TicketsBy Bill Koch
GoBearcats.com
CINCINNATI – Late in the first half of the University of Cincinnati's 62-48 victory at Memphis, senior forward Gary Clark went up for a rebound, lost control of the ball, and tumbled to the FedEx Forum floor.
Memphis forward Mike Parks Jr. grabbed the ball under the Tigers' basket and went up for what he surely thought would be an easy layup only to have Clark bounce up to block his shot. The play had little impact on the outcome, but it was emblematic of Clark's approach to the game.
"From a coaching standpoint you sit there and you think, now there's a Bearcat," said UC head coach Mick Cronin. "That's everything you want. When you have a senior make a play like that, there's a sense of pride as a coaching staff that this guy has really bought into becoming everything that we wanted him to become. To me, that was the epitome of who he is now as a player."
Most college basketball coaches will tell you that no matter how much they scout a recruit or what the recruiting analysts say about him, they don't really know what they have until he gets on campus and begins to practice. And even then it sometimes takes several years to know for sure.
It was different with Clark, who arrived at UC as a freshman in 2014 and immediately made a positive impression on the coaching staff.
"The first week or so of practice his rebounding was off the charts," Cronin said. "I told (associate head coach) Larry (Davis) this kid is going to be a great rebounder, one of the best rebounders to ever play at Cincinnati. Either that or the rest of our guys are terrible because he gets every rebound."
Cronin's initial assessment was on the money. The 6-foot-8, 230-pound Clark started all 34 of UC's games during his freshman year when he averaged 7.8 points and 7.2 rebounds. Four years later, he became the fifth player in UC history to score 1,000 points and accrue 1,000 rebounds. The others are Oscar Robertson and Jack Twyman, both members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame; All-American Paul Hogue, who led the Bearcats to national championships in 1961 and 1962; and Robert Miller.
The unassuming Clark has produced one of the most impressive careers in UC history. As the Bearcats head into the 2018 NCAA Tournament, he ranks 17th in scoring with 1,440 points, third in rebounding with 1,109 and fifth in blocked shots with 178. He has started 135 games, the most of any player in school history; is second in career victories with 105; and tied for second with Troy Caupain in consecutive games played with 137.
During Clark's time at UC, the Bearcats have gone 23-11, 22-11, 30-6 and are 30-4 this season with a No. 2 seed in the South Region, the highest seed for a UC team since the 2002 Bearcats were a No. 1 seed. They've posted back-to-back 30-win seasons for the first time in school history.
With Clark leading the way, UC went 27-4 during the regular season and won the American Athletic Conference championship, clinching the title on the final day of the regular season with a pulsating 62-61 victory at Wichita State. It was the first regular-season league title for UC since 2003-04 when the Bearcats played in Conference USA.
Clark, 23, was the AAC Player of the Year, the Defensive Player of the Year, won the league's Sportsmanship Award and was a unanimous first-team selection. Clark then led the Bearcats to the AAC Tournament title in Orlando with three straight double-doubles, including a 20-point, 12-rebound performance in a 56-55 victory over Houston in the championship game. Clark scored the winning point by making a free throw with four seconds remaining and was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.
Even Cronin didn't foresee all that. And the UC coach couldn't have known during Clark's early days at UC that he had landed a player whose comportment off the court would be every bit as impressive as his play on the court. Nor could he have known how much affection UC fans would eventually feel for him, fondly chanting "Ga-ry! Ga-ry!" as his list of accomplishments grew.
***
The point man for UC during Clark's recruitment was associate head coach Davis, who liked everything about Clark's game the first time he saw him play. Well, almost everything.
"All the things he does now you could see it in him then," Davis said. "But I'm sitting there thinking he should have had 35 points and 15 rebounds. He should have blocked four more shots. He could have dominated that much more. I thought he was talented, but I didn't think he played hard enough and I told him that. I thought at the time that this kid is different because he didn't bristle at it. I think he appreciated the fact that I told him that."
In fact, Davis' blunt assessment might have helped to convince Clark to attend UC. He was also being recruited by Wake Forest and North Carolina State and later by a few other Atlantic Coast Conference schools. But to most of those ACC coaches, Davis said, Clark wasn't their first choice. They were focused on other, more highly rated players and saw Clark as a fallback option.
Clark was intrigued by Davis' critique. Rather than take it as an insult, he embraced it. And he was pleased to hear it again from Cronin as the recruiting process unfolded.
"That showed me that he cared enough about me for my future that I could trust him," Clark said. "I've always been about trust and loyalty. They made me push myself to get better and (Cronin) finally came and said we're going to offer you a scholarship because you've gotten better with your conditioning and you're playing harder. That's when I was like, these guys really care about me."
Clark grew up in Clayton, N.C., a town of about 20,000 located 16 miles southeast of Raleigh. The oldest of four children, he was raised by his mother, Tammy McKey, and his father, Gary Clark Sr. His parents are divorced. His dad, who lives in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., said Clark was very shy as a youngster, but was always a standout athlete. In middle school, he ran the hurdles, the 400 meters, and threw the shot on the track team. He also played wide receiver and safety on the football team. But he excelled in basketball, already dunking the ball in the eighth grade.
"He fell in love with the game very, very early," Gary Sr. said. "I think he was probably six or seven years old when I bought him his very first basketball and basketball goal. He would cry if I didn't want to go out there with him. He wanted to be out there all the time. His mama would get mad at me. He loved the game."
When Clark reached high school, he gave up football and track because he wanted to save himself for basketball, but also because he wanted to carve out more time for fishing, which would become one if his favorite pursuits. Just as he had fallen in love with basketball, he quickly took to fishing as a youngster when he accompanied his grandfather and uncles. By the ninth grade, he said, "I really got big into it."
"I just like the calm," Clark said. "I can get on a boat and I don't have to worry about anything. I have control over how well I make my jig or my artificial bait dance to make the fish come get it. I can get away because a lot of places don't have any (cell phone) service."
