Outracing Adversity : Clarke Maintains Fast Pace in Heptathlon Despite Her Recent Break With Parents

Someday, when the potential has been met and Melanie Clarke is an Olympic heptathlon champion and an American heartthrob who graces the cover of national magazines, some late-night talk-show host is bound to utter:

“So, tell us how wonderful it has been to be Melanie Clarke.”

And Melanie Clarke will flash a smile like the one on her Ultrabrite billboards, take a deep breath and, in a millisecond, debate the consequences of telling the truth.

And then, in all likelihood, she will pleasantly say something like, “It’s been just great, better than I ever dreamed. . . .” And someplace far away, James Harvey, television remote control in hand, will shake his head and chuckle.

Harvey, like Clarke, knows better. And so does a small circle of Clarke’s friends--the true ones, not the acquaintances who have climbed on the bandwagon now that she is well along in the transition from nobody to somebody.

They know of the struggle--how Clarke, for the past year estranged from her adopted family she’s known all her life, has supported herself by working at a place that sells hot dogs on a stick; that Clarke’s greatest attributes are her quickness and an uncanny knack of mimicking techniques of others.

If Clarke had been such a quick study in the classroom, she might have taken the high road to stardom. A full four-year college scholarship was hers for the taking out of El Camino Real High, but when Clarke’s first two tries at the Scholastic Aptitude Test failed to meet the NCAA’s minimum requirement, the half-dozen schools recruiting her balked.

Clarke got a tutor but later decided that a scholarship was not worth the effort.

“It was my decision,” she said while relaxing outside after a summer school class at Valley College. “My parents didn’t want me to go to a junior college, but I knew if I went to a university, I would struggle. I wasn’t ready for it. So I figured I’d go to a JC and really prepare myself, really focus on what I had to do in the classroom while also enhancing my track.”

Which is where Harvey, the track and field coach at Valley, enters the picture.

Harvey, a man used to “stuck-up parents or stuck-up kids,” had a recruiting trail lined with athletes who wanted to go someplace else but, for one reason or another, could not.

Clarke was no different in that respect, but in every other way she was pleasantly unique. Harvey sent out a questionnaire to recruits that rarely was returned. Clarke filled it out and drew a happy face on it to go with a note that said thanks for the interest.

For the past two years, Harvey has played Michelangelo and Clarke, a svelte 5-foot-11, has been his marble. “The statue was already there,” he said. “We just chiseled away the rough edges.”

He has carted Clarke around to all-comers meets--where she often ran against men--and encouraged her to bury her head in a schoolbook.

While at Valley, Clarke won the state junior college heptathlon championship in 1990, and last spring she got grades of mostly Bs and Cs while holding down a part-time job. She completed this triathlon of sorts--from her home in Northridge, to school in Van Nuys, to work in Woodland Hills--despite the lack of a car.

In the heptathlon, athletes compete in the hurdles, high jump, shotput and 200 meters on one day, then the long jump, javelin and 800 meters the next. And they say that final 800 is tough? Try homework after a full day of school, training and work.

Harvey said Clarke gives others too much credit for her success, which she attributes to coaches, her boyfriend Albert Fann, the former Cal State Northridge running back, and even to the parents she no longer speaks to.

“No one made Melanie,” Harvey said. “Melanie made herself.”

A handful of people already have pegged Clarke as the heir apparent to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who broke her own world record in the heptathlon in 1988 with a score of 7,291 points at the Olympics in Seoul.

Clarke’s best of 5,364 doesn’t yet compare. But neither does her training regimen, Harvey said.

“Jackie has enough money that she can run around and train,” Harvey said. “Melanie can’t afford that luxury. Until she gets in a position where she can actually train, I don’t know how good she will be.”

Clarke was in a classroom last spring while her teammates were weightlifting and she rarely trained for the field events.

“My scores don’t touch (Joyner-Kersee’s) yet, but I know there is so much I haven’t done yet,” Clarke said. “I didn’t work on the high jump, javelin or the shotput and for the long jump all I did were run-throughs. I worked on the hurdles right before the state meet and that was it. I haven’t reached my potential at all.”

Mike Bailey, who has successfully recruited Clarke to USC, said emphatically that Clarke might reach Joyner-Kersee’s class within a few years.

“She has that kind of speed,” Bailey said. “I can see her improving 600 to 800 points in the next year. Then, who knows?”

Harvey and Bailey acknowledge that Clarke’s imprint on track and field could stretch far beyond the record books.

She is attractive, pleasant and smiles easily, more like the marketable Florence Griffith-Joyner than the reserved Joyner-Kersee.

“In any type of public-relations situation or business situation, Melanie is going to attract people like a magnet,” Harvey said. “If she does anything on the national level, Melanie is going to make a lot of money because somebody is going to give her a good job.”

Against junior college competition, Clarke rarely was tested. She was undefeated in the heptathlon and at 400 meters, and Valley never lost a relay race in Western State Conference competition.

She said one of the reasons she looks forward to the start of training with USC is that Angela Roth will be a teammate and a likely training partner. Roth, who went to high school at Dorsey, was the state high school champion in the 400 when Clarke was at El Camino Real.

“I always thought I could beat her, but she always beat me in the quarter(-mile),” Clarke said. “It’s not a grudge or anything, but I have to beat her. That’s just the way I think. If you beat me, I will work until I come back and get you.”

Clarke now lives that commitment in other areas as well. Schoolwork, for instance, no longer drags her down. But even that lesson has carried a price.

“I’m a lot more bullheaded now,” she said. “I don’t let people influence me the way they used to. Before if I had to study or go to a practice or research something, I could be distracted. Now if a friend says, ‘Well, we’re turning ours in late,’ I’ll say, ‘Well, I can’t.’ Some people don’t understand that. They remember how I used to be.”

As a result, Clarke has found life can be lonely on the way to the top. “I only have about three good girlfriends,” she said, “and a lot of guy friends. It seems like I made a lot of friends once I became Melanie Clarke, you know, the track star.

“I’m kind of sensitive now about my friends. Albert tells me, ‘You’re so naive,’ and I guess I am. I just have to look so much further into people now.”

Clarke’s personal life is complicated by the strained relationship she has with her adoptive parents, whose home she left 13 months ago. She declines to talk publicly about the reasons for their rift but laments that her success is not shared with her adoptive father, who she says followed her through youth league softball and took her to track meets spanning the length of the Pacific Coast.

“He was the one always there supporting me,” she said. “My dad always told me I could do anything I wanted to do if I worked hard enough to do it. The thing was, I never wanted to work hard enough to do it when I was younger.

“And now that I do, he’s not around to share it.”

For a moment, the bright eyes and shining smile disappear.

Sometimes being Melanie Clarke isn’t easy at all.