Clark Is The Man in The Bubble : Basketball: The adults have resolved their differences, leaving Christian High and its new superstar, Tony Clark, free to have some fun on the court.

You can find the best high school basketball player in San Diego County these days perfecting his game in a dark gymnasium at tiny Christian High School.

The word “gymnasium” is used loosely. Christian plays its basketball on a large slab of concrete covered by a huge tent. The canvas is held up by some aluminum and steel beams. For formality’s sake, there are some aluminum bleachers. The teachers and kids around Christian know the gym as “The Bubble.”

Tony Clark is not hard to spot among all of the mattresses, box springs, chairs and lamps stored behind the far basket, or the collection of basketball players on the court. The former are apparently leftovers from the Christian Heritage College dormitory stock, the latter mostly first-year varsity players.

At any rate, Clark lights up the place more than the handful of light bulbs--seemingly left over from Thomas Edison himself--that work hard just to keep the place dimly lit.

“I’d never seen it until this year,” Clark said of The Bubble. “I went in and sat on the portable bleachers and just looked. I tried to take in everything.”

The exterior of The Bubble can be described with three words: yellow, faded and dirty.

To describe Tony Clark’s odyssey during the past year, you need a few more.

In the space of 12 months, Clark has won the county boys’ scoring title (29.3 points a game) while at Division I Valhalla High School, transferred to Christian, been declared ineligible to play basketball, seen an appeal for eligibility denied, signed a letter of intent with the University of Arizona, had his eligibility restored and started a new season at Division V Christian. He is averaging 44 points a game for Christian (3-4).

Clark is 6-feet-7, but he’s just a boy, really. He is 17, has a 3.6 grade point average and a winning smile. But he has done a lot of growing up in the past year. When you get squeezed in a tug-of-war between adults trying to control a kid’s game, you don’t have much choice.

Funny. On the court, basketball can be such a beautiful thing. Off the court, it sometimes smells like yesterday’s garbage.

“I think there are probably some people around the county looking at us and saying, ‘All right! They’re losing,’ ” Christian Coach Randy Wright said. “But high school sports are supposed to be fun. And when you’re going through an adverse time, you learn through those kinds of circumstances.”

Right now, losing more than winning seems to be the only adverse circumstance in Tony Clark’s life. His eligibility problems are behind him, a bright future ahead. He will play both basketball and baseball at Arizona. He is already signed, so if he is injured and can’t continue his athletic career, the scholarship will still be waiting. Chances are good that he will be drafted in major league baseball’s June free agent draft.

He has a new school, new friends and the respect of his coach and teammates.

“It’s going real good,” said Christian point guard Jeff Rose. “Tony has helped us in a lot of areas. He can score points easy, and that takes some of the pressure off David Piester (who averaged about 25 points a game on the Christian junior varsity team last year). His ball-handling helps me taking the ball up court . . . he’s fit in real good.”

But exactly how Christian landed the biggest fish in the pond is still a touchy subject. Valhalla Principal Bob Avant and basketball Coach Manny Silva say there was unethical recruiting. Wright and Christian Principal Ed Giles deny it. Art Clark, Tony’s father, said he and his wife wanted to find a good Christian atmosphere where the teachers cared about the kids.

“I’m one of those guys who is really involved in how his kids develop athletically, academically and morally,” Art Clark said. “There was a certain atmosphere at Valhalla that his mother and I didn’t like. It was not a one-for-all atmosphere. Everybody seemed out for themselves. Coaching in certain areas is not what I thought it should be.

“It was a negative also on the moral side. I’m not going to get into it, but we had to leave. There were some things that I didn’t think Tony should be exposed to.”

Art Clark is Baptist, Patty Clark a Mennonite. Art Clark said his family attends Skyline Wesleyan Church.

Avant and Silva say they were not aware of Clark’s displeasure, and both say they are not sure why Tony Clark left Valhalla.

“You’d have to ask them,” Avant said. “I didn’t ask Tony a single question because I didn’t think it was fair.”

Said Silva: “The only tangible reason I know of is his religious convictions. I didn’t really talk with him or his dad about it.”

Clark’s parents say they are the ones who first came up with the idea that he transfer. When some recruiting allegations cropped up, Avant refused to sign Form 101, a section public/private transfer waiver. San Diego Section Commissioner Kendall Webb ruled Clark ineligible and placed Christian on probation. Clark met with Avant two weeks before school started and attempted to persuade him to change his mind. Avant refused. The Clarks appealed Webb’s decision. Finally, on Nov. 14--four days after Clark announced he would attend Arizona--Webb announced that a three-member subcommittee of the Board of Managers upheld the Clarks’ appeal.

Finally, Tony Clark was free to deal with box-and-ones and triangle-and-twos rather than some adult in a tie.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “I forget who said it, but there is a quote that high school sports is not a business--not yet, anyway. There are too many egos. There is too much pride involved in high school sports with kids who just want to play the game. The important thing everyone left out of this is how the kid felt. I was excluded from everything except the meeting with Avant, and I initiated that.”

That’s the thing that gets Tony Clark. He is a basketball player with an unusual amount of talent. Adults took it into their hands to decide where he would use it. Then, when he was declared ineligible and throughout the appeals process, he watched several different adults decide his fate.

