Name-a-Day Calendar, February 5: Fordham Rams
Page 91 of 365
Chosen in: 1906
Chosen by: Student J. Ignatius Coveny
Fordham University has been playing intercollegiate sports longer than just about everyone else in the country, and they have one rather absurd record to prove it: Fordham’s baseball program has 4567 wins, the most of all time by a mile. Second-place Texas has 3623 wins and Fordham leaps past them by a whole 26%.
That has nothing to do with the nickname but it helps to establish its 19th-century origins. The school was still called St. John’s College in the 1890s but its campus was located in the Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx, so the community casually called it “Fordham” even before the official switch.1 Around this time, fans at Fordham sporting events often chanted as if they were counting up to the school’s colloquial name: “One-dam, two-dam, three-dam, Fordham!” But this was a Christian server college and swearing wouldn’t be tolerated; the school’s Jesuit fathers demanded that students stop chanting “dam(n)” and replace it with “ram”.
When this was all going down, the school’s sports teams were known as the Rose Hills, owing to the etymology of the campus itself (the college was founded on the site of the former Rose Hill Manor). But as the years passed with this new “ram” chant, the ram gradually became a school symbol. In 1906, student J. Ignatius Coveny wrote a fight song entitled “The Fordham Ram”, and suddenly the Rose Hills were no more. The school’s teams would be called the Rams from then on.
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St. John’s College officially became Fordham University in 1907.