Norm Clarke, an award-winning sportswriter and reporter, died early Thursday morning at 82 after battling prostate cancer for more than 20 years.
Clarke, famous for a signature black eyepatch he started wearing after losing his eye in a childhood accident, took a turn for the worst last Sunday, his longtime friend Andrew Hudson said. Clarke was admitted to the hospital on March 12 after injuring his hip in a fall at his Las Vegas home.
“He talked a lot about how the patch was both a curse and a blessing,” Hudson said. “He had a lot of experiences that made it very difficult for him growing up, but when he put the patch on, he became this iconic guy that everyone recognized right away. It became his signature.”
Clarke began his career in 1963 as a sportswriter for Montana’s Terry Tribune. Over the next five decades, he spent time with the Associated Press in Ohio and at the Denver Rocky Mountain News and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
And he didn’t just cover sports. Clarke was in Candlestick Park covering the World Series for the Rocky Mountain News when the October 1989 earthquake struck San Francisco, he covered the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas and he wrote about the return of the Iranian hostages for the Associated Press in 1981.
Hudson said there was no place he could go with Clarke where his friend wasn’t recognized by his fans, after befriending the locals in Denver and Las Vegas. Clarke was even recognized by sports fans in San Diego while covering the Broncos’ very first Super Bowl win. His sources ranged from card dealers to valets to waiters and waitresses, and they would regularly call him with “all sorts of tips and sightings and things they had seen,” Hudson said.
Hudson fondly remembered attending the opening of a Las Vegas show with Clarke while visiting the man after he made the switch to celebrity columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1999. When the cast came out to take their bows, they were all wearing black patches.
“In all of this, he never wanted his legacy to be as a gossip columnist,” Hudson said. Clarke wanted to be remembered as a solid reporter.
Hudson said he visited Clarke last night and woke up to the news that his friend had died.
“Everything just happened very quickly. … It was surreal,” Hudson said. “He was unconscious and I just told him how much he meant to so many people, how he had so many friends who were sending him prayers and well wishes. I’d like to believe he heard me and he understood.”
The only word that Hudson said came to mind when thinking about Clarke was luck — how lucky he and everyone else felt to have met and loved the reporter. Hudson said Clarke was “like a meteor in the sky” and a beloved friend to many.
Clarke was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001 and battled the disease for more than two decades.
“He’d been suffering for a while and going through chemotherapy,” Hudson said. “He was hopeful, he was planning on moving back here to Denver … and was winding down everything in Vegas, including cancer treatments, but the cancer had spread too far.”
Clarke is survived by his wife, Cara; his brother, Jeff Scheid, and his wife Jenny; his sister, Nancy Morast, and her husband Duane; and his brother, Newell Clarke, and his wife Rene.
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