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A generation ago, Norm Clarke, the Canadian-born son of immigrant parents from Jamaica became one of Toronto’s most celebrated high school athletes.
It started him on a journey from the modest playgrounds of York, to the national team and a U.S. basketball scholarship at St. Bonaventure University — a most rare and treasured thing for any Canadian in the 1970s but especially for someone who otherwise might not have afforded such a grand education.
He would become the Bonnies’ captain.
He would compete in the 1988 Olympics.
He would become a man with a profession — a teacher. He did his mom and pop proud.
Today, his son Julian is embarking on a similar journey but by a different, perhaps equally adventuresome yet smoother, road. The second-generation star from Oakwood Collegiate is poised to sign with an NCAA Division 1 team.
“Who doesn’t,” Julian says, laughing, when asked if the NBA lives in his dreams.
This week, he is visiting Santa Clara, alma-mater of recent NBA most valuable player and fellow Canuck Steve Nash.
“I’ll get to meet everybody and see the campus. It’s usually the last step before you verbally commit or sign,” says Julian, who led the Barons to the OFSAA championship.
He averaged double figures in points, rebounds and assists for a team that lost only four games all year.
It elicited e-mails from U.S. college coaches, innumerable phone calls from recruiters, and inquiries from dozens of U.S. schools including N.C. State, Temple, Villanova, Cornell, Boston University and Harvard.
“It’s both exciting and at times bothersome in that you hear the same things over and over. You get to the point where you say: ‘OK, I got it.’ But you have to be polite.”
Julian is always polite, even when he was ripping the heart out of the top three seeded teams — Clarke Richardson, Pickering and Mother Teresa — at the Ontario championships.
He is also extremely resolute — a 17-year-old who seems already to have nailed life like he nails treys.
In the final game of the championship tournament, Julian knocked down five three-pointers in the fourth quarter to capture a championship that had eluded his father.
“I was probably more emotional,” laughs Julian, “but he looked pretty happy, too.”
All of which might be enough to start a pretty nice bidding war for his services next season.
Except for one thing: Julian Clarke is looking for more than just a place to play basketball. He’s looking for a place to build a life.
“He can go play anywhere. That’s not the issue,” says Norman, “but how long do you play basketball? A lot of kids go down there and don’t get degrees or they come back with a piece of paper from Kalamazoo or some place nobody heard of and (employers) say: ‘What’s that? Something you could print off the Internet.’ ”
So unless Santa Clara coach Kerry Keating is heard to mutter that Julian’s mother wears army boots or something similarly unlikely, the West Coast Conference school should be getting one smooth operator, on the court and in the classroom.
He carries a 91.6 grade average in a sport whose athletes are too often not known for their academic excellence.
“He’s an amazing athlete, but he’s (also) a role model to others,” says Oakwood coach Anthony Miller.
“He’s an inspiration to the other players ... they understand it’s important not to skip classes.
“We have seen a lot of (the players’) grades go up. They want what he’s getting and they see how he’s going about it.”
But why Santa Clara?
It plays against NCAA power Gonzaga, and there’s Loyola Marymount and San Francisco University but it isn’t exactly ranked among America’s basketball factories.
The Broncos were last in the West Coast Conference with a 7-24 overall record this season and won just three conference games.
“I’m going because of the academics. Mostly. They’re an Ivy League-level academic school ... ranked high in science and business around the world. It’s great I can use basketball to get me there. Of course, I’m going to play basketball and have a lot of fun doing that.”
For Julian, unlike many athletes, the game isn’t the end — it is the means to an end.
“My original idea was to take neuroscience but they didn’t have that. By taking bio-chemistry, I can take a pre-med advisory program and go into medical school straight from there. I want to specialize in working with the brain. If I could get on to something like neurology that would be great.”
In a world dominated by talk about cross-over dribble techniques, shooting forms and vertical leaps, this recruiting trip is about much more than checking out the gym, the fieldhouse, and if there are any cute co-eds. Not that those aren’t all nice fringe benefits.
But, to understand where Julian Clarke is going, it is necessary to understand where Norman Clarke came from.
It is necessary to understand the struggles and the dream of making a better life that has been sought by almost every immigrant family that has stepped onto this land from Jacques Cartier to the Vietnamese boat people to a Haitian refugee.
