Terrence Clarke died three years ago. A tidal wave of elite Mass. basketball players is keeping his memory alive. - The Boston Globe (2024)

Asemota sat in the audience enthralled. A Boston kid was going to play at Kentucky. He remembers frantically checking his phone to see which news outlet would have the scoop as Clarke, with a chain around his neck and a Brewster Academy ring on his finger, unzipped his camouflage jacket to reveal his Wildcats shirt.

In front of family, friends, coaches, and a swarm of media, Clarke paused to acknowledge some of the young ballers he recognized. He shouted out Asemota.

“When he said my name, my heart dropped,” Asemota said.

Monday marks three years since Terrence Clarke died in a car crash at 19. The projected 2021 NBA Draft pick was in Los Angeles to prepare for predraft workouts. The news stunned the basketball world — and Boston — and the loss continues to reverberate.

The NBA made Clarke an honorary draftee that June. At this winter’s All-Star break, Celtics star Jaylen Brown paid tribute to his late friend by wearing his jersey in the slam dunk contest.

Clarke was a basketball prodigy who went viral on YouTube in middle school and was near the top of every national prospect ranking. Yet he pointed the shine back to his hometown. His mini-documentary for SLAM Magazine in 2019 included a photo shoot at Fenway Park.

“In the 21st century, we haven’t really had that guy to put a spotlight on Boston. That was him,” said Joe Almeida, a longtime Boston-area resident and local basketball historian.

Clarke’s greatest hope for his legacy, he told the kids in the crowd during his commitment, was for the next generation to use his journey as a blueprint.

“I want you guys to not even just look at me, but work harder than me, if anything, because the situation that I’m in right now — I feel like you all can be better than that,” Clarke said. “I try to do everything for y’all so y’all can be better than me.”

Three years after Clarke’s death, Massachusetts is in a new golden era of basketball prominence. Clarke impacted many of those torch-bearers, and in return, they’re helping fulfill his wish.

‘Maybe I have a chance’

Dexter Foy, Clarke’s longtime AAU coach and mentor, noticed Clarke’s following start to build early in the seventh grade. By ninth grade, Clarke exhibited clear NBA potential. He turned every head in every gym he entered.

“When we would go to high school games, or different events like that, kids would really take notice of him,” Foy said. “It was crazy. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s Terrence Clarke, that’s Terrence Clarke!’ and it just got huge.”

Clarke’s talent and competitive fire as a 6-foot-8-inch guard put him on the path to greatness. The Greater Boston area has produced plenty of talented players this century: Nerlens Noel, Shabazz Napier, Wayne Selden, Bruce Brown, and Jalen Adams, to name a few. Clarke’s gravitational pull, especially among kids, was different.

“When I was 10, I looked up to the 17-year-old high schoolers and I wouldn’t go near them. But Terrence invited you in,” Almeida said. “At 19, he almost saw it as his responsibility, and I mean, how can you grasp that at 19?”

Sebastian Wilkins, a four-star wing from Canton, met Clarke during a basketball camp at the Dana Barros Basketball Club in Stoughton. Clarke was watching him play, and came up to Wilkins after to chat and offer praise.

“For my generation, he’s the biggest thing to come from Boston,” Wilkins said. “For him to say that, I really appreciated it.”

Jaylen Harrell, a four-star guard from Dorchester who plays at CATS Academy, had to do a double-take when he first met Clarke at the Tobin Community Center in Roxbury, but developed a friendly rapport as they frequently crossed paths in the city.

“When he was in the city and you saw him, it was like you wanted to be him, growing up as a basketball player, especially coming from Boston,” Harrell said.

Clarke’s beaming smile and lanky, animated arms amplified his words, be it encouragement or trash talk. When his schedule allowed, he hyped up the sidelines at high school and pickup games.

Elite prospects often shut themselves off from local basketball participation given the added injury risk. But Clarke competed in the Boston Neighborhood Basketball League until he couldn’t.

“If you blow up, especially in Boston, you don’t really play in BNBL and the summer tournaments,” Harrell said. “But he always played in tournaments — always had a smile on his face, too.”

Tre Norman, a Boston native and a freshman at Marquette, also grew up running into Clarke at the Tobin Community Center. Norman once traveled with Clarke to a tournament in Indiana, when Norman was in middle school and Clarke was already a national name. Among elite young talent from around the country, Clarke made sure to show Norman love.

