He’s a Champion Off Duke’s Bench

The six Clark sisters, they could all play. And sisterhood or no sisterhood, some of their driveway games could get pretty rough. The eldest daughters, Sharon and Margaret, ended up playing collegiately for Pepperdine and having excellent basketball careers. A younger sister currently plays for DePaul. Another one plays for a smaller college in Colorado. The two youngest Clark girls can play the game, too.

And then there’s their only brother, Marty.

“Yeah, there’s only so much testosterone in my family,” Marty can’t resist saying.

Marty Clark is a basketball player himself. He has a chance tonight to become a fairly immortal basketball player, if indeed it is possible for someone to become fairly immortal. Marty is one of three members of the Duke squad who can become a three-time national champion. He and Grant Hill and Antonio Lang can do what very few have done. They can do something that might even make some of their old teammates jealous.

Christian Laettner never won three. Neither did Bobby Hurley or Thomas Hill.

“Down deep, they don’t want us to, either,” Clark says.

He is only saying this to be funny. You know that Duke basketball crowd, always making with the jokes. Like the fans of the Blue Devils who responded Saturday after rooters for the Razorbacks from Arkansas began chanting, “We want Duke! We want Duke!” The snappy comeback from every Duke fan to the Hogs was: “I smell bacon! I smell bacon!”

Sounds good to Clark. Get the skillet. Turn those Razorbacks into strips of Oscar Mayer tonight and, wow, what a way to go out. Three championships. Let’s see Laettner top that, up there in Timberwolf country where it’s cold, even with all his NBA money and all.

“My first phone call after the game goes right up to Minneapolis,” Clark says, provided Duke wins.

And why not? Tweak the big guy. Hey, hadn’t Laettner gotten on him? Hadn’t Marty had some pretty un-Christian thoughts toward Christian, for a while there?

Clark says, “Well, hate is a strong word. But I didn’t get along with Christian for a long time, no. He gets on people. And he doesn’t let people get too close, so they don’t really get to know him. That’s why he’s misperceived a lot, I think. He’s a unique person.”

And competitive.

“See, that’s it,” Clark says. “Duke’s a competitive program. It’s an inherent part of the entire Duke experience. It’s almost ridiculous how competitive we can be, just around each other.

“If you followed us around the country with a video camera, you wouldn’t believe your eyes half the time. We can get pretty crazy, whether it’s basketball, Ping-Pong, playing our Sega games, wrestling in the room, slap-boxing or whatever.”

Slap-boxing? You mean, like, slapping one another’s hands or slapping upside the face?

“Oh, man,” Clark says, “I mean full-contact slap-boxing. Do we ever. You take Tony Lang, for instance. He took some actual boxing lessons last summer. Me, too. Only now Tony thinks if he ever got into a ring full-time, he’d be another Muhammad Ali.”

Who’s the best Duke slapper? “I guess probably Laettner,” Clark says. “Or at least he thinks he is. Christian thought he had the quickest hands this side of the Mississippi.”

Competitive. That’s Duke in a nutshell. That’s why the national championship trophy might end up on a shelf in North Carolina for the fourth year in a row. That’s why only two teams west of that Mississippi River--Kansas (1988) and Nevada Las Vegas (1990)--have won the NCAA tournament since UCLA did in 1975. And that’s why Clark, a 6-foot-6 senior who is one of Duke’s team captains but not even a starter, has a chance to become fairly immortal.

From the time he played against his various sisters in what he remembers as “some vicious two-on-two games,” Clark says he has been a dreamer. All he required was a place to play, same as his sisters. He grew up tall, same as they did. (Both Margaret and Sharon stand taller than 6-3.) Their father built them a basketball court in Colorado, put them in private schools in Illinois. Marty went to the same high school Isiah Thomas did, a Catholic school in Chicago’s suburbs, St. Joseph’s. His principal problem, he says, was waiting for his six sisters to free up the family bath.

He went to Duke to study economics. Then he almost left for lack of playing time, until Billy McCaffrey beat him to it. The trouble with playing at Duke is being good enough to play. Marty has started 10 games in four seasons.

“Playing time, it’s like air to a player,” he says.

Saturday, he got some. Clark got 24 minutes of playing time. His game had been off of late, but the coach had faith. Into the game went Clark with a pat on his reddish head. He gave Duke eight points, three assists, three rebounds, four steals and a block. With 41 seconds to play, Marty stripped the ball from Dan Cross of Florida and fed it to Cherokee Parks, whose layup gave Duke the game. Said Mike Krzyzewski, the coach: “We don’t win this game without Marty Clark.”

All those days and nights on the bench, they mattered no more.

“I’ve had a lot of really, really, really good players playing in front of me,” Clark says. “But I haven’t quit. You’re not going to win a championship with five guys. And how many guys ever win three?”

Some people hope Duke won’t.

“Oh, they’re just tired of us winning all the time,” Marty says.

He’s sorry, but that’s the way it is. Wake up and smell the bacon.