At UC he found a fishing soul mate in teammate Zack Tobler, a walk-on who grew up in Ft. Wright, Ky., and had been around fishing and hunting his entire life. As a freshman at UC, Clark's locker was next to Tobler's. Before long they were fishing together, occasionally taking along a teammate or two on their excursions.
Clark first attracted attention from college basketball coaches when he was a freshman playing on the Clayton varsity.
"These coaches started coming and asking questions about who's this freshman who's playing on the varsity," Clark said, "and I would actually start terrorizing seniors from other schools. It was weird because I'm the first to attend college in my family, so I didn't know how to take it. It was just like, this is pretty cool. My first unofficial visit was to (North Carolina-Wilmington). I was ready to go right then, but my coach was like, you're going to get a lot more. After awhile they just get kept rolling in the better I got."
Clark finished his high school career as Clayton's all-time leader in scoring, rebounding and blocked shots. He was a two-time Greater Neuse River Conference Player of the Year, averaged 26 points, seven rebounds and four assists as a senior, and was rated a 4-star recruit by Rivals.
"When he was in high school, everybody in the community knew Gary and came out to watch him play," said Clayton coach Denny Medlin. "We had to turn people away from our gym. It was just a unique situation. It's like he's gone to Cincinnati and done the same thing, except it's on a much larger scale. Everybody there fell in love with him too."
The highlight of Clark's high school career was the quadruple-double he posted during his senior year against West Johnson when he scored 22 points with 21 rebounds, 15 blocked shots and 10 assists, even though he played only a few minutes in the fourth quarter of a blowout win. It remains the only confirmed quadruple-double in the history of North Carolina high school basketball, according to Medlin, and it came on the same day that Clark's name was inadvertently left off the list of McDonald's All-American nominees.
The oversight was later corrected and Clark eventually was included on the list, but it served its purpose in providing extra motivation for him that night.
"It was one of those things where I was going out to try to prove a point," Clark said.
Clark is so laid-back that Cronin frequently had to publicly prod him to be more aggressive on offense during his first few years. He was too deferential, too quick to pass to a teammate instead of attacking the rim himself. At first, Clark mostly smiled and shrugged when confronted by reporters with Cronin's criticism, almost as if it he didn't believe he was good enough to be so selfish. Besides, he preferred to get his teammates involved.
Primarily a low-post player with a soft shooting touch around the basket, Clark frequently gets double-teamed when he has the ball, so it's logical for him to look for the open man. But he would sometimes pass even when he was confronted by only one defender. And that's what irked Cronin.
Even at times early in Clark's senior year, Cronin had to tell him that if he didn't attack the basket he would have to do extra running at practice. Finally Clark got the message and stopped passing up shots. In fact, he began to aggressively seek them out.
Clark is very old-school, fundamentally sound on offense and defense. He doesn't pound his chest after a dunk or let loose with a primal scream in an age where such displays are commonplace. That doesn't mean he plays without intensity. The competitive fire is there. You don't grab 1,000 rebounds without being intense.
It's just that the placid look on his face and the way he rarely ever forces the action tend to hide his passion more often than not.
"You see it when I jump into the defensive lane and get a steal and go dunk it or rotate and swat somebody's shot and block it real hard," Clark said. "You can see it if you're watching, but if you're looking for the animation and all that stuff, it's not in me. I'd rather just get the job done. That's just the way my personality is, unless one of the guys in practice or somebody on the other team will start yapping and then I'll return the favor. If I do it, the only person who hears it is the guy next to me who I'm saying it to."
* * *
Two years into his college career, Clark received a boost from the addition on the UC roster of Kyle Washington, a 6-foot-9 forward who transferred to UC from North Carolina State. Long before they became teammates, they competed against each other on Dec. 20, 2014 when UC played the Wolfpack in Raleigh.
Clark was a freshman. Washington was a sophomore. UC won, 76-60, getting nine points and four rebounds from Clark. Washington scored 10 points with six rebounds for NC State.
"I remember Bobby Lutz, my assistant coach at State, talking about how he was a good, young player," Washington said of Clark. "He had games where he would show what he would eventually become, but it wasn't all the way there yet. Coming into the game, I was like, I think this guy's pretty good, so I'm not going to underestimate him."
Clark recalls Cronin emphasizing to him before the game how good Washington's jump hook was and urging him to do his best to keep him from getting to his spot to shoot it.
After that game, they went their separate ways. But by the end of the season Washington had decided to transfer. When he was recruited by the Bearcats he remembered Clark, who became one of the reasons he chose UC, figuring that they could win a lot of games together.
Clark first became aware of Washington when he was in high school. He was attending a camp at NC State during the summer before his senior year, which was Washington's freshman year in college. Minutes before his team was to play, Clark saw Washington putting up shots using a rebounding gun, trying to squeeze in as many as he could before he had to leave the floor.
"His work ethic, I saw it then," Clark said, "and when he got here, I saw it even more how he was constantly in the gym getting up shots."
Under the NCAA's rules for transfers, Washington was ineligible to play during Clark's sophomore year, but they competed tooth and nail during practices, with neither player giving an inch, and earned the respect for each other that they still have today.
Both players became 1,000-point career scorers and combined to form one of the most effective low-post scoring tandems in the league, if not the nation, which caused matchup problems for their opponents.
"It's something people have to deal with that they don't usually have to deal with," Cronin said.
As Washington put it, "It's pick your poison."
***
Off the court, Clark won the Jean Stephens Memorial Award, which goes to the UC athlete "who epitomizes integrity, respect, high ethical standards and a commitment to the team." Clark, who is on track to graduate with a degree in criminal justice following spring semester, logged more than 50 hours of community service at Our Daily Bread, the Sheakley Boys and Girls Club and the Friars Club. He also participated in campus orientation during the fall to help new students get acclimated to their new surroundings.
