NCAA Basketball: Campbell’s Chris Clemons is doing things his way

He only received three NCAA Basketball college scholarships. He scored over 3,000 points in the NCAA, finishing third all-time in scoring. He rocks the number three for Allen Iverson. This is Chris Clemons.

It’s February 16, 2019, and the Campbell Fighting Camels are on the road against the Presbyterian Blue Hose. On the surface, it’s just another afternoon game on the docket for a pair of peers in the Big South Conference with just a few weeks to go until the postseason begins. Every win matters, especially to a Camels squad hoping to reach the NCAA Basketball Tournament for the first time since 1992, the one and only time the boys from Buies Creek, North Carolina made it to the Big Dance.

Campbell trails 59-55 with 5:51 remaining on the clock. They need a bucket, and they need it badly. Fittingly, the ball ends up end the hands of Chris Clemons.

Donning a bold orange jersey, Clemons crouches low. Very low. As low as his stocky 5’9” frame allows him to go, sizing up his opponent at the top of the key. His uniform sways with each dribble, each calculated movement as he toys with the defender that’s between him and the basket.

Clemons saunters forward, slowly, assuredly, playing within himself and within his own patented personality — he’s looking to score, and he knows that he will.

One crossover. Then another. Then, finally, a hang-dribble to freeze his defender, giving the small guard just enough separation to spring upward into a three-point jumpshot, a shot that he’s made time and time again throughout his illustrious four-year tenure at Campbell.

The shot falls through the net, gracefully, pulling the Camels within one point of the Blue Hose. A meaningful shot in the scheme of a game (which Campbell would go on to lose, 76-71), but even larger in the grand scheme of things.

With that three-pointer, one of Clemons’ 444 that he’d make as a Camel, the 5’9” guard became only the ninth men’s’ player in NCAA history to break the 3,000-point barrier, a mark that few even dream of. (South Dakota State’s Mike Daum would become the tenth player to do so a few games later.)

The ensuing media frenzy that followed the collegiate star after the game was enormous yet expected, as the likes of ESPN, Fox Sports, and CBS Sports had been following the amateur guard’s journey more closely as the prospect of reaching that historic milestone had become inevitable. But it wasn’t the buzzing reporters nor excited cameramen that first told Clemons of his accomplishment, though they certainly would’ve liked to.

Instead, it was his father, Carlyton Clemons, who broke the news to his son. He had been recording the game and following along, incredibly proud of his son’s journey — as a student, a player, and as a young man — and wasn’t going to miss that night for the world. He wanted to be there to see history in the making, and he was, and told his son of his feat as soon as he exited the locker room.

Chris’s response to the uproar?

“OK, alright, great… We still lost, though,” Chris Clemons recalls saying to his father, his attention squared solely on the team’s point total from the game and not the personal point total that would be sharpied into collegiate record books forever.

The glory of the feat, the fanfare and mass media attention that followed him, the tense climb up the scoring leaderboards, and the supreme weight of that one shot — all of it — were things that Clemons didn’t bother to worry about. (It clouds his mind and his game, so he says.)

He’s appreciative of the attention and admiration, to be sure, but all of the hype — the SportsCenter highlights, the all-star games, the scoring accolades – were not primary goals that Clemons saw as vital to his role at Campbell. He was the team’s point guard and floor general, the on-court leader whose responsibility was to lead by example, to take over games whenever necessary and win as many games as possible.

At no point in his four-year career — not when he hit 1,000 points, nor 2,000, nor 3,000, nor the eventual 3,225 that vaulted him to third all-time in NCAA history — did Clemons view his own accomplishments as anything more than periphery achievements.

“I didn’t really think about that,” Clemons said. “I didn’t play the game trying to reach a certain mark.”

What he wanted more than anything was to win, to play the game he grew up loving, and to let the accolades pile up as they may. If he was going to score, it was going to be organically, not something forced or intentional.

That shot he drilled against Presbyterian, according to Clemons, was just another shot, one he considered “routine” in nature, one he’d taken — and made — over and over again. The shot, and the attention it garnered, was nothing new for the undersized star.