ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 1, 1997 TAG: 9703030097
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CULLOWHEE, N.C.
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
RADFORD NATIVE MARIO CLAYTOR was such a bad egg nobody wanted to coach him as a youth. Now he's a solid citizen playing Division I basketball.
When Mario Claytor was 12 years old, he was the last player taken when coaches in the Radford youth basketball league held its draft.
It wasn't that he was overlooked. Everybody knew him. Nor was the problem that he lacked skill. He had a little, which you could see when he was actually playing the game instead of fighting and fussing, which was also his custom.
Nobody wanted Mario Claytor.
"He was terrible,'' said Dickie Wall, now the Roanoke Catholic coach but then one of the coaches who passed on little Mario every time his name came up that draft day long ago. "Incorrigible.''
Against his better judgement, Wall finally spent his draft choice on Claytor, hoping all the while that the kid wouldn't be too much of a bad influence on everybody else on the team. There were impressionable youngsters to be concerned about, particularly 4-year-old Chad Wall, the pint-sized team manager. Chad's father believed in the teaching of virtue, scholarship, and long-range jump-shooting accuracy.
Mario Claytor occasionally had other goals.
"Mario was 5-feet tall and three-quarters of it was mouth,'' Wall said.
Looking back on it, Mario Claytor might have been the last kid in the city of Radford that you would have thought would go through two tours of duty in the United States Army, get shot at by Iraqis of evil intent, and end up being one of the 15 best basketball players in the four major branches of the armed forces.
Mario Claytor would not have been at or near the top of many lists of those who would strike you as a candidate for higher education. Certainly you would never have thought he'd be a college student in good standing at the relatively ancient age of 27.
No way would anybody have conceived in their most outlandish flights of imagination that Claytor would have the discipline and the desire to move into exile in the far-off hills that snuggle up to the North Carolina slopes of the Smoky Mountains and emerge as the most elderly Division I basketball player in the country. If there is one older, researcher Steve White, the Western Carolina sports information director, hasn't found him yet.
Who would have thought that all these years later, Claytor would be playing Division I hoops?
"They call me `Senior Citizen,''' Claytor said. "Grandpa. They're always teasing me.''
Is that any way to treat a man who served his country in a 155-millimeter howitzer battery that protected an innocent land from the invading legions of Sadaam Hussein?
What kind of respect is that for a guy who's playing college basketball when he could barely make the team at one of the smaller high schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
Make the team? He was lucky to be retained once he did survive the cuts.
At the end of Claytor's junior year at Radford his coach, Buddy Martin, turned to one of the assistants, John Woodrum, and said, "If for some reason I lose my mind and let Mario Claytor on this team again, then will you please shoot me right between the eyes.''
Martin let Claytor back on the team and because of it, another famous coach might have been prompted to go looking for a handgun. Claytor didn't start a game all year as a senior, not until John Knight got hurt and he was put into the lineup for the Region IV final at Graham. Radford won and Mario had the game of his life. The next week, in the state quarterfinals at University Hall in Charlottesville, maybe the best team Don Meredith ever had at Lord Botetourt had the Bobcats in the bag until Mario came off the bench to mortar shot a jumper from the left baseline that caved in the Cavaliers.
Meredith saw that shot rip twine and just for a moment his knees sagged as though somebody had whacked him in the abdomen with a 6-iron.
"It was the only shot I took,'' Claytor said.
There are those who remember that shot to this day. Vividly. Less vivid are memories of what Claytor himself looked like.
"I was 5-10 and 160 pounds,'' Claytor said.
One dim-sighted historian recalled another Claytor, one that was tall and skinny. So did Claytor's teammate Steven Osborne, the point guard who threw him the pass that led to the shot that bombed Botetourt.
"Mario was pretty tall,'' Osborne said.
Osborne used to be listed at a generous 5-8 in the Radford program. No wonder Claytor looked tall.
Funny thing happened on the way through Army basic training, though.
"I grew 5 inches in the first three months,'' Claytor said.
On boot camp food?
Sure enough, though, the Mario Claytor of the Western Carolina Catamounts goes 6-5, 210 pounds. It blows Martin's mind.
"There is no comparison between 'Rio and Mario,'' he said. "None. 'Rio is a man.''
'Rio. That's what they call him now. He got the nickname while playing his way onto the All-Army team and then, beyond that, to the All-Armed Forces team.
You have to be good to even try out for those teams. To actually make the squad requires a man of imminent basketball distinction. 'Rio, veteran of Desert Storm and author of many a dunk, was such a man.
Those qualities found a deserving spotlight when Mario matriculated to Hartnell (Cal.) Community College. Claytor might have preferred to go to a four-year school but alas, his high school transcripts were not of the type that tend to draw admiring glances at many admissions offices.
Claytor plodded on in the classroom to the point that eventually he was a respectable performer. So respectable, in fact, that he hopes to use his communications major at Western to get a job as a local sportscaster when he graduates.
But that's getting ahead of the story.
After two years at Hartnell averaging 23.5 points and 10 rebounds, enough scouts from four-year schools saw him play and made him offers that he had some decisions to make.
It came down to Western because it was relatively (four hours) close to Radford and his parents and friends and because he had an in with the coach, Phil Hopkins.
``Coach used to run me out of the gym at Radford University,'' Claytor recalled.
That was during the days when Hopkins was Joe Davis' assistant at Radford.
During that period, Hopkins had made friends with one Dickie Wall, attorney, hoops buff, and father of Chad Wall, best friend of Philip Hopkins, Phil Hopkins' son.
So it was that years later, when Dickie Wall called Phil Hopkins and said, ``Have I got a player for you,'' the coach paid close attention.
Now Claytor is nearing the end of his first year at Western. From a basketball perspective, it hasn't been that great a year for him. He played about 10 minutes per game and averaged under five points. He's been hurt off and on, too.
``It's a lot different for me than it was in junior college ,'' he said. ``My job now is to keep myself ready for when Coach Hop wants to put me in.''
That could be any time.
``Mario's struggled on the floor, but he hasn't been a bit of trouble for us,'' Hopkins said. ``We worried how he'd respond to coaching, being so much older than everybody else, but that hasn't been a problem. If you didn't know Mario was older, you'd think that he was just a typical college student.''
Typical, he isn't.
``Say this for Mario,'' Martin said. ``He kept coming back. The guy would not be denied.''
Nor does he plan to be now.
``If I couldn't play,'' he said, ``I wouldn't be here.''
And if he couldn't play, then he wouldn't have had another chance to influence young players from Radford. As luck would have it, one of them will be joining the squad at Western next year as a walk-on.
It's been a while since Claytor and Chad Wall have gone to basketball practice together. They'll no doubt have plenty to catch up on.
LENGTH: Long : 145 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: RAY COX STAFF. At 27, Western Carolina's Mario Claytorby CNBis believed to be the oldest Division I basketball player in the
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