He earned UC's Legion of Excellence Award for in 2016 for having the highest grade point average on the men's basketball team and interned with UC's vice-president of safety and reform to impact campus safety.
In December, after the Bearcats lost back-to-back games to Xavier and Florida, they bounced back with a home victory over unbeaten Mississippi State, then flew to the West Coast to face UCLA in storied Pauley Pavilion, where they knocked off the Bruins to gain a measure of revenge for their second-round NCAA Tournament loss in 2017.
At the time, it was a signature victory for UC, the second straight win on the way to a 16-game winning streak, which was tied for the nation's longest. Clark had a typical Clark game with 10 points, 11 rebounds, three blocked shots, four assists and three steals. But what Karen Hatcher, UC's executive senior associate athletic director, remembers most from that trip occurred at the team's hotel on the morning of the game, where 85 donors who had made the trip on the team's charter flight gathered for a UC-sponsored breakfast.
"I came downstairs for the breakfast and Gary said, 'Hey, can I go in the room where the donors are? I just would really like to tell them thanks.' So we went in and he went to every single table, thanking them for coming and supporting the team," Hatcher said. "He took pictures with many of them. Obviously, he's done so many things here like that, but just to see it and watch it was really kind of special. Later when I talked to him, he said, 'I just think that people who would do that, to fly all the way out here and spend their money to watch us play, is such a big deal. It's really great to be in an arena and have people from your team cheering for you.'
"The times when I have him meet with donors he's not ever talking about himself. He's talking about the rest of the team. He's talking about how he loves his team. He's talking about his coaches, how they might be hard, but they're pushing him to be a great player and a great man. That stuff, I just love hearing it as a mother of two children. That's how you want your kids to be. The donors all love him. The first thing they asked was, 'Did you tell him to come in?' I said, 'Absolutely not. He asked.' When people hear stuff like that, they're like, where did that come from? We love that. Gary is like a gentle giant. He's very appreciative of the little things."
***
About a month before the UCLA trip, Clark touched a family of UC fans in a more personal and emotional way. The relationship started when Sarah Chaney, who works in UC's development office, received an email from UC fan Cheri Miller requesting UC memorabilia for her niece, 31-year-old Natalie Youtsey, a UC graduate and a marathon runner who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010 during her sophomore year at UC. Years later, Natalie contracted PML (progressive multi-focal leukoencephalopathy), which her family says was a rare reaction to an aggressive chemotherapy drug. Miller made a point in her email to tell Chaney that Clark was her niece's favorite player.
Natalie started taking the drug in 2012 and found it to be extremely beneficial. She was doing so well that she ran 25 marathons and two ultra-marathons of 100 miles each, most of them with her father, Clark. Her mother, Lynn, and her Aunt Cheri served as their support team during the races. But in July 2017, Natalie began to experience serious problems.
"She had very low energy, was having problems with her vision, and was having swallowing problems," Lynn said. "We'd taken her to the doctor multiple times because things weren't getting better and we were told by her neurologist and her family doctors that they didn't believe it was MS related. They just believed she was fatigued because she's a runner. From there, it just kept getting worse. She couldn't see, she could barely hear us, and couldn't speak."
In early August, Natalie's parents took her to UC Medical Center, where doctors did a spinal tap and concluded that their daughter did indeed have PML. According to Lynn, they performed an aggressive blood treatment in an attempt to remove the drug from her system and to boost her own immune system. But Natalie continued to struggle.
"The doctors told us at least four or five times, this is probably going to be it," Lynn said. "You might want to call your family in and say your goodbyes. We would sit up with her all night and the next morning she would still be there over and over and over again."
Natalie was transferred to the Drake Center for Post-Acute Care in the middle of October. She wasn't able to attend UC's Nov. 10 season opener against Savannah State at Northern Kentucky University's BB&T Arena, the Bearcats' temporary home while Fifth Third Arena, their on-campus arena, was being renovated. But her parents, who had renewed the family's season tickets, went to the game and continued to attend each home game thereafter.
"We always felt like we were taking her with us," Lynn said. "We never gave her ticket away. We never let anyone else use it. Although she wasn't able to communicate with us, we would still tell her about the game, tell her how great Gary did, took the program and hung it up in her room. We tried to make that carry on because that was just our thing. But she just got worse."
After the email from Natalie's aunt arrived at UC, T.J. Wolf, director of student-athlete development for the men's basketball program, arranged for Clark and freshman guard Trevor Moore to visit Natalie at Drake on Nov. 8. Megan Coffey, UC's associate director of video services, was to accompany them to shoot video of the encounter for UC's web site, GoBearcats.com.
No one told Natalie about the upcoming visit because it was meant to be a surprise. But the day before Clark and Moore were scheduled to visit a minor injury to Clark caused it to be postponed.
"Megan contacted us and said, 'I'm so sorry. We can send someone else, other team members, or we can wait until Gary's up to coming,'" Lynn said. "We said, 'We'd like Gary to come. We'll wait.'"
On Nov. 15, Clark and Moore arrived at the hospital with Wolf and Coffey. The wait was worth it.
"When Gary walked into the room, Natalie just broke down crying," Lynn said. "She said, 'Gary!' Even now when we talk about Gary coming, she's just so emotional she can't even stand it. It's meant the world to her."
Clark hugged Natalie and knelt down next to her wheelchair to have his picture taken with her. He also gave her one of his old game jerseys.
"He was so friendly and had such a contagious smile," Lynn said. "When he smiled, you felt it in your heart, like he was a genuine guy. My husband said, 'This world needs so many more Gary Clarks.' He was just the epitome of niceness and being a true gentleman."
The meeting was emotional for Clark, too, and still was when he talked about it three months later. When he first heard about Natalie's situation, Clark said, he thought about his sister and his mother and realized that if either of them were to go through a similar ordeal he hoped that someone they looked up to, someone who might be able to impact their recovery, would take the time to do what he did.
