Go Gonzaga! But Who Is Gonzaga?
By MARC TRACYMARCH 31, 2017
In the 1980s, as H.I.V. and AIDS ravaged sections of Manhattan, a Jesuit priest named William McNichols hit upon the perfect saint for that troubled time and place.
His name was Aloysius Gonzaga. Born to an extremely wealthy and powerful family in mid-16th-century Italy — Aloysius is the Latinized version of his given name, Luigi — Gonzaga felt a calling different from his family’s aristocratic leanings. He renounced his inheritance and became a Jesuit. When a plague broke out in Rome in 1591, he devoted himself to caring for its victims, contracted the disease himself and died. He was 23; he was soon canonized and became the patron saint of youth.
“I had seen a statue of him in a book, in which he was carrying a man who had the plague, and it struck me that he’d be the perfect patron saint for people with AIDS and also people working with people with AIDS,” said McNichols, who was based in Greenwich Village. (He now lives in New Mexico and is no longer a Jesuit.)
“I think most people don’t know” who Gonzaga was, said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, author of several books and editor-at-large at the Jesuit publication America. “Most Catholics don’t, either.”
Most Americans know Gonzaga’s eye- and ear-catching name only because of the Spokane, Wash., university that bears his name. And most know the university only because of its basketball team.
The Bulldogs — or the Zags, as they are alternatively known — made an improbable run to the round of 8 in the 1999 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. That meteoric rise into the national athletic consciousness led the university to invest heavily in what had been a little-known program, which the following year was taken over by an assistant, Mark Few. Now the Bulldogs have reached 19 consecutive tournaments, and this year, under Few, they have reached their first Final Four. A top seed, Gonzaga will play seventh-seeded South Carolina in the national semifinals Saturday night.
Few, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, said Thursday that he did not know much about Gonzaga, the man. “I can defer that to my wife,” he told reporters. Several Gonzaga players also acknowledged knowing little about the 16th-century Italian they have turned into a household name.
“I think he was like a Jesuit, right?” the redshirt senior Przemek Karnowski asked. “In the 18th century? I don’t know, man.”
Told he was a saint, the senior Rem Bakamus replied, “That would make sense.”
It would be difficult to attend Gonzaga without realizing that it is a Catholic — indeed, Jesuit — institution. For those who want to know more, Gonzaga offers further explanation to prospective students, according to Patrick Lee, the university’s vice president of mission and ministry.
“In the literature we send out, we have to explain the name of the place, because it’s an odd name for people to work with,” Lee said. Gonzaga is also referred to during campus tours and as part of freshman orientation.
Gonzaga’s life story of service is reflected, according to Michelle Wheatley, the university ministry director, in the student body, which the university said sends more students to the Peace Corps than any university of its size.
“It does get overwhelming sometimes with basketball,” Lee added. “A common message we’re trying to send from our area through the university is that the experience of basketball players is not for themselves. What they’re here for is others.”
While the Bulldogs are not saving lives with their play, they might be the best underdog story — even as a No. 1 seed — the Final Four has had since Butler made consecutive trips in 2010 and 2011.
South Carolina, which had flirted with missing the tournament altogether, is in an immediate sense the most unlikely entrant in the field — which also includes top-seeded North Carolina and third-seeded Oregon — but Gonzaga is the team that best fits the long-shot role. Unlike its power-conference competition, it plays in a league, the West Coast Conference, that does not sponsor football and therefore does not distribute tremendous resources to its member colleges.
Yet for those who had heard of Gonzaga the saint before Gonzaga the basketball team, his newfound, if indirect, fame is amusing and an altogether positive development.
“Anything that increases interest in a saint’s life, whether basketball or a book, is a great thing,” said Martin, who in 2011 published an article about what Gonzaga meant to him.
McNichols agreed. “I think it’s great,” he said, adding of other college basketball teams (and colleges), “It’s so funny, because different names of Jesuit saints like Loyola, Gonzaga, Xavier — I think it’s wonderful.”
Indeed, Jesuits faced a quandary in this year’s round of 8, when Gonzaga faced Xavier.
“When it was Xavier-Gonzaga, I had to remain agnostic,” Martin said, the pun apparently unintended.
In the Final Four, it is an easier call. “Any Jesuit school,” Martin said, “would take precedence over any other school.”
