by Eric D.Graham
NORTH CAROLINA (BASN)-While we marvel at Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point performance on March 2, 1962 against the New York Knicks, cheer Barry Bonds 762 home runs and applaud Minnesota Vikings’ running back Adrian Peterson’s 199 yard effort against the Green Bay Packers last Sunday, in which he fell nine yards short of breaking Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson’s NFL regular season rushing record of 2,105 yards, we have failed to recognize Philadelphia’s Germantown Academy’s cross country runner, Cameron Clarke.
Who is Cameron Clarke, you ask?
Cameron Clarke is an African-American teenager from the “City of Brotherly Love”, who attained a perfect score on last year’s Scholastic Aptitude Test.
That’s right, he scored a perfect score on the S.A.T.
Clarke, in fact, is now part of an exclusive group of only 360 students in the United States, who have accomplished this incredible feat.
“He really didn’t want anyone to know about his score, so he didn’t tell anyone at Germantown Academy about it when he got the result in June,” Clarke’s father told BlackAmericaWeb.com,
Despite Clarke’s humility, we, at Blackathlete.com, however, felt that his perfect score should be celebrated and highlighted just like Kobe Bryant’s 81 point performance against the Toronto Raptors in 2006 or Grinnell College’s James Taylor NCAA -record 138 points against Faith Baptist Bible, especially with so much negative press about Black boys underachieving in school on the news.
“I put in a lot of work,”Clarke said. “I took a prep class with some of my friends, and I did a lot of practice tests from a book.
“But that only prepares you so much,”he added. “The difference between getting, like, a 2,400 and a couple of points lower is just focus. “You can screw up or mess up on the smallest of things. And I just feel like on that particular day, I was focused and I got kind of lucky, I guess, that I didn’t make any mistakes.”
If this was an athletic competition, we would simply say Clarke was in a zone.
A test-taking zone.
Clarke’s brilliant test taking skills, however, should inspire other black students, male and female to strive for excellence in everything they do, whether it’s sports or academics.
For the record, Clarke is also the first cellist in the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra to attend Germantown Academy. Plus, he is a member of the school’s Math Club and writes for the school’s newspaper.
Congrats to Cameron!