"It touched me in a way that I didn't realize it would until afterwards," Clark said. "She was running marathons and then to see that she could barely talk….I had met her once. I took a picture with her, but I didn't know the true story. She was so active and doing marathons, which I couldn't imagine doing. It's like me and basketball. If someone were to take this away from me, I couldn't imagine what it would mean for someone to help me and just spend time with me."
The story didn't end there.
Two days before Christmas, Natalie was allowed to go home. On Jan. 7, she accompanied her parents to the UC-SMU game at NKU. She was still in a wheelchair, still dealing with a lot of medical issues, but slowly improving.
"The doctors kind of consider her a miracle because they didn't really think she would make it," Lynn said. "Megan knew we were going to bring her to the game. She came over and said, 'I think Gary wants to come up and say hi after the game.'
"After the game, Gary had to do his press conference. Then he came up in the stands. Natalie's vision still isn't great, but she could see him coming to her and she just broke down, "Gary!" Gary came up, gave her a big hug and said, 'I love your jersey. We're matching.' Then they talked a little bit. Now Gary acknowledges her at every (game). He either waves to her or blows her a kiss. She's been at every (home) game except there was one game at 9 o'clock and she was already asleep by then. It's just been amazing for us to have him support her like that."
Clark didn't break down the way Natalie did, but he had to fight to keep tears away.
"Most people would call me soft-spoken," Clark said, "but times like that, it really touches a soft spot in me where you've got to kind of keep it together and not tear up. The first time I really got upset was when she came to the first game. I didn't know she was coming. Not thinking that she was going to come to a game all year and then to finally make one, it was a good feeling."
Just as Cronin predicted, Clark's legacy as a UC basketball player has centered around his rebounding prowess. It's what has chiefly defined him as a player and what gives him the most personal satisfaction.
Unlike most players, who can't wait to get their hands on the stat sheet after a game to see how many points they scored, Clark can't wait to find out how many rebounds he had. Rebounding is also the one aspect of his game that reveals his mean streak, such as it is.
When he grabs a rebound, Clark said, "It's almost like I'm taking another man's will. It's like, oh you're tired and I'm not tired, especially when I constantly get it, possession after possession on the offensive end. Defensive ones are a lot easier than offensive ones. If you get three or four offensive rebounds in one possession or consecutively, you're taking away his will. His coach will sub for him. It feels good."
Clark loves to talk about the art of rebounding, beginning with the importance of jumping off both feet and seizing the ball with both hands, something he learned in high school but has emphasized even more in college. He says he's not the most athletic player on the team, so he understands that positioning and technique are crucial to his success.
"It's a combination of getting position and the effort and trying to rebound on every possession because guys get tired," Clark said. "When guys get tired they don't go as hard as they do at the beginning of the game. For me, it's just become second nature to always go to get an offensive rebound or a defensive rebound."
For Clark, it's just plain fun to see the reaction from his opponents when he consistently beats them on the glass. He experienced that against when he had 11 rebounds to nine for the Bruins' big man, 7-foot Thomas Welch, even though Welsh had four inches on him. Welsh finished with nine rebounds, so it's not like Clark thoroughly dominated him. But there were stretches in the game when it seemed as if he was.
"You could hear him mumbling to his other guys and his guards mumbling to him about we need a rebound," Clark said. "I think he got one and he just had so much emotion for the first time the whole game because he got one. I'm looking at the ref, like it was a foul, but he got one."
Clark's high school coach, who has closely followed his former player's college career, has been gratified to see the improvement he's made, beginning with his increased shooting range. As a freshman, Clark was 0-for-5 from long range. As a senior, he has shot 43.3 percent beyond the arc. He improved his free throw shooting from 62.5 percent as a freshman to 74 percent percent as a senior.
"He's gotten a lot physically stronger," Medlin said. "He's worked on his body. He's become a tremendous defensive player. I just think he's taken the skills that he had – we knew he could do the things that he's doing - and he's just gotten better. He's always had a nice touch around the rim. He's constantly worked on that. He's obviously improved his 3-point shooting, and he's always been a great rebounder.
"And Gary's such a good person that people do rally around him. They enjoy watching him and they enjoy being around him. He makes everybody feel like they're important. He makes everybody feel like they're special because to him they are."
In addition to the slew of awards Clark has earned at the end of his senior year, he made the AAC's all-rookie team as a freshman; was Defensive Player of the Year and a second-team all-conference selection as a sophomore; and made the league's all-tournament team as a junior. Early in his senior year he was the Most Valuable Player in the Cayman Islands Classic.
His memorable moments include a career-high 26 points on 12-of-15 shooting with 10 rebounds against Marshall, and the winning basket on a 15-jump shot with five seconds left in overtime in UC's win at Iowa State, both during his junior year. He converted a 3-point play with 12.1 seconds left in a 58-57 win at Connecticut during his sophomore year. And don't forget the game-winning free throw he made to beat Houston in the AAC tournament championship game.
Four years ago, Clark showed up at UC simply hoping to earn playing time his freshman year and ended up starting every game. He never expected to score 1,000 points or snare 1,000 rebounds. And he certainly never expected to be mentioned in the same breath with Oscar Robertson, Jack Twyman and some of UC's other all-time greats.
"It's surreal to me when people say you're going to be probably one of the greatest Bearcats that's come through here," Clark said, "because I think of people like Oscar Robertson and Kenyon Martin, the guys that came before me like Sean Kilpatrick, and I'm like, really?"
Bill Koch covered UC athletics for 27 years – 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer – before joining the staff of GoBearcats.com in January, 2015.
GoBearcats.com
CINCINNATI – Late in the first half of the University of Cincinnati's 62-48 victory at Memphis, senior forward Gary Clark went up for a rebound, lost control of the ball, and tumbled to the FedEx Forum floor.
Memphis forward Mike Parks Jr. grabbed the ball under the Tigers' basket and went up for what he surely thought would be an easy layup only to have Clark bounce up to block his shot. The play had little impact on the outcome, but it was emblematic of Clark's approach to the game.
