In July 2006, Jason Clark, a rising junior at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, Va., was given the following rating at a Reebok ABCD summer camp.
“Weaknesses: Clark needs to become stronger. His legs are extremely skinny and his lack of strength limits his ability to get to the rim off the dribble. Sometimes players that are as lanky as Clark improve their handle, strength and confidence as they begin to fill out. That could happen with Jason, too.”
Three months later on Oct. 18, 2006 — his mother Audrey’s birthday — Clark became the first member of Georgetown’s 2008 recruiting class.
Five years later, Clark is now a senior captain. He remains a long-armed, lanky, 6-foot-2 guard with wicked athletic skills, but he has become a veteran who has started in the Hoyas’ last 66 games. Georgetown has gone 44-22 in that stretch.
“I was always at Georgetown games. I went to high school 15 minutes away from here. I loved the atmosphere, I loved the crowd, and I couldn’t wait to get on the court,” Clark said.
Clark has become stronger, developing into a scoring threat in the rough-and-tumble Big East, and he has grown in confidence.
“He’s ready for what this year holds for him, and I don’t necessarily think that from an offensive perspective or a defensive perspective. I don’t think there’s going to be a drastic change,” Head Coach John Thompson III said.
“I’ve never had anyone question my heart,” Clark said. “But they’ll say, ‘He can’t do this because of his size, the ability to take his team to the top and take his team to win.'”
Clark isn’t hostile, nor does he talk about his critics with a chip on his shoulder. Clark does appear to recognize, in fact, that he has a lot to prove. Rarely has he captured the headlines that follow the Hoyas.
That is, not until this past summer.
In August, the Hoyas embarked on an exhibition trip to China, billed as an exercise in sports diplomacy by the State Department and featuring a team visit from Vice President Joe Biden. However, the trip turned ugly when a brawl erupted between the Bayi Rockets and the Hoyas in Beijing. Clark found himself right in the center of it.
In video clips of the fight, Clark is shown being fouled in the backcourt, to which he took exception. Clark swung his arm in a half-punch, half-shove at the Rocket player who committed the foul, but was thrown to the ground by another Rocket player from behind.
Pretty soon, the court was full of Hoyas and Rockets pushing and shoving. One particularly startling image from the melee shows Clark on the ground, a kick being aimed in his direction by one of the Rockets, a team made up of People’s Liberation Army soldiers.
“Everybody has their opinion about the brawl, and nobody ever wants to have a brawl. But I think it was a good thing for us. We know when we go to battle with other teams that we’re going to have each other’s backs,” Clark said.
“I mean, I was as new to the whole thing as everybody else. I think, after the brawl, I knew how to handle myself, how to speak to the media about it. We were getting calls, emails and texts about everything, ‘What’s going on?’ And you knew you had to just answer, ‘We’re OK,’ because you don’t want to stir up anything that was already as big as it could be,” he added.
Georgetown quickly moved on, but Clark’s role was that of primary leadership. He stood up for his team, standing next to Head Coach John Thompson III at the peacemaking session with the Rockets the next day and handling the entire affair with class.
Yet while Clark may be reaching star level at the national stage, he has always been well-known in the Metro region. The Washington Post named him its all-Met player of the year his senior year of high school, and he entered Georgetown as part of a national top-10 recruiting class.
Of course, he was never the headliner. Austin Freeman was the all-Met player of the year prior to Clark. Local product Chris Wright had entrenched himself as the starting point guard, and Greg Monroe, now the starting center for the Detroit Pistons, was the jewel of the class of 2008 with Clark and senior center Henry Sims as the complimentary pieces.
“I knew I was a great defender, a good shooter, good dribbler, and I knew I had to come in and be a better defender, better shooter,” Clark said. “But I knew that my job was to make the hustle plays. That’s what Coach Thompson wanted, not [for me] to be a scorer — dive on loose balls, get rebounds I wasn’t supposed to get.”
Starting was not an option for Clark his freshman year. Jessie Sapp, Clark’s mentor during his freshman season, was an all-Final Four team honoree, and Wright and Freeman were McDonald All-Americans in the backcourt.
But Clark was inarguably one of the most versatile players, and he has maintained that role. His quickness makes him a great defender and a lethal cutter in the Princeton offense. His crossover dribble creates a menacing echo when it hits the floor, the ball passing between his legs multiple times as he moves down the court. He can dunk with ease and get to the basket.
On the other end, Clark has proven an adept wing player, grabbing more than 300 rebounds. Already among Georgetown’s all-time top 30 in steals, Clark will likely join elite company this season: If he scores 100 more points and grabs 103 more rebounds, he will become the 23rd Hoya to make the all-time top-40 list in both points and rebounds.
“He has shared the spotlight with Chris and Austin in terms of the attention that [the media] has given him, and that’s much different this year, where clearly he is the elder statesman out there. And he’s ready for that,” Thompson III said.
