UC Santa Barbara polished the bridle from a golden past while saddling up for this weekend’s All-Gaucho Roundup.
Its annual alumni fiesta featured Saturday’s celebration of life for the late, great and brassy Donn Bernstein. He was the Gauchos’ first full-time sports information director, recruited by football coach Jack Curtice in 1964 to promote the university’s bold entry into major college athletics.
Curtice, a former Stanford University coach and a renowned innovator of the passing game, urged a bigger investment from the university to challenge the athletic greatness of her bigger sisters in Berkeley and Westwood.
UCSB, a relative newcomer to the University of California system, jumped on board with both pairs of cleats. The first of three phases for a new football stadium was completed in 1966, with blueprints drawn for an expansion to 33,000 seats. Future home games were contracted with the likes of Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Air Force. Trips to Washington, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Northwestern were also scheduled.
“If Cactus Jack Curtice was going to lead Gaucho football to the promised land,” Bernie explained many decades later, “then by God, Donn Bernstein would conduct the publicity campaign.
“I set forth to build a Gaucho media bandwagon second to none.”
But the war wagons of Vietnam forced UCSB to change course just a few years later. The students’ pep-rally bonfires soon evolved into bank burnings to support the anti-war movement.
“The students really lost interest in football,” Bernie conceded just a few years later.
The school responded by drawing up a more modest budget and dropping football after the 1971 season. Bernstein read the bottom line and left the following season to construct a new media bandwagon at the University of Washington. The gig led him to even bigger things just a few years later as the media coordinator for ABC Sports.
But some things didn’t change for UCSB. Bernstein held onto his old, rustic cabin on Isla Vista’s Del Playa Drive and kept that bandwagon rolling out of its driveway. He remained an active Gaucho booster until his dying day of Oct. 16, 2019.
UCSB honored him as an honorary alumnus in 1979 and inducted him into its Athletics Hall of Fame in 2002.
The Gauchos, meanwhile, enjoyed their own measure of athletic greatness in the half-century that followed. It was reflected in last week’s ceremony to induct the newest class for their Hall of Fame.
Jennifer Borcich, Soccer, Class of 2004
She broke the Big West Conference record by scoring 56 career goals and, combined with 26 assists, also set the high-water mark for total points with 138. She won the league’s Offensive Player of the Year Award three times and made the All-Big West Conference First Team during all four of her seasons as a Gaucho.
Borcich was also an All-Far West and NCAA All-Regional pick during both her junior and senior years.
The impeccable timing she developed as a striker wasn’t lost over time. She was about to give birth in Sacramento last year and unable to travel to the Hall of Fame banquet when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a postponement of her induction to last week.
“Jen did it all for us,” longtime Gaucho coach Paul Stumpf said. “She was our team captain, was the most fit player, worked the hardest, and she was a great teammate. In a word, she was a great player.”
Tom Harris, Track and Field, Class of 1980
He came to UCSB in the mid-1970s to train at the internationally acclaimed decathlon training center run by Gaucho coach Sam Adams. He wound up setting the school record of 7,600 points in the 10-event competition during the spring of 1980.
Harris also earned NCAA All-America honors that year with a sixth-place finish at the NCAA Championships. He’d finished 10th as a sophomore in 1978.
He twice qualified for the U.S. Olympic Trials. He nearly made it to the 1984 Games in Los Angeles when he set a personal record of 7,835 points.
“In my mind, I thought I could make it to the Olympics,” Harris said. “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think so. But now I look back, the work ethic we had, being first on the track and last to leave, that applies to the rest of your life.”
Harris wound up finding fame as a sound editor in Hollywood, winning five Emmys while working on such shows as “The West Wing” and “ER.”
Damon Jones, Baseball, Class of 1991
Like Harris, he achieved greatness even after leaving the field of competition. Jones, who was recently hired by the Los Angeles Dodgers as a vice president, assistant general manager and baseball legal counsel, was inducted by UCSB as this year’s “Distinguished Gaucho.”
He hit .250 as a freshman, redshirted as a sophomore and then batted .273 as a junior while playing an errorless outfield. But his greatest accomplishments came in the classroom, where he earned a pair of Big West Scholar-Athlete of the Year Awards.
Jones did post-graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania before earning his juris doctor with cum laude honors at Harvard Law School.
He spent more than two decades as a sports, entertainment and media attorney. That included a stint as senior vice president and general counsel for Major League Baseball’s Washington Nationals. He most recently served as General Counsel for the NFL’s football team in Washington D.C.
Jones also devoted himself to that city’s inner-city youth by volunteering for the Nationals’ Youth Baseball Academy.
“The longer I’ve been away and the more my career has progressed, the more I’ve come to appreciate my time here,” Jones said of UCSB. “I have a strong core belief in community service, particularly in underserved communities. I view it as both a privilege and an obligation, especially as an African-American.
“The lessons I learned as a player, even in Little League, had an impact on my development in ways I wasn’t aware of until much later. I want other kids to get that opportunity.”
Chad Peshke, Baseball, Class of 2001
His tenure as the Ironman of UCSB baseball began during his freshman year when he replaced an injured infielder in the starting lineup for the 1998 season opener. He had set the school record of 214 consecutive starts by the time he graduated in 2001.
“That’s the thing I’m most proud of,” Peshke said after Cleveland picked him in the MLB Draft.
His batting statistics were Hall-of-Fame quality. He still holds the school’s all-time records for hits (294) and doubles (68). He’s also third in triples (11) and fourth in total bases (427).
Peshke was twice voted to the All-Big West team as a second baseman. He also made the NCAA All-West Region Team as a senior. His batting average of .394 that season still ranks ninth in the school record books. But his coach, Bob Brontsema, said Peshke’s greatest virtue was that he was “a gamer.”
“He can play short, second or third,” he said during the Gauchos’ NCAA Regional season of 2001. “He knows how to play the game.”
1988 Men’s Volleyball Team
Coach Ken Preston, who received his individual induction into UCSB’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2018, guided the 1988 Gauchos to the California Intercollegiate Volleyball Association championship and an NCAA Final Four appearance in Fort Wayne, Ind. They beat George Mason in the semifinals before losing a five-set thriller to USC in the championship match.
Jose Gandara and David Rottman, the team’s top two hitters, were voted to the NCAA All-America team that season. They both still rank among UCSB’s top eight in career kills. The team’s setter, Jon Wallace remains the Gauchos’ all-time leader in assists.
Eric Fonoimoana, another Gaucho Hall-of-Famer and a gold medalist in beach volleyball at the 2000 Olympic Games, was an emerging star as a freshman that season.
“One of the reasons we were successful was that all differences were left at the door when we walked into the gym,” Rottman said. “We had one common bond and that was to work hard and win.”
It’s been a common thread from the days of Curtice and Bernstein, and beyond.
— 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.