"From a coaching standpoint you sit there and you think, now there's a Bearcat," said UC head coach Mick Cronin. "That's everything you want. When you have a senior make a play like that, there's a sense of pride as a coaching staff that this guy has really bought into becoming everything that we wanted him to become. To me, that was the epitome of who he is now as a player."
Most college basketball coaches will tell you that no matter how much they scout a recruit or what the recruiting analysts say about him, they don't really know what they have until he gets on campus and begins to practice. And even then it sometimes takes several years to know for sure.
It was different with Clark, who arrived at UC as a freshman in 2014 and immediately made a positive impression on the coaching staff.
"The first week or so of practice his rebounding was off the charts," Cronin said. "I told (associate head coach) Larry (Davis) this kid is going to be a great rebounder, one of the best rebounders to ever play at Cincinnati. Either that or the rest of our guys are terrible because he gets every rebound."
Cronin's initial assessment was on the money. The 6-foot-8, 230-pound Clark started all 34 of UC's games during his freshman year when he averaged 7.8 points and 7.2 rebounds. Four years later, he became the fifth player in UC history to score 1,000 points and accrue 1,000 rebounds. The others are Oscar Robertson and Jack Twyman, both members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame; All-American Paul Hogue, who led the Bearcats to national championships in 1961 and 1962; and Robert Miller.
The unassuming Clark has produced one of the most impressive careers in UC history. As the Bearcats head into the 2018 NCAA Tournament, he ranks 17th in scoring with 1,440 points, third in rebounding with 1,109 and fifth in blocked shots with 178. He has started 135 games, the most of any player in school history; is second in career victories with 105; and tied for second with Troy Caupain in consecutive games played with 137.
During Clark's time at UC, the Bearcats have gone 23-11, 22-11, 30-6 and are 30-4 this season with a No. 2 seed in the South Region, the highest seed for a UC team since the 2002 Bearcats were a No. 1 seed. They've posted back-to-back 30-win seasons for the first time in school history.
With Clark leading the way, UC went 27-4 during the regular season and won the American Athletic Conference championship, clinching the title on the final day of the regular season with a pulsating 62-61 victory at Wichita State. It was the first regular-season league title for UC since 2003-04 when the Bearcats played in Conference USA.
Clark, 23, was the AAC Player of the Year, the Defensive Player of the Year, won the league's Sportsmanship Award and was a unanimous first-team selection. Clark then led the Bearcats to the AAC Tournament title in Orlando with three straight double-doubles, including a 20-point, 12-rebound performance in a 56-55 victory over Houston in the championship game. Clark scored the winning point by making a free throw with four seconds remaining and was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.
Even Cronin didn't foresee all that. And the UC coach couldn't have known during Clark's early days at UC that he had landed a player whose comportment off the court would be every bit as impressive as his play on the court. Nor could he have known how much affection UC fans would eventually feel for him, fondly chanting "Ga-ry! Ga-ry!" as his list of accomplishments grew.
***
The point man for UC during Clark's recruitment was associate head coach Davis, who liked everything about Clark's game the first time he saw him play. Well, almost everything.
"All the things he does now you could see it in him then," Davis said. "But I'm sitting there thinking he should have had 35 points and 15 rebounds. He should have blocked four more shots. He could have dominated that much more. I thought he was talented, but I didn't think he played hard enough and I told him that. I thought at the time that this kid is different because he didn't bristle at it. I think he appreciated the fact that I told him that."
In fact, Davis' blunt assessment might have helped to convince Clark to attend UC. He was also being recruited by Wake Forest and North Carolina State and later by a few other Atlantic Coast Conference schools. But to most of those ACC coaches, Davis said, Clark wasn't their first choice. They were focused on other, more highly rated players and saw Clark as a fallback option.
Clark was intrigued by Davis' critique. Rather than take it as an insult, he embraced it. And he was pleased to hear it again from Cronin as the recruiting process unfolded.
"That showed me that he cared enough about me for my future that I could trust him," Clark said. "I've always been about trust and loyalty. They made me push myself to get better and (Cronin) finally came and said we're going to offer you a scholarship because you've gotten better with your conditioning and you're playing harder. That's when I was like, these guys really care about me."
Clark grew up in Clayton, N.C., a town of about 20,000 located 16 miles southeast of Raleigh. The oldest of four children, he was raised by his mother, Tammy McKey, and his father, Gary Clark Sr. His parents are divorced. His dad, who lives in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., said Clark was very shy as a youngster, but was always a standout athlete. In middle school, he ran the hurdles, the 400 meters, and threw the shot on the track team. He also played wide receiver and safety on the football team. But he excelled in basketball, already dunking the ball in the eighth grade.
"He fell in love with the game very, very early," Gary Sr. said. "I think he was probably six or seven years old when I bought him his very first basketball and basketball goal. He would cry if I didn't want to go out there with him. He wanted to be out there all the time. His mama would get mad at me. He loved the game."
When Clark reached high school, he gave up football and track because he wanted to save himself for basketball, but also because he wanted to carve out more time for fishing, which would become one if his favorite pursuits. Just as he had fallen in love with basketball, he quickly took to fishing as a youngster when he accompanied his grandfather and uncles. By the ninth grade, he said, "I really got big into it."
"I just like the calm," Clark said. "I can get on a boat and I don't have to worry about anything. I have control over how well I make my jig or my artificial bait dance to make the fish come get it. I can get away because a lot of places don't have any (cell phone) service."
At UC he found a fishing soul mate in teammate Zack Tobler, a walk-on who grew up in Ft. Wright, Ky., and had been around fishing and hunting his entire life. As a freshman at UC, Clark's locker was next to Tobler's. Before long they were fishing together, occasionally taking along a teammate or two on their excursions.
Clark first attracted attention from college basketball coaches when he was a freshman playing on the Clayton varsity.
