UC Santa Barbara needed a big man when it stepped up into the world of big-time college basketball more than a half-century ago.
Six-foot-8 Doug Rex was ready and willing to put the Gauchos on his back.
He rewrote their record book for scoring and rebounding. He led them to a historic, 20-6 season during those crucial, transitional years to NCAA Division I status.
But Rex, who died on Oct. 29 at age 73, never got the same due accorded to the next generation of Gaucho stars.
Unlike Brian Shaw nearly two decades later, he didn’t cash in his NBA draft selection by playing professional basketball. He merely crossed to the other side of Highway 101 and served one season as an assistant coach at Dos Pueblos High School before joining the staff at UCSB.
He inspired no catchy monikers like the flashy Eric “The Freeze” McArthur, who played a different kind of center in 1990 on the greatest Gaucho team of all-time. One of Rob Gym’s greatest mysteries was that nobody ever nicknamed its monster rebounder as “Tyrannosaurus Rex”.
His death last month went mostly unnoticed in Santa Barbara, a town where he’d played and coached for 10 consecutive years. He was laid to rest in the college basketball heartland of Kentucky — his home state during the latter part of his life — with an obituary that made only a vague reference to his exploits in the sport.
It told mostly about the simple loves of his life: “banana splits and anything chocolate … playing blackjack at the casino.”
It concluded with the revelation that “His favorite job was being a papa.”
Rex and his wife, Janice, had three children — daughter Jordan, and sons Jayden and Jason — and five grandchildren.
On the Cusp of Greatness
But Rex, a center known more for jump hooks than slam dunks, came up just short of reaching ultimate glory.
That trend began at Bishop Alemany High School in Mission Hills, where he finished just one vote short of the 1967 CIF-Southern Section 2A Player of the Year Award. My dad, Santa Barbara News-Press sports editor Phil Patton, was on that panel with full knowledge that Rex was being recruited by UCSB.
I’ve always wondered if he voted for Rex … or against him to keep the big center off the recruiting radar of other schools.
Rex averaged 25 points a game for Alemany. Carl Skidmore of CIF champion South Pasadena — a guard who stood nearly a foot shorter — edged him out after lasting longer in the playoffs.
Rex did get recruited by 38 schools. UCLA’s John Wooden and North Carolina’s Dean Smith even expressed interest. But he just wanted to play and get a degree in economics from a respected university.
“First of all, I wanted a school with a good academic program because, after all, you go to college to get an education,” he said. “Second, I’d rather go to a not-so-well known school where I’d play than a big basketball school where I’d sit on the bench.
“UCSB was one of the only schools that sold itself on its own merits without knocking others in comparison. That was enough for me.”
Frosh Look for Gauchos
The NCAA didn’t allow freshmen to play varsity college basketball until 1972 — a year after Rex’s graduation from UCSB. He did give Gaucho fans an impressive preview in his debut with the freshman team. His double-double of 16 points and 12 rebounds nearly upset the varsity in a 66-62 exhibition defeat.
Humble and hard-working, Rex was accepted whole-heartedly by the varsity veterans the following season. That became clear to coach Ralph Barkey after he took Rex out of a lopsided game against San Fernando Valley State, later known as Cal State Northridge.
His 33 points that night had brought him within striking distance of the school record of 36 set five years earlier by Tom Lee.
“The big thing is that our players have developed tremendous confidence in Doug, and as a result he is getting the ball in the pivot a lot more than he did earlier in the season,” Barkey said in the post-game interview.
“The fact that some of our players wanted me to put him back in the closing minutes when he was within three points of setting a new school record is a tremendous compliment to Doug, especially since he is only a sophomore.”
Barkey resisted the suggestion, regarding it as unsporting, but he liked what it said about the future of his program.
UCSB had enjoyed prior success at the small-college level. Coach Willie Wilton guided the 1940-1941 Gauchos to a 20-9 record and the NAIA Final Four. Art Gallon took them to a 20-8 season and the NCAA College Division quarterfinals in 1960-1961.
But their upgrade from the College Division (now known as Division II) to the University Division (now known as Division I) was no easy task. UCSB suffered four straight losing seasons after moving up to the West Coast Athletic Conference (now known as the WCC) for the 1964-1965 season.
The Gauchos didn’t make themselves known until Rex became eligible as a sophomore. He led them to a 17-9 record — their first winning season at the NCAA’s top level — while averaging 17.8 points and 11.2 rebounds per game during the season of 1968-1969.
But he was hardly satisfied with himself.
His Own Harshest Critic
“I know it’s not good basketball, but I worry a lot on the floor,” Rex said at the time. “I get real mad at myself when I make mistakes.”
