Grand Canyon University grows up, flexes its muscle

On Tuesday night, little (but perhaps not for long) Grand Canyon skunked the UNLV baseball team down at 35th and Camelback in Phoenix, the bustling city corner upon which the university sits. The final score was 7-0. Beyond the left-field scoreboard at Brazell Stadium, outfielders could hear the rumble of Valley Metro buses.

Yes, it was a midweek game, and those don’t count much in college baseball. But this one wasn’t close.

During one stretch, multiple Grand Canyon pitchers retired multiple UNLV batters during a procession that reached 16 in a row.

Now, this might have come as a surprise, considering Tim Chambers has built a winning program at UNLV that qualified for the NCAA Tournament last season, and defeated nationally ranked Nebraska in two of three games to start this season. And because Grand Canyon is little (but perhaps not for long).

First, a back story and anecdotes.

When I was in college, which is getting to be a long time ago, little Grand Canyon College — it’s Grand Canyon University now — was my little school’s biggest rival.

Grand Canyon and Western New Mexico would play these hellacious basketball games, and Grand Canyon almost always won by one point or in double overtime — mostly because Grand Canyon had Bayard Forrest, a giant who stood 6 feet 11 inches and shot hook shots over my school’s 6-5 guys.

Grand Canyon would beat our team, and then it would go on to win NAIA national championships, and then giant Bayard Forrest would go on to back up Alvan Adams across town with the NBA’s Suns.

There once were three NAIA championship banners hanging from the rafters of Antelope Gym, which, if memory serves, had exactly four rows of bleachers on each side of the court.

Antelope Gym was the kind of place where NBA teams would hold shootarounds before playing the Suns, to avoid autograph seekers and the curious.

One time there was a mix-up, and the Detroit Pistons and Western New Mexico Mustangs arrived at Antelope Gym for shootarounds at the same time. Instead of filing a grievance with the players union, M.L. Carr invited some Mustangs onto the court to play him one-on-one. It was a big thrill for our guys.

During this era, Grand Canyon also won multiple NAIA championships in baseball. We would jump onto the top step of the dugout — an actual dugout — just to watch the Antelopes take infield. Bing, bing, bing, bing. It was like watching Tommy play pinball; they were so smooth with the gloves.

That was about the last I heard from Grand Canyon, until it started advertising on TV in Las Vegas late at night, during the Letterman and Craig Ferguson shows.

Grand Canyon is now a for-profit university worth about $2 billion on the stock market, which basically means you can get a diploma from there by taking classes on a laptop computer.

You have to pay lots of money to take these classes, or take out loans. Whereas a lot of people who sign up for classes on their laptops don’t receive a diploma from Grand Canyon — they may get tired after a long day at the Texaco station, or the kids are always crying making studying difficult — the school gets to keep the lots of money.

So the Grand Canyon gym no longer has four rows of bleachers on each side of the court. It now has 7,200 seats and a plush state-of-the-art arena, and it has Dan Majerle as coach, and in just its second season in Division I, it scheduled No. 1 Kentucky, Harvard and New Mexico. And Grand Canyon beat the Lobos 68-65.

And now the Antelopes have skunked the Rebels in baseball, too.

Last week, the Sports on Earth website sent a man, Will Leitch — you might remember Buzz “Friday Night Lights” Bissinger screaming at Leitch as they sat with Bob Costas for a discussion on how the Internet has changed sports, or whatever — to write about Grand Canyon.

Leitch wrote the GCC Arena was one of the nicest college basketball facilities he’d ever been to, that it has corporate advertising wherever one turns, and kiosks where one can sign up for classes that can be taken on a laptop computer. And that as a faith-based, for-profit member of the Western Athletic Conference, Grand Canyon may soon reach the NCAA Tournament as the only for-profit team in the bracket.

And won’t that be some March Madness for the NCAA to deal with.

“Every time Greg Gumbel says Grand Canyon’s name on CBS,” wrote Leitch, “it will direct more people to those kiosks.”

Leitch says Grand Canyon “might be the most controversial school in the NCAA right now,” and then you hear about Grand Canyon skunking UNLV in baseball on Tuesday night — or you might have even watched it on TV, owing to GCU’s arrangement with Cox Communications.

And then maybe you think to yourself, or maybe you even say it out loud: Just how badly does UNLV want to have a winning football team, anyway?

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.