"These coaches started coming and asking questions about who's this freshman who's playing on the varsity," Clark said, "and I would actually start terrorizing seniors from other schools. It was weird because I'm the first to attend college in my family, so I didn't know how to take it. It was just like, this is pretty cool. My first unofficial visit was to (North Carolina-Wilmington). I was ready to go right then, but my coach was like, you're going to get a lot more. After awhile they just get kept rolling in the better I got."
Clark finished his high school career as Clayton's all-time leader in scoring, rebounding and blocked shots. He was a two-time Greater Neuse River Conference Player of the Year, averaged 26 points, seven rebounds and four assists as a senior, and was rated a 4-star recruit by Rivals.
"When he was in high school, everybody in the community knew Gary and came out to watch him play," said Clayton coach Denny Medlin. "We had to turn people away from our gym. It was just a unique situation. It's like he's gone to Cincinnati and done the same thing, except it's on a much larger scale. Everybody there fell in love with him too."
The highlight of Clark's high school career was the quadruple-double he posted during his senior year against West Johnson when he scored 22 points with 21 rebounds, 15 blocked shots and 10 assists, even though he played only a few minutes in the fourth quarter of a blowout win. It remains the only confirmed quadruple-double in the history of North Carolina high school basketball, according to Medlin, and it came on the same day that Clark's name was inadvertently left off the list of McDonald's All-American nominees.
The oversight was later corrected and Clark eventually was included on the list, but it served its purpose in providing extra motivation for him that night.
"It was one of those things where I was going out to try to prove a point," Clark said.
Clark is so laid-back that Cronin frequently had to publicly prod him to be more aggressive on offense during his first few years. He was too deferential, too quick to pass to a teammate instead of attacking the rim himself. At first, Clark mostly smiled and shrugged when confronted by reporters with Cronin's criticism, almost as if it he didn't believe he was good enough to be so selfish. Besides, he preferred to get his teammates involved.
Primarily a low-post player with a soft shooting touch around the basket, Clark frequently gets double-teamed when he has the ball, so it's logical for him to look for the open man. But he would sometimes pass even when he was confronted by only one defender. And that's what irked Cronin.
Even at times early in Clark's senior year, Cronin had to tell him that if he didn't attack the basket he would have to do extra running at practice. Finally Clark got the message and stopped passing up shots. In fact, he began to aggressively seek them out.
Clark is very old-school, fundamentally sound on offense and defense. He doesn't pound his chest after a dunk or let loose with a primal scream in an age where such displays are commonplace. That doesn't mean he plays without intensity. The competitive fire is there. You don't grab 1,000 rebounds without being intense.
It's just that the placid look on his face and the way he rarely ever forces the action tend to hide his passion more often than not.
"You see it when I jump into the defensive lane and get a steal and go dunk it or rotate and swat somebody's shot and block it real hard," Clark said. "You can see it if you're watching, but if you're looking for the animation and all that stuff, it's not in me. I'd rather just get the job done. That's just the way my personality is, unless one of the guys in practice or somebody on the other team will start yapping and then I'll return the favor. If I do it, the only person who hears it is the guy next to me who I'm saying it to."
* * *
Two years into his college career, Clark received a boost from the addition on the UC roster of Kyle Washington, a 6-foot-9 forward who transferred to UC from North Carolina State. Long before they became teammates, they competed against each other on Dec. 20, 2014 when UC played the Wolfpack in Raleigh.
Clark was a freshman. Washington was a sophomore. UC won, 76-60, getting nine points and four rebounds from Clark. Washington scored 10 points with six rebounds for NC State.
"I remember Bobby Lutz, my assistant coach at State, talking about how he was a good, young player," Washington said of Clark. "He had games where he would show what he would eventually become, but it wasn't all the way there yet. Coming into the game, I was like, I think this guy's pretty good, so I'm not going to underestimate him."
Clark recalls Cronin emphasizing to him before the game how good Washington's jump hook was and urging him to do his best to keep him from getting to his spot to shoot it.
After that game, they went their separate ways. But by the end of the season Washington had decided to transfer. When he was recruited by the Bearcats he remembered Clark, who became one of the reasons he chose UC, figuring that they could win a lot of games together.
Clark first became aware of Washington when he was in high school. He was attending a camp at NC State during the summer before his senior year, which was Washington's freshman year in college. Minutes before his team was to play, Clark saw Washington putting up shots using a rebounding gun, trying to squeeze in as many as he could before he had to leave the floor.
"His work ethic, I saw it then," Clark said, "and when he got here, I saw it even more how he was constantly in the gym getting up shots."
Under the NCAA's rules for transfers, Washington was ineligible to play during Clark's sophomore year, but they competed tooth and nail during practices, with neither player giving an inch, and earned the respect for each other that they still have today.
Both players became 1,000-point career scorers and combined to form one of the most effective low-post scoring tandems in the league, if not the nation, which caused matchup problems for their opponents.
"It's something people have to deal with that they don't usually have to deal with," Cronin said.
As Washington put it, "It's pick your poison."
***
Off the court, Clark won the Jean Stephens Memorial Award, which goes to the UC athlete "who epitomizes integrity, respect, high ethical standards and a commitment to the team." Clark, who is on track to graduate with a degree in criminal justice following spring semester, logged more than 50 hours of community service at Our Daily Bread, the Sheakley Boys and Girls Club and the Friars Club. He also participated in campus orientation during the fall to help new students get acclimated to their new surroundings.
He earned UC's Legion of Excellence Award for in 2016 for having the highest grade point average on the men's basketball team and interned with UC's vice-president of safety and reform to impact campus safety.
In December, after the Bearcats lost back-to-back games to Xavier and Florida, they bounced back with a home victory over unbeaten Mississippi State, then flew to the West Coast to face UCLA in storied Pauley Pavilion, where they knocked off the Bruins to gain a measure of revenge for their second-round NCAA Tournament loss in 2017.
