On a Roll With the Waves : Pepperdine’s Dexter Howard Has Shown a Brilliance on the Court That Sometimes Fades, but He’s Red Hot Now

On the day before Pepperdine’s basketball team was to play at Nevada Reno, starting forward Dexter Howard overslept and missed the team van to Los Angeles International Airport.

Howard caught a ride and made the team flight, but, as a disciplinary measure, he was benched briefly at the start of the game the next night.

He was wide awake when he went into the game, however, and he didn’t miss many shots against the Wolf Pack. The junior from San Francisco scored 31 points, then a career high, to lead Pepperdine to an 87-79 victory. Last week, in a 102-76 rout of UC Irvine on the road, he scored 33 points.

Howard, a graduate of McAteer High School who was the San Francisco prep player of the year in 1985, has been brilliant at times in his three seasons with Pepperdine.

But that brilliance has been marred by streaks.

As a redshirt freshman in the 1986-87 season, he scored 24 points in a nationally televised game with DePaul. He averaged 13.2 points a game and shot 65% from the field in Pepperdine’s first 12 games. However, in the next 18 games he averaged only 4.6 points and shot just 33.3%.

He was more consistent last year, averaging 9.9 points and 4.1 rebounds and shooting 53.4% from the field as the team’s sixth man. But he brought those averages up with a hot streak in the Waves’ last nine games when he averaged 13.3 points and 5.2 rebounds. In the last game of the season, a loss to New Mexico in the first round of the National Invitation Tournament, he made 8 of 8 shots from the field--all in the first half--and finished with 20 points.

So he has shown flashes of greatness, but this year he has been on the beam.

Howard did not start in Pepperdine’s opener, an 82-79 loss to Texas in the Hawaii Tip-Off Tournament, but he started the next five and has averaged nearly 30 minutes of playing time a game--the most action he has seen in his college career.

Plenty of action has been good for him--not so good for opponents. He is leading the team in scoring with an average of 21.2 points and also is the Waves’ best rebounder with an average of 9.3. He has made 53.7% of shots from the field.

As Howard has steadily picked up steam, so has Pepperdine. After losing their first two games, both by 3-point margins, the Waves have won their last four, three on the road.

In past years, Orange County has been never-never land for Pepperdine; the Waves had never won a road game at Cal State Fullerton or UC Irvine. But last week the Waves began with a 71-67 victory over Fullerton and then came the trouncing of the Anteaters and Howard’s 33 points.

Howard said he didn’t play well against the Titans, though he finished with 13 points and 13 rebounds. In that game, he said, he was more preoccupied with defense than with scoring. He felt that he did not do much to contain Fullerton’s star junior forward, Cedric Ceballos, who finished with a game-high 29 points. But Howard bounced back two nights later with 33 points and 11 rebounds against Irvine.

He believes his up-and-down first season at Pepperdine resulted from financial problems his family was having. He is the youngest of four children. His father, he said, is a construction worker and his mother a teacher of handicapped children.

Last year, he said, he had hoped to start, but Tom Lewis, in his first year of play after transferring from USC in 1986, started ahead of him. Lewis averaged 23 points to lead the West Coast Athletic Conference in scoring for all games.

He said that he was told that he could be more valuable to the team coming off the bench. “I felt that, if that was what was best for the team, OK. But I thought to myself that it would be better if I were starting.

“For two years I would come in mostly when we were down, come off the bench mostly when the momentum of the game was changing. I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t I start and help the team maintain a lead?’ ”

He said that he and Lewis were not the best of friends at the beginning of last season but that they have become close since then. “We’ve taken two or three classes together. He’s a fun guy. He’s a nice guy to hang around with.”

It has also been nice for Howard to hang around with Lewis on the basketball court. Many of Howard’s baskets have come because he has gotten open and Lewis has hit him with sharp passes. Known more for his scoring, Lewis is the team’s second-best scorer and rebounder this season, averaging 17.5 points and 6.5 rebounds.

Coach Tom Asbury said he thinks that his two forwards “have become closer on and off the court. There was natural competition a year ago; now I think it’s more of a teamwork situation. Tom is a great passer and gets the ball to Dexter well.”

This year Howard’s renaissance was slowed when he broke his nose in an early practice. He and teammate Casey Crawford, a 6-11 center, were battling for a rebound, and Howard was accidentally elbowed.

Howard missed a couple of days of practice and did not start in the Waves’ first exhibition. He gave way to David Hairston, a transfer from Chabot College.

He wore a mask over his nose at first “but threw away the mask and decided to take my chances. I felt that it was so important that I couldn’t miss any games.”

This year, he said, “I have tried to dedicate myself. It is really up to us to make this a winning season.”

Asbury said Howard “is coming into his own and starting to be the type of player that we anticipated when we recruited him. I don’t want to say he’s been a pleasant surprise because it’s not a surprise. And his improvement has been magnified by the amount of playing time he’s getting.” Howard has been averaging nearly 30 minutes a game this season, compared to 20.6 minutes in his first year and 22 last season.

The new offense that Pepperdine is using, a 3- and 4-man passing game compared to the high-post offense employed by Jim Harrick, may also be helping Howard. “It might be creating more opportunities for him than the previous offense because of his talent and his instincts,” Asbury said. “There is more spontaneity than in the high-post offense, where there is less flexibility. It opens things up, and he can create more.

“Dexter is also getting a lot of offensive rebounds, doing a lot of dirty work that needs to be done, and converting that into a lot of points too.”

Howard has also been doing what needs to be done in the classroom. He did not play as a redshirt freshman and was able to hit the books that year. He has gone to summer school every year since he has been at Pepperdine and has accumulated nearly enough units to graduate.

He has taken enough classes to major in two disciplines: political science and sociology. He hopes to go to law school and become an attorney whether he plays professionally in the National Basketball Assn. or elsewhere.

“You don’t have to play basketball all your life. Basketball is an outlet that leads to other things. I can dunk and dribble, but there are other outlets.

“Whatever it takes to graduate, I will do that. Why go to school if not to get a degree?”

Meanwhile, he is enjoying life on the basketball court as the new and improved Dexter Howard.

“I play with emotion. I take a lot of quick shots; that’s my style. Some play it cool and collected, but I like to bang and butt heads.

“I get more motivation and play harder when I feel I have something to prove.”