Clarett, Maurice - "Flameout" - GQ

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Flameout

Since leading Ohio State to a national championship in 2002, running back Maurice Clarett has gone down in a blaze of guns, booze, and really bad decisions. Robert Draper meets him at the end of the road

November 2006

On his last night of freedom, Maurice Clarett drove through Columbus, Ohio, the city that had made him famous, then infamous, and now a joke. He'd been swigging on a bottle of Grey Goose, and he had nowhere left to go. It was midnight, but he figured he'd drop by a friend's house and get his hair cut. The friend didn't have his clippers with him. Clarett kept driving.

The car wasn't his, but that wasn't unusual. He always seemed to be behind the wheel of a car that someone was happy to loan him, because in certain circles the name Maurice Clarett still implied a future worth having a stake in. Back home in Youngstown, he'd been spotted recently driving an orange Navigator. In Malibu, he'd been seen tooling around in a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Now, out of football and five days away from trial—for holding up two patrons outside a bar in Columbus on New Year's Eve 2005—the best Clarett could do was his uncle's white SUV. In the back was everything he thought he'd need for his defense: financial records, high school diploma, family photos, and any other evidence that might prove he was stable and decent and didn't need to stick up strangers in a parking lot.

But Clarett was also carrying evidence of a different kind. Like the half-empty bottle of vodka. Like the hatchet, the three semiautomatic handguns, and the loaded SKS assault rifle in the passenger seat. Like the Kevlar vest underneath his shirt.

If Maurice Clarett was in Columbus to clear his name, then why was he girded for a night of violence?

He talked on the phone as he drove aimlessly around town. He called his former coach, Jim Tressel, of Ohio State, and his future coach, Jim Terry, of an arena team called the Mahoning Valley Hitmen. He called his pal LeBron James. He called ESPN writer Tom Friend. He called his lawyer, Mike Hoague, and his mother, Michelle. To some, he sounded alert and upbeat. To others, drunk and melancholy. Speaking to Hoague, Clarett choked up as he talked about holding his daughter, Jayden Marie, born just three weeks ago.

"I'd do anything for that little girl," he said. "I'd go to jail thirty years for her. …"

"Maurice," said Hoague, "you're not going to jail, okay? You're not guilty. Now get some sleep."

At well past two in the morning, he called his mother, who had to go to work the next morning in Youngstown. As he talked, he swerved along Brice Road, missing the turn for his hotel, and pulled an illegal U-turn. He saw police lights in his rearview. He didn't pull over. "I've got guns in my car, I'm going to jail," he moaned into the receiver. "Call my lawyer. Tell Ashley I love her."

Clarett put the phone down but never turned it off. A few minutes later, Michelle Clarett heard the one sound a mother dreads most—that of gunfire.

But no, it was only the sound of tire spikes letting the air out of Clarett's final run to daylight.

*****

One week later, Maurice Clarett made a call from the Franklin County Jail, and the phone was handed to me. "I want to talk to you about writing a book with me," he said. "I've got a lot of things to say, man. Talk to my lawyer. He'll get you in to see me tomorrow. And bring a lot of notepaper. We'll get it right this time, my brother."

This was Clarett's way of apologizing for standing me up two years ago, after I'd scheduled a flight to Ohio to spend a few days with the exiled Buckeye star. At the time, his flameout seemed inexplicable. Less than two years before, in his very first college game, he had shredded Texas Tech for 175 yards and three touchdowns. Three weeks after that, he had racked up 230 yards and two touchdowns. Columbus was his—though when he told ESPN in October that he would consider abandoning OSU for the pros, bad blood began to simmer. In December of that year, he asked to leave its Fiesta Bowl preparations to attend the funeral of a Youngstown friend, and the team denied him, claiming he hadn't filled out the proper paperwork. It was a callous move by the university, but Clarett made things worse: He responded by openly referring to athletic director Andy Geiger as a liar. Then he led Ohio State to a victory in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl and delivered its first national championship since 1968. Again, Columbus toasted Maurice Clarett.

