Losers No More

It must have been the happiest six-hour, two-restroom-stop bus ride through Texas nothingness in the history of charters.

Driver, step on the gas.

The streak was over.

Eighty consecutive football losses. Nine years of insults, ignominy, IVs, interceptions and incompletions.

“This has to be the greatest relief since the discovery of all,” said Clifton Gilliard, Prairie View A&M;’s associate athletic director.

Before departing Langston, just north of Oklahoma City, as the first victorious Prairie View squad since Oct. 28, 1989, players lingered for two hours on the field after Saturday night’s 14-12 victory at Langston University.

Grown men wept, hugged, spun in circles and otherwise bounded in jumps for joy.

Defensive back Michael Conley ripped blades of grass from the stadium turf for posterity and stuffed them into a little plastic bag.

“I ain’t never been this happy in my life,” a sleepy-eyed Conley said back in his dorm room Sunday afternoon.

Safety Quincy Fuller secured the two footballs he intercepted against the Langston Lions, remembering that a coach once told him that living forever required making history.

“Now,” Fuller said, “we will live forever.”

Bus motors rumbling, each player consumed an individual medium pizza and three Cokes before setting off for home sweet home.

They showed two Bruce Lee movies on the defensive bus--”Fists of Fury” and “The Chinese Connection.” Players were exhausted, but few slept. Victory, at long last, was theirs, and it was a subject that needed to be hashed out breathlessly.

As buses approached the Prairie View campus in the Sunday morning predawn, players noticed that the lights were on at Blackshear Stadium.

“We knew something was up,” Fuller said.

About 100 students and friends greeted the team with whoops and hollers.

“People were there with camcorders, cameras, holding posters,” senior cornerback Dekari Lenear said. “Those are true friends.”

Conley said, “It was like we were the champions of something.”

Coach Greg Johnson, hired away from Langston two years ago, thought it fitting that Prairie View had ended its NCAA-record losing streak against his former school, and that he did not accompany the team home.

Johnson was dispatched directly to Dallas for a Monday news conference to promote Saturday’s annual Prairie View-Grambling game at the Cotton Bowl.

“I’ve only been here a year and a half,” Johnson said. “I felt I had little to do with what went on. Things work out for a reason. It wasn’t Greg Johnson’s day. It was for the seniors who’d been through the drudgery. It was their day.”

Radio Daze

News of Prairie View’s victory shot like an electric current through this small college town, population 4,004, 50 miles northwest of Houston.

Gilliard, a running back on Prairie View’s 1958 national title team, listened to play-by-play accounts on the radio.

Also the school’s assistant cross-country coach, Gilliard stayed in Texas for a meet in San Antonio. Filling his car with gas in nearby Hempstead last Friday, Gilliard took the proverbial earful from the attendant.

“The man said, ‘When are you going to win a football game?’ and I said, ‘This week.’ ” Gilliard said. “He started laughing at me.”

When Prairie View won by stopping a two-point conversion on the game’s last play, Gilliard jumped up and down like a game-show contestant, shouting, “We did it!”

Veronica Hines, wife of Prairie View President Charles Hines, peered out of her on-campus home and saw hundreds of people flooding the area.

“They just appeared,” Veronica said.

Students ripped down the goal posts and deposited the pieces of steel on Hines’ front lawn.

“It was touching,” she said. “They felt my husband deserved the goal posts.”

As Veronica and Charles Hines watched from their porch, student-body President Alzo Slade came over to shake the president’s hand.

A few students scattered when the police arrived, but this was a night of victory, not violence.

“I told the police to leave the goal posts there until I got some pictures,” Veronica Hines said.

The party lasted well into morning.

By the time an out-of-town reporter arrived at midafternoon Sunday, the campus was recovering from a happy hangover, evidence of the night’s events marked by a few strewn beer cans.

“Panthers Got Their Groove Back,” screamed the sign on the road leading to campus.

Inside the 3Panthers grocery store, clerk Meredith Carpenter said copies of Sunday’s Houston Chronicle--”Eighty’s Enough,” screamed the front-page headline--were going fast.

“People are buying the paper to frame and keep as collectors’ items,” she said.

Carpenter, a 20-year-old criminal justice major, was 11 when the Prairie View losing streak began.

Outside the store, two members of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity were arranging letters on a billboard to announce a party being thrown that night for the team at the nearby Newman Center.

Oh, what a relief it was.

“It doesn’t matter that we have a good engineering program, or nursing program,” senior Leander Nash said as he formed the letters “Kappa Alpha Psi Kongratulates Panthers.”

