Mark Clouse ★ filling his role BY john feinstein
★ MISSION FIRST ★
Almost 30 years later, Kevin Houston remembers the afternoon vividly. He was a West Point senior, the captain of the Army basketball team. He was also the leading scorer in the nation. Every day in practice, he found himself matched up against Mark Clouse, a freshman from Cincinnati, who had become a solid player off the bench for coach Les Wohtke’s team – someone who could play good defense and consistently make an open shot. “Kevin was double-teamed all the time,” Clouse says with a smile on a hot summer afternoon in Morristown, N.J., a stone’s throw from Mendham, his home base for the last six years. “I’d stand in the corner with my arm up. Often as not, Kevin would find me and I’d be all alone.” In practice though, Clouse wasn’t waiting for Houston to find him, he was trying to drape himself on Houston at all times. Coach’s orders. “I was supposed to make it as hard as I could for him,” Clouse says. “Push him, chase him, annoy him. That was my job. It wasn’t easy. Kevin was very crafty. I’ve always told people that Kevin was Larry Bird in a 5’10” body. That made trying to guard him a serious challenge.” Which, much like everything else Clouse has taken on in life, he took on with zeal. He was so zealous that one afternoon, Houston did something he had never done in four years. “I threw an elbow at him,” Houston says, failing to suppress a laugh. “Only time I ever threw one in practice or in a game. He got to me. I’m not sure who was more surprised – Mark or me.” “It was me,” Clouse says. “But I figured I was doing what I was supposed to do.” There haven’t been many times in Clouse’s life when he hasn’t done what he’s supposed to do – and done it well. He did it as a basketball player; as a cadet; as a pilot in the Army Air Corps and, nowadays, as a hugely successful businessman: last April, at the age of 47, he was named the Chief Executive Officer of Pinnacle, one of the largest food distributors in the country. Clouse graduated from West Point in 1990 – as President of his class. He only played basketball for two years because a bad case of frostbite that happened when he was stationed in Alaska during the summer after his sophomore year took away his ability to cut and push-off as effectively as he needed to. “I didn’t have much margin for error in order to compete athletically at the Division I level,” he says. “It wasn’t as if I was in great pain or anything, but I knew I’d lost something – just enough to make a difference. That’s when I went in and told coach Wothke that I didn’t think I should play that season. He was so loyal that I’m pretty sure he would have played me ahead of some of the younger guys we had coming in. That wouldn’t have been the best thing for the team. I needed to get out of their way. “Still, it was the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life. Basketball was
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