Baldwin Village was left in the vapor trail of Frank Clark’s flight out of Los Angeles International Airport.

He was 10, going on 11, going on 20. Fidgeting in his seat, Clark looked around, unsure of what to do. He was alone, flying across the country to a new life.

So Clark did what any kid would do. He asked for a Sprite and some peanuts, eventually closing his eyes and nodding off as home disappeared in the distance.

Eleven years later, Clark is a 6-foot-2, 277-pound fire hydrant. He turned 21 earlier this summer and is entering his senior year as a defensive end at Michigan. The NFL is in his future, but this is about his past.

“As I sit here and reminisce about it, it’s weird how this all came about,” Clark said.

It starts back in Baldwin Village, a section of Crenshaw where wayward souls cook on hot cement. It’s nicknamed “The Jungle,” a name born from a canopy of tropical trees covering this section of South L.A.

The title has devolved into a new meaning over time. The Jungle is lawless. The Jungle is unforgiving. Clark's neighborhood was where the final scene was filmed in "Training Day," a 2001 movie about drugs, guns, corruption and everything in between.



According to data compiled by the LA Times, Baldwin Village has more than 30,000 residents, with a median household income of less than $40,000. Roughly 32 percent of families in the area are headed by a single parent. It ranks high among Los Angeles neighborhoods for violent crimes and property crimes. Crack and meth are currency. In 2011, one drug raid was so large, the L.A. Sports Arena parking lot was used as a staging ground for the 900 police officers used.

These are the streets Clark wandered with his mother, Teneka Clark, from the early 1990s until 2003, when he was handed a plane ticket.

Frank Clark can't provide a last known address in Los Angeles. He and Teneka, along with his two older siblings, were nomadic. They rambled around town, sleeping in a shelter one night, in a random friend’s house another night. Teneka had drug problems, Frank explains, and this was the fallout.

Michigan defensive end Frank Clark.

“I’d walk for hours with my mother, wondering where we were going next, what we were going to do next,” Clark said.

He avoided the underbrush of The Jungle, despite being tempted by the voices of the streets. Clark says one of his childhood friends, Henry Smith, was killed in front of a local church during a drive-by shooting. Smith was running with the gangs and paid the price.

"(Frank) has seen a lot and experienced a lot.”

This is Regina Bryant, the sister of Frank’s father, Frank Clark III. Regina remembers when Teneka Clark’s mother called from Los Angeles in 2003, saying her grandson needed to get out of that place. She called her counterpart in Cleveland, speaking grandma to grandma, and decided that young Frank would board a plane and head east.

Regina was fresh out of college at the time. She had met her nephew once, when he was 3 or 4 years old. Now he was 10 and walking through an airport in Cleveland with wide eyes. He gave Regina an awkward, uncertain hug.

Young Frank Clark moved into his grandmother’s home in the Maple Heights section of Cleveland. It can be a rough place, but it isn’t Crenshaw. The older Frank Clark moved in, too, before later moving to the St. Clair section of the city, where his son would split time between the two houses.

It turns out the younger Frank Clark didn’t like Cleveland. The town was too slow and the buildings were too small. He'd never seen cows or snow and thought both were weird. More than anything, he missed L.A. -- the people, the streets, the smells.

But Cleveland offered something The Jungle never could: Normalcy and an unchanging address.

This isn’t meant to mean life went from hell to Hallmark. There still were issues. There were just fewer.

"It wasn’t a great story, like he showed up and everything instantly changed for the better,” Regina said. “Ohio was a different environment, but just one with a new set of challenges. It wasn’t so peachy when he got here.”

Neither Regina nor young Frank delves much into the issues surrounding his arrival. “His dad had his own internal issues that he’s working through,” Regina explained. “It was different. I’ll leave it at that.”

Once Frank Clark adjusted to the newness of the Cleveland area, he pushed his focus to football. He attended a local Catholic school for seventh and eighth grade and played Pop Warner ball. When it came to high school, Clark’s father, grandmother and aunt refused to send him into Cleveland’s public school system. Instead, they chose Ginn Academy, an all-boy school created in 2007 for at-risk youth.

