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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > May > 29 > Entry
BLOG: Rev. Rod Parsley — Wrong In Sports, Too
When it comes to the Reverend Rod Parsley, John McCain has learned the same lesson several Ohio college basketball coaches did about the televangelist did seven years ago:
As promising as an association with this charismatic preacher looks, hook up with this guy and you’ll be involved in something you don’t like. Something that is flat our wrong
At a February rally in Cincinnati, McCain appeared with Parsley, whose World Harvest Church — a jumbo-sized Pentecostal institution just outside Columbus — includes over 12,000 members, a a television studio where he tapes his weekly broadcast and a 122,000-square-foot Activity Center that houses a couple of basketball courts..
That gives hint of Parsley’s over-sized love of basketball — he played in high school — and will get us to the problems with the coaches. But first the McCain issue..
In an effort to curry favor with conservatives or Ohio voters or whomever, the Republican candidate for president called Parsley his “spiritual guide,” an embrace — actually more like a one-night stand — from which he’d quickly disengage himself once he learned some of the stuff Parsley was preaching.
Parsley — as writer David Corn noted in detail in a recent story in Mother Jones — has said Christians should wage war against the “false religion” of Islam, in order to destroy it. To him there appears no difference between ordinary Muslims and Islamic extremists. His rants about the prophet Muhammad and Allah are just as skewered.
Parsley also compares Planned Parenthood to the Nazis. and has called for the prosecution of people who commit adultery.
Hearing all this and a lot more, McCain realized all that glitters is not gold with this guy and quickly — and quite publicly — distanced himself.
A few years ago, several coaches from Ohio junior colleges and small four-year schools saw promise in scheduling games with World Harvest Bible College, the higher learning institution — pared with a then-budding K-12 school — Parsley housed on the church campus.
But that first season — with former Miami University women’s coach Lisa Bradley running the World Harvest men’s team — other schools quickly smelled a rat.
In a story that first broke in the Dayton Daily News, it was revealed that Parsley’s World Harvest team was trouncing its opponents thanks to a line-up led by ringers. All this while preacher often sat courtside with a body guard and whooped and hollered at his team and the refs.
As it turned out, World Harvest was led by Alvin Mobley, a 6-foot-8 shot blocking, tomahawk dunking, long-range shooting star who one rival — Randy Lincicome, now a Wittenberg assisrtant, but back then the head coach at OSU-Newark — called “a giant among kids.”
And Mobley was just that. Prior to coming to World Harvest as a “college player,” he had played briefly at three other colleges in Florida and New York and then embarked on a long pro career that included stints with Quad Cities in the Continental Basketball Association, the Wisconsin Blast in the International Basketball Association and tours in pro leagues in Portugal, Holland, Austria and Mexico, where he said he averaged 39 points a game and was the league MVP.
And then there was starting point guard Tony Sullivan, who was listed as a freshman at World Harvest, even though he’d already graduated from Denison University, where he played basketball three seasons.
The then 600-student school had several other college transfers including guard Mills Hawkins, who had played at College of Charleston and center David Mobley, who was from Jefferson College in Watertown, N.Y.
When the story broke in the Dayton Daily News, several of World Harvest’s rivals were upset, though not totally surprised.
“When I saw some of the guys they played against us I said to myself, ‘Oh no, looks like the church team might be doing a little cheating,’” said Wilberforce assistant Michael Cheaney.
After his team was trounced by World Harvest, Ohio-University—Zanesville coach Jeff Butler was disgusted: “You see these kind of things when you’re dealing with a renegade program.”
Lincicome had similar thoughts: “There’s a smoke screen there. Something’s not right. It’s fraudulent to pass yourself off as a college team and play a pro.”
Of course World Harvest officials said they did no wrong. They said they weren’t ruled by the NCAA, NAIA or the National Christian College Athletic Association. They said they were governed by the National Bible College Association, which, back then, had just a few schools in it and had installed Bradley as its new vice president.
By the next season, World Harvest was having trouble scheduling games. Several coaches refused to play them and wanted nothing to do with Parsley’s college.
John McCain now knows the feeling.
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