He’d always been a cerebral athlete, even on a baseball diamond. He was an imposing figure on a pitcher’s mound, but Alemany discovered him to be just as useful as a first-base coach. He became especially adept at figuring out what the opposing pitcher was about to throw.
“I made a science out of it,” Rex said. “I picked off the catcher’s signs on six out of the other seven schools in our league.”
Rex received All-WCAC honorable mention as a Gaucho sophomore in a league chock full of NBA-bound centers. But he was determined to improve.
“The toughest adjustment I had to make between frosh and varsity ball was getting used to the contact,” he said. “It’s a lot tougher to play with the big boys like Pete Cross (USF) and Dennis Awtrey (Santa Clara). When you’re out there 38 or 39 minutes a game with them, it gets to you, especially after a fast break or two.
“I realize I’m not as aggressive as I could be, but I’m going to work on that this summer.”
UCSB athletic director Jack Curtice, meanwhile, worked that summer on getting the Gauchos into a new conference. Curtice, who had just retired as their football coach, was incensed when the WCAC voted against adding football or accepting the membership applications of Fresno State and San Diego State.
Dad echoed Curtice’s displeasure in his “Patton’s Pressbox” column. He wrote that, “with the exception of Pacific, the remaining WCAC schools apparently do not want a well-rounded conference athletic program with strong, representative teams in all sports.”
UCSB met with representatives from Fresno State, Long Beach State, San Diego State and San José State to form a new conference called the Pacific Coast Athletic Association. They announced the formation of their new league during a news conference in Santa Barbara in October 1968.
By the time the conference was officially chartered in July, Cal State Los Angeles had also signed up and Pacific joined as a football-only member.
“The new conference will provide a real challenge in our university and will mark a great step toward improving our athletics in the future,” Curtice said.
Two decades later, the league renamed itself as the Big West Conference to become part of ESPN’s Big Monday basketball TV lineup.
Ironically, budget deficits prompted UCSB to drop football just two years after joining the PCAA. The league responded by dropping the Gauchos as a member before the 1974-1975 school year, although it readmitted them two years later.
First to 1,000 Points
Little changed for Rex during his two years in the new league. He averaged 18.7 points per game both seasons and earned All-PCAA First-Team honors both times.
He became the first Gaucho in history to reach the 1,000-point milestone — no easy feat in the days of three-year careers — and finished with 1,434. Carrick DeHart, a four-year starter, broke his school record in 1990 and finished with 1,687 points. Orlando Johnson holds the record currently with 1,825 scored from 2009 to 2012.
Rex’s career rebound average of 10.6 still tops the school record books. His scoring average of 18.4 ranks third behind Raymond Tutt, who posted a 21.5 mark in two seasons (1996-1998), and Johnson’s three-year average of 19.6.
The names Shaw, DeHart and McArthur have been immortalized as “Legends of the Dome” on banners that hang inside UCSB’s Thunderdome.
Shaw was the star of the Gauchos’ first NCAA Division I Tournament team in 1988. DeHart and McArthur, sophomores on that club, led them to their first Division I Tournament win two years later.
Rex, however, never got a banner. He never even made it into the Thunderdome. It opened for business one year after he lost his coaching job, when Barkey was replaced by Ed De Lacy.
Tark the Shark-Infested Waters
Bad timing — playing during Tark the Shark’s reign of terror at nationally ranked Long Beach State — also robbed him of any post-season glory. The NCAA awarded national tournament berths in those days to only league champions, and coach Jerry Tarkanian’s 49ers were beginning a streak of eight straight PCAA titles.
The Gauchos looked tournament-ready by the advent of the 1970s. Their lineup included Rex and John Tschogl, an athletic small forward who would later play for both the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and Philadelphia 76ers.
But UCSB finished second in the PCAA to the nationally ranked 49ers in both 1970 and 1971. It lost heartbreakers of 99-98 and 73-71 to Long Beach during Rex’s junior season.
The Gauchos expected the consolation of a National Invitation Tournament during their 20-6 season of 1971 after suffering their only two league losses to Long Beach. The 49ers proved themselves worthy of their national ranking by taking eventual NCAA champion UCLA to the wire before losing, 57-55, in the NCAA West Regional Final.
But Rex would endure his final snub and never play again, even after getting drafted by the Houston Rockets. He was realistic about his chances of making it in the NBA as a 6-8 center.
The Gauchos once experimented with having him switch positions with 6-9 Earl Frazier, a leaner but taller power forward.
“I started playing forward during practice this week and I kind of like it,” he said. “I’m pretty slow, though, and don’t have very good moves, so it would take a lot of work.”
He would eventually conduct his work with a coach’s whistle, and even that went silent after six years.
Rex put basketball behind him and entered the business world, finding his enjoyment in banana splits and anything chocolate.
And most of all, he learned that “papa” is the best nickname a guy can ever grow into.
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.