. Everyone at Fordham loves you as much as we revere you.”

Bob Ahrens, who worked as the WFUV Sports director for 20 years before his retirement in 2017, worked with Scully for years through the station.

“He loved Fordham, he loved FUV,” Ahrens said. “He was a Fordham guy through and through. He had a love for the school. He always wanted to know how the teams were doing.”

The Early Years

Scully was born in the Bronx after his parents immigrated from Ireland. He grew up in Washington Heights before he attended Fordham Preparatory School. He graduated in 1944 and served briefly in the Navy before returning to Rose Hill to study communications.

At Fordham, Scully had a sports column in The Fordham Ram student newspaper, worked as a stringer for The New York Times, and sang in the Shaving Mugs, a campus barbershop quartet. He also briefly played outfield for the Fordham baseball team.

When he gave the commencement address at Fordham in 2000, Scully told the graduates that the words he associated with Fordham were “home, love, and hope.”

“Home, because I spent eight years here on this campus, and it really was my second home. Love, because I loved every minute of it, and some of my closest and dearest friends in all the world were my classmates and teammates. And hope, hope came from a five-letter word called a dream,” he told the students.

Scully told the graduates that “I am one of you.”

“I walked the halls you walked. I sat in the same classrooms,” he told the graduates. “I took the same notes and sweated out the final exams; drank coffee in the café and played sports on your grassy fields.”

But Scully’s favorite place to be was behind the microphone. He called Fordham baseball, basketball, and football games for WFUV, 90.7 FM, which launched in 1947. In a 2020 documentary for WFUV Sports, Scully joked that he would call games to himself while playing in the outfield.

“I used to be so thrilled by the roar of the crowd that first, I loved the roar. Then I wanted to be there, and eventually I thought I would love to be the announcer doing the game,” he said in the documentary.

When Scully received the Ram of the Year award in 2014, he recalled sitting in the Fordham Prep auditorium next to his classmate Larry Miggins.

“We were talking about what we hoped to do when we finished school,” Scully said after accepting the award. “Larry said, ‘I’d love to be a major league ballplayer,’ and I said, ‘I’d love to be a major league broadcaster.’ And we both kind of chuckled.”

Scully recalled how a few years later, on May 13, 1952, he was behind the mic in the broadcast booth at Ebbets Field when Miggins came to bat for the Cardinals.

“It was so hard to speak. The Dodgers had a left-handed pitcher named Preacher Roe from Ash Flat, Arkansas. Preacher Roe was going to face my buddy Larry Miggins, and I’m going to describe whatever happens,” Scully said. “And Larry Miggins hit a home run.”

The Voice of the Dodgers

After graduating from Fordham, Scully spent the summer working at a CBS radio affiliate in Washington, D.C., before he returned to New York to speak with the network about working there. Just a few days later, he received a call from Red Barber, the legendary CBS sports director and broadcaster, asking him to cover a college football game that Saturday.

In less than a year, Scully joined Barber on what were then the Brooklyn Dodgers’ broadcasts. When Barber left to work for the Yankees following the 1953 season, Scully became the Dodgers’ primary announcer, a position he held until he retired in 2016.

During his long career, Scully recorded some of the most memorable calls in baseball history. He had been in the Dodgers job for less than five years when Don Larsen took the mound in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series and pitched a perfect game, the only one in a World Series.

“Got him! The greatest game ever pitched in baseball history by Don Larsen, a no-hitter, a perfect game in a World Series. Never in the history of the game has it ever happened in a World Series,” Scully said on the broadcast.

Less than 10 years later, Scully would be behind the mic for another perfect game, this time with Sandy Koufax on the mound. Scully’s call of the last inning featured his descriptive, evocative style.

“And there are 29,000 people in the ballpark, and a million butterflies,” he said, after the first batter.

As Koufax was one out away from a perfect game, Scully said, “I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.”

In 1974, the Dodgers traveled to Atlanta and faced Hank Aaron, who was one home run away from breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career home runs. In the fourth inning, Aaron stepped up to the plate and made history, with Scully behind the mic.

“It’s a high drive into deep left center field, Buckner goes back to the fence, it is gone!” Scully called before letting the crowd take the mic for almost 30 seconds of celebration.

