The Varsity 8+ claimed gold, finishing its final race in a time of 7:08.1, more than four seconds ahead of Fairfield in second and 18 seconds clear of Iona in third.  It marked the fourth straight season that the Fordham Varsity 8+ shell won its race at this event.

Read the full story on fordhamsports.com

Today, they’re helping Fordham build its own.

When they learned about the waterfront center that Fordham is planning, “it was something that we felt really strongly that we’d like to be able to help create,” Laura Ekholm said.

They’re doing just that with a major gift toward the project, for reasons that have a lot to do with their children’s experience at Fordham.

Support for Sailing and Other Aquatic Sports

The waterfront center will be built on Eastchester Bay in the Bronx, four miles east of the Rose Hill campus, to serve the varsity women’s rowing team as well as men’s crew, co-ed sailing, and women’s sailing. The first phase, construction of docks, is expected to be completed in time for the fall 2024 season.

Fordham donors and supporters have been moving the project along for years, led by Fordham Trustee Fellow Dennis Ruppel, FCRH ’68, and his wife, Patricia Ann Ruppel, who are making another major gift to the project this year. In October, Fordham Trustee Kim Bepler hosted and underwrote a fundraising dinner for the project at the New York Yacht Club in Manhattan.

The event raised $1.3 million for the project—with $1 million of that coming from the Ekholms.

‘Something of Great Value’

The Ekholms raised their family on Minnesota’s Lake Minnetonka, and their children grew up sailing on it, so when two of them—Anders, FCRH ’17, and Annika, FCRH ’20—went to Fordham, it was no surprise that they signed up for sailing.

They were impressed at the strength of the classroom education their children received, as well as the tight-knit sense of community in the sailing program and its rigors that hone time management and other life skills.

Today, Anders Ekholm is a team lead with TransPerfect, a translation and language services company in New York, and Annika Ekholm is involved with the sailing program full time. In addition to volunteering as a coach, she works for the Fordham Sailing Association, helping to set up a community sailing program in conjunction with the Villa Maria Academy, a Catholic elementary school next door to the waterfront center’s site.

She’s excited to see how the center could support other programs for area youth as well. “Sailing has given me and so many other people in the Fordham sailing sphere so much,” she said, “and anything that we can do to spread that, to give that to the community, will be a great, great thing for all involved.”

Being involved with the sailing program has been “a ton of fun,” Laura Ekholm said. “It’s just a fabulous community.”

She and Paul are investing in the waterfront center not only because of its immediate benefits but also to advance the University generally. “Giving money away is something to do when you find something of great value,” Paul Ekholm said. “For me and Laura, the great value of Fordham was the education they got, and we feel like we should support Fordham beyond sending our kids there.”

Gifts in support of the Fordham waterfront center advance the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about the campaign and make a gift.

Bringing Bronze Back to Ireland

Fiona Murtagh, FCRH ’16, won a bronze medal as part of Ireland’s women’s coxless four rowing team on July 27. Murtagh, an Irish native, rowed for Fordham as an undergraduate after transferring from the National University of Ireland in Galway. As a Ram, she led women’s rowing to two victories at the Head of Charles regatta and was named to the All-Atlantic 10 first team in 2016.

In early August, Murtagh arrived back to her hometown of Moycullen, in County Galway, with fans cheering her on amid celebratory bonfires. After spending a month before the Olympics in a training bubble, Murtagh told The Irish Times, “We deserve a break to spend time with family and friends. It’s been so long since we have seen anyone.”

Forget Tokyo, the real Olympic village is Moycullen this evening! A homecoming to welcome back rowing medallist Fiona Murtagh – not every day an Olympic medal comes through the parish. #Olympics #Tokyo2020 pic.twitter.com/s3wjKOY6pN

— Dr. Barry Houlihan (@stagedreaction) August 1, 2021

A ‘Gutsy’ Performance from a U.S. Pitcher

Soon after Murtagh received a hero’s welcome in Ireland, former Rams pitcher Nick Martinez took the mound as the U.S. baseball team’s starting pitcher in the gold medal game against Japan on August 7. He earned the starting nod after striking out nine and picking up a win against South Korea in the group stage. Although the U.S. fell to Japan, 2-0, to claim the silver medal, Martinez made a strong showing, striking out seven batters over six innings while allowing one run. In the publication’s game recap, USA Today called Martinez’s performance “gutsy” and stated that he “[kept]the U.S. in the ball game.”