At the time, it was a signature victory for UC, the second straight win on the way to a 16-game winning streak, which was tied for the nation's longest. Clark had a typical Clark game with 10 points, 11 rebounds, three blocked shots, four assists and three steals. But what Karen Hatcher, UC's executive senior associate athletic director, remembers most from that trip occurred at the team's hotel on the morning of the game, where 85 donors who had made the trip on the team's charter flight gathered for a UC-sponsored breakfast.
"I came downstairs for the breakfast and Gary said, 'Hey, can I go in the room where the donors are? I just would really like to tell them thanks.' So we went in and he went to every single table, thanking them for coming and supporting the team," Hatcher said. "He took pictures with many of them. Obviously, he's done so many things here like that, but just to see it and watch it was really kind of special. Later when I talked to him, he said, 'I just think that people who would do that, to fly all the way out here and spend their money to watch us play, is such a big deal. It's really great to be in an arena and have people from your team cheering for you.'
"The times when I have him meet with donors he's not ever talking about himself. He's talking about the rest of the team. He's talking about how he loves his team. He's talking about his coaches, how they might be hard, but they're pushing him to be a great player and a great man. That stuff, I just love hearing it as a mother of two children. That's how you want your kids to be. The donors all love him. The first thing they asked was, 'Did you tell him to come in?' I said, 'Absolutely not. He asked.' When people hear stuff like that, they're like, where did that come from? We love that. Gary is like a gentle giant. He's very appreciative of the little things."
***
About a month before the UCLA trip, Clark touched a family of UC fans in a more personal and emotional way. The relationship started when Sarah Chaney, who works in UC's development office, received an email from UC fan Cheri Miller requesting UC memorabilia for her niece, 31-year-old Natalie Youtsey, a UC graduate and a marathon runner who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010 during her sophomore year at UC. Years later, Natalie contracted PML (progressive multi-focal leukoencephalopathy), which her family says was a rare reaction to an aggressive chemotherapy drug. Miller made a point in her email to tell Chaney that Clark was her niece's favorite player.
Natalie started taking the drug in 2012 and found it to be extremely beneficial. She was doing so well that she ran 25 marathons and two ultra-marathons of 100 miles each, most of them with her father, Clark. Her mother, Lynn, and her Aunt Cheri served as their support team during the races. But in July 2017, Natalie began to experience serious problems.
"She had very low energy, was having problems with her vision, and was having swallowing problems," Lynn said. "We'd taken her to the doctor multiple times because things weren't getting better and we were told by her neurologist and her family doctors that they didn't believe it was MS related. They just believed she was fatigued because she's a runner. From there, it just kept getting worse. She couldn't see, she could barely hear us, and couldn't speak."
In early August, Natalie's parents took her to UC Medical Center, where doctors did a spinal tap and concluded that their daughter did indeed have PML. According to Lynn, they performed an aggressive blood treatment in an attempt to remove the drug from her system and to boost her own immune system. But Natalie continued to struggle.
"The doctors told us at least four or five times, this is probably going to be it," Lynn said. "You might want to call your family in and say your goodbyes. We would sit up with her all night and the next morning she would still be there over and over and over again."
Natalie was transferred to the Drake Center for Post-Acute Care in the middle of October. She wasn't able to attend UC's Nov. 10 season opener against Savannah State at Northern Kentucky University's BB&T Arena, the Bearcats' temporary home while Fifth Third Arena, their on-campus arena, was being renovated. But her parents, who had renewed the family's season tickets, went to the game and continued to attend each home game thereafter.
"We always felt like we were taking her with us," Lynn said. "We never gave her ticket away. We never let anyone else use it. Although she wasn't able to communicate with us, we would still tell her about the game, tell her how great Gary did, took the program and hung it up in her room. We tried to make that carry on because that was just our thing. But she just got worse."
After the email from Natalie's aunt arrived at UC, T.J. Wolf, director of student-athlete development for the men's basketball program, arranged for Clark and freshman guard Trevor Moore to visit Natalie at Drake on Nov. 8. Megan Coffey, UC's associate director of video services, was to accompany them to shoot video of the encounter for UC's web site, GoBearcats.com.
No one told Natalie about the upcoming visit because it was meant to be a surprise. But the day before Clark and Moore were scheduled to visit a minor injury to Clark caused it to be postponed.
"Megan contacted us and said, 'I'm so sorry. We can send someone else, other team members, or we can wait until Gary's up to coming,'" Lynn said. "We said, 'We'd like Gary to come. We'll wait.'"
On Nov. 15, Clark and Moore arrived at the hospital with Wolf and Coffey. The wait was worth it.
"When Gary walked into the room, Natalie just broke down crying," Lynn said. "She said, 'Gary!' Even now when we talk about Gary coming, she's just so emotional she can't even stand it. It's meant the world to her."
Clark hugged Natalie and knelt down next to her wheelchair to have his picture taken with her. He also gave her one of his old game jerseys.
"He was so friendly and had such a contagious smile," Lynn said. "When he smiled, you felt it in your heart, like he was a genuine guy. My husband said, 'This world needs so many more Gary Clarks.' He was just the epitome of niceness and being a true gentleman."
The meeting was emotional for Clark, too, and still was when he talked about it three months later. When he first heard about Natalie's situation, Clark said, he thought about his sister and his mother and realized that if either of them were to go through a similar ordeal he hoped that someone they looked up to, someone who might be able to impact their recovery, would take the time to do what he did.
"It touched me in a way that I didn't realize it would until afterwards," Clark said. "She was running marathons and then to see that she could barely talk….I had met her once. I took a picture with her, but I didn't know the true story. She was so active and doing marathons, which I couldn't imagine doing. It's like me and basketball. If someone were to take this away from me, I couldn't imagine what it would mean for someone to help me and just spend time with me."
The story didn't end there.