“My parents were blue-collar workers. Long hours. Shift work. Lot of times I went home and they weren’t there and we had to learn to fend for ourselves,” recalls Norman, now 49 and a Toronto teacher and assistant coach with Oakwood.
“They gave us the best they could based on their experiences and their limitations of education and not being able to get a better job. They didn’t have much. But they worked hard to give us what they could.”
Even now, there is a hint of emotion in his voice, the eyes appear a little misty. But, maybe it’s just the heat in the weight room this day at Oakwood, where he has spent a lifetime and where his photo hangs on the wall of fame.
“I went to other schools, I started at Western Tech but didn’t like the experience because of what I felt was racism at the time.
“I was physically abused by a teacher and decided to come to Oakwood. It was a smaller community, more open and there was a black culture. It didn’t matter what colour you were, they just accepted you ... and I wanted to play basketball and this was the place to be for basketball.”
In the late ’70s, Oakwood was a basketball hothouse, perennial contenders for city and provincial titles.
Norman wasn’t a great student. “If I needed a 66 to get out of writing an exam, I’d get a 66 and say, ‘OK, that’s good enough’. ”
Basketball kept him out of trouble and in school.
“It took me off the streets. I used to hang out in the park a lot when I was younger late at night, not causing trouble but just talking. There wasn’t anything else to do, really. Basketball became a magnet for me. It made me make choices that were beneficial long term. I made friends that were my peer group, not just guys that were hanging out.”
It got him into St. Bonaventure in Western New York.
He became captain of a team that went to the NIT. One year they missed the NCAA tournament by one game.
He still goes back to conduct workshops and basketball camps. He went to Seoul in 1988 and still regards the Olympics as his biggest athletic thrill.
“You can’t describe the feeling. You have to experience it. There are no words,” he says.
Along the way he married Natalie Vuckovich, today a Toronto lawyer and herself a member of the Laurentian University sports Hall of Fame where she won a national championship in basketball.
Julian’s mother still holds high school track records in Sault St. Marie where she grew up.
“She’s very competitive,” says Norman.
“Yes, and kind of outside of sports, too,” says, Julian, laughing and recalling a Grade 4 school project Julian brought home.
“I put it on the table and walked away. I got 25 out of 40 and it was like, “Whoa! Wait a minute. Back in here. What is this!”
It was the last time father or son can recall Julian “bombing” an exam.
It has been a case of mother knows best, ever after.
“(Natalie) is more stringent on the education,” admits Norman. “And I think it’s in both our gene pools that we don’t want to lose. I think Julian’s inherited that.”
There has rarely been a time when basketball wasn’t part of life in the Clarke-Vuckovich home.
“I watched from the end of the bench from one of those baby thingees,” says Julian.
But his first personal recollection of the game was watching Space Jam.
“I remember watching Michael Jordan and how he shot. I watched the movie every day. I’d sit there and pretend to shoot just like him,” he says, flexing his wrist. “I was five years old. I started to develop my shot before I ever touched a basketball. I still shoot the same way.”
Indeed, Clarke led his team in scoring in four of the five games at OFSAA giving Oakwood its first gold since 1993.
They may have to make room for Julian’s photo on Oakwood’s wall of fame next to his father.
It would be a small manifestation that Norman fullfilled his parents’ dream of a more noble future.
“My parents scrounged a lot. I think when you’re a kid of immigrant parents you realize the importance of wealth. I,” says Norman, “along with my wife, wanted to make a better deal for our kids, plain and simple, so it was important for us to get good jobs, a good education, so we could give them direction.”
That direction hasn’t always been an open lane to the basket. His mother could play defence off the court with all the persistence Julian showed on it.
“I was in Grade 5 and I hadn’t finished a homework assignment and I remember I cried because I couldn’t go to practice. I still remember standing at the window watching my dad drive away. That was the last time I cried,” says Julian, “and the last time I missed practice.”
A self-professed neat freak and perfectionist, Julian could be a good fit at Santa Clara which has all but one player returning next season. They are young, they have a need for a perimeter shooter. It is a program that needs to develop a culture of success; one like Julian helped foster at Oakwood, one like Norman helped foster in his son.
But whatever the numbers on the scoreboard, this will always be about more than reaching the NCAA tournament.
For Julian Clarke it is about finding a way to help the world around him and about helping yourself.
It is about the passing of a family trust; and as much as it might be about winning at basketball, it is about winning at life.
bill.lankhof@sunmedia.ca