But the affection was soon to expire.

Clarett would never play another down for Ohio State. Less than a year after the championship, the school suspended him for filing a false police report, and for allegations of accepting cars and cash. Since he refused to cooperate with the NCAA's investigation but also refused to deny their charges, Clarett left campus on a wave of antipathy. When I first contacted him, in the summer of 2004, he was mounting a quixotic legal fight to become the first player to enter the NFL one year out of high school. Never before has a football legend-in-the-making fallen so far so quickly, with so little hope for redemption and with so little reason governing his demise.

I wanted to hear Clarett's side of things. But before I boarded the plane, his then agent called with the news: "Maurice has disappeared." The interview was off. He conceded that his client had maturity issues. But hey—the guy was a star, or had been, and might still be. Who was going to tell him what he could or couldn't do?

When Clarett eventually emerged, he spouted off to an ESPN writer about all the handouts Ohio State had allegedly bestowed on him. He came off in the story looking like a brat and a weasel. After it was published, his worried mother called me. Apparently, Maurice wanted to explain himself. Was GQ still interested?

I wasn't.

From there, he proceeded with the tailspin we've come to expect from athletes who believe their chances at stardom will be endless. The courts turned away Clarett's legal challenges against the NFL in 2004, and because he'd signed with an agent, Ohio State couldn't take him back. He retreated to Malibu, switched agents, sat out the year, got fat, and lived large. In 2005, despite his dismal showing at an NFL workout, the Denver Broncos risked a third-round draft choice on the 21-year-old who had played one year of college ball. Clarett failed to impress, and Coach Mike Shanahan cut him before the regular season, going out of his way to say that it had been a "mistake" to take a chance on Clarett. "When a coach of that caliber says that," says one of Clarett's former coaches, "you're blackballed out of the league."

But this latest turn of events—the stickup at the Columbus bar, followed by the encounter with cops wielding pepper spray and stun guns, wrestling Clarett to the ground—had thrown a typical sports narrative o the rails. Here was a superstar with no moves left. A man with a date in court. A man with a newborn daughter to feed. And yet Maurice Clarett was drinking, driving, and packing heat as if he could outrun the consequences…

As it turned out, the judge quashed our interview and forbade Clarett to meet with the media. Clarett and I nonetheless managed to communicate by phone and mail. "My story has always been twisted and cut short," he wrote. Clarett believed that the truth of his saga lay in Youngstown: "Seeing where I came from and having gone where I been, you can appreciate the hard work and dedication I had to put in."

The problem with this was that it presented Youngstown as the place Clarett had succeeded in leaving behind, rather than the place that had twisted him and cut him short. They'd worshipped Maurice Clarett in the Steel Valley. When thousands of strangers chant your name and grown men follow you around offering you cash and cars, how do you maintain perspective? Ever since Ernest Lawrence Thayer conjured up Mudville in "Casey at the Bat," it's been axiomatic that the cheerless Youngstowns of America invest disproportionately in their heroes. "This area has always celebrated the individual," says Clarett's former coach at Warren G. Harding High School, Thom McDaniels. "I don't know if I can explain it, and it's never been my approach to celebrate individuals at the expense of the team. But this community has a tendency to do that."

Say what you will about Maurice Clarett: His story isn't just that of a phenom who coughed up the ball at the one-yard line. It's the story of a runner who lacked the resources to go the distance…unless the playing field was tilted downhill.

"I'm not just a guy saying that I was born in the ghetto," he writes. "I believe you did your research well enough to know."

In fact, Clarett was not born in the ghetto. Throughout his early years, the south side of Youngstown was solidly blue-collar, racially mixed, "full of good, hardworking people," remembers his mother, Michelle. "Now they've left, and they're renting out to transients. The neighborhood has just gone down, down, down."

