Earlier this month, David Barton delivered a series of presentations at Charis Bible College in Colorado on “The Principles of Success.” In the very first presentation, Barton made a claim that we had never heard from him before, despite having listened to literally hundreds of his radio programs and presentations, when he told the audience that he played college basketball for a team that “set the NCAA record for two years in a row of most points scored” per game.
Barton was teaching on a passage from 1 Corinthians about the need to “strike a blow to my body and make it my slave” and whip one’s self into shape in order to be a success and cited his college basketball days as an example.
“I remember when I was playing basketball, the college stuff that we did,” he said, “we started every day with a five mile run, then we lifted weights, then we had an hour of racquetball, then we had two hours of full-court basketball, then we came back for another run. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable, but in those years, our college team set the NCAA record for two years in a row of most points scored. We averaged 105, 104, 103 points a game, I forget what it was”:
Just about every report that we have ever seen states that Barton graduated from Oral Roberts University and did so in 1976.
According to Wikipedia, the ORU men’s basketball team led the nation in scoring in the 1972 and 1973 seasons. A search of the rosters posted on ORU’s own website from the years Barton presumably attended finds no mention of him having been on the men’s basketball team, including during the two record-setting seasons he specifically cited:
UPDATE: Warren Throckmorton contacted ORU directly to inquire about Barton’s claim and a school official declared that “after checking with the Athletic Office, there is no record of a David Barton ever playing basketball for ORU.”
