Playing Past Heartbreak

Keydren Clark’s senior season at St. Peter’s College was supposed to be about chasing legends, not mourning his best friend.

But all that changed on the morning of June 21, when Clark’s teammate and confidant, fellow New Yorker George Jefferson, was found dead in the on-campus dorm room they shared with another teammate.

Cause of death, an autopsy found, was an enlarged heart.

Clark discovered the body.

And just like that his bid to join Oscar Robertson and Pete Maravich as major college basketball’s only three-time national scoring champions seemed far less significant than it had with the effervescent Jefferson there to cajole and congratulate him.

Jefferson had prodded Clark toward heights unimaginable for a 5-foot-9 point guard only lightly recruited out of Rice High in Harlem.

But after his friend’s death, Clark withdrew from the game he had loved almost from infancy -- “Just kind of drifted away,” his mother said -- and struggled to understand, his heart broken and his mind drifting.

“I don’t think basketball was a priority because he kind of shied away from it,” said his mother, Rosie, a Continental Airlines flight attendant.

“I think it was because he spent all that time in this gym with George. It was too hard for him to come in here to play. I think it’s still hard for him to come in here to play.”

As she spoke, Clark’s mother sat two rows behind the St. Peter’s bench in the school’s Yanitelli Recreational Life Center. It was halftime of the Peacocks’ home opener this month, an emotional 73-60 victory over Monmouth.

About an hour earlier, her seemingly composed son had escorted Jefferson’s weeping mother, Jackie, arm in arm to center court for a pregame memorial in which school President James N. Loughran awarded Jefferson a posthumous degree.

Clark later admitted he’d had a good cry of his own in the locker room before scoring a game-high 20 points on six-for-12 shooting.

“I was thinking, ‘How would George handle this situation?’ ” he said. “He’s the main key to me being a two-time nation’s leading scorer. He always got me in the gym, always made me feel like I was nothing, just so I would push myself to the limit. And the whole process of me stepping away from basketball made me understand that more and made me even hungrier than I was in the past.”

Slowly, his closest allies say, his passion has returned.

“I think he’s at a different stage now,” said his coach, Bob Leckie, a former St. Peter’s point guard who saw something in a 13-points-a-game high school role player that other college coaches didn’t, recruiting Clark via handwritten notes to the player and his mother. “I think he’s forging ahead, rather than allowing the past to be too much of a burden. But it’s a process.

“He’s a changed man, and I understand that. So am I because of this experience. But I feel comfortable in that he’s working toward the future. I can see it. I can see it in his demeanor, and I can see it in his play a little bit too.

“It’s a tremendous amount of responsibility to bear, knowing that you have an opportunity to lead the nation in scoring for the third time in three years and be mentioned in the same breath as Oscar Robertson and Pete Maravich and try to lead your team to the NCAA tournament in a one-bid conference.

“Then he has to deal with the passing of his dear friend.”

Jefferson, Leckie said, was Clark’s “motivating factor. He wouldn’t allow him to take a day off from basketball, and when that was taken away from him -- when George was taken away from him -- I thought he lost his edge.”

On top of all that, Leckie had upgraded the schedule to showcase his star, who brought a 25.8-point scoring average into this season. Clark, only the third player less than 6 feet tall to lead the nation in scoring and the first since Army’s Kevin Houston in 1986-87, averaged 24.9 points in his first season -- sixth nationally, first among freshmen -- 26.7 as a sophomore and 25.8 last season.

But Clark, perhaps trying too hard after dedicating the season to Jefferson, struggled early on this season. He made only eight of 39 shots -- two of 19 from beyond the three-point arc -- and scored 27 points in the Peacocks’ first two games, double-digit losses to Florida and Oakland (Mich.) in the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic.

Since then, he has started to return to form, averaging 25.3 points in the Peacocks’ last six games, four of them victories. Averaging 22.4 points overall, he scored a season-high 42 last Sunday in an 87-84 victory at Niagara, including 23 of the Peacocks’ last 25 in the second half and seven of their first nine in overtime.

“It’s taken a while,” Leckie said, “but he’s coming around.”

Though he possesses NBA range on his jump shot -- with 352 three-point baskets in his career, he is on pace to eclipse the NCAA Division I record of 413 held by former Virginia guard Curtis Staples -- and seemingly is capable of scoring at will if the situation dictates, Clark is not a prototypical scorer.

He’s no gunner.

“Keydren lets the game come to him,” Leckie said. “When people see him play, they’re somewhat shocked that he doesn’t throw up a lot of shots, that he allows the game to unfold.

“He’s our go-to guy -- and he knows that -- but I think he plays the game the way we as coaches like to see it played.”

St. Peter’s Athletic Director Bill Stein, a former top aide at Georgetown under John Thompson, goes so far as to call Clark the nation’s best passer.

Clark, who averages about four assists, said the key to his success is his basketball acumen, gleaned through years of playing and watching the game.

He has studied tapes of Robertson and Maravich and said of the more-than-half-a-foot-taller Hall of Fame guards, “They did it their way and I’m doing it my way.”

That he’s doing it at all -- and has caught the eye of NBA scouts -- is a surprise even to the coach who gave him a chance. In high school, Clark played off guard on a nationally ranked team that sent eight players to Division I colleges. Coaches at more prominent colleges ignored him, probably because of his size, but Leckie had faith, believing that Clark would be better suited to playing the point.

Still, “never in my wildest dreams did I think he’d be a national scoring champion,” said Leckie, who changed his mind after Clark scored 48 points against Northern Arizona in his third college game and a Yanitelli Center-record 44 against St. Francis in his fourth. “But he came right out of the starting blocks.

“That’s when I knew I had something special. Up to that point, I thought I had a quality person and a good New York City guard. That was enough.”

Clark briefly considered transferring to a bigger school after his freshman year but stayed out of loyalty to Leckie, who with Clark’s help has rebuilt the Peacock program. Winners of only 13 games in the three seasons before Clark’s arrival, the Peacocks were 17-12 two seasons ago and 15-13 last season.

This season they’re young, but Clark is hopeful they can win the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference and reach the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1996 and only the third time in school history. They’re 2-0 in conference play after victories at Canisius and Niagara last weekend.

Clark brought his small Jesuit school national recognition, earned a degree in business administration and started work toward a master’s in elementary education.

And he showed that he’ll be able to make a living playing ball -- overseas, at least, if not in the NBA.

“He’s definitely on our radar,” an NBA talent evaluator said.

Most important to Clark, he got to know George Jefferson.

Though they’re the same age, “he was like a big brother, always making sure I was doing fine,” Clark said. “He was just a wonderful person to have met. To share three years of my life with him here at St. Peter’s is something I would never change.”

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Small wonder

Keydren Clark, who has 2,397 points at St. Peter’s College, could become the seventh player in NCAA Division I to score more than 3,000 points, and the first under 6 feet tall:

*--* Player, Team Years Points Pete Maravich, Louisiana State 1968-70 3,667 Freeman Williams, Portland State 1975-78 3,249 Lionel Simmons, La Salle 1987-90 3,217 Alphonso Ford, Mississippi Valley State 1990-93 3,165 Harry Kelly, Texas Southern 1980-83 3,066 Hersey Hawkins, Bradley 1985-88 3,008

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Note: Oscar Robertson scored 2,973 points in three seasons at Cincinnati, 1958-60.