ESPN The Magazine's Tom Friend: Clarett's night of desperation
On possibly his last night as a free man, Maurice Clarett was calling on the telephone. I hadn't seen him or heard from him in a year, not since the Denver Broncos kicked him to the curb, but I was on his list Tuesday night. Along with Jim Tressel and LeBron James and some arena football coach. His list of thank-yous.I looked at the clock when he called, and it was just past 11 p.m. ET. He told me he was driving somewhere, and along the way his cell phone cut in and out. He wasn't loud or belligerent. Instead he seemed melancholy and possibly drunk.
He started in with his news: He was a daddy. His girlfriend, Ashley, had given birth to a baby girl on July 17 and he claimed it had changed his life. "F--- Ohio State, f--- winning the national championship, it's more cool having her,'' he was saying. He said he'd cry a lot when he held her, and that just the other day in his mom's house, he'd cried four times holding her the same afternoon. He said he'd do anything for that little girl, that he'd go to jail for 30 years for this little girl. It wasn't clear what he meant, although it's starting to get clearer now.
Do read it all.
Friend, you may recall, was reviled by Buckeye football program junkies as an apologist for Clarett, if not his outright abettor in the battle he waged, based mostly in lies and driven by his bottomless self-absorption, against the Ohio State football program and Coach Tressel. Right from the early ESPN The Magazine cover story depicting Clarett tossing aside the Scarlet and Gray jersey for the NFL, ESPN The Magazine, and their TV network cousins have served as the mouthpiece for Clarett's lying mouth. The charges he spouted, and which ESPN trumpeted, were all investigated by internal and NCAA authorities, turned out to be without merit, and resulted in not so much as a wrist slap for the program.
I'm told by a friend who saw some of the early ESPN coverage of the latest arrest that they were actually asking people if they thought that Ohio State bore some responsibility for Clarett's problems. Going on four years out of OSU, with all the recent history away from OSU as a backdrop, ESPN is still suggesting that Maurice Clarett was ill-served by the Ohio State football program, instead of the other way around.
For my part, I never forgave him for the pre-Fiesta Bowl grandstanding he did in Tempe in 2002, addressing the national press to accuse the OSU administration of lying to him, while his teammates and coaches were preparing to try to win a National Championship Game a few hours later. People who say he was exploited by the university, or the college football system, forget that he was a major behavior problem and a royal pain in the ass even before he was an Ohio State football hero.
All ESPN managed to prove was that when a star player walks around with his hand out, there are sometimes over-zealous boosters all too ready to put money or favors into it, and that OSU was not immune to the problem.
With Clarett though, even those of us who follow the program with a microscope could barely keep straight whether Clarett was, at any given moment, admitting that he had lied about something he had previously said, or saying that he had lied when he said he was lying. He was happy as long as there was a microphone in front of him and he was the center of attention.
That said, Friend writes a great piece here. He clearly has connected with Clarett over the years, and probably now knows as much about him as anyone. He seems to have been fully rehabilitated as a result of repeated contact with Maurice Clarett.
Posted by dan at August 10, 2006 10:04 AM