“You sit here and have no control over the situation at all,” Clark said. “All of the ridiculous things they brought into the whole situation, all it did was highlight my frustration. They excluded me completely. It was hard for me to understand what they were basing their decision on.”

The buzzword in a situation like this is ethics. Ethics is what they were basing their decision on. So Tony Clark might have to sit his final season? Nothing personal, Tony.

“I believe Tony Clark is a great young man,” Silva said. “I’d say it now, and I’d say it 20 years from now.”

Said Avant: “Great kid. Fine student, fine athlete, fine person. I really feel badly for Tony Clark. I like him very much. But I don’t care who was involved, I’d do the same thing all over again. I believed some people were unduly recruiting athletes to go to Christian.”

On May 15, there was a dinner at Jimmy’s Restaurant in National City involving six of the premier players in the county and/or their parents, as well as Giles. Word leaked that somebody was attempting to build a state championship team, and coaches around the county cried foul.

“Ninety-nine percent of the coaches in San Diego believe Christian illegally recruited him,” Silva said. “There was no way we wanted Tony not to play. Why should the kid suffer? But to let Christian get away with what happened is a mockery of the system.”

Webb’s subsequent investigation pointed toward Art Clark and Gary Jenkins, who is active in the Christian booster club, as the organizers of the meeting. Because of this alleged recruiting, Webb placed Christian on probation. He ruled Clark ineligible not for the recruiting, but because Avant refused to sign the consent form. Christian asked that the form be waived because of hardship, and Webb ruled that there was none.

“Plenty of people around the county think I stick my nose in where I shouldn’t regarding my kids,” Art Clark said. “I’m not worried about what they think. If they had to feed them, clothe them and house them, I might give them some input.”

Said Silva: “The dad is going to make his own decision. It’s his family, and he’s going to do what’s best for his family. How can you fault him for that? The issue to me is the Christian recruiting dinner.”

For five months, Tony Clark was a basketball player without a team. Now, he has a team but, in a way, the battle still is unfinished. Now he finds himself fighting for respect. There are loud whispers around the county, coaches privately saying Clark’s transfer to a Division V school was ridiculous.

“If Tony Clark had stayed at Valhalla, I think he’d be the top player in the county,” Mt. Carmel Coach John Marincovich said earlier this year. “Maybe in Division IV (actually, Division V) he ought to score 60 points a game, but what does it mean?”

Clark can repeat that quote word for word from memory.

“It makes no sense,” he said. “Me being a player doesn’t change because I went to a Division I or V school. Coaches are saying because I went to Christian, I’m not as good a player as if I went to Valhalla. The one thing I hope they do--and some of them haven’t yet--is come out and watch me play and base their criticism on what I did on the court. I could handle it a lot better.”

The opponents now are schools such as Calvin Christian and Marian as opposed to Lincoln and Oxnard Santa Clara. But the court is still the same size, and the rules are the same. And you can’t hear the talk on the basketball court. That’s one place where Clark can keep his sanity.

“Tony’s one of the few kids, I think, who can handle the media exposure, attention by peers, his success and still keep a sense of humility,” Wright said. “He’s got some great character qualities. I’m really impressed that a 17-year-old student athlete handles himself the way he does.”

Christian has gotten off to a slow start because of injuries and inexperience. Just two players returned from last year’s team, and the Patriots’ best returning player--Brad Fox--hurt his leg in the final football game of the season and won’t return until after Jan. 1. Another starter, Titus Ciets, missed some games with a back injury, and Malik Jordan, who was about ready to move into the starting lineup, suffered a knee injury last week. Ciets and Jordan both missed Friday’s Point Loma game, a 65-64 loss.

There are 365 students at Christian, and just nine boys are on the varsity basketball roster. With the injuries, the Patriots practiced with six players last week.

So that puts even more pressure on Clark to score. In a loss to Point Loma, Clark scored all 27 of Christian’s first-half points and finished with 47. He has scored 311 of his team’s 465 points (67%) this season. Sometimes it seems as if the other Christian players are supporting extras for their new star.

It also seems that would be frustrating for both sides. Clark is self-conscious of his scoring, but realizes he can’t back down if the team is to have a chance to win. For that reason, he says his teammates don’t discourage his shooting.

“In our first fall league game, I ended up with 43, and I felt bad,” Clark said. “As fall league went on, I kept asking them if they wanted me to shoot that much. They said yes, but I felt bad. And now, every game, I look at the box score to see how the points are distributed, and I still feel bad.”

Said Rose: “Sometimes it is frustrating. But when he has an open shot, nobody is going to get on him for not passing. He’s the best player in San Diego.”

It’s an odd mix, Clark’s major college skills with guys who are just learning the game on the varsity level. What it amounts to is that they are learning more than just basketball.

“I think the kids on the team are pretty special individuals because they’re pretty unselfish,” Wright said. “Their responses are not typically what a high school athlete’s would be. They’re not stupid--they want to win. They’ve been very accepting of him. He’s made us a better team. I think there’s a lot of quiet leadership, where kids look up to him and respect him. Plus, it’s an opportunity for these kids to say, ‘Hey, I get a chance to say I played with a Division I basketball player.’ How many kids in San Diego get to do that?”