Maurice watched the changes, watched his world grow bleak and ghettoized. On Easter Sunday during his freshman year in high school, he phoned his coach, Gary Barber. "There was a shooting in the neighborhood, and Maurice wanted me to come pick him up and take him over to my house," Barber says. Ghetto kids were accustomed to such outbreaks. Maurice wasn't a ghetto kid. He was the youngest of three boys, and the only terror he'd known came from his brothers whupping up on him. The ghetto was a new kind of malevolence, and Clarett retreated from it into football.

By eighth grade, every high school coach in the region had heard about him. All the things they couldn't teach—the vision, the shifty feet, the appetite for bulldozing linebackers—were present in his nearly 200-pound body. "Every school contacted him," says Mike Butch Jr., Clarett's junior high coach. "It's really illegal, but there was a lot of interest. He wanted to be a pro basketball player then—he was already dunking the ball in eighth grade, and he completely dominated. But I told him that with his height, he should concentrate on football, where he was way above anybody else."

So Maurice went shopping from school to school, telling one startled coach that he intended to be the starting varsity tailback as a freshman. He pointed to a photo on the wall of a school legend and said, "I'll be better than him." He finally settled on Austintown Fitch High School and signed up with both the football and basketball teams. But when the basketball coach informed Maurice that he couldn't wear the black high-tops he'd bought, he stormed out and informed school officials that he was transferring. (To this day, Clarett says that he left Fitch over the shoe incident, known in Youngstown circles as Sneakergate. "That's preposterous," a Fitch coach maintains.)

The coach at Harding, Gary Barber, had seen Maurice play. "I thought, Wow, that kid's a specimen," he says. "He looked like Herschel Walker." Harding struck gold with Clarett, who began to roll up unfathomable numbers. Three hundred yards of rushing in a half. A rushing average of almost ten yards a carry. USA Today's national 2001 offensive player of the year. It didn't take long for all the big universities—Miami, Notre Dame, Texas—to come calling. (In the end, it was no contest. Maurice stuck with the local school, Ohio State, and its new coach, Jim Tressel, an Ohio native with Youngstown roots.) But the kid didn't revel in the fame. He stayed off the streets; made decent grades; got bigger, faster, stronger. ("I'd tell him, 'Don't lift twice a day—you'll tear your muscles,' " remembers Barber.) Harding counted itself lucky to have him.

And because he didn't get into trouble, it was easy for the coaches to miss the warning signs. Just as he bristled when the Fitch coaches wouldn't let him wear his high-top sneakers, Clarett saw dark implications when his Harding coaches flexed him out as a flanker—They're trying to turn me into a wide receiver! —when in fact the goal was just to get the ball in Maurice's hands as often as possible. "He had an obsessive-compulsive personality," says Barber. "He'd get something in his head, and he'd replay it." Barber's successor, Thom McDaniels, noticed as well that Clarett wasn't apt to show mindless obedience but was always "interested in why." As in: Why did he, Maurice Clarett, have to waste his time at a team pregame meal? When he didn't show up to one that McDaniels organized, the coach chewed him out, and his star "walked away from the conversation very unhappy. So I sat him for two games. After that, we had a wonderful relationship."

McDaniels, a legend himself in Ohio high school gridiron circles, no longer talks to the media about the greatest player he ever coached. "It's a terrible tragedy, and I don't know what to say because I don't know what to make of it," he says of Clarett's trajectory. "He'd been spoiled and pampered by other people before he ever got to me. One of the first conversations I had with him was that there was an enormously long line of people waiting to pat him on the back, and I was in the very short line that was gonna tell him what he needed to do to become better. It hurts me to say this. I think he came under the influence of an awful lot of people who wanted something out of him."

