Digger Phelps Stands as the Link Between Fordham, Notre Dame

For the vast majority of the current players, it hasn’t been much of a rivalry. To the coach of the Notre Dame basketball team, the Fordham athletic director and a few old Rams, however, the annual meeting still holds great significance. Memories can do that.

There are moments when Frank McLaughlin speaks about Notre Dame and uses the pronoun “we.” And he’s a Fordham graduate as well as the man in charge of the entire athletic department on Rose Hill. George Zambetti stopped by Notre Dame’s hotel headquarters Wednesday morning to see his old coach, and Zambetti is the Fordham team physician. The two programs were joined briefly almost two decades ago and they still remain bound in an almost mystical way.

Richard Phelps, “Digger” to college basketball observers from the moment he burst onto the national scene at Fordham during the 1970-71 season, is the common denominator. In his first year as a head coach, he brought in an assistant named McLaughlin and took an underachieving group of Rams on the ride of their lives. Top 10 billing. Sellout crowds at Madison Square Garden. The NCAA Tournament.

And then Phelps was gone, off to Notre Dame and the job of his dreams. Fordham hasn’t revisited the Top 10. The Rams no longer fill the blue seats at the Garden. And the NCAA hasn’t issued another postseason invitation to the university in the Bronx. Digger took the future with him.

Yet, there they were recently, meeting for the 21st time in 21 years. As usual, Notre Dame was bucking for national recognition; Fordham was struggling to surpass the .500 mark. From his courtside seat, McLaughlin looked beyond the records. “I get a real positive feeling,” he said. “I think it’s an honor to compete against Notre Dame.”

McLaughlin knows a lot about Notre Dame. Captain of the 1969 Fordham team, he followed Phelps to South Bend, where he spent six years before becoming head coach at Harvard. “It was a tremendous experience for me,” he said. “I was a New York guy. It gave me a national outlook. I even met my wife in South Bend.”

He came home to New York three years ago to oversee the transformation of the Fordham athletic department. The Rams will be moving into the Colonial League, a conference of prestigious institutions, in 1990, but they hope to retain the series with Notre Dame. And it fits in well with Notre Dame’s national schedule and its ability to recruit all over the country.

“I think Digger deserves credit for continuing the series,” McLaughlin said. “He remembers his roots.”

Indeed, there are those who won’t let him forget it. Zambetti is one. He was a reserve on that ‘70-71 Fordham team that won 26 of 29 games, stunned Notre Dame before a full house at the Garden and went to the Final 16 of the NCAA Tournament before losing to a Villanova team that suffered a narrow defeat to UCLA in the championship game.

“It was a Cinderella, once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Zambetti said. “He (Phelps) still has fond memories of that team. He keeps saying he wants to have a reunion.”

There was a reunion of sorts at the Garden Wednesday night. There always is when Phelps comes to town. McLaughlin stood with him in the tunnel leading to the locker rooms during halftime of the first game between Georgia Tech and Iona. Familiar faces came by to say hello. A lot of people remember that Fordham team as special, a small, quick pressing team that caught everyone by surprise and took New York by storm.

Zambetti recalled students camping outside Rose Hill Gymnasium, the overflow squatting two-deep on the maroon border of the court and the first 10 minutes of the Holy Cross game. “They had a good team,” he said. “I think they were even ranked. After 10 minutes we had a 32-8 lead. I remember it so distinctly. Those 10 minutes were the epitome of what we accomplished as a team.”

Fordham won that game, 102-78, to run its record to 12-0. The Rams had won 10 games the previous season. Zambetti said there was no resentment among the returning players when Phelps left for Notre Dame. “We understood,” he said. “Maybe some of the alumni who thought it was life and death didn’t appreciate it. But I was just thankful I was in the right place at the right time, and that he came into our lives then.”

The Rams had their fun with him the following year. Phelps inherited a Notre Dame team that lost Austin Carr, Sid Catlett and Collis Jones. “We had to use some football players,” McLaughlin said. Notre Dame’s 6-20 record included an 89-72 loss to Fordham in South Bend.

“We were still out to show them,” Zambetti said. “They had nobody that year.” The doctor acquired a grainy film of that game, had it transferred to videotape and presented it to Phelps yesterday. “They cleaned our clocks, the same guys we had coached,” noted McLaughlin, deftly switching allegiances.

Fordham won again the following year at the Garden, by a single point. Since then, the series has been one-sided in favor of the Irish. Notre Dame’s 77-58 victory Wednesday night was its 14th in the last 16 meetings.

Who knows when or even if a Fordham basketball team again will beat a Notre Dame club? Still, McLaughlin said, the series is beneficial to both. “We have the same academic philosophy,” the Fordham AD said. “It’s just that they’re better known on a national level.”

And the Irish do have a celebrity for a coach, the very Digger Phelps who got his start at Fordham.