Don’t Try It at Home : Tiny Arkansas Baptist Loses Twice on the Road--on the Same Night

Can a basketball team be in two places at once? After last weekend, that’s the question about Arkansas Baptist College’s team.

On Saturday night, Arkansas Baptist helped one school end the nation’s longest losing streak. And, apparently, it helped another school extend the nation’s longest winning streak.

On Monday, officials were trying to figure out how Arkansas Baptist could have done that, since the other schools involved, Prairie View A&M; in Prairie View, Tex., and Oklahoma City University in Oklahoma City, are 450 miles apart.

“It looks like something’s gravely wrong,” said W. T. Keaton, president of 286-student Arkansas Baptist near downtown Little Rock.

Fans at Prairie View A&M;, about 50 miles northwest of Houston, celebrated Saturday night after the Panthers ended their 30-game losing streak with a 90-76 victory over Arkansas Baptist.

And fans at Oklahoma City University--the defending champion in the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics--enjoyed a 148-78 victory over Arkansas Baptist that extended the Chiefs’ winning streak to 63.

Arkansas Baptist officials said Monday that the school’s team had been at Prairie View on Saturday night, along with Coach Arcell Marks.

The box scores prepared by the official scorers at both Oklahoma City and Prairie View, however, list the visiting team as Arkansas Baptist. At Prairie View, the box score listed 12 players for Arkansas Baptist. The box score from the Oklahoma City game listed only six players for the Arkansas school.

“Four names appeared in both box scores,” George Biggs, Arkansas Baptist’s athletic director, said Monday. “Unless they are are Jesus, Paul, Silas and Elijah--he never died you know, he was just taken up--then it would be impossible.”

It might have been that Arkansas Baptist mistakenly scheduled the two games for the same date and, somehow, had to honor the contracts.

Oklahoma City Coach Win Case said that Marks, Arkansas Baptist’s coach, had tried to get out of the contract four or five days before the game, pleading that he had to take an exam on Saturday night. Case said he told Marks that Arkansas Baptist had to honor the contract and play the game.

According to Case, Marks then responded with a pledge that an Arkansas Baptist team would be at Oklahoma City on Saturday.

“He said he’ll either do one of two things: ‘I’ll either take my final early and come down with the team, or I’ll just have my assistant come,’ ” Case recalled.

So, Case said, he wasn’t too surprised when the visiting team, with six players, showed up, along with a man who identified himself as Bobby Carey, Arkansas Baptist athletic director. Biggs said he took over as athletic director in June, succeeding Carey.

Marks was at Jackson, Miss., Monday night, where his team lost to Jackson State, 113-54. Before the game, he acknowledged that he had asked Case if Arkansas Baptist could change the date of the Oklahoma City game.

“He said he’d see what he could do in the meantime,” Marks said. “I was thinking maybe he decided to cancel it, so I went to my class (and) we went over to Prairie View.”

He said he didn’t know who played the game at Oklahoma City. Marks said he found out about the situation “when I got to school this morning.”

“(The) president called me in and told me about it. . . . My reaction was, not surprised. . . . Crazy things go on in sports, I just wasn’t surprised. I was hoping after I heard it that maybe the situation would just go away, but I know it’s newsworthy.”

Marks said he hadn’t talked with Carey about the Oklahoma City game. “I plan to talk to him, he’s a good friend of mine,” Marks said.

Oklahoma City’s winning streak ended Monday night in an 84-75 loss to Central Arkansas.

Freshman forward Mitchell White, listed in the box scores as having played in both games Saturday night, said Monday that he had played Saturday at Oklahoma City.

“I don’t know anything about (the box scores),” White said. Asked who was with him in Oklahoma, he paused and then said: “You need to talk to coach.”

Clay Stoldt, Oklahoma City’s sports information director, said most college squads travel with 12 to 15 players, so the number of players was unusual. But it wasn’t unusual enough to cause concern, Stoldt said, because “different programs are at different levels.”

Oklahoma City’s Coach Case said that after the game, the man who identified himself as Carey was given a check for for $1,200, made out to Arkansas Baptist. That was the amount of the gate guarantee for the trip to Oklahoma City.

At Prairie View, Murphy Crawford, sports business manager, said Arkansas Baptist was guaranteed $500 for Saturday’s game. That money hasn’t been paid, Crawford said, but will be unless he is told otherwise.

In Oklahoma City, Mark Pate, an assistant district attorney, said that prosecution was possible if it could be proved that Oklahoma City officials were deceived about the recipient of the gate guarantee.

It’s not clear if the situation will affect the records of Oklahoma City and Prairie View. Oklahoma City belongs to the NAIA and Prairie View to the NCAA. Arkansas Baptist belongs to neither.

“It’s a wild one,” NAIA spokesman John Mulvihill said. “It will take some time to determine what the ramifications are.”

Jim Wright, the NCAA’s director of statistics, said that Prairie View’s victory will stay unless someone can show that the team it played wasn’t Arkansas Baptist.

“Whatever Arkansas Baptist wants to do about playing--if they want to play five games in a day--that’s up to them,” he said.