Art dealer's fortunes rise with Rutgers'

ADP exec had prints of football painting made - now, they're selling fast

By BETH FITZGERALD
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

ADP executive Keith Gilman's office wall sports a memorial to his college years, when his loyalty to Rutgers University football was a triumph of hope over experience.

It is a print of "The First Game: Rutgers vs. Princeton, 1869," a painting Arnold Friberg created for the centennial of the first intercollegiate football game. Rutgers met Princeton University on a New Brunswick field on Nov. 6, 1869, to play what sports historians generally agree was the first intercollegiate football game.

But for Gilman, the painting speaks of more than collegiate nostalgia. This was his initiation into the business world as an art dealer and entrepreneur. The only reason the print exists is because just before he graduated from Rutgers in 1999, Gilman contacted Friberg's Salt Lake City gallery with a business proposition. The artist agreed to produce a limited edition of 1,500 signed prints, which Gilman would market to Rutgers and Princeton students and alumni.

This has been an extraordinary year for the Scarlet Knights: a nine-game winning streak that didn't end until a Nov. 18 loss to Cincinnati; a 10-2 season with an extended flirtation with the Big East championship that ended in a triple-overtime heartbreaker against West Virginia. Rutgers will meet Kansas State in the Texas Bowl on Thursday. Princeton football caught fire this year as well: The team ended the season tied with Yale for the Ivy League Championship.

And it was a break-out year for Gilman, who has watched demand for his prints languish when Rutgers was losing, then rise in step with Rutgers' success on the football field.

"Sales have doubled this year, thanks to all the exposure Rutgers is getting," Gilman said. He won't disclose how many remain unsold, "but there are very few left; I'd say that within the next 12 months, they'll be sold."

Gilman has never raised his prices: $285 for an unframed print and $499 for a framed print with an NCAA medallion. He relies on world-of-mouth referrals and promotes the prints through his postings on various Rutgers football Internet message boards where fans log on just to talk about the team.

The print shows the birth of intercollegiate football as a rough-and-ready affair, sans helmets and shoulder pads. Rutgers archivist Tom Frusciano said in its infancy, football looked more like "a mix of rugby and soccer, very informal, with a supper afterwards; not at all like what we have today." Much of the painting's energy flows from the startling, almost iconic image of the Rutgers men, their heads covered with red scarves to distinguish them from the Princeton men.

Gilman said he first saw a photograph of the painting in the archives at the Alexander Library. "We welcome students to come here and use our collections," Frusciano said. The library's special collections and the university archives are especially strong in New Jersey history and in Rutgers history; the archive even has films of football games going back to the 1930s.

Rutgers won that historic first game, six goals to four - which may explain why more Rutgers than Princeton fans have bought the prints, by a 3-1 margin.

"When I first got involved with the prints, things could not get much worse for Rutgers, and Princeton football was average at best," Gilman said. "The fact that both teams did great this year means the excitement is back."

Gilman said he has made it to nearly every Rutgers home game, while he was in school and since he graduated, and recalls the bitter years, "when it felt like there were 1,000 students in the stands, and nobody cared about the outcome. If we beat a strong opponent, the following game, we'd lose to a weak team and that didn't feel right. Now, it feels so steady."

This is Greg Schiano's sixth year coaching Rutgers football, and he took plenty of heat when the team was losing. The Scarlet Knights' two wins and nine losses in 2001 slid into deeper disaster with a 1-11 finish in 2002; the turning point came in 2005, when the Knights were 7-5.

Gilman joined ADP six years ago as a sales rep, calling on small businesses to sell the company's payroll processing services. Since his mid-September promotion to sales executive for a territory running from Springfield to Cape May, he has a 50-plus person team of his own to coach. Is he tempted to draw a parallel between his job and the challenge that faced Schiano when he arrived at Rutgers six years ago?

Gilman just burst out laughing. "Oh no, I have a much better team than Schiano had when he came to Rutgers."