The Best Who Never Were

There is a dark cloud that hangs over any big city playground basketball court, its shadow casting uncertainty over every young hoops protegee. Thy are easy to identify. Look for the cocky little bop in the stride. For every kid who makes it out of St. Louis, a Bradley Beal or a Justin Tatum, there are countless others who do not. Google the names of David Brent or Marshall Rogers. 

Marshall Rogers and David Brent were teammates on the best high school basketball team ever produced by the city of St. Louis, MO: the 1969 Sumner Bulldogs. Anyone who debates this assessment is just wrong.

Marshall Rogers was a Sumner High 1971 grad who had it all: size, strength, a text book perfect jump shot and a swag that made him what many old timers call to this day the best trash talker in the history of the Pubic High League. His high school coach John Agee called him, “a combination of Oscar Robinson, Elgin Baylor and Jo Jo White, all rolled into one.” He also owned a volatile personality controlled by a troubled mind. 

Marshall Rogers

Rogers went at first to the University of Kansas. He stayed for one semester. Eventually, he found his way to Pan American University where hall of fame and folksy Coach Abe Lemons waited with outstretched welcoming arms. Lemons may be the only coach who ever really truly understood the moody and volatile Rogers. In 1976, Rogers led the nation in scoring with an average of 36 points per game. He was a 1976 first round NBA draft choice of the Golden State Warriors. He was dropped by the team in pre-season camp before his second season.

A college star, at 6’4”, Rogers was a “tweener.” When he got to the Pros, Rogers was not big enough to bang inside with the taller players but not quick enough to play on the perimeter. After his two-year NBA career as a marginal player with Golden State and several years of a nomadic quest to re discover his game in the backwater of the minor leagues, Rogers was washed up. Rogers had nowhere else left to go but back home to North St. Louis. He soon faded into obscurity. Rogers struggled with mental health issues most of his adult life. He lived mostly with his mother and sporadically held down menial jobs. Rogers was several times, through the jurisdiction of the court system, placed in mental health facilities for evaluations.

In his 40’s, Rogers was a fixture at a neighborhood playground basketball court near his mother’s house. Every summer evening, he could be found alone, a solidary figure shooting one jump shot after another at a rim with no net, always clad in his old and tattered Golden State Warrior practice gear. Few who saw the dusk silhouette of this overweight middle age man going though his nightly ritual would have pegged him as a one-time national scoring leader.

Sadly, Rogers died alone in June, 2011, from complications of diabetes. He was 58 years of age. Rogers spent the last few years of his life in an assisted living center, no family member remained who could care for him. His constant companion in those last years was a scrap book from his glory days as a Sumner Bulldog. He delighted in sharing it with both friends and strangers. Rogers had his high school stats committed to memory. He eventually lost both of his legs to diabetes.  It is said he refused, after the amputations confined him to a wheel chair, to take his life sustaining medicines. He had no interest in a life that denied him the ability to shoot solidary jump shots on an empty playground.

David Brent is St. Louis’s basketball version of the best that never was. Brent starred for the 1969 Sumner Bulldogs. So talent loaded was Coach John Algee’s squad that Marshall Rogers was the team’s 7^th man.  Brent stood 6’11” but moved like a gazelle and ran the court like a cheetah. His speed for a man of his size was jaw dropping. At almost 7 feet tall, he ran the anchor leg on the Bulldogs state championship mile relay team with a 440-yard split of under 49 seconds. In the 1969 final four, he torched Columbia Hickman in the semifinal round with a 35 point, 13 rebound and 9 blocked shots effort. He hit 14 of 18 field goal attempts. For good measure, the next night in the championship win over Webster Groves, Brent led the scoring with 35 points. Brent averaged 26 points per game in his senior season. He led the Bulldogs in 1970 to another PHL title.

Brent enrolled as a freshman at Jacksonville State, the year after the Dolphins had finished second in the NCAA tournament, falling to John Wooden and the UCLA Bruins in the title game. In 1971, freshman were not allowed to play varsity basketball. Having never played any type of organized AAU competition, Brent’s talents were only known on the local St. Louis scene. His coming out party on the national stage would be the pre-season Jacksonville Varsity vs. Freshman scrimmage game. In the fall of 1970, the Dolphins returned not only 7’4” Artis Gilmore, one of the era’s top big men, but also 7-foot 1 inch Pembroke Boroughs III, plus two other starters from the previous year’s national runner up team.

Brent dominated the game and in doing so opened the eyes of the basketball world. He hung 45 points on an embarrassed Gilmore and blocked 11 shots. Brent stayed through his sophomore year at Jacksonville and then took some bad advice and bolted for the cash dangled by the Memphis franchise of the American Basketball Association. The still teenage giant had not the emotional maturity to be cut loose on his own with a group of seasoned pros. He immediately picked up some bad habits.

So, where is David Brent today? After a five-year tour of constantly shuffling between pro practice squads and a seat on the end of the team bench, in 1976, the Los Angeles Lakers released his contract rights. No one answered his agents many calls. The kid with all the talent was at the age of 25, washed up. He said at the time, all he knew was basketball.

Public records show David Brent, since retiring from basketball, has lived off and on in St. Louis for the last 40 years. There are several addresses and cell numbers listed for him, over 40, none active. I can find no death certificate for him. He has become, to my search, a ghost of playgrounds’ past. There was one human interest story on him I found written in a local newspaper over 15 years ago. What I took from the article was that adult life had not been kind to the once man-child. I heard from a source a few years ago that Brent was a street corner preacher in North St. Louis, performing for the coins of by-passers. A former PHL star from the early 70’s told me recently, when I relayed to  him of what I heard, “I don’t know man, preaching on the street corner? That don’t sound like David, but I haven’t seen or heard of him for years, so it might be true.”