Martinez, who was drafted by the Texas Rangers in 2011, after his junior year at the Gabelli School of Business, made his Major League Baseball debut for the Rangers in 2014 and started 68 games for the team over four seasons—including several games at Yankee Stadium. He has been pitching professionally in Japan since 2018, first for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters and currently for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.

Rowing for Gold and Silver in St. Louis

Martinez and Murtagh are not the first Rams to take their places on the Olympic podium. In 1904, at the summer games in St. Louis, 1894 Fordham graduate John J. F. “Jack” Mulcahy and his partner, William Varley, won gold and silver for the U.S. in two rowing events: the double sculls and pair without coxswain, respectively. Mulcahy had developed an interest in rowing at an early age, at a time when the Harlem River played host to popular regattas.

After the Olympics, Mulcahy worked briefly as a New York City alderman and as vice president of Midvale Steel Company. He returned to Fordham in 1915 to help the University launch its rowing program and served as the team’s inaugural coach. Vincent M. Doherty, a 1918 graduate and a member of the 1915 freshman crew, recalled that Mulcahy “was a stern master,” but that “he had the affection and respect of every man on the squad.”

A Steeplechase Medal as a Student

At 1932’s Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Joe McCluskey, then a Fordham junior, won bronze in the steeplechase—a seven-and-a-half-lap race that includes both standard hurdles and water jumps. In his 2002 obituary, The New York Times noted that had officials not made a mistake in lap counts, McCluskey would have won silver.

In the 1933 edition of the Fordham Maroon yearbook, McCluskey’s entry read, “Any introduction to this son of Fordham would be superfluous for he is known to every man on the campus because of his athletic conquests,” and his classmates recognized him as the student who had “Done Most for Fordham.” Throughout his career, McCluskey won 27 U.S. track and field titles.

“I don’t think I had as much ability as some others,” he once said, “but I put more into it. When you can’t stand at the end of a race, you know you’ve given everything. I ran a lot of races when I couldn’t stand at the end.”

Double Gold and an Olympic Record

Also willing to push himself to exhaustion was Tom Courtney, FCRH ’55, who won the gold medal for the United States in the men’s 800-meter race at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.

“It was a new kind of agony for me,” Courtney recalled of the race, in which he set an Olympic record time of 1:47.7. “I had never run myself into such a state. My head was exploding, my stomach ripping, and even the tips of my fingers ached.”

Five days after that race, he earned another gold medal, as the anchor of the U.S.’s four-man, 1,600-meter relay team.

“When I got back to the States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show,” Courtney wrote in his memoir, The Inside Track (Page Publishing, 2018). “There was a big party at Leone’s Restaurant, and a wonderful parade down Fordham Road. I was in a convertible with my coach, Artie O’Conner. He was very motivational for me. … He loved Fordham and it helped me to love Fordham.”

After the Olympics, Courtney went on to earn an M.B.A. from Harvard and had a long career in business. He retired in 2011 as chairman of the board of Oppenheimer Funds.

Mulcahy, McCluskey, and Courtney are all members of the Fordham University Athletics Hall of Fame.

It’s 8 a.m. on a frigid Saturday morning in early March, and most of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus is just sputtering to life. But at the Lombardi Memorial Center, members of the Fordham rowing team, some 45 men and women, are already seated at rowing machines and well into morning interval training.

The day’s workout is 90 minutes of distance and sprint conditioning, offset by short recoveries, all of it meant to simulate rowing’s home-stretch intensity of “legs burning and lungs bursting,” says Ted Bonanno, head coach of the women’s varsity and men’s club teams.

“We have an expression,” says Fordham senior Patrick Cahill, co-captain of the men’s team. “You earn your medals in the winter and pick them up in the spring. … Without the gym work, there would be no success.”

That philosophy takes on particular relevance this year, as Fordham rowing celebrates its centennial. It all started with John J. F. “Jack” Mulcahy, an 1894 Fordham graduate and one of the pioneers of American rowing. The New York native went on to become Fordham’s first Olympic champion. At the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, Mulcahy and Michael Varley won the gold medal in double sculls and the silver medal in coxless pairs.

With his rugged good looks and chiseled features—“a man you wouldn’t want to tangle with,” jokes former Fordham rower James Sciales, FCRH ’87—Mulcahy even modeled for some of the sculptures that adorned the Olympic venues.

