Bob and Garry’s totally rad hoax

Time was when good, clean fun was good and clean. Nobody got hurt and a good time was had by all.

Bob Sivils did his part back in the 1980s to escalate good, clean fun to heights few could imagine.

Some called it a hoax. Some thought the sports world gullible. I thought of it as inspired genius.

All are correct. Longtime Sallisaw residents will recognize Bob’s name as the former band director at Tommie Spears Middle School. He also served as chess coach. He was recognized as the 2005-06 Sallisaw Teacher of the Year. And when he quit teaching after eight years, he was a candidate for a school board vacancy in 2013, but finished just 34 votes shy of the seat.

Before he came to Sequoyah County in 2001, he taught band in Arkansas for 28 years, including a stint in Garland County, where Hot Springs is the county seat. In 1985, Sivils was band director at Jessieville, a small comprehensive public secondary school for grades 9 through 12.

Back in 1951, long before Sivils arrived, Jessieville was making its presence known, at least on the basketball court. The high school, which had no more than 35 students, accomplished the unthinkable when the Lions defeated mighty Little Rock, an 11-time state champion that won four consecutive state titles from 1944-47. (That was three years before Milan, Ind., put itself on the map when the tiny high school won the Indiana state basketball championship by defeating Muncie Central, a school 10 times its size. The movie “Hoosiers” was based on the story of the miracle season.)

But back to the mid-’80s. Sivils and Garry Crowder, the girls basketball coach at Jessieville, decided to make some sports history of their own. So they pinned their hopes to the football team and star player Jess Norman at private school Village Academy in extreme southern Arkansas.

Rather, they invented Village Academy and made up superstar Jess Norman.

The Village Academy Beavers, who played mostly Louisiana schools in an effort to avoid being exposed, were created when Sivils and Crowder be- came frustrated with the limited knowledge exhibited by staff members at Little Rock newspapers who would answer their calls on fall Friday nights when they reported actual Jessieville football scores.

The idea stemmed from a 1985 April Fools’ story by George Plimpton in Sports Illustrated about New York Mets pitching prospect Sidd Finch, who could throw a 168 mph fastball with pinpoint accuracy. Sivils was one of many nationwide hoodwinked by the story. So like P.T. Barnum, Sivils believed there’s a sucker born every minute. That’s when he and Crowder created Village Academy, which they located in the real community of Village, which used to have a school, near Magnolia in Columbia County. So, each week during the football season from 1985 to 1988, they called the state’s two largest newspapers with the real scores for Jessieville, then called back with scores and statistics for fictitious Village Academy. Although the star, Jess Norman couldn’t be the only player on the team, so Sivils and Crowder padded the stats with names of their friends, who loved the recognition.

The men figured their prank would succeed if Village Academy didn’t play Arkansas schools and didn’t win too much. As it turned out, the Beavers conveniently didn’t even have a home stadium, so all their games were played on the road in Louisiana.

The fake scores and game summaries for the school’s football team were unchallenged and undetected and were regularly printed in the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat, the two state newspapers in Little Rock, along with the heroics of makebelieve star Jess Norman. The Associated Press even picked up the scores, and they ended up running in newspapers across the state.

In fact, Jess Norman was such a standout on the gridiron, college recruiting letters began arriving at Crowder’s home address.

The prank was so good and so successful, that Sivils and Crowder couldn’t resist sharing the secret. Before long, fellow faculty members at Jessieville created an alma mater and fight song for Village Academy. Publicity photographs showed up, and green T-shirts and bumper stickers that said “Village Academy Beavers” were distributed.

Turns out the Beavers also had a track program and girls basketball, where Jess Norman’s sister Jessica was a star. And when inclement weather forced the closing of schools across the state, Village Academy was also on the list for Little Rock television stations.

And during the 1988 Christmas parade in Hot Springs, the daughter of a Jessieville teacher rode in a convertible with a poster attached to the car that read “Little Miss Village Academy.”

The jig was up, however, when an Arkansas Democrat reporter was tipped off in October 1988, and the beaver — er, the cat — was out of the proverbial bag.

But that didn’t keep Village Academy from taking on a life of its own. When the Arkansas Activities Association was selling bricks for a fundraiser, someone bought one that’s engraved in memory of Jess Norman and Village Academy. And Crowder said that for years, the portion of the University of Arkansas football program where Razorback Foundation contributors were listed included a donation from the Village Academy Booster Club. Sivils, who now lives in Siloam Springs, Ark., is reputed to be responsible for the annual contribution in the name of the booster club.

But it turns out Jess Norman was famous for more than just football and track. After Sivils moved to Sallisaw, concert programs would list Norman as having written at least one piece each year, because former Sallisaw band director Scott Mosby helped perpetuate the Jess Norman legend. “Scott was a big fan of this prank,” Sivils recalled this week. “When he would print our programs for band, he would always make sure that Jess wrote one of the songs.” Norman’s name showed up on an annual basis until Sivils moved from Sallisaw to Siloam Springs.

The hoax is considered one of the classic pranks in modern Arkansas history, and was the subject of a lengthy feature story in the 2015 edition of Hooten’s Arkansas Football magazine.

In 2016, before Sivils moved from his home at 505 S. Mc-Gee, a Dallas magazine reporter came to Sallisaw and interviewed Sivils for two hours for a five-page article. Sivils even recreated the 1980s photo of Village Academy football coach Bob Bandman with a present-day photo of the veteran coach, this time on the turf at Sallisaw’s Perry F. Lattimore Stadium.

“There’s never been any publicity in Sallisaw that I know of, so you’ll be breaking the story there,” Sivils said this week. “I’ve got a lot of friends in Sallisaw, I always will have. It’ll be neat for them to see this.”

Sivils looks back fondly on those three magical years of Village Academy glory. “We had a good time with it.”

And, as he points out in disbelief, the legend of Jess Norman “doesn’t seem to die out.”

If you’d like to herald the obscure school, Arkansas-based Rock City Outfitters still offers Village Academy Beavers shirts on its website. And, yes, there’s also a community Facebook page for the Beavers.

Long live the Beavers!!!