Remembering A Bergen County Basketball Giant
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Lee Clark was the consummate basketball junkie. He almost missed the Dec. 14, 2007 ceremony when Leonia High School named its basketball court after him, because even in retirement, Clark had a game to coach -- as a Pinelands Regional volunteer assistant.
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But Tom Procopio, a 1972 Leonia grad and one of Clark's English students, then the principal at Pinelands, arranged for the game to be postponed a day so Clark could go to the court naming and then coach Pinelands the next night.
"He wouldn't miss a game, even on the night his court was being unveiled,'' Fran Orlowski, who played for Clark and was the Leonia coach that year told the Record's Mark Czerwinski the night of the unveiling. "He loved the game.''
Clark, who died in his sleep at age 93 in a rehabilitation facility near his Manahawkin home on Aug. 9, won 457 games in a head coaching career that included 1959-1989 at Leonia, three years at Don Bosco and four years at Dumont in addition to assistant coaching stops at Clifton and Pinelands. The highlights were a 1967 Group 1 state 73-65 championship win over Burlington Township at Atlantic City's Convention Hall and a 63-57 loss to St. Joseph in the 1982 Bergen Jamboree final as a tenth seed, the first time any Group 1 school had reached the final in the modern history of the tournament.
An honored and beloved man
"There are two types of people in the world, those who didn't know Lee Clark and those who liked and loved him,'' said his only child, former Bogota basketball star and assistant coach Chris Clark. "If you knew him and didn't love him, there was something wrong with you.''
You'd be hard-pressed to get disagreement from the hundreds of boys he coached, the thousands of students he taught and the people he interacted with during his long and successful life. Clark spent 30 years coaching at Leonia and delivered the only state championship and only Bergen County Jamboree finalist the Lions have ever had.
"Lee was relatively quiet off the court,'' said Paul Puglise, the former Waldwick coach who has headed the Bergen County Jamboree committee since 2007. "He was always a gentleman and always ready to talk hoops no matter where he was.''
During the period Clark led Leonia, North Jersey was loaded with talented coaches at the small school level. Bob Stolarz was at Becton, Jay Mahoney at Bogota, Marty Rivard at Cresskill, Bob Biegel at Hasbrouck Heights, Bill Ferguson at North Arlington, John Wendelken at Palisades Park, John Guy at Ridgewood, Puglise, and Herb Cohen at Wood-Ridge roamed the Group 1 sidelines and faced each other time and time again.
"It was a clinic every game,'' Puglise remembers. "The coaches were innovative, mostly playing multiple defenses and covering every detail. If you didn't have a good scout to tell you what these guys were running you could be in big trouble.''
Clark was at the middle of it all. He was the high school teammate of former Boston Celtic Basketball Hall of Famer Tommy Heinsohn at St. Michael's in Union City, then graduated from St. Peter's College. He returned to be an assistant at St. Michael's before taking an English teaching position at Leonia and then becoming the junior varsity basketball coach in 1958. The next year he became the varsity coach.
In the fall of 1962, a Rutgers senior named Valerie Hunt began student teaching at the high school. Six years later Lee and Val were married. Val Clark became one of the state's top woman officials in field hockey, lacrosse and basketball at both the high school and college level, turning down a chance at working in the Atlantic Coast Conference later in her career. She spent decades as the Reference Librarian at Bergen County's top library, Johnson Public Library in Hackensack before the couple retured to Manahawkin in 2003. In many ways they were Bergen County's First Couple of basketball.
Clark's impact on North Jersey basketball was undeniable
Lee's influence in North Jersey hoops extended beyond just coaching his team.
Lee coached at a time when the NJSIAA had much stricter rules for out-of-season contact with athletes, even in the summer, barring schools from having more than two athletes on any summer league basketball program.
"Lee was so organized that he started Bergen County's first summer league in the 1960s in Leonia, and made it an eight team league so that all of his varsity kids could play," The league lasted for more than 40 years.
Clark served on the Bergen County Jamboree from the late 1970s until he left in 1996 when he came out of retirement to coach Dumont after the rules had changed keeping active coaches off the committee. During that nearly two decade span the tournament grew into the top in-season tournament in the state, thanks largely to the stability and vision of the committee.
A personal thought
The first time I covered a Leonia High School basketball game was in January of 1975 (I looked it up) when the Lions were two years away from leaving their old bandbox gymnasium that measured just 68-x-50 feet and moving to a new facility that will turn 50 years old this winter. I was a relatively new reporter in my third year and Clark was already halfway to legendary status.
The Lions beat Palisades Park that night, 72-69 for their 11th straight win behind Tony Colagreco, who went on to score more than 1,700 points and play at Fordham. Clark was patient with this young reporter asking questions about the oddly shaped court where the midcourt line was 10 feet beyond the opposing foul line and there was little room at either end.
Over the years I got to know Lee pretty well, covering a game or two almost every year while he was at Leonia and spending a lot of time with him, and the rest of that amazing Jamboree committee from the late 1970s to early 1990s. Lee, tournament chairman Ed Strohmeyer, Tony Comeleo, Mickey Corcoran and Charlie Brown welcomed me into the club and when they went out to eat at Pinto's, the now closed Italian restaurant maybe a mile from HHS- between double headers at the tournament the first and second rounds, I learned more basketball than I did if I studied it for a decade.
Only Brown is still with us, at 91 years of age, and one of the few survivors of when the tournament started in 1951 (he was a freshman that year) and I miss all of them.
Bergen County high school sports is special and has always been special. From the time I moved here from Queens to Teaneck in 1967, I've been fortunate to meet and become friends with a lot of awesome people in high school sports. And as we get older, I've had to write about losing so many of those awesome people. Lee Clark was one of them. May his memory always be for a blessing.
Funeral arrangements
Clark is survived by Val, his wife for nearly 58 years, son Christopher Clark, daughter-in-law Patty, granddaughters Shay and Camryn and his sister, Agnes Ghilain. Another sister, Joan McDonald Kellenberger passed away in 2016.
Visitation will take place Sunday, August 16 from 4-8 p.m. at Petrik Funeral Home, 140 Palisade Ave., Bogota. Funeral mass is scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday, August 17 at St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, 115 East Fort Lee Road, Bogota with a procession immediately following to the internment at Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington. The procession is scheduled to stop at the Leonia H.S. parking lot before proceeding to the cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, contributions to the Lee Clark Scholarship Fund care of Fran Orlowski, 335 Magnolia Place, Leonia 07605 would be appreciated. The fund has been providing scholarships to senior Leonia basketball players since 1995 and is largely funded by an annual Final Four party on Semifinal Saturday of the NCAA Men's Tournament each year.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Remembering A Bergen County Basketball Giant