The school was the brainchild of Ted Ginn Sr., the legendary football and track coach at Glenville High School. Because Ginn Academy doesn’t have its own athletic department, students are permitted to play sports for the public schools.

Clark didn’t play football as freshman. Then as a sophomore, he stepped onto the field for Ginn’s team at Glenville. The talent was obvious and Clark knew it. He demanded to be used all over the field -- quarterback, tight end, wide receiver, linebacker, safety, kicker.

“Frank wanted to do everything except what I wanted him to do,” Ginn said.

Ginn wanted Clark to play defensive end and the two locked horns.

“So I fought with Frank from his sophomore year to his senior year,” Ginn said. “In his senior year, he finally decided to listen.”

Regina uses a mixed bag of descriptors for young Frank: “Intelligent.” “Mischievous.” “Curious.” “Charming.” “Pleasant.”

Mostly, though, it’s this: “He was just a boy finding his way.”

As a senior at Glenville, Clark recorded 70 tackles, including 19 sacks, and caught 12 passes leading to three touchdowns as a tight end. He found his way, and it led him to become a three-star high school prospect.

On Feb. 2, 2011, Clark accepted a scholarship to Michigan over offers from North Carolina, California, Michigan State and others.

In the three years since then, Clark has appeared in 36 career games and made 17 starts for the Wolverines at defensive end. He posted 43 tackles, 4.5 sacks and recovered two fumbles last season. Opposing coaches voted him All-Big Ten second team and chatter built that he might enter the NFL draft.

Clark returned to school after Regina added her two cents to a million dollar decision: "I told him the more you know, the better off you’ll be."

But like his move to Cleveland, Clark's time at Michigan hasn't been all sunshine and roses. He was arrested for stealing a laptop from a floormate in his campus dorm as a freshman. The resulting felony charge of second-degree home invasion was cleared after one year of probation, but the damage was done to his reputation. The charge has stuck.

Since then, Clark has harnessed an uncomplicated motive of ambition. He realized soon after what was nearly lost -- the opportunity to change his reality -- and that his circumstances are as fickle as they are fleeting.

“My mother struggles with a lot of things, know what I mean?” he said. “Just being away from her, knowing I can’t help her at a time where I look at it like she needs me, especially as an adult -- that’s what hurts the most. My mother was a big figure in my life and still is a big figure in my life, though, I don’t talk to her every day. The one thing that I want to do is to help her as much as I can when I get to that place where I can help her.”

Frank Clark hasn’t seen his mother since they went to the airport in 2003. It eats at him. During his junior year of high school, he returned to California for a football camp and hoped to see his family. An aunt and some cousins showed up. His mom and siblings didn’t.

Clark hasn’t been back since, but wears the birthmark of Baldwin Village to this day. It doesn't wash off.

Michigan's Frank Clark celebrates with students following a win over Purdue in his freshman season.

“I chose not to go back to my boys and my neighborhood, especially while I’m in college, because they wouldn’t really understand me, if you know what I mean,” Clark said. … “Before I left, the road I was going down was the road that my best friend was going down. … I was going down the road where there was the gangs, the drugs and the violence -- the road every typical guy growing up in my neighborhood and in inner-city Los Angeles went down.”

Instead, he went to Cleveland. Then to Michigan.

Now he’s a senior, on track to earn a general studies degree from U-M’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

“He kind of holds onto that -- ‘I am a kid from inner-city Crenshaw and inner-city Cleveland.’” Regina said. “Well, no, he’s not. He’s a young man going to the University of Michigan and playing football. He needs to walk in that greatness now. Other people can only dream of that.”

Clark dreams, more than anything, that his mother will see him play this season; says it would be "the best thing ever" if she's on hand for Senior Day.



That's all over the next horizon, along with the rest of Frank Clark's journey. The exhaust has faded on the first part of the trip, even though he still squints to see it. Sitting and reminiscing, he says he remembers his mother telling him, "You're good. You don't need to be in the streets."

So he found his own way.

Brendan F. Quinn covers University of Michigan basketball and football. Follow him on Twitter for the latest on Wolverines hoops. He can be contacted at bquinn@mlive.com