He then remarked on the historic achievement: “What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol and it is a great moment for all of us.”

Bill Buckner, who almost caught that home run, would be at the heart of another famous—or infamous—Scully call.

Now playing first base for the Red Sox, Buckner and his team were attempting to break the famous “Curse of the Bambino,” having not won a World Series since trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season. In 1986, the Red Sox faced the New York Mets in the World Series, and in Game 6, the Mets’ Mookie Wilson hit what looked to be a simple ground ball down the first base line.

“Little roller up along first, behind the bag, it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight, and the Mets win it,” he said. “If one picture is worth a thousand words, you have seen about a million.”

And in 1988, with the Dodgers in the World Series, outfielder Kirk Gibson had hurt both of his legs in the prior series and wasn’t sure if he was going to play. But with two outs in the ninth, a man on base, and the Dodgers down a run, Gibson was called on to pinch hit. He limped up to the plate, and then a miracle happened, which Scully captured poetically.

“High fly ball into right field, she is gone!” Scully said. “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

A Lasting Influence

Scully’s iconic style has made him an inspiration for many generations of sports broadcasters who followed in his footsteps at WFUV and at Fordham.

“His vocabulary, his storytelling, his personality—everything. He just was perfect,” ESPN NBA announcer Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, said in the 2020 WFUV Sports documentary. “It made you … [want]to make sure you were always prepared anytime you went on the air. You might have had two exams that day or [been]having trouble at home that day—it didn’t matter. You had to have a certain standard for WFUV that began with Vin Scully.”

Ahrens said that Scully always made time for the students and the station. The students usually interviewed him about once a year for the weekly One on One call-in show, and Ahrens said he hosted at least two workshops with the students over the phone.

“Vin’s on the phone, they can’t see him in person, and the control room is packed,” he said. “He was always generous with his time when he had it. And he didn’t have to, but he loved FUV, he loved Fordham, and he was always willing to help out.”

Ahrens remembered shortly after he took the job in 1997 he reached out to the Dodgers to try to set up a time for students to interview Scully. The Dodgers’ media team took his number and said they would try to see what they could do.

“I was in the newsroom, and we had a PA system and the [front desk manager]hops on the PA system and says, ‘Bob Ahrens, Vin Scully on the phone,’” he said, with a laugh. “You can imagine the whole newsroom turned silent.”

WFUV Sports named its lifetime achievement award after him—the Vin Scully Lifetime Achievement Award in Sports Broadcasting—which Kay took home in 2018.

“To be given an award with Vin Scully’s name on it is beyond anything I could have ever imagined,” Kay said at the awards ceremony. “He is the patron saint of WFUV Sports, he is the patron saint of anybody who does baseball play-by-play. He is the best at what he’s done.”

Ryan Ruocco, FCRH ’08, who calls Yankees games on YES and basketball games on ESPN, wrote that “Vin was truly one of one.”

“It’s impossible to put into words the impact Vin Scully has had on broadcasting, our Fordham/WFUV family, and the sport of baseball,” Ruocco wrote. “His storytelling and excellence behind the mic was matched only by his grace, generosity, and kindness.”

Scully impacted even those who didn’t step behind the microphone. Pitcher Nick Martinez, who attended the Gabelli School of Business for three years before he was drafted in the 2011 MLB draft, had the chance to meet Scully in 2015.

Martinez said he was “awestruck at first.”

“And then once we got talking, I thought it was extremely cool just being able to talk about our campus and our school, and some of the other guys that came before me. He was sharp, naming some of the guys that were on the [Fordham] team currently, and how we just had a couple guys drafted. I just thought it was extremely cool that we had that connection,” he recalled.

Mike Watts, GABELLI ’14, who calls games for ESPN, Westwood One, and other networks, said that Scully and his legacy at WFUV inspired him to come to Fordham.

“There is no WFUV Sports without Vin Scully,” Watts said. “His name gave all of us credibility. To have the greatest at anything come from your school, your radio station, your program—it’s the light that all of us were following.”

