This was 10 years ago, and the man on the other end of the phone had no idea he was the answer to a trivia question. And he made it clear that he no longer wanted that distinction.
His name was Ralph Tedeschi, and in 1949 he did something that no Rutgers athletes had done before or have done since. He and his teammate Alex Treves won a team NCAA championship in, of all sports, fencing.
"Oh, dear," Tedeschi, who led that Rutgers team to a shared title with Army, told me from his home in Cincinnati then.