Originally Posted by
DFW HOYA
I think it was less about secular/Jesuit leadership and more about John Brooks.
Excepting a year in grad school in Pennsylvania, a year in Jesuit tertianship in Connecticut, and a year in Rome, Rev. Brooks literally spent his entire life in either Boston or Worcester, where his vision of "the academy", a community of scholars, was rooted in the small college traditions of New England.
His loyalty to HC is unquestioned, but he was not comfortable with the changes going on at BC and Georgetown (two schools that Holy Cross still considered its peers), of which athletics was becoming a visible part.
Maybe he didn't want to see Mt. St. James need a 45,000 seat Fitton Stadium to play Pitt and Syracuse. Maybe the small college model was to be preserved at the expense of the inexorable trends elsewhere, and athletics needed to follow that direction or else. Maybe Peter Likins was just more convincing than Dave Gavitt. More than all of these, maybe the glory of the past was more important than the promise of the future.
Rev. Brooks famously said he was not in the sports entertainment business, and he may well have been directing that at the presidents of BC and Georgetown, two Jesuits he knew well. A generation later, BC and Georgetown are no longer peers at HC, its athletics vision is decidedly regional, and the athletic experience still seems about "what was", and not "what is to be". A different quote from Rev. Brooks is more telling. "We have created a model for others to follow," he said in looking back on the Patriot League. "So far, no one has followed."
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