RENTON — Frank Clark began his Seattle Seahawks career Friday with a rookie minicamp practice, and with that so too began the highest-profile test to date of head coach Pete Carroll’s belief that he can, and will, get the best out of every player he coaches.
Since his time at USC, Carroll has focused not just on building winners, but on helping players maximize their potential while overcoming obstacles. The idea of “helping people be the best they can possibly be” or of “doing things better than they’ve ever been done before” would all seem so cheesy if not for the fact that Carroll has produced results while in many instances also creating success stories out of athletes with red flags in their past.
“We kind of live in the world of optimism around here,” Carroll said. “We think that something good is going to happen and we’re going to be able to take care of all situations that we deal with and pretty relentlessly go about our daily business with that thought in mind. Where others might see time to turn away, we’re going to try and outlast the situation. We’re going to hang. We’re going to hang in there and keep fighting and clawing to see if we can’t come up with a solution that makes some sense to help a guy find his best.”
The Seahawks have taken big risks on players who came with baggage before, finding huge success with some (Marshawn Lynch) while admitting failure with others (Percy Harvin). But in this post-Ray Rice/Greg Hardy/Adrian Peterson era, domestic violence is the hot-button topic in the NFL, and Clark, regardless of what the courts decided, wears the DV-label in the eyes of many fans.
When the Seahawks drafted Clark a week ago, the pick was heavily scrutinized, and the criticism only grew in the following days when it was reported by the Seattle Times that the Seahawks’ thorough investigation into Clark didn’t include talking to witnesses listed on the police report.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Clark said a day after practicing with the Seahawks for the first time.
Plenty would argue that Clark shouldn’t have been on the field with the Seahawks either because they’d prefer Seattle hadn’t drafted him, or because they don’t believe he deserves a chance at an NFL career. But what Clark was referring to was a past that included being homeless at times growing up in the Baldwin Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, and saw his mom send him to Cleveland when he was 12 so he could avoid falling in with gangs like his two older brothers had.
“We didn’t have nothing,” Clark said. “So every day, whether it was practice or whether it was just me finding a meal, it was a struggle. I remember days I was walking, nights walking, we didn’t have nowhere to stay. That inspired me to be who I am today.”
Clark’s story would be an inspiring one if it weren’t overshadowed by one very ugly incident. But Frank Clark doesn’t get to be a feel-good story. Despite all he overcame to go from homeless as a kid to the Seahawks’ top pick in the 2015 draft, Clark, for the time being, is defined in the minds of most by one incident that took place last fall in a Sandusky, Ohio hotel room.
Despite criticisms of their investigation, Carroll again strongly defended the decision to draft Clark; the Seahawks remain confident that the truth is different than the ugly description of incidents in the police report.
“There are enough facts out there that have told the story after the initial report was in,” Carroll said. “I think there was enough stuff if you dig in and read all of the stuff, the story that’s told by the process, the prosecution and all that was compelling in contrast to what you read. So I don’t know what it says about police reports, but I think that was pretty…it was very telling. That just added to the story. It was one part of it that we put together to make some sense of this.”
Clark wouldn’t go into detail either, other than to say, “I know what I did and what I didn’t do.”
But regardless of what happened in that hotel room, Clark is now a Seahawk; that isn’t changing. The Seahawks are confident in what they discovered about Clark, and are now focused on him being a productive part of their defense. No one is required to be happy about that or support Seattle’s decision to draft him, and Clark knows it is now on him to prove Carroll and general manager John Schneider were right to take a chance on him.
Carroll and the Seahawks are betting their reputations on Clark being much more than a violent incident in a Sandusky hotel room, and he plans to reward that faith.
“I’m not complete,” Clark said. “I’m not a complete person. I’m not the perfect person. … I’m a person that’s still learning. I’m a player who is still learning.
“I just want to gain the trust of the fans. I want to gain the trust of my coaching staff as far as playing on the field. And I want to gain the trust of everyone, all my fans, and the viewers watching personally. Like I said, I’m not a bad person at all. I’m a great person. I’m a family person. I’m a great guy to be around and I just want to gain the trust of the 12s and everyone else in Seahawks nation.”
Herald Columnist John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com
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