Maurice Clarett’s Cry For Help

By Paul Smith
paul.smith@collegeblitz.com

	Maurice Clarett, once a cover boy for Sports Illustrated, is now front page fodder. (Sports Illustrated)

The accusatory rats have jumped ship for the most part. The stories about ex Ohio State football hero Maurice Clarett, coverboy, catalyst to the 2002 national championship, have assumed the voices of hundreds of judges, banging cyber gavels from London to Los Angeles.

Punk.

Scum of the earth.

Loser.

Career criminal in the making.

Following Clarett's latest misadventure with Columbus police, one that resulted in him being stopped near a seedy neighborhood on the city's east side, with half a bottle of vodka and four guns in his possession, the sit-in-judgement crowd from the corporate canyons to the Grand Canyon banged in unison.

After all, hadn't he held up people outside the popular young people's dance club, "Onion" at gunpoint? Hadn't he had some verbal hoo-hahs with others that resulted in some physical confrontations?

When Columbus Police Sergeant Michael Woods, a nice-guy classic Irish beat cop who earned his way up the lader, told the assembled media post four-guns: "(If) you've got four guns in your car, you're up to no good."

GUILTY, intone the sycophants from hither to yon. SLAM THE GATE.

The $5 million bond said the rest. If ever, they reasoned, there was an open-and-shut case, this was it.

Maurice Clarett, punk street kid from Youngstown who never got it together, who wanted the fast lane as soon as he made the 170 mile trek southwest to Columbus for the first time, got what was coming to him, that's all.

Yeah, sure. And the hell with all the circumstances that surrounded this troubled young man. Before the "bleeding heart" types pull out the daggers, know this: This humble scribbler is a political conservative.

But he is one who has a niggling addiction to fairness.

And this rush to banish Maurice Clarett to his own personal Steppes is as scary as some of the kid's conduct over the past misspent 3 years.

What Maurice Clarett needs is his own personal Emile Zola.

You may remember the colorful 19th century French journalist who wrote a firebrand 4,000-word essay "J'Accuse" about Captain Alfred Dreyfuss, a French artillery officer who turned out to be a military hero, but was railroaded through a joke of a justice system, his "justice" getting a brotherly shove by an angry French press.

"La verite est en marche et rien l'arretera," Zola wrote, one of the most famous phrases in French literary history. "Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it."

He spent several years at the forbidding "Devil's Island" facility off the jungle-laden coast of South America before true justice took its course and he returned home.

Where is the truth in Clarett's case? That is one question that will apparently be batted around for the foreseeable future.

To the Franklin County legal and justice system's credit, there will be a critical piece of it available soon. An exhaustive battery of psychological tests.

Keep in mind...

• Here was a sure-fire high first-round draft pick who by the time the Denver Broncos called his name, had seen two full founds of the National Football League draft float by.

• Here was a guy who had spilled an unflattering series of revelations about the Ohio State football program he saw to only-too-willing writers from ESPN-The Magazine.

• Here was a guy who had asked coach Jim Tressel, during the most critical week of practice before the Fiesta Bowl upset of highly-favored Miami for a few days off to go home for the funeral of a friend.

A gang-banger whose life was a trainwreck and had suffered the ultimate fate.

• Here was Maurice Clarett's conflicted world, one further complicated by a gold-digging mother who pushed her son to lobby for precedent setting N.F.L. eligibility after his freshman year. And when Ohio State, the N.F.L., and others in between balked, injected race into the mix and created a highly-combustible mess of auto-dealer perks and booster-clubbers gone wild that ultimately led to the year-early resignation of one of college sport's great leaders, O.S.U. Athletic Directer Andy Geiger.

Unquestionably, here was a cry for help.

All along, Clarett kept trying to jump back on the football merry-go-round. Cut from the Broncos after what most cited as being "disruptive" in training camp, the possibilities glided by -- Indoor football...Canada...N.F.L. Europe.

On one blog, when one poster posited that Clarett is "An American tragedy," another quickly responded, "He's a punk."

What is the truth? THAT is what many hope and pray comes out in the psychiatric tests.

People who deal in seven-figure salaries will be making the call here. People with half a generation of intense educational credentials, state-of-the-art behaviorial analysts.

But if you take the events of his life, carry yourself through that magical fall where the bodybuilder-constructed, joyous kid who wore the scarlet jersey with what seemed a very lucky #13, to the emotionally-scarred present, you get a very confusing series of images.

Some will remember back to the Chicago Bears' talented defensive end Alonzo Spellman, who went from being one of the more feared down linemen in the league to holing up in a motel in southern New Jersey playing "guns" with the local police.

Spellman was eventually evaluated as having severe bi-polar disorder and, slowly, painfully, began taking steps back from the ledge that threatened his very life.

He has largely disappeared from public view. But maybe no news in this case is the best possible news.

Your humble correspondent is neither Danny Sheridan nor a neon-nation sports book. But if I were a betting man, I'd say it's better than even money it will be discovered that Maurice Clarett suffers from exactly the same ailment.

From The Wall Street Journal's "Daily Fix" of August 10, writers Carl Bialik and Jason Fry cited his latest misadventure with Columbus police by noting a passage from Washington Post übercolumnist Michael Wilbon: "You would have had to have been the darkest of cynics to even suggest that Clarett's first big night (the winning touchdown in overtime against Miami) would be his last, that his life would descend into a hellish nightmare."

Clarett talked to ESPN-"The Rag's" Tom Friend, no friend of O.S.U. athletics, eager to clear the air. Odd choice of media partnership, because Friend and others performend one of the all-time hatchet jobs on the university, Ohio State football, Ohio in general ever written.

This time, to be fair, Friend gets it a lot closer to right than before. He unfolded a frightening tale that, in the eyes of The Wall Street Journal's Bialik and Fry, "leaves you shaking your head."

Clarett's attorneys insist there is a lot more to this story than meets the naked eye.

I am inclined to believe them. I think a lot of us just hope that lot more is exculpatory stuff that gets Maurice Clarett on the first steps of what will promise to be a demanding, difficult recovery.