Don’t Sell This Young Star Short

It was back-to-school night at Buena Park Junior High, and Joe Clarkson stopped by to see his former teacher, the one who made him read “Call of the Wild” in eighth-grade lit when, really, he would rather have been out shooting hoops.

Joe is 18 now, a senior at Buena Park High.

“I saw him and I felt pretty bad,” says the teacher, Joanne Rodasta. “He hadn’t grown. He’s still about 5-foot-2. I remember we used to call him Joe (Worthy) Clarkson. This was a kid who lived for basketball. It made me kind of sad to see how little he still was.”

Then a while later, Mrs. Rodasta picked up her Saturday morning paper and turned to the sports section.

“Guard Joe Clarkson, playing the best game of his career, scored 25 points and made some clutch free-throws in the second overtime to give Buena Park a 60-55 victory over visiting Sunny Hills on Friday night in a Freeway League game,” the story began.

Rodasta was, uh, surprised . Not only was Joe playing varsity basketball, he was a star. She went back to her junior high school students and told them all about it. It’s not quite The Jim Abbott Story, but it’s not bad.

“This kid is my hero,” Rodasta says.

And, yes, Joe is still (very) short.

“I’m 5-5 but say I’m 5-6,” he says. “No, OK, I’m 5-5. If I’m lucky.”

Joe Clarkson is a starter for Buena Park High. His teammates who join him on center court are no shorter than 6 feet, 1 inch. There’s one guy who is 6-6. Joe is the shortest player in his league, and who knows, probably way beyond that as well.

“They say basketball is a big man’s game, but it’s not if you play hard and you really want to play,” says Joe’s coach, Ed Matillo.

And Joe always wanted to play--really, really bad. “My life is basketball right now,” he says.

So Joe (Worthy) Clarkson is on a high. His senior class voted him “Class Clown.” The cheerleaders speak of him in glowing terms. He’s got a more-or-less steady girlfriend. He’s a real crowd-pleaser at the games. There’s something about Americans liking to see the little guy win.

“Joe’s always pumped up,” says starting forward Angel Barrios, 17. “You see him get all excited. He kind of picks up the whole tempo of the game, brings it higher.”

Yet Joe’s had plenty of lows.

“I didn’t play in junior high,” he says. “The coach, when I was in seventh grade, he said ‘If you’re not tall, don’t plan on playing much.’ And he lived up to it. I made the team, but I just sat on the bench. I was the practice dummy. . . . It’s weird how I didn’t give up.”

It’s weird, too, about how Joe didn’t come from one of those perfect-type families. His parents are divorced, and Joe recalls that they fought a lot before they split up. Joe went to live with his mother and her new husband, except that didn’t work out at all.

Now he lives with his dad and his new wife. His younger sister and his half-brother live with his mom.

“When we were having all these problems, I would just take out everything in basketball,” Joe says. “I think that was probably a major reason I stuck with it. It was a major way to let out aggression. I’d just go to the park and shoot.”

Except then there was last year. That’s when Buena Park High won the league title; all the guys on the basketball team got these neat rings. Joe did not, however. He’d been kicked off the team. Joe can have a short fuse.

What happened was Coach Matillo had decided that Joe wouldn’t start that year. There was another guy who was better--although Joe still doesn’t buy that--so Joe wasn’t playing as much as he would have liked. During a tournament before the regular season, the kid blew up, said he should be playing and he said a lot more. I can’t print it here.

“Then I took my jersey off and threw it at him,” Joe says of the scene with the coach.

“I never thought I would take him back,” Matillo adds. “It was embarrassing to me, to him and to the school. He really messed up.”

Joe took it hard. Watching his team win the league title, while he was up in the stands, seemed a punishment nearly impossible to bear.

“I was mad,” Joe says. “I didn’t want them to win without me. I wanted to be the reason they weren’t winning.”

He wrote a letter to the coach. “Matillo,” it starts. “I want to say sorry for what I said to you. I know it was wrong and I don’t want you to hate me for it.”

Joe also wrote that he felt like a jerk, that he made the school look bad, that he was sorry again and again, that he wanted to play next year.

“It just hurts me to sit on the bench and know I can’t do anything for my team,” he said.

So Matillo gave the kid another chance. “I told him he was on a short rope,” he says.

And it has worked. “I shaped up and shut up and did what he said,” Joe says.

Because Joe Clarkson loves basketball.

“It’s like, the fans, the fans; they are all mine,” he says. “I feel part of something. This is my family. I could play all day. I love to score. I love to make baskets. It’s a great feeling. I love to win. When you play and you win, that is the best feeling I have ever had.”

So far, Buena Park High is tied for first in its league. Joe wants his ring.