“I was just a kid he used to see all the time, so he could’ve easily looked me off and kept it pushing, and went to the cameras and just gone about his day,” Norman said. “And he took time to chop it up with me, and he didn’t act like he didn’t know me.

“That kind of meant the world to me at the time, because like I said, I wasn’t really anything yet. Just knowing him made me feel like I was somebody.”

As a middle schooler, Asemota briefly connected with Clarke and got his phone number. When considering whether he should attend Brewster Academy like Clarke, Asemota decided to text him for advice.

He didn’t expect a response. Clarke had connections to Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Donovan Mitchell. Why would he answer a text from a 15-year-old?

“I was a little nervous to text him because I didn’t think he was going to actually respond to me,” Asemota said. “You know how people are saying, ‘Oh, you can call me for anything,’ this and that, but you know how that be. I just said, ‘Ah, all right, I’m just going to text him.’

“He texted me back immediately.”

Clarke told Asemota that Brewster’s expectations were high, but recommended the program if he wanted to get better. Asemota heeded his advice, attended Brewster for a year, and continued to text with Clarke.

At one point, he lamented to Clarke about the early-season sprint sessions that didn’t even involve touching a basketball. Clarke reminded him to stay the course.

“He always told me to just keep going, no matter what happens,” Asemota said. “Always know that no matter what, you got to just be you, and then all the cards are going to fall in their place.”

Some were lucky enough to see Clarke hone his craft. Clarke, Harrell, and Wilkins, along with Brockton’s AJ Dybantsa, trained at different times with Brandon Ball. The younger phenoms would work out and then stick around to watch Clarke.

Dybantsa, the top-ranked junior in the country, met Clarke in elementary school. By the time Dybantsa reached middle school, they would get in occasional twice-weekly workouts at Vine Street. Clarke spent a lot of time away from Boston at Brewster Academy and Kentucky, but he and Dybantsa would still work out when he came home. Once after a session, Clarke pulled Dybantsa aside.

“He’s like, ‘You’re going to be great. Just keep working. Don’t worry about any of that other stuff, just keep doing you,’ ” Dybantsa said.

“I was seeing progression for myself, but hearing it from him — obviously already made it to a big college — I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s good, coming from him. Maybe I have a chance.’ ”

‘It weighed the whole city down’

On April 22, 2021, players from Clarke’s former Expressions Elite program — including Asemota, Dybantsa, Harrell, and Wilkins — were preparing for a long bus ride to an AAU tournament in Indiana.

Asemota was in a car on the way to meet his teammates when some of his coaches started hearing something was wrong. He knew Clarke was in Los Angeles preparing for the NBA Draft. Clarke had posted the previous day about signing with the prestigious Kutch Sports agency. Asemota sent a check-in text to Clarke as he and his teammates went to social media.

Clarke’s post had thousands of comments, oddly high for such an announcement. But they were messages of heartbreak.

“I’m like, no [expletive] way, bro,” Asemota said. “There’s no shot. My heart’s dropping. I’m already damn near tearing up.”

“Me and Jason are on the same bus, right? So we hear it and we’re like, it’s cap,” Dybantsa said. “It’s fake. Just don’t say that.”

Wilkins saw the messages, but didn’t believe them until his father entered his room to ask what was going on. Eventually, the players piled on the bus, and shortly into the ride, program director Todd Quarles told them the news through tears.

“I was just hysterically crying,” Asemota said. “I was crying repeatedly; I couldn’t stop. That day, it was just insane.”

“The rest of the 12 hours was just silent,” Dybantsa said. “Nobody was talking. And then we played those games — we played, like, 3-4 games out there for him — and then we just kept playing. We just had to play for him at that point.”

Norman was playing Fortnite when his friends remarked that they had seen news that would “mess the city up.” He went online and saw members of Clarke’s draft class sending broken hearts. One person from the Boston area posted “RIP TC” and Norman responded, telling them not to play around with rumors.

The news came out a few hours later.

“It was just unreal. It kind of felt like when Kobe [Bryant] passed away, like it shouldn’t have happened,” Norman said. “You’re not expecting anything like that to happen. And then the next few days were just hard, man, just trying to get through the stages of grief.

