Sixth in a series previewing members of the 2014 class who will be inducted Feb. 28 into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.
Encased in glass in the lobby of the Nutt Athletic Complex, a single score sheet from the 1971 Arkansas School for the Deaf score book sums up one of the greatest nights in Arkansas high school basketball history.
Forty-one field goals. Twenty free throws. One-hundred and two points. All compiled in one game by one player - Bennie Fuller.
Late in the evening of Jan. 19, 1971, sportswriter Jim Bailey answered the telephone at the Arkansas Gazette. On the other end of the line was a very exhilarated Houston Nutt Sr.
“Bennie Fuller scored a hundred points,” Nutt shouted and repeated. “Bennie Fuller scored a hundred points.”
“I think he [Nutt] was calling from a gas station in Sheridan,” Bailey said.
On his way back to Little Rock after his team had played a regular-season game on a cold winter’s night in the small Grant County town of Leola, the School for the Deaf coach could not wait to get home to report the news of Fuller’s incredible night.
Fuller, a 6-1 senior guard/ forward, cracked the 100-point barrier, making him only the second high school player from Arkansas to achieve the feat. Amazingly, Fuller’s 102 points ranks No. 2 all-time in Arkansas, behind Morris Dale Mathis, who scored 108 points for St. Joe on Jan. 25, 1955.
It wasn’t the only time Fuller, who will be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame on Friday at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock, flirted with 100 points.
He scored 98 points in a game against the Mississippi School for the Deaf one year earlier, and Fuller averaged 50.9 points a game during the 1970-1971 season, topping the 50-point mark 12 times that season.
“I feel very honored,” Fuller said in an email. “ I’m surprised. I wasn’t expecting to be honored.”
Born March 13, 1951, Bennie Charles Fuller grew up near Hensley in south Pulaski County. He learned to shoot basketball by using a hoop made from a bicycle wheel. Fuller averaged 36 points a game as a sophomore at the School for the Deaf, and by the time he was a senior, college scouts were making their way to the school’s gymnasium on every game day.
Fuller’s 102-point game earned him statewide and national attention. By the end of the season, Fuller had 104 offers from two- and four-year institutions, not bad considering few colleges scouted Class B deaf schools.
Fuller took campus visits to the University of Arkansas, Texas-El Paso and Memphis, but none offered what the hearing-impaired player needed.
The coach who eventually signed Fuller to a college scholarship never saw Fuller play a high school game. Pensacola Junior College, located in the Florida Panhandle, earned Fuller’s services.
Jim Atkinson, Pensacola’s interim coach at the time, was originally from Fordyce and a family friend of the Nutts. Atkinson not only got Fuller to sign, but he also offered a scholarship to Donnie Nutt, the son of Clyde Nutt, who was the brother of Houston Nutt Sr. No other school could accommodate Fuller with a personal interpreter, and even though Donnie Nutt was full-hearing, he was fluent in sign language.
“I had heard of Bennie and what he had done like everyone else, plus I knew Houston,” Atkinson told the Pensacola News Journal in an article published on March 11, 2012. “To be honest, I was trying to find someone to tie our next season to, that one player that would make it interesting for fans. To me, that had to be Bennie.
“Then I learned about Donnie. I didn’t know how to [do sign language], and he was also a very good player.”
Fuller signed April 29, 1971.
“I haven’t seen him play a game,” Atkinson said in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat that day. “But somebody that had his percentage and scored that many points, you can’t go wrong with.”
Fuller thrived at Pensacola for one season. He averaged 30 points a game - Donnie Nutt averaged 21 points - for a team that struggled to a 7-18finish.
The school replaced Atkinson with Rich Daly from Moberly (Mo.) Junior College for the 1972-1973 season. Daly brought in a bevy of highly touted players, and while the team eventually finished 26-4, Fuller and Nutt saw their roles on the team diminished.
“I wasn’t terribly happy with the team,” Fuller said in the 2012 News Journal story. “The first year, the other players complained I would lead in points all the time, but I couldn’t help it. Then the coaches changed - I just planned to leave Pensacola, but my parents tried to keep me there. … I did for their sake.”
Fuller spent his final two years at Arkansas-Pine Bluff. He was only a role player for the Lions, but he did complete his degree in community recreation and returned to the School for the Deaf to teach.
He currently lives in Oklahoma City, working for the United States Postal Service.
Fuller’s Arkansas high school records appear to be untouchable. Fuller is the state’s all-time leading boys scorer and is fourth on the national list. He scored 4,896 points at the School for the Deaf from 1968 to 1971.
“Houston always encouraged Bennie to shoot,” said Emogene Nutt, whose husband died in 2005. “Bennie was a team player but Houston wanted him to shoot.”
The one big night in south Grant County stands out as Fuller’s most amazing one game achievement.
He scored 22 points in each of the first two quarters against Leola. He added another 20 in the third.
“At the half I told him, ‘Bennie, you’re hot, keep shooting,’ ” Nutt Sr. told the Arkansas Democrat in January of 1971. “After he had 64 at the third quarter, the other boys got the idea and said, ‘Let’s give it to Bennie.’ They were not told to feed him, but were just playing their normal game.”
And then came an improbable final eight minutes. Fuller made 15 field goals and hit all eight of his free-throw attempts for a 38-point quarter. A majority of those shots, Fuller said, came from outside the lane.
“I had no idea I scored 38 points in the fourth quarter,” Fuller told the Pensacola News Journal in 2012. “It was like a machine gun, one after another, it was just nuts.”
Nutt Sr. was tempted to pull Fuller late in the 133-58 victory. In an Arkansas Democrat article from Jan. 20, 1971, Nutt Sr. said his team’s leading rebounder - James Tolbert - was out for that game, so he left Fuller in to make sure the team could compete on the boards.
“Houston said he was going to take Bennie out but some of the other players were pleading with him to let him stay in the game saying ‘Bennie’s got 97 points,’ ” Bailey said. “So Houston left him in.”
“When I made 102 points that night, there were some people [in the stands] that didn’t seem very happy,” Fuller said. “But most of the people were very excited. They came to shake my hand or pat me on my back.”
“It was the greatest performance I’ve ever seen by a high school player,” Nutt Sr. said in the Arkansas Democrat article that appeared the day after the game . “He is the best I’ve ever seen.”
Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame glance
BENNIE FULLER AGE 62 (born March 13, 1951) HOMETOWN Hensley HIGH SCHOOL Arkansas School for the Deaf COLLEGES Associates degree (Pensacola Junior College), bachelor’s degree (Arkansas-Pine Bluff).
NOTEWORTHY Fuller is the all-time leading scorer in Arkansas boys high school basketball history with 4,896 points from 1968 to 1971. He is fourth on the national list, behind three players from Louisiana. … Fuller scored 606 points as a freshman, 1,007 points as a sophomore, 1,301 points as a junior and 1,982 points as a senior. … In January 2013, the Arkansas School for the Deaf named its basketball court in honor of Fuller.
… Fuller averaged 30 points a game in 1971-1972 during his freshman season at Pensacola Junior College.
Sports, Pages 21 on 02/23/2014