It all began on a simple field, a boy and his dream.
The field was any field in Anywhere, U.S.A-a long swath of green, cut by a handful of pock marks from years of wear.
The boy was any boy, his friends called him D, but he could have just as easily been John or Jamal or Chris.
There wasn't much special about that field or that boy a decade ago, except every day, like clockwork, the boy would arrive at the field and the game that would follow was guaranteed to be one of the best the nation had ever seen.
Because the boy never arrived alone. Every day the boy would come with a big group of friends. Then it was special.
On the field Joe Montana would be taking snaps, Jerry Rice catching long bomb after long bomb, Herschel Walker would be slicing and dicing like a Cuisinart, and in the middle of it all, the MVP of every game was the boy.
It wasn't really Joe Montana, of course. It was a boy, any boy, and his dream.
But sometimes, the dream had to be put on hold.
That's when Darius Clark had to go home, and the boy had to survive in a man's world.
He grew up in the innercity of Tampa, on the wrong side of the tracks in the bay-sparkled town. There was just him and his mother and a younger brother, an iron-clad trinity in a difficult world. In a day where athletes list being from the innercity in their biographies like most people would note a twice-forgotten hobby, Darius Clark learned really what it was like to start on the short end of life's stick.
"It was rough," he says on a Duke practice field, maybe as far away from the inner-city as anyone could get. "We had to deal with fighting, gangs, things of that nature... growing up in that environment [with a] low income background.
"But she always kept me straight."
She is Pearl Roberts, a woman with the patience of Job and the grit of an SEC lineman, the proud mother of two sons and a one-woman barrier between the world she lived in and her two boys.
She rode Darius hard, but she kept him straight. She gave him religion, taught him to value education, and always, always kept him out of harm's way.
"[My mother] kept me out of trouble," Clark says. "Sports were my way out.... That kept me active so I wouldn't be outside with the neighborhood bullies and robbers and things of that nature. I was fortunate in that respect. I give my mother all the credit in the world."
He would make it out, a success story among statistics, but he would make sure he never forgot. On his right upper arm, Clark has a tattoo, a tattoo of himself in his Duke uniform. Below the image is the word 'blessed'. It reminds him where he came from, he says, and it reminds him what a success football has made his life.
""I've got two more tattoos on me, but this one is special," Clark says. "I'm blessed to be playing something that I like to do.... [It] shows that... when things get hard, you're blessed to be able to go out there and make plays, make tackles, make interceptions, and I just look at it sometimes and say, 'Yeah, I'm still doing the things I like to do.'
Yet even if Darius Clark had never stepped inside Wallace Wade Stadium, his life would be a victory. At a university more familiar with chorus lines than unemployment lines, the fact that he made it at all might be the greatest thing that could ever be said about him.
"There's a lot of other places I could have ended up in the environment that I was in," he says with the conviction of a man finally seeing life's road flatten out. "[Making it] was hard, and for me to be at Duke is a big accomplishment in my eyes [and] in my mother's eyes."
But the fact is, Clark has become as much of a fixture in Wallace Wade as the helmet painted in the middle. For four seasons, Clark's name has been penciled in somewhere in the Duke secondary. He was always a solid player, a good team player coaches would say, (incredible work ethic, the coaching spiel would continue) but he was never the star of the defense, always behind a Chike Egbuniwe or a Chris Combs.
But in two weeks this year, all that has changed. In the last two games, Clark has picked off four passes, putting his name atop the ACC interception list and in the headlines of the local newspapers.
Yet four picks are still a long way from making up for a five-year career's worth of losing.
"It's frustrating to lose," Clark says, shifting the focus from his play to his team's tumbling fortunes. "As a team we're not up to the ability we should be. Yeah, I'm making some plays, but that doesn't mean anything. We just gotta stay together as a team, get back on track, we're in this thing together."
Yet even if the Blue Devils never find that magic formula, Clark will never find reason to believe his five years were a waste.
"Everything happens for a reason, my mother told me that," he says. "So I figure this is something that the Lord wants me to experience. I've got to deal with it, suck it up and just continue to do what I'm doing, striving to get better every week."
And as he walked away from the small group of reporters gathered after practice Wednesday, the tattoo stood as a reminder that Darius Clark's life is still about a boy, a field and a dream.
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