“People say, ‘You go to that school that hasn’t won a football game in nine years.’ ”

They can’t say it anymore.

It Wasn’t Always Grim

The 80-game losing streak began on Nov. 11, 1989, with a 19-18 defeat by Langston, and it was no accident that the football program went downhill.

Once, Prairie View was a national black college football powerhouse, rivaling Eddie Robinson’s Grambling teams. The Panthers under coach Billy Nicks won five national titles in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

Future NFL stars Otis Taylor, Ken Houston and Clem Daniels played at Prairie View, founded in 1878 as part of a post-Civil War Reconstruction plan to help facilitate the transition of blacks from slaves to wage earners.

Integration by previously white collegiate football powers in the 1960s slowly bled Prairie View of talented players.

But the heavy ax fell in 1989, when coach Haney Catchings was indicted in an expense-report fraud scam.

The school shut down the football program in 1990, reinstating it in 1992 but without scholarship players.

The rest is misery. The once-proud Panther became pathetic. In 1991, Alabama State defeated Prairie View, 92-0, actually easing up after building a 72-0 halftime lead.

In 1994, a “kicker” named Nsikan Udoyen, recruited from the swim team, booted his first attempt off the backside of a teammate.

Of the team’s 80 losses, nearly one-fourth, 19, were shutouts.

A running back named Michael Porter left the program without ever having won a game in high school or college.

Prairie View players were cursed and spat upon by opposing fans, yet dropping the program never seemed a viable option in football-crazed Texas.

“No football in Texas? Good night!” Frank Jackson, director of student development, told The Times in a 1995 interview. “Men have sold their souls for this stuff.”

Coach Ron Beard lost 44 games before he was fired in the spring of 1995. He was replaced by Hensley Sapenter, the presiding coach on Sept. 30, 1995, the night Prairie View set the all-division NCAA record with its 51st consecutive defeat, a 64-0 loss to Grambling at the Cotton Bowl.

Sapenter was fired two years ago for using ineligible players. The school then turned to Langston’s Johnson.

Prairie View now gives 15 football scholarships, still woefully short of the NCAA limit of 65 and far too few to be competitive in the Division I-AA Southwestern Athletic Conference.

“When you send 15 scholarships against 60 scholarships, it’s like sending a person with a knife into a gunfight, and then demanding that person come out on top,” Lenear, the senior cornerback, said.

Johnson knew he couldn’t compete with Division I-AA schools, but he figured Prairie View could stop the skein against the likes of Langston, a lower-level NAIA program.

Johnson grew so tired of losing-streak questions this year that he banned his players from talking to reporters.

“It was always the same, putting cameras in their faces, seeing the blank look,” Johnson said. “They just got tired of it. We were going to get covered anyway, as long as the streak was going.”

Prairie View came close to ending it Sept. 12, leading Division III Howard Payne at the half before losing, 22-14.

During last Friday’s bus ride to Langston, Fuller said he dozed off and had a recurring dream.

“The number 80 has always been big in the dream,” he said. “I dreamed that whenever we did win, I’d have a big game. I just knew it was going to be broken in this game.”

Fuller’s interceptions against Langston were his first and second of the season.

Conley said he awoke on the bus with “a strange feeling.”

Indeed, victory would feel strange.

Players and coaches hope the streak’s end will mark a new beginning for Prairie View and spark interest in alumni to raise the money required to increase the number of scholarships.

“How long do we let this go on and say, ‘It’s OK?’ ” Johnson asked. “Playing these men at a competitive disadvantage? I wouldn’t put my kid in a fight like that every week, knowing his chances are slim and none.”

For this week at least, ending the streak was all that mattered.

Finally, perhaps the dirge mongers will go away--HBO and the rest with their touchy-feely chronicles about a rural football program’s march toward infamy.

Driver, step on the gas.

“It’s good to get that horse collar off from around our neck,” Athletic Director Walter Redd said.

The streak is over.

Prairie View got its groove back.

“Now,” Gilliard said, “you can get about the day’s work.”

*

1976-78 Tampa Bay Buccaneers--NFL record for most consecutive losses, 26

1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers--Most losses in an NBA season, 73. Final record :9-73

1962 New York Mets--Most losses in a major league baseball season, 120. Final record: 40-120

1991-92 San Jose Sharks--Most losses in an NHL season, 71 (11-71-2)

Washington Generals--One victory in last 5,736 games against Harlem Globetrotters.