“It really weighed the whole city down. Everybody in the city felt it, for sure.”

Twitter messages poured in, from NBA stars like LeBron James and Jaylen Brown, and Clarke’s draft classmates, like No. 1 pick Cade Cunningham.

Kentucky held a vigil for Clarke the day after his death, and the city of Boston did the same in Dorchester. Brad Stevens, then-coach of the Celtics, said it was “hard to talk about a basketball game” after finding out about Clarke’s death. The Celtics created a video tribute for Clarke that aired five days later.

Expressions Elite kept playing, and Asemota appreciated the players’ selflessness as they grieved.

“It was just the hardest weekend ever,” he said. “When we were playing, teams knew. They heard the news, they knew we were Expressions. Before the game, we did a tribute to Terrence. It was a hard weekend just to keep playing basketball.”

‘I want to be my own player but carry his legacy’

In August 2022, Dybantsa was entering ninth grade and gaining steam as one of the top prospects in the country. He was at Chris Paul’s Rising Stars camp participating in a dunk contest when he donned a Terrence Clarke No. 5 Kentucky jersey for his final act.

Dybantsa threw down a behind-the-back slam, and as fans and phones swarmed him, he pointed a finger at the sky.

Perhaps more than any other player, Dybantsa understands the world Clarke lived in. But Dybantsa is not trying to be Clarke. He makes an important distinction between mirroring a legacy and moving it forward.

“If someone says, ‘Oh, you play like Terrence,’ that’s just a compliment,” Dybantsa said. “I want to be my own player but carry his legacy at the same time. I don’t want to be him. He had his own legacy.”

Headlined by Dybantsa, Massachusetts boys’ basketball is thriving. Nationally ranked players are popping up from Fall River to Brockton, to Boston, up to Lowell, and west to Springfield.

Arlington native Bensley Joseph, who is transferring to Providence after three seasons at Miami, was a close friend of Clarke’s. Dasonte Bowen, a fellow Brewster Academy standout from Dorchester, played his sophom*ore year at Iowa. The talent really picks up starting with Norman’s 2023 high school class.

Almeida believes that without Clarke’s commitment to highlighting Boston, the national landscape would overlook today’s stars.

“Every kid says, ‘I’m putting Boston on the map,’ since 1970. But in this era, he’s the one who had the whole package,” he said. “He’s the only one that SLAM Magazine wanted to write about. And so because of that, you have to pay attention to the next kids. Other than AJ, none of them are as good as Terrence — but they get looked at. That’s residual.”

Many credit Clarke for reminding the state of its hoops potential.

“It just gave me the inspiration that I can do the same thing,” said Harrell, the reigning Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year. “If a kid from Boston did it, and he had the same trainer, same gyms, same time frame as I had, then there’s no way I can’t do it either.”

Harrell feels Clarke’s legacy when he practices with the same trainers and coaches. Wilkins, a sophom*ore at Brewster, sees Clarke’s No. 5 hanging from the walls of the school’s gymnasium. Dybantsa and Norman have Clarke-inspired jerseys from the Let it Fly Classic in Chelsea. Asemota wears No. 5 in honor of Clarke and keeps a commemorative pin in his room.

Norman brought reminders of Clarke with him to Marquette. He has a tattoo on his left arm of the city skyline with the phrase, “Just a kid from Boston.” On the right side of that design is Clarke’s No. 5, and on the left side is a heart-shaped TC5 logo.

On Sept. 6, 2022 — Clarke’s birthday — Norman committed to Marquette. Supporters who attended his ceremony at the Tobin Community Center wrote birthday messages to Clarke on a poster Norman has in his dorm room. He and his family sang “Happy Birthday” to Clarke and held up a painting of Norman’s face among the city, with Clarke smiling in the clouds.

Norman is still making a name for himself in college basketball, but he hopes to use his growing platform and local connections to arrange camps and back-to-school drives this summer, honoring Clarke along the way.

“I don’t want to just give back, but I want to give back and keep reminding people who are still coming up, who didn’t, haven’t had the chance to meet him or know him — still get the vibe of how he was in life,” Norman said.

“I hope they give a statue in Boston to him or something, because he deserved it. He deserved the world.”

Ethan Fuller can be reached at ethan.fuller@globe.com.