In the fall of 1986, a 14-year-old Marty Clark walked through the doors of St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a Catholic prep school in the western suburbs of Chicago whose basketball program had launched Isiah Thomas to Indiana and to the Detroit Pistons just a few years earlier. The head coach was Gene Pingatore, who had been in the chair since 1969 and would stay there until he died on the bench in 2019, his name eventually attached to the school's gym. Pingatore's St. Joseph teams were a fixture of Illinois prep basketball — disciplined, defensively rigorous, and a place where Catholic-school kids from the western suburbs played alongside scholarship-recruited kids from the city's South and West Sides who rode the bus an hour and a half each way to chase a basketball career out of Cabrini-Green and West Garfield Park.
Marty Clark was one of the western-suburbs kids. He grew to 6'6". He could shoot. He could pass. He could handle the ball as a wing guard. By his senior year, 1989-90, he was the upperclassman in a backcourt that included a junior named William Gates — the kid from Cabrini-Green who, along with Arthur Agee, had been recruited to St. Joseph by a Pingatore scout in eighth grade. The filmmakers who would eventually edit five years of footage into the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams had been rolling cameras in the St. Joseph gym since 1987. Marty Clark, a senior on the 1989-90 team, was on the periphery of one of the most acclaimed sports documentaries in American history while it was being filmed. He would later be asked about it by a Duke alumni interviewer almost ten years after graduating: yes, he confirmed, William Gates had been a junior teammate of his at St. Joseph; yes, he had known Arthur Agee before Agee's family was forced to transfer him out; yes, Gates was an outstanding person. The footage of Marty Clark's senior year is in the Hoop Dreams archive somewhere — 250 hours of unedited tape, of which only the editors know what made the final cut.
Out of St. Joseph, Marty Clark committed to Duke. He arrived in Durham in the fall of 1990, a 6'6" freshman guard with the kind of jump shot that Coach K's offense rewarded, a deep-rotation slot waiting for him at the bottom of a roster led by Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill (entering as a freshman the same fall), Thomas Hill, Brian Davis, and Greg Koubek. Duke had lost in the 1990 national championship game to UNLV by 30 points the previous April. The 1990-91 team had come back to Cameron in October with a year of revenge in its lungs.