The Jan. 12th issue of The New Yorker contains an article about Pope Leo XIV that includes a short section on his time at Villanova University. I read this with interest – I was a senior there when the future pope was a freshman – and was surprised to find, in one long paragraph, two small errors. Both have to do with sports, specifically basketball, so could be seen as insignificant, but they did cause me to wonder about the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department.
The author, Paul Elie, states that Villanova played its home games at “the Palestra” on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The team played some of its games at The Palestra – as did St. Joseph’s, La Salle, Temple and of course Penn – as part of Philadelphia’s celebrated Big Five. But its home games were played at the more prosaically named Field House on the school’s campus.
Elie uses this misinformation to suggest that the school’s success as a “men’s-basketball powerhouse” is a recent phenomenon. (He notes that three recent graduates now play for the Knicks; as always with New York publications, it's all about New York.) Yet in 1971, Villanova played for the national championship, losing to UCLA by six points. Hundreds of students welcomed the team home in the Field House, where forward Clarence Smith gave an emotional reading of Kipling’s If.
I sent a letter to The New Yorker, which I suspect will not be published.