“General, you will be remembered as one of the finest and most dedicated soldiers in a long and storied history of the United States military, no question about it,” the president said after describing Keane’s distinguished 38-year Army career stretching from his time as a cadet in the Fordham ROTC program to the Vietnam War to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Among other achievements, Trump said, Keane “designed new training methods to ensure that military leaders would always be extremely well prepared for the intensity of combat command,” and also designed “state-of-the-art” counterinsurgency combat training for both urban and rugged environments.

In his own remarks, Keane said he was “deeply honored by this extraordinary award.”

“To receive it here in the White House, surrounded by family, by friends, and by senior government officials, is really quite overwhelming, and you can hear it in my voice,” he said. “I thank God for guiding me in the journey of life,” he said, also mentioning his “two great loves”—his wife Theresa, or Terry, who died in 2016, and the political commentator and author Angela McGlowan, “who I will love for the remainder of my life.”

“With all honesty, I wouldn’t be standing here without their love and their devotion,” he said.

Fordham Ties

Keane is the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The most recent alumni recipient was sportscaster Vin Sully, FCRH ’49, awarded the medal by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Keane has advised President Trump and has often provided expert testimony to Congress since retiring as vice chief of staff of the Army in 2003. He is a Fordham trustee fellow and a 2004 recipient of the Fordham Founder’s Award.

Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and was the first member of his family to attend college. He had 16 years of Catholic education, including his time at Fordham, where there was a prevailing idea that “you should have a sense of giving things back, and finding ways to do that,” he said in an interview last week on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show.

Six other Fordham alumni, including some who were his contemporaries at Fordham, attended the ceremony. One of them, Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74, said he’s impressed with how Keane, on television, “can say so much in such a short time that makes sense.”

“He attributes a lot of it to the philosophy courses he took at Fordham,” said Jordan, an author and speaker specializing in financial services who met Keane about 15 years ago, when he was a senior executive at MetLife and Keane was on the board. “He’s a guy who’s extremely successful, extremely humble, has a common touch, and always remembers his friends and attributes a lot of his success not to himself but to the people around him, and the people who helped form him.”

Also in attendance was retired General Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, who has appeared at Fordham events, including the International Conference on Cyber Security.

Turning Points

Keane earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1966. He became a career paratrooper, going to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division, which he later commanded.

He was decorated for valor in Vietnam, which was a turning point for him, with its close combat in which “death was always a silent companion,” he said.

“It was there I truly learned the value of life, the value of human life—to treasure it, to protect it,” he said in his White House remarks. “The experience crystallized for me the critical importance of our soldiers to be properly prepared with necessary skill and the appropriate amount of will to succeed in combat.”

He said he spent his Army career “among heroes who inspired me, and I’m still in awe of them today.”

“My sergeants, my fellow officers, and my mentors shaped me significantly, and several times they saved me from myself,” he said. “That’s the truth of it.”

The 9/11 attacks were a second major turning point for him, he said. He was in the Pentagon when it was attacked, and helped evacuate the injured. He lost 85 Army teammates, he said, and two days later was dispatched to New York City to take part in the response to the World Trade Center attacks.

“It was personal, and I was angry,” he said. “I could not have imagined that I would stay so involved in national security and foreign policy” after leaving the Army, he said. “My motivation is pretty simple: Do whatever I can, even in a small way, to keep America and the American people safe.”

Watch the ceremony honoring General Keane

Several Fordham alumni attended a reception honoring General Keane on March 10. From left: Scott Hartshorn, GABELLI ’98; Phil Crotty, FCRH ’64; the Rev. Charles Gallagher, FCRH ’06; Paul Decker, GABELLI ’65; Laurie Crotty, GSE ’77; General Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66; and Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74. On the right is Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and university relations at Fordham.

Each of these announcers shares a common heritage. They all got their start at WFUV, Fordham University’s public media station, which has been launching the careers of sports broadcasters for more than seven decades. Now, some of the history of the station has been preserved in a documentary titled Off the Air: The Legacy of WFUV Sports.

Evan Jaenichen, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior and the video coordinator at WFUV Sports, came up with the idea for the documentary and pursued it as the capstone project for his new media and digital design major.

“I had started at WFUV last year and loved it so much,” said Jaenichen, who brought the idea to Bobby Ciafardini, the station’s sports director, and to Bob Ahrens, who retired in 2017 after two decades as sports director.

