A great finish

PULLMAN – Leave it to the most powerful dunker on the team to know that it’s not about how you start, but all about how you finish.

Ivory Clark did not start his college basketball career in a great position. Nor he did start his Washington State career on the best of terms.

But the senior, playing his last home game this afternoon in Washington State’s regular-season finale, sure has figured out how to end his tenure.

“It’s just a dream of mine,” Clark said of this 23-6 season, which will lead him to the NCAA tournament in two weeks. “After this, this is over for me. There’s no more of this. I just want to go out on the highest note possible and achieve all I can while I’m here. Those guys, they have another year. Who knows, maybe they can repeat this next year. I just want to make the most of it.”

Even as recently as a year ago, it would have been hard to imagine the forward from New Orleans saying such a thing.

Of course, go back a couple of years more, and it all would have seemed even more unlikely.

Clark, the do-everything athletic freak, was known in high school not as the dominant basketball player but as the promising football prospect. Major-college scholarship offers came pouring in from places like Auburn and Nebraska.

But his heart – and that 7-foot-2 wingspan – were wrapped around another sport. That love for basketball made his collegiate journey far more unorthodox than it otherwise might have been.

Gone were his days as a defensive end at an SEC or a Big XII school. In was his stint at NAIA Dillard University.

“A lot of people told me that it wasn’t a wise decision, including my dad,” Clark said of passing on the opportunity to play football. “But I don’t think I loved it enough to play it on the collegiate level. I just followed my heart and I wanted to play basketball. I went out on a limb.”

That limb nearly broke when Clark’s coach was fired after one season at Dillard. He ended up at Midland College, a two-year school in Texas. It was there that WSU and Tony Bennett found Clark, and from there that he found his way to Pullman.

Getting to senior day, however, wasn’t easy even after he arrived on campus.

“Ivory was a typical junior college kid who didn’t quite understand the intensity and the work ethic of this level, all the time. Not just in spurts,” Bennett said. “I think at the end of the year he wasn’t giving us everything he had.”

Of all the players on last year’s team, perhaps none dealt worse with former head coach Dick Bennett than Clark. As a junior, Clark was both uncomfortable and unhappy, two things that no amount of athleticism could overcome.

Fortunately for Clark and the Cougars, the passing of the torch from father to son on the bench seemed to also light a fire within the rising senior. Given a little more latitude this time around, Clark has turned into WSU’s most unique weapon.

“Once you’ve been put in chains for so long, in your mind after they’ve been released, in your mind they’re still on you,” Clark said. “But he doesn’t bench me for taking an errant shot every now and then and he’s just allowed me to express myself on the court. I think I’ve benefited from being free and stress-free so much under him.”

When a small forward is giving WSU problems, the senior can defend him. Or maybe a 7-footer like Washington’s Spencer Hawes – Clark has guarded him, too. Need a shot block? That’s in his job description as well.

“He’s the biggest difference this year,” redshirt sophomore Daven Harmeling said. “Obviously, everybody’s a year older and more experienced, but the lift he gives us – the blocked shots, the steals, the dunks – those are things that get the team going, the crowd going, and maybe makes other teams step back and be intimidated a little bit by having him in the lane.”

“Everywhere I’ve been, whoever can jump the highest and block shots and dunk usually the crowd loves them,” Bennett said. … “He’s got the wow factor.”

Beyond this season, Clark is unsure of what the future holds. A degree over the summer, to be sure, but beyond that, life looks like an unclaimed rebound for the 21-year-old. A career in professional basketball is possible, although what level remains to be seen.

But for now, there’s one destination that looms large on the horizon: the NCAA tournament.

“It’s kind of like a storybook ending for me,” he said. “Now I’m just happy. Everything has turned out this year. I couldn’t ask for a better season.”