Cornell Fans Cheer Surprising NCAA Success at Manhattan Club

March 22 (Bloomberg) -- Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne slumped in exhaustion in leather chairs under a framed candy-striped jacket at the Cornell Club as their school’s basketball team ran out the clock on an 87-69 victory over Wisconsin.

Fielder and Senchyne, graduate students in Cornell’s English department, were en route to the Ithaca, New York, campus from a Philadelphia conference on early African- American print culture. They stopped off to join about 60 fellow Cornell fans at the 44th Street club in Manhattan, under a banner celebrating the school’s undefeated 1939 football team.

The pair said that, as current students, they are less surprised by the team’s success than some of the red-clad alumni crowding the club’s Big Red Grill & Tap. An Ivy League team had not advanced to the round of 16 in the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament since 1979.

“There used to be a place near campus where, if the team scored 80 points, you’d get a free half-pound of chicken wings,” Senchyne said. “They don’t do that any more.”

Seats in the bar filled up a half-hour before tip-off yesterday with fans primed by a March 19 first-round victory over Philadelphia’s Temple University. People shoved tables closer together to make room for late arrivals and introduced themselves with the question: “What year are you?”

In a corner under the bar’s largest television set, Richard and Robin Kaufman, both class of 1976, shared their table with a rotating crew that included a pair of female 1998ers and a couple who have an undergraduate daughter.

Cornell Couple

“We met at Cornell,” Robin Kaufman said. She’s now vice president of student affairs at SUNY-Purchase. Richard Kaufman is an attorney. “We have a daughter graduating this year and another in the class of 2006,” he said.

The Kaufmans joined the shouting as Cornell grabbed a 16-4 lead. In their day, Richard Kaufman said, the basketball team from the Ithaca, New York, school never finished above sixth place in the Ivy League.

“It’s always been Penn or Princeton in basketball,” he said. “Cornell’s about hockey.”

As Wisconsin narrowed the gap, Daniel Arnow, class of 1958, stepped away from the bar and rested nearby.

Arnow, now retired in New Rochelle, New York, said he didn’t make it to the club for the first-round game against Temple. Cornell won that game, becoming the first team in the Ivy League -- which bars athletic scholarships -- to win an NCAA tournament game since 1998.

“I figured I’m not going to miss it twice,” he said.

Lift for Campus

About 20,000 graduate, undergraduate and professional students attend Cornell, which also has a medical school campus in New York City.

The team’s success has been a lift for a campus where 10 enrolled students have died during this academic year, from suicides, accidents and illness, according to Thomas Bruce, the school’s vice president for communications. All but one were undergraduates at the Ivy League university, one of eight highly rated academic institutions in the northeastern United States.

Cornell alumni include Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup Inc.; Abby Joseph Cohen, senior investment strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

Packed Club

The school community has been swarming the club, said Tim Della Pace, director of food and beverages. A server handed out boxed sandwiches -- the kitchen is usually closed on Sundays --and people snacked through halftime and the opening minutes of the second half, when Cornell pulled away again.

A crowd of boos erupted when CBS cut away from the game as it turned into a blowout. Della Pace urged calm and settled the room by switching the TVs to a jerky internet feed.

As the clock wound down, people started calling the front desk and asking about plans for Cornell’s game against top-seeded Kentucky on March 25 at Syracuse, New York. Della Pace said the club still is working out the details and asked people to call back.

“We’ll probably pull the furniture out and make it stadium seating,” he said.

Loss to Kansas

Fielder and Senchyne, both still clad in Cornell shirts and gear, headed out to a show. Senchyne said a close loss to top-ranked Kansas in January had opened his eyes to the team’s possibilities.

“I knew they’d turned a corner at the Kansas game,” Senchyne said. “When they held in there and nearly won, I said all bets are off.”

Fielder said they’d try to get tickets to see the next game, at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, if any become available.

“It’s been really special,” she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Aaron Kuriloff in New York at akuriloff@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Sillup at msillup@bloomberg.net.