It should be clear by now that I’m not telling my story in precise chronological order, so let me jump ahead a bit. Just for a minute or so. After Manhattan College, I got a full-ride PhD fellowship to study English at Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt was terrific—is terrific—but honestly, Manhattan College was more competitive and a whole lot tougher. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani went to Manhattan. So did two Southern District of New York DAs, Ronald Ellis and John Keenan. Former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly is a Manhattan grad. But so is Thomas Gambino, caporegime of the Gambino crime family. Hey, it takes all kinds to play cops and robbers.
I will say this: there were a lot of tough kids at Manhattan College. That school definitely got you ready for the real world.
During my first semester at Manhattan, the dean of Arts and Sciences approached me. “Look, James, I know Brother Leonard at St. Patrick’s, and I know what happened to you. It shouldn’t have happened.” The dean offered to make things right. “If you do very well here in your first year, I’ll get you into Harvard. That’s a promise.”
I did very well, but I also made a lot of good friends, and at the end of the first year, I decided to stay at Manhattan.
Years later, I became friends with Frank McLaughlin, who had been an All-American basketball player at another Catholic school, Fordham Prep, and then wound up going to Fordham University. What a surprise. He became an assistant basketball coach at Fordham under Digger Phelps, and when Phelps got hired at Notre Dame, Frank traveled to South Bend with him. He eventually left Notre Dame and became the head coach at Harvard.
While Frank was at Harvard, he met legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith. Smith blew Frank’s mind by telling him that when he was at Fordham Prep, Smith had gone there personally to recruit him. Dean Smith wanted him at North Carolina, which had one of the best basketball programs in the country. You know, the school where Michael Jordan played. “But the Jesuits wouldn’t let me get anywhere near you. They made sure you were going to Fordham.”
Of course they did, Frank. They knew you would lose your immortal soul at the University of North Carolina.
One footnote to the Frank McLaughlin story. When I was a freshman in high school, my family moved across the Hudson from Newburgh to Beacon, New York. Our house was next door to Phelps’s Funeral Home, which was owned by Digger Phelps’s father. The funeral home was how Coach Phelps got the nickname “Digger.”
I met Dick Phelps years later and he said he liked the Alex Cross novels. I told him I always rooted for Notre Dame and that I’d once had a crush on his sister. Digger said, “You stay away from my sister.”
“Digger, she’s like fifty now.”
“Yeah, so what? Stay away from my sister.”