Spoiled and pampered. Came under the influence. McDaniels is only one of many to suggest that for all of Clarett's determination, he lacked the fortitude to play by the rules. More than anything else, he was immature, easily bedazzled and thrown o course. When I asked Clarett how to explain his rapid slide from Ohio State sensation to would-be running back for the Mahoning Valley Hitmen in three short years, he replied, "Just say I lived out my dreams, fantasies, and realities. From vacations in and out of the country to living on the beach and driving a Rolls-Royce at age 20. Ringside seats, boat parties…"

As to why Clarett entered the limelight so soft and so susceptible, there is a theory, often implied but never stated outright, except by one former coach who said it to me on condition of anonymity:

"The mother—now, she's a big part of the problem."

*****

Michelle Clarett sits in a restaurant in downtown Columbus. The right side of the menu she holds in her hands lists a dozen or so steaks, many of them named after Ohio State football legends. Archie Griffin. Woody Hayes. Jim Tressel. "I guess Maurice didn't make the menu," she says.

Michelle is tall and sturdy, bespectacled and coiffed, with a judicial aspect to her 46-year-old face. Her voice, though quiet and measured, is anything but passive. "Tell me something," she says. "Why is my son punished for speaking his mind? From birth that's how I raised my sons—that it's okay to question something that doesn't seem right. This menu here. If I see something on it that doesn't make sense, I'm going to ask the waiter about it. What's wrong with that? Maurice thought what Ohio State did to him, not letting him go to his friend's funeral, was wrong. He spoke his mind. And they went after him for it, and it's never stopped."

A mother's unconditional love: There is nothing more precious in life, nor anything more clichéd in the annals of sports journalism. Throughout Maurice Clarett's travails, Michelle has been by his side—provider, chaperone, coach, fan, and now jailhouse visitor. She has given everything to her three boys, two of whom are incarcerated (the eldest, Mike junior, is serving time on drug charges) and all of whom have children she now has a hand in raising. Other than church, Michelle Clarett has no life but work (as chief deputy clerk in the Youngstown courthouse) and her boys. No suitors, no vacations, barely any sleep. The concept of self-pity is foreign to her.

How do you cope, I ask.

"I serve an awesome God," she says.

Maurice's father, Myke Clarett, was divorced from Michelle when she was 25 and their three boys were ages 2 to 5. Maurice avoids all contact with his father unless, says Myke, "he's pissed off. The last time we spoke was a couple of days after his arrest in January. A reporter called me and asked me what I thought. I told him, and I got a call from Maurice saying stay out of it, you don't know what you're talking about, your help isn't wanted or needed."

Myke Clarett maintains that he "always paid the child support that the court said I was supposed to pay." For whatever reason, Maurice didn't buy this and was so offended by his father's meager offerings that he asked his high school coaches to have Myke banned from attending practices. And so there was never a man in Maurice Clarett's life—there was only Michelle. And three cheers for the mother, who made the mortgage payments, who began her daily schleppings at five in the morning and ended each night around ten, who served as commissioner of the boys' youth league, who fed half the kids in the neighborhood, who taught her kids how to speak well and work hard and not for a minute think that there would be an absence of love in their lives. There is no easier mark than the mother, because she's the only one there, and she will support Maurice to the end, believing him because a son must know that his mother believes (even though, as Clarett told me, "There's a lot that my mother doesn't know because I don't want to hurt her feelings").

It may be true, as Myke Clarett says, that Michelle is "overprotective" and that "no matter what my boys have ever gotten into, it was never their fault." Then again, what else would one expect of a mother? A mother can do only so much for her sons, a male friend once told her. For some stuff in life, they just gotta have a man. Michelle could accept that. Except that there wasn't a man handy, and she didn't have time to go fetch one up, either.

And so a few things would be missed. Discipline, fear-of-God ultimatums, calling the boys on their bullshit—not her things. The lack of guidance showed on the playing field. The toughness required of football players was never fully instilled in the Clarett boys. The eldest, Mike junior, told his mother one day that he was giving up the sport because he was tired of being tackled. Marcus, the middle son, dropped out of the University at Bualo because, he told her, it was no fun playing for a losing team. (He was also rendered academically ineligible.) Maurice possessed a greater intensity than his older siblings, yet even he spent much of his high school and college career sidelined by injuries. The feminine logic—why play when you're hurt? —is unassailable, except that football requires this of its participants. Clarett would learn this the hard way, in training camp last year with Denver, where he sat idle for two weeks with a bad groin and then got cut before he could prove once and for all that the world had it all wrong about Maurice Clarett.

