EDITOR’S NOTE: Seventh in a series about nine inductees to be enshrined in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Saturday in Natchitoches.

By Lenny Vangilder

Special to the American Press

Perry Clark has often described his 11 seasons as head basketball coach at Tulane as his own Camelot.

But one of the great stories of college basketball in the 1990s didn’t exactly start out that way.

Shortly after Clark was hired in July 1988 to bring back the Green Wave program after a four-year, self-imposed shutdown in the wake of a 1985 point-shaving scandal, the coaching staff was set to conduct tryouts.

One significant thing was missing, however. No one had remembered to order basketballs.

It’s safe to say things got much better from there. Clark won 185 games in 11 seasons, taking Tulane to its only three NCAA Tournament appearances in school history, seven trips to the postseason, and one conference and three division championships.

It is that remarkable rise from the ashes that has landed Clark in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. He will be enshrined Saturday in Natchitoches.

While Clark’s time at Tulane might have indeed been Camelot, it was also unique in so many ways.

What team has gone from no program to winning a conference title and reaching the NCAA Tournament in three seasons? Or at a university that had never even been to the NCAAs before or since? Or using a 10-man rotation that featured an entirely new team coming onto the floor five minutes into the game?

“One through five, there are a lot of teams that might be better,” Clark would say on more than one occasion during the breakthrough 1991-92 season. “But one through 10, we can play with just about anybody.”

Clark, who played Division III basketball at Gettysburg (Pa.) College, had been a winner at every stop in his career. He was an assistant at his alma mater, DeMatha Catholic, under legendary head coach Morgan Wootten, where the Stags lost eight games in three years.

As an assistant at Penn State, the Nittany Lions had three winning seasons and reached the National Invitation Tournament. Then in six years on Bobby Cremins’ staff at Georgia Tech, the Yellow Jackets won 123 games and made four trips to the NCAA, including an Elite Eight.

“I knew I hated losing,” Clark said in 1991, “and I wasn’t going to be (at Tulane) for four years and still be talking about building.”

Early on, Clark and his staff — which included eight future college head coaches during his time at Tulane — looked for something a little different. “What we really tried to do was get the best defensive player (in the Metro Conference) at every position,” Clark said.

After a 4-24 season in his first campaign with eight of the 11 roster spots occupied by freshmen, Tulane added another solid recruiting class and jumped all the way to 15-13 in year two.

The best, however, was yet to come.

Tulane got through the pre-conference phase of the 1991-92 season with eight consecutive victories and was one of 10 Division I teams unbeaten as the calendar turned to January. All of them were ranked — except for Clark’s team.

The Green Wave opened conference play against Louisville, the longtime gold standard in the Metro. Tulane had one win in its history over the Cardinals, none in Freedom Hall.

The second version of “The Posse” — a five-man wave who would enter around the first media timeout and immediately step up the tempo with its defensive pressure prevailed 87-83 in overtime.

Less than 48 hours later, the 9-0 Green Wave was ranked nationally for the first time since the 1950s. And from there, the story would grow by leaps and bounds.

Over the next eight weeks, just about every major network and newspaper was either on the phone or on their way to Tulane to tell the story of this unprecedented relaunch of a program and its uniquely structured roster, where the bench was more popular than the starters.

“(Clark) was really good at letting us go to a certain point,” Hartman. “Then he would pull us back. Practice was really intense, but we had to play games. The starters felt like they were the reason we were having success, but we felt like we had the best bench in the country.”

The story kept growing. The winning streak reached 13, the second-best start in program history, before Tulane lost at Texas Tech. A 99-75 victory over Temple one week later was the most points ever scored against a team coached by the legendary John Chaney.

A first-ever ESPN appearance — in a time when landing on national TV was rare — at home against Southern Mississippi introduced America to “The Posse.”

Even a late-season five-game losing streak couldn’t keep this Cinderella story from a happy ending.

Tulane won the Metro regular-season title on the final day of the season, defeating Southern Miss in Hattiesburg, and eight days later — while the team sat on the plane awaiting takeoff from a tough one-point loss in the Metro tournament final — CBS unveiled the NCAA Tournament bracket with Tulane’s name on it for the first time ever.

A late jump shot by junior Anthony Reed — the first player to commit to Clark three years earlier — clinched a 61-57 victory over St. John’s.

The rapid ascent had not only made headlines, but earned Clark his second consecutive Metro Coach of the Year award and national coach of the year honors from the U.S. Basketball Writers Association and United Press International.

With two departing seniors, Tulane started the 1992-93 season in the national preseason polls. A gruesome leg injury to Lewis in the second game of the season would slow the roll, but the Green Wave ended up matching the 22-9 mark of the previous year with a return trip to the NCAAs, defeating Kansas State in the opening round.

Tulane’s rapid rise opened doors for Clark and his staff for higher-caliber players.

Jerald Honeycutt and Rayshard Allen, along with other highly ranked recruits Chris Cameron and Correy Childs, reached the postseason in each of their four seasons. As sophomores in 1995, they got to the NCAA Tournament and beat Brigham Young in the opening round, and a year later, despite a Conference USA division title and an 18-9 record, they were snubbed by the NCAA committee but quickly rebounded to reach the NIT semifinals.

“(The first four years) set the standard,” Honeycutt said in 2018. “Those guys paved the way. Even though we had some postseason success, (Tulane) is still known more for what those guys did before us.”

Tiny, 3,600-seat Fogelman Arena was as tough a place for opponents as any facility in the country in the 1990s. The interest in the program, however, warranted taking key games downtown for several years, first to the Superdome and eventually to the new Smoothie King Center.

In one of those trips downtown in 1995, Honeycutt delivered one of the magical moments of Clark’s career, recovering a loose ball in the corner and hitting an acrobatic 3-pointer at the buzzer to beat Florida State. It earned Honeycutt an ESPN ESPY award for Play of the Year.

In 2000 Clark left New Orleans to be the head coach at Miami. He spent four years with the Hurricanes and later was head coach for another four seasons at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

None of those will top the 11 seasons spent at Tulane.

“Through it all,” Clark said, “it was just a magical time.”

To put in perspective, Tulane, which made two NIT appearances before the 1985 shutdown, has not been to either the NCAA or NIT since Clark left.

Though Camelot may have come to an end, the memories remain, three decades later.