Ahrens helped put Jaenichen in touch with some of the most recognized voices to come out of the station, including Scully, FCRH ’49; Breen, FCRH ’83; Tony Reali, FCRH ’00, the host of ESPN’s Around the Horn; Bob Papa, GABELLI ’86, the radio voice of the New York Giants; and Chris Carrino, GABELLI ’92, radio voice of the Brooklyn Nets.

Vin Scully, the Dean of Fordham-Trained Sportscasters

The story of the station’s sports legacy begins with Scully, who said he used to call Fordham baseball games to himself while he was playing in the outfield at Rose Hill. He later called Fordham sports games on the air for WFUV, which was founded in 1947, his sophomore year. Scully says in the video that he was always enamored with the game.

“I used to be so thrilled by the roar of the crowd that first, I loved the roar. Then I wanted to be there, and eventually I thought I would love to be the announcer doing the game,” he says.

Scully retired in October 2016 after 67 seasons as the voice of the Dodgers. He was inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, and has received many other accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has inspired generations of broadcasters who have stepped up to the mic at WFUV.

“His vocabulary, his storytelling, his personality—everything. He just was perfect,” says Mike Breen, who recently became the third Fordham graduate to win a Curt Gowdy Media Award from the basketball Hall of Fame. “It made you … [want]to make sure you were always prepared anytime you went on the air. You might have had two exams that day or [been]having trouble at home that day—it didn’t matter. You had to have a certain standard for WFUV that began with Vin Scully.”

New York’s Longest Running Sports Call-In Show

In the years after Scully’s graduation, the sports department continued to grow, particularly during the 1970s, when Malcolm Moran, FCRH ’75, introduced One on One, which has become known as New York’s longest running sports call-in show.

“It was so much fun because I think for a lot of sports fans around the tri-state area, they had no way to express themselves like this,” Breen says in the video.

In the late 1980s, broadcaster Marty Glickman, who was best known for calling New York Knicks, New York Giants, and New York Jets games on the radio, became an adviser to the students at the station.

“I knew of Marty Glickman—at the time he was the Jets play-by-play announcer—[but]I didn’t know how impactful he would be on my life at the time,” Carrino says. “Marty’s voice is in my head every broadcast that I do. His mantra was ‘consider the listener.’”

Making It to the Major Leagues

After Glickman, Ahrens took over in the late 1990s as WFUV’s first full-time executive sports director.

“We were so fiercely and proudly student-run that we weren’t sure exactly what to make of a professional executive producer,” Reali says in the video, joking that when Ahrens told him he could cover Yankees’ games, that was all it took to convince him of the benefits of learning in a professional environment.

“I thought if we’re going to do this the right way, we should go to the major league games and train the students how to be broadcasters and how to do interviews,” Ahrens says. “I called the Mets and the Yankees. The Mets offered us one game, no clubhouse access … and [in]what was probably stupid at the time but became a very bold move, I turned it down.”

He followed up with a call to the Yankees and, after a discussion with the team’s media relations director, WFUV was granted a credential.

“We went from there to the Giants and the Jets. The following year, we went to basketball and hockey on an as-available basis and then a year later we had everything,” Ahrens says.

Current students say working at WFUV provides invaluable experiences—such as covering the Super Bowl, interviewing legendary players and broadcasters, and hosting live shows—not available to students at traditional college radio stations.

“It’s a real broadcast that’s actually going on at 90.7 FM to the entire tri-state area, so that’s one of the biggest audiences that any radio station can reach,” said Brianna Leverty, a Fordham senior.

Jaenichen said WFUV has helped him develop his love for storytelling. While he’s not sure exactly what professional path he wants to pursue after graduation, Ciafardini, his current sports director, thinks projects like this could be in his future.

“I think Evan is amazingly talented and the work that he has put out is a prime example of what he’s capable of doing,” Ciafardini said.

Jaenichen said it’s inspiring to know that the broadcasters he interviewed for the documentary were once in his shoes.

“It was a huge thrill to talk to people I’ve looked up to my whole life,” he said. “You realize that they’re just like you and they came exactly from where you are.”

Watch Off the Air: The Legacy of WFUV Sports