No, there was no counterweight to the unquestioning devotion of Michelle, who has defended her son's controversial acts at every turn. Leaving Fitch High for Harding over a pair of shoes? It was the right thing, she says: Fitch used literature texts with racist content. (Officials at the school deny this.) Dissing Ohio State by telling ESPN that he'd consider leaving after one year? Michelle blames the college's sports-information director, who sat in during the interview and allowed this line of inquiry. (The story's author insists that no one from the school was present.) Clarett's accusations of scandal at OSU to ESPN reporter Tom Friend? Michelle strongly implies that Friend misrepresented her son's words. (Friend says he has the whole thing on tape.) And finally, the charge that Maurice fell prey to unsavory cohorts? "I think it's inappropriate for people to view him by the company he keeps," Michelle says. "There are people I've known who have drug problems. That doesn't make me a bad person, does it?"

But the hardest blow, she says, the one impossible to forget or forgive, was Ohio State's show of "complete, unadulterated disrespect for me. The first running back to start as a freshman in more than fifty years—and where the hell was I sitting for that first game? In the freaking end zone. My son got them to the Fiesta Bowl. And at that? game I was sitting in the nosebleed section. When you see friends of people working in the athletic department getting better tickets, sitting on the fifty-yard line, and here I sit, mashed into a corner…"

"Those friends," I say, "probably contributed heavily to the university."

Her reply is rich with venom:

"Any bigger than my son's contribution?"

*****

"I'm not bitter at what happened," Clarett writes. "I can say I'm disappointed. I can also say that I've learned a lot. I believe when I get out of this current situation, I can become a motivational speaker. Life's best teachers are experiences and I have more than you can imagine."

A few weeks before the trial that would end in a prison sentence for one of the greatest football players that never was, a preacher in a Baptist church in Youngstown told his congregation about a letter he had just received from Maurice Clarett at the Franklin County Jail. The preacher said nothing about why the 22-year-old native son was there. This was Clarett's church, after all. These were his people.

What the preacher said was this: "God will use this young man! This young man will help others! He will reach people that us church folks can never reach!" Maurice Clarett was broken, said the preacher—broken by God, and this was a blessing. "God wants us to be uncomfortable," he said, while Michelle Clarett nodded and dabbed at her eyes.

God is getting what he wants. A born runner now lives in a cage. He's 22 and says he has a story to tell through books and speeches. And yet his own lawyers, Nick Mango and Mike Hoague, don't know what that story is. All those weapons, the vodka, the bulletproof vest… They don't know. Maybe, they think, he felt threatened. Maurice, they confess, had never been shy about taking what was offered. What if someone was after Maurice to collect on some debt, real or imagined? For that matter, there had been talk of Clarett owing money to Hai Waknine, an alleged member of an Israeli mob called the Jerusalem Group whom Clarett knew back in L.A. and who was awaiting trial on racketeering charges. Maybe Waknine thought Clarett intended to testify against him. Or Clarett thought Waknine thought that. There had to be a defense!

Alas, it wasn't Hai Waknine. "I don't have any blood with him," Clarett told his attorneys when they floated the theory to him. "He showed me love. I ain't scared of him." And it wasn't a Youngstown mobster, because Maurice had never met one. He was lost and drunk and a long way from adulthood, trying to make himself feel invulnerable while knowing that he wasn't, seeking pep talks from those who could assure him of his greatness and his place in the world—coaches, fellow athletes, sportswriters, his lawyers, and last but never least, his mother.

Maurice Clarett wasn't going to waste anyone that night. Except, maybe, himself.

Robert Draper is aGQ correspondent.

http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200610/maurice-clarett-running-back-ohio-state