Two days before Christmas, Natalie was allowed to go home. On Jan. 7, she accompanied her parents to the UC-SMU game at NKU. She was still in a wheelchair, still dealing with a lot of medical issues, but slowly improving.
"The doctors kind of consider her a miracle because they didn't really think she would make it," Lynn said. "Megan knew we were going to bring her to the game. She came over and said, 'I think Gary wants to come up and say hi after the game.'
"After the game, Gary had to do his press conference. Then he came up in the stands. Natalie's vision still isn't great, but she could see him coming to her and she just broke down, "Gary!" Gary came up, gave her a big hug and said, 'I love your jersey. We're matching.' Then they talked a little bit. Now Gary acknowledges her at every (game). He either waves to her or blows her a kiss. She's been at every (home) game except there was one game at 9 o'clock and she was already asleep by then. It's just been amazing for us to have him support her like that."
Clark didn't break down the way Natalie did, but he had to fight to keep tears away.
"Most people would call me soft-spoken," Clark said, "but times like that, it really touches a soft spot in me where you've got to kind of keep it together and not tear up. The first time I really got upset was when she came to the first game. I didn't know she was coming. Not thinking that she was going to come to a game all year and then to finally make one, it was a good feeling."
"I'm sure there's more talented guys in the country," Cronin said, "but Gary Clark is such a winning player. He's underrated, other than among coaches. If you talk to coaches, especially the coaches in our conference, Gary Clark's their favorite player. Those are people that really know basketball. See, we're paid to win games, so when you ask a coach about it, they see what that guy brings to the table. If he makes a mistake, it's like a meteor storm or something. It never happens. You're in shock."
Just as Cronin predicted, Clark's legacy as a UC basketball player has centered around his rebounding prowess. It's what has chiefly defined him as a player and what gives him the most personal satisfaction.
Unlike most players, who can't wait to get their hands on the stat sheet after a game to see how many points they scored, Clark can't wait to find out how many rebounds he had. Rebounding is also the one aspect of his game that reveals his mean streak, such as it is.
When he grabs a rebound, Clark said, "It's almost like I'm taking another man's will. It's like, oh you're tired and I'm not tired, especially when I constantly get it, possession after possession on the offensive end. Defensive ones are a lot easier than offensive ones. If you get three or four offensive rebounds in one possession or consecutively, you're taking away his will. His coach will sub for him. It feels good."
Clark loves to talk about the art of rebounding, beginning with the importance of jumping off both feet and seizing the ball with both hands, something he learned in high school but has emphasized even more in college. He says he's not the most athletic player on the team, so he understands that positioning and technique are crucial to his success.
"It's a combination of getting position and the effort and trying to rebound on every possession because guys get tired," Clark said. "When guys get tired they don't go as hard as they do at the beginning of the game. For me, it's just become second nature to always go to get an offensive rebound or a defensive rebound."
For Clark, it's just plain fun to see the reaction from his opponents when he consistently beats them on the glass. He experienced that against when he had 11 rebounds to nine for the Bruins' big man, 7-foot Thomas Welch, even though Welsh had four inches on him. Welsh finished with nine rebounds, so it's not like Clark thoroughly dominated him. But there were stretches in the game when it seemed as if he was.
"You could hear him mumbling to his other guys and his guards mumbling to him about we need a rebound," Clark said. "I think he got one and he just had so much emotion for the first time the whole game because he got one. I'm looking at the ref, like it was a foul, but he got one."
Clark's high school coach, who has closely followed his former player's college career, has been gratified to see the improvement he's made, beginning with his increased shooting range. As a freshman, Clark was 0-for-5 from long range. As a senior, he has shot 43.3 percent beyond the arc. He improved his free throw shooting from 62.5 percent as a freshman to 74 percent percent as a senior.
"He's gotten a lot physically stronger," Medlin said. "He's worked on his body. He's become a tremendous defensive player. I just think he's taken the skills that he had – we knew he could do the things that he's doing - and he's just gotten better. He's always had a nice touch around the rim. He's constantly worked on that. He's obviously improved his 3-point shooting, and he's always been a great rebounder.
"And Gary's such a good person that people do rally around him. They enjoy watching him and they enjoy being around him. He makes everybody feel like they're important. He makes everybody feel like they're special because to him they are."
In addition to the slew of awards Clark has earned at the end of his senior year, he made the AAC's all-rookie team as a freshman; was Defensive Player of the Year and a second-team all-conference selection as a sophomore; and made the league's all-tournament team as a junior. Early in his senior year he was the Most Valuable Player in the Cayman Islands Classic.
His memorable moments include a career-high 26 points on 12-of-15 shooting with 10 rebounds against Marshall, and the winning basket on a 15-jump shot with five seconds left in overtime in UC's win at Iowa State, both during his junior year. He converted a 3-point play with 12.1 seconds left in a 58-57 win at Connecticut during his sophomore year. And don't forget the game-winning free throw he made to beat Houston in the AAC tournament championship game.
"I'm sure there's more talented guys in the country," Cronin said, "but Gary Clark is such a winning player. He's underrated, other than among coaches. If you talk to coaches, especially the coaches in our conference, Gary Clark's their favorite player. Those are people that really know basketball. See, we're paid to win games, so when you ask a coach about it, they see what that guy brings to the table. If he makes a mistake, it's like a meteor storm or something. It never happens. You're in shock."
Four years ago, Clark showed up at UC simply hoping to earn playing time his freshman year and ended up starting every game. He never expected to score 1,000 points or snare 1,000 rebounds. And he certainly never expected to be mentioned in the same breath with Oscar Robertson, Jack Twyman and some of UC's other all-time greats.
"It's surreal to me when people say you're going to be probably one of the greatest Bearcats that's come through here," Clark said, "because I think of people like Oscar Robertson and Kenyon Martin, the guys that came before me like Sean Kilpatrick, and I'm like, really?"
Bill Koch covered UC athletics for 27 years – 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer – before joining the staff of GoBearcats.com in January, 2015.