In addition to founding and coaching the Fordham team in 1915, Mulcahy served for several years as president of the Atalanta Boat Club and was a New York City alderman. He’s revered among Fordham rowers past and present, who share his passion for rowing’s relentless focus on the team.

“This isn’t a sport where you stand out and star,” says Bonanno, who rowed on the U.S. national team in the 1970s, coached at three Olympics, and is in his 26th year at Fordham. “No matter how much you do, you’re only as good as your whole boat.”

Fordham senior Nicole Arrato, captain of the women’s team, prefers it that way, saying one of rowing’s greatest challenges is being on the water and having to pull with the same momentum as your seven teammates. “You have to learn teamwork and communication,” she says. “And you need the mental and physical drive to reach your best.”

Fordham’s tight-knit group of alumni rowers couldn’t agree more. “The kind of commitment you learn in rowing builds character,” Sciales says.

That today’s team continues to row on the Harlem River, the same waters used by Mulcahy, is not lost on past or current rowers. After all, it was the success and celebrity of Fordham’s first Olympic champion that helped establish New York City as a center of American rowing.

“Here was an Irishman who worked his way up in what was then considered a gentleman’s sport and became the best in the world,” says John Fischer Jr., FCRH ’72, a former men’s team co-captain. “And to think he was a Fordham man. Not many schools can point to that kind of a heritage.”

—Jim Reisler

On November 14, the Fordham Rowing Association will celebrate the program’s resilient legacy with a gala dinner at the Water Club in Manhattan. Learn more and register.

V. John Kriss, FCRH ’62, believes there is something special about crew and the kind of complete education—mind, body, and spirit—it can provide.

“It is a sport unlike most others,” said Kriss, a former member of the Fordham University Board of Trustees and an enthusiastic supporter of the men’s club team and women’s varsity crew at Fordham. “You’re one of eight people in a boat doing exactly the same thing at the same time—dipping the oar in, feeling the pain in your legs, getting out of breath. The agony strikes each of you in the middle of the race, but you’re thinking the same way: If you let up a little bit, somebody else has to pull up the slack.

“By the time you graduate,” he added, “you’ll understand what it means to work as a team.”

Kriss, who retired in 1998 as a senior vice president of American Funds Distributors, said he was “totally green” in 1958 when he tried out for the crew team during his freshman year. “Crew was a way for me to participate at Fordham,” he said.

Although Kriss was new to the sport, his upbringing—as the fifth child and only son of parents who were children of immigrants—left him predisposed to learn crew’s lessons in teamwork and selfless devotion to a common cause.

“My parents didn’t go to high school,” Kriss said, “but they would say to me and my sisters, ‘When you graduate from college’—not if you go to college—‘your life will be different from ours. You’ll advance; you’ll improve; you’ll do better than we did.’”

Kriss’ parents also instilled in him an appreciation for hard work. When he was 9 or 10 years old, he began assisting his father, who was a plumber.

“I started out carrying his pipe from job to job, threading pipe and sweating joints and digging ditches and cleaning sewers,” said the Larchmont, New York, native. “We had no money, and we were aware of it, but it didn’t matter. The family pulled together.”

After graduating from Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, Kriss enrolled at Fordham. He graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1962 with a degree in economics. After serving in the U.S. Army for several years, he took a job in New York City with Con Edison in the company’s computer department. “I loved the programming but hated sitting around trying to debug programs,” he said. “At this point, I was 25 years old, dead broke, and still owed for college. I thought, if I ever make a nickel, I better find out what I’m going to do with it.”

So Kriss started calling brokerage firms. He took a 50 percent cut in pay, he said, to enter E.F. Hutton’s training program and went about building a business by “cold-calling the Manhattan telephone book for two years.”

“I learned to be very humble,” he said. He stayed with E.F. Hutton for eight years before joining American Funds and moving to California, where he has lived ever since.

Over the next couple of decades, as he built a successful career at American Funds, the value of his Jesuit education became clearer to him. “It was a way of living, a way of thinking,” he said.

Kriss decided to help provide the same kind of educational opportunities he received to current and future Fordham students.

“I started out giving $100 because I got a flyer in the mail,” he said. “Then I thought, I could do better than that. That’s how it started.”

Since then, he has become one of the University’s most steadfast and generous benefactors. In 1997, he established the Mary Lou and John Kriss Endowed Scholarship Fund with a gift of nearly $2 million.

The fund provides renewable awards to students who are members of the crew team. He also has supported the Fordham Fund, among other initiatives.

