Grand Canyon brims with old-school charm
It must have been 1976, because I was wearing plaid pants with cuffs and had Farrah Fawcett’s poster on my wall. I was riding in a van with a bunch of 6-foot-4-inch forwards from the Rust Belt and a 5-10 kid from Las Cruces who played like he was 6-10.
We had just crossed the New Mexico state line into Arizona, on our way to play Grand Canyon.
Most of us were city guys who somehow wound up at a small college in New Mexico, so we didn’t know what to expect when we’d get there. We had seen pictures, on postcards and in encyclopedias. I think we were expecting a field house carved from centuries-old rock, with eagles swooping from the rafters. Perhaps a curio shop where one could buy turquoise, leather goods and kachina dolls.
As I said, we were from the city.
And, as it turned out, so were they.
Grand Canyon College wasn’t located on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was located at the bustling intersection of 35th Avenue and Camelback Road in the heart of Phoenix.
No majestic rock formations, eagles or curio shops. Only Texaco stations, Burger Kings and Valley Metro buses belching diesel fumes. And palm trees. Lots of palm trees.
The campus was spartan, consisting of a classroom building, baseball diamond and gymnasium. Antelope Gym had four rows of bleachers that you pulled out from the wall, like in junior high.
OK, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration. There might have been five rows of bleachers.
The only impressive thing about Antelope Gym was a gigantic banner hanging from the rafters. "NAIA BASKETBALL CHAMPIONS 1975" was all it said.
Grand Canyon College, now Grand Canyon University, which will provide the opposition for UNLV on Friday night in the college basketball season opener at the Thomas & Mack Center, was founded by Arizona Southern Baptists in 1949. One of the school’s primary benefactors was the Rev. Vaughn Rock, better known to his congregation as "Brother Rock." As in pass the rock. Or rebound it.
It has always been about basketball at Grand Canyon, right from the start.
My school, Western New Mexico, has played Grand Canyon 76 times, more than any other school with a direction, ampersand or hyphen in its name.
They have beaten us 39 times; we have beaten them 37.
We were good; they were usually a little better.
In 1975, the year they won their first of three NAIA championships, Grand Canyon had a 6-10 redwood from Oregon named Bayard Forrest, who went on to become Alvan Adams’ backup with the Phoenix Suns. The Antelopes’ coach was Ben Lindsey, who was tall, had a mustache, spoke in a deep voice and coached Arizona for one forgettable year, between the reigns of Fred "The Fox" Snowden and Lute Olson.
During its championship season of 1975, Grand Canyon beat my school 62-61 at our little bandbox, and 89-83 in double overtime in their little bandbox. Then the Antelopes went to Kansas City, Mo., and beat everybody else in a huge bandbox, Kemper Arena.
"It was more than we ever expected," Forrest said in the March 24, 1975, edition of Sports Illustrated, the one with boxer Chuck Wepner on the cover. "We came here with the goal of winning three games, because that meant the NAIA would pay our way to stay for the last two days and we could watch the finals."
This is the charm of small-college basketball. Guys don’t look at it as a steppingstone to the NBA and a way to date a desperate housewife. Guys look at it as a way to get an excused absence from class.
In the small colleges, players rarely shave points or sell their jerseys to tattoo parlor owners or demand their mothers be set up with jobs and houses. And though the small colleges have overzealous boosters, too, when they spring for hamburgers and milkshakes on the weekends, nobody really cares, because the cafeteria is closed on weekends and even 6-4 forwards too small to play in the Big Ten have to eat.
At small colleges such as Grand Canyon, basketball isn’t a business. It’s mostly still just something to do after the cafeteria closes.
Mostly.
Grand Canyon now plays at the NCAA Division II level, and last week christened a beautiful on-campus arena that seats 5,000. It has joined forces with former Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo and has raised more than $1 million and wants to join the Western Athletic Conference, should the WAC survive.
That’s another thing about these small colleges. They keep trying to emulate the big boys, when the big boys should be trying to emulate them.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.