When he put Grand Canyon on the map as Arizona’s first four-year college to win a national basketball championship in the 1970s, center Bayard Forrest would play along with people who thought they played their home games at the bottom of the National park.

“We used to laugh and joke about that with people,” Forrest said. “I would say, ‘You have no idea how worn out we are riding those donkeys down to the bottom.’ “

By now, with GCU reaching the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history, people are getting a little more acquainted with the school that sits in the middle of Phoenix and looks nothing like it did when Forrest was a bruising 6-foot-10 player, leading the Antelopes to the NAIA national championship in 1975 under coach Ben Lindsey.

Back then, it was Grand Canyon College, which first opened in 1949 with Forrest’s father, Nelson, playing on the school’s early teams.

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Lindsey played basketball for Dave Brazell at Grand Canyon from 1959-62. Brazell also coached the baseball team, leading that program to multiple NAIA titles.

Forrest remembers how Arizona State, Arizona and Northern Arizona wanted no part of playing the little NAIA school that at that time would have been the equivalent of NCAA Division II now.

Nobody expected Grand Canyon to land Forrest, who grew up in Prescott but moved to Oregon when he was 16 in the middle of his high school basketball career.

Forrest was so big that UCLA’s John Wooden and Indiana’s Bobby Knight both recruited him, along with ASU’s Ned Wulk.

His uncle, who was working at Grand Canyon, asked Forrest to consider coming there and to pray on it.

Forrest was being touted as the next in line of great UCLA big men and would have followed Bill Walton.

“Then, I started praying to God, ‘You don’t want me to go to Grand Canyon, do you?’ ” said Forrest, who now runs a ministry with his wife in Colorado, and travels the world to speak. “But He made it clear that is where I should be. Ben Lindsey knew how to get the most out of me. They tried to get to me to Indiana and play for Bobby Knight. I laughed, I don’t want to be yelled at. I wasn’t tough enough to do that. But I would run through a brick wall for (Lindsey).”

Lindsey sold Forrest on the idea that if he came to Grand Canyon, it would win the national championship.

After Forrest’s last season in ’75, a team that also featured David Everett and Mike Haddow, Lindsey led Grand Canyon to another NAIA title a few years later.

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“Grand Canyon College at that time was pretty small,” Lindsey said. “It may be the smallest college to ever win a national championship. But the NAIA was larger, a much larger national association at that time.

“I remember many time, people who even lived in Phoenix thought we were at the Grand Canyon. We were not very well-known at the time. Bayard Forrest is probably responsible for putting the school on the map. He was a player who would have played for almost any school in the nation. For us to get a player of that caliber was special.”

The tiny Antelope Gym sat fewer than 1,000 people and it would be overflow capacity for games when the Lopes were going strong the 1970s.

The school would have to ask some fans to leave to allow for visiting fans who had traveled from California to be able to get in.

“It was run to be a small school like that on that ugly little campus,” Forrest said. “When I got there, we have maybe 600 students. I have great memories. I still wear that championship ring.

“To see the campus now, we played in a cracker-jack gym that had to turn people away.”

Forrest was ecstatic when GCU hired Bryce Drew to replace Dan Majerle as head coach last year, not just because Drew had success at Valparaiso and Vanderbilt. But because of his strong Christian values.

The day that hiring was announced, Forrest said he reached out to GCU President Brian Mueller and told him, ‘We’re behind you.”

“He is solid as a rock morally,” Forrest said about Drew. “We have his backing. I love the fact that he has such high standards.

“I told (Mueller) you can count on me. I said, ‘I will recruit for the school now.’ I couldn’t support what was going on before.”

Lindsey said he still catches a few GCU homes games a year and believes in the Lopes in Indianapolis.

Not in a million years, Forrest said he thought he’d see the day that Grand Canyon would be part of March Madness.

He will be among the GCU alumni pulling for the Antelopes to pull the upset of the tournament on Saturday when they face No. 2 Iowa in the first round.

“I think for me, the big thing, anybody can beat anybody in the NCAA on any given day,” Forrest said. “All it takes is one team being a little off and the other team being totally on. I know the odds are against that, but the fact that they made it now, it’s incredible.

“Bryce is leading this program in the right way and you’re going to see Grand Canyon take off.”

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To suggest human-interest story ideas and other news, reach Obert at [email protected] or 602-316-8827. Follow him on Twitter @azc_obert.

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