As a trustee fellow at Fordham, Kriss has the opportunity to meet a lot of current students, something he relishes. “I’ve been coming to Fordham four or five times a year for the past 13 years, and I generally have breakfast in the cafeteria with the members of the crew team. We just sit around and talk—about school, the people they’re dating, and what they’re planning to do after college.

“I contribute to Fordham because I hope I can offer what I got to other people, and it doesn’t matter that they know who I am,” he said. “It matters that 20 or 30 years from now, they wake up and say, ‘I’ve become somebody.’”

The sun is a faint pink presence behind buildings lining the Harlem River as the Fordham crew hits the piers at Peter Sharp Boat House. It is 6:20 a.m., and a lone seagull perched on a pylon takes flight across the glassy waters as the rowers approach.

For the 50 team members who have traveled here from Rose Hill, this is the first activity of the day. Six days a week, for more than two hours, the men and women haul out their shells, take to the river, and row.

And row.

And row some more.

Down the river and under the High Bridge, to Yankee Stadium, then up beyond University Heights. They race each other, starting at moderate stroke speed, gradually upping their strokes to build strength and endurance.

“For a college student, being on crew takes a lot of dedication,” said Ted Bonanno, coach of the men’s club sport and women’s varsity crew. “Not only do they row about 10 miles on the river every morning, but almost all of them come to the Lombardi Center in the afternoon after classes and practice on the rowing machines. It’s work.”

Such hard work, however, led the men’s team to a record-breaking win last year in the Collegiate 4 at the internationally acclaimed Head of the Charles in Boston. On Oct. 23 and 24 of this year, the team returns to defend its title and try for another win—this time perhaps in the Collegiate 8 category.

However, Fordham’s crew already has set its own personal best by receiving bids to participate in five events at Head of the Charles this year: three men’s categories and two women’s categories. It is the most bids a Fordham crew has ever received.

“We’ve never had so many rowers at the Head of the Charles before, and we’re all excited,” said Angelo Labatte, a Fordham College at Rose Hill junior majoring in history and anthropology. “We’re a pretty young team, but almost all of us should get some experience, and hopefully a win.”

Unlike most team sports, where star players are often singled out, being on crew is being part of a well-oiled machine that works not just in unison but also in tandem. It has been called by some the “ultimate team sport.”

“Crew is unique; I don’t know of any other sport like it,” said John Kriss (FCRH ’62), a member of Fordham’s Board of Trustees and an enthusiastic supporter of both men’s and women’s crew. Of all his experiences at Fordham, said Kriss, crew is the most memorable.

“I think crew was the single biggest influence on my life,” said Kriss, who recently bought new shells for the team. “There are eight people pulling together as a unit. You slide together, you dip the oar in the water together, pull back together. You feel the same pain at the same time and you go into oxygen deficit at the same time. There is no room for slackers.

“If you dedicate yourself to that discipline,” Kriss continued, “by the time you graduate and go out into the world you’ll understand what it means to work as a team.”

The one crew position that stands alone is that of coxswain, defined literally as “boat servant.” The coxswain sits at the rear of the boat calling out the stroke rating and the direction for the rowers, who row with their backs to the front of the boat.

On this morning, Fordham coxswains Abigail Paparo, a FCRH junior majoring in Latin American studies, and John Callahan, a freshman in the College of Business Administration, also have to whip up motivation: Coach Bonnano has instructed them to take their crew up to 32-34 rating (strokes per minute) on the last leg of practice.

“The psychological aspect of leading is tough,” said Callahan, a high school coxwain who was recruited to the team just a week after the start of the semester. “You want to get the rowers to empty it, give it all they’ve got, but you also have to make sure they don’t lose their technique when they tire.”

There is also pressure on coxswains, said Paparo, during a race such as the Charles, where the course winds and turns.

“If you don’t have a good grasp of steering and when to cut that turn, and if you can’t make split-second decisions, you could lose a race,” Paparo said. “It often comes down to seconds and inches.”

Bonanno said he expects “great things” from his team this year in skill building and in competition.

And regardless of the outcome on October 23 and 24, crew members Michael White and Chris Reich, both FCRH juniors who were part of last year’s Head of the Charles Collegiate 4-winning team, say they will have a lifelong ethic of discipline—thanks to the sport.

“Crew has helped me learn to manage my time, with practice, study and classes,” said White, a double major in mathematics and economics.