For all of the future accolades, Clark lacks one glaring feat: a single postseason win. In three seasons, Clark is 0-2 in the NCAA tournament and 0-1 in the NIT. That record and the loss of highly touted players from Clark’s past years — Monroe, Wright, Freeman and Monroe’s Pistons teammate DaJuan Summers — leave Clark’s Hoyas inexperienced and with a lot to prove.
Even Clark considers himself underrated.
“I want to go out and prove to everyone that I am capable of leading a basketball team and leading them to victories,” he said. “The critics say a lot of things about some players, and usually it’s their size. ‘He won’t be able to do this or be able to do that.’ I like to prove people wrong when they have negative things to say about someone.”
Sometimes it’s difficult to understand how Clark could be underrated. He was a member of the “D.C. Three,” one of the best backcourts in the nation last season, and he’s been center-stage in some big-time Hoya games.
When Snowpocalypse hit D.C. in 2010, literally freezing all activity within the District, Georgetown had a home game against then-No. 2 Villanova. Clark repowered the arena by himself with six three-pointers on seven attempts, helping to bury the Wildcats and lead the Hoyas to an important victory.
Then, nine months later in Kansas City, with the Hoyas playing a de facto away game against Missouri, Clark hit three straight treys in overtime to sink the then-No. 8 Tigers.
That’s not to say Clark hasn’t had his share of misses, two of which came against archrival Syracuse. In February 2010, Syracuse had built a 23-point lead over the Hoyas with less than 18 minutes to go in the game, but Georgetown somehow battled back. After Monroe missed a foul shot, he jumped on his miss and grabbed the offensive rebound, sending an outlet pass to Clark, who was standing just left of the top of the three-point line.
Clark elevated into his smooth jump shot, with the ball arcing to a devastating clang off the front of the rim. Just an inch more on the shot, and the Hoyas would have been up by one point. Instead, the Orange escaped with a win.
On Feb. 26 last season, Syracuse again led Georgetown at Verizon Center, this time by 12 points with 17 minutes left. Then Clark led a surge. He hit three treys in front of a crowd that included Bill Clinton and Alonzo Mourning, and with 40 seconds left and Georgetown down by three, the ball found Clark open in the right corner behind the three-point line. He lifted into the air, but Syracuse then-junior forward Kris Joseph just got a hand on his shot, blocking it and ending Georgetown’s chance for another spectacular come-from-behind win.
They were tough losses, but Clark took them in stride.
“Even though we lost that game, I had so much fun playing in it. It hurt to lose, sure, but those are the games you remember,” Clark said. “You have to make it fun. You have to. Of course, you have to go out there and be serious. There are millions and millions of people watching you. There are people shouting at you, negative things, positive things. I think it’s a big focus thing. You have to focus on the game, what’s at hand, remember everything you have to do. But it’s an adrenaline rush, playing in front of so many people. It’s a great feeling.”
He’s the sort of player Georgetown needs at this stage, one who genuinely enjoys playing the game. But he also understands his team’s position as underdog. Years of high pressure and stress to imitate the 2007 Final Four team seemed to create a sense of urgency for previous teams, who were taking cues from their leaders. With Clark at the helm, that pressure doesn’t seem to be there. Instead, there’s a much more subdued atmosphere, stemming from a captain that has as much to prove as his team. In that same way, Clark still has the ability to become whatever Georgetown needs him to be on the floor.
“[Clark] means a lot, because he’s been a consistent player for us all three years. He knows what it takes,” Sims said. “He has a lot of knowledge, and he’s not afraid to teach the freshmen and everybody else on the court.”
Athletic enough to defend and rebound but quick and skilled enough to create chances for himself, Clark could play at either guard spot or small forward. With sophomore guard Markel Starks likely to start at the point and freshman guard Jabril Trawick flashing serious athletic skills, Clark will likely be spending most of his time at his more familiar shooting guard position.
“In many ways it’s a natural progression. It’s a progression that he’s prepared himself for,” Thompson said. “But Jason is still Jason. Jason goes about his business in a workman-like fashion. He gives you an honest effort everyday in workouts. Every game he’s going to give you an honest effort and that focus. That giving of himself is something that the freshmen are seeing and everyone else is seeing.”
But what does Clark see?
“I think I see the game much differently. It’s slowed down now, a lot after my freshman year, but it’s very slow to me now,” Clark says. “I’ve gotten a lot stronger. People may not see that because of my size — I’m skinny, I’m lanky — but I’ve gotten a lot stronger. I know where my shots come from. I know how to score. I know how to get my teammates involved. Basically, everything about the game has changed for me.”
The 2006 evaluation still seems to reverberate as a criticism, but Clark has his eyes on more than proving his critics wrong. His answer to a question about his team’s goals for the season is telling.
“I think definitely winning championships, but overall, I guess … ” He paused, not satisfied with that answer, looking for the right one.
“We can’t have a one-game-and-out tournament,” he said. “A big accomplishment is making it to the tournament, but a bigger accomplishment is winning games in the tournament. We want to win the games we’re supposed to win and not drop off. An accomplishment for us is to be better than we have been in the past.”
Challenge accepted.
