Clayborn fights through adversity to get to senior year

By Brian Heinemann
For The Herald

Adrian Clayborn isn’t motivated by awards or recognition. Not even a perceived disrespect.

When Michigan State linebacker Greg Jones was announced as the Big Ten Preseason Defensive Player of the Year Monday, Clayborn shrugged it off. It made sense. Jones won the postseason award for best defensive player last year, so why shouldn’t he get the same award?

“I’m always working to get better and working to be the best, but he deserved that stuff,” Clayborn said. “It should be more motivation to him to get it again this postseason.”

That’s the type of person Clayborn is. His success hasn’t gotten to his head. He hasn’t even contemplated what it would be like to have the money he’d earn by being an NFL draft pick. The furthest he will go is to say that he hopes that if he buys a car one day, it will be something nice.

“If you look at that stuff, that means you’re missing out on what you’re doing right now,” he said. “If I was to focus on that, then I’d miss out on training and stuff like that. You have to have a mindset of you have to work for that stuff, and I’m working right now for it.”

All he wants to do now is provide more of a spark to his team and his defense, helping them earn more victories and win a Big Ten title.

“He’s a great leader,” line-mate Karl Klug said. “Our top leader on the whole team, him and Ricky (Stanzi), and it’s great to have him back. Very talented, talented guy. The best part is he’s a humble guy. He’s not arrogant or anything. He won’t let you know about what he did on the field. He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

What Clayborn does talk about, though, are things that help you start to realize what makes him tick and what molded him into the person he has become.

One of the things that does motivate him are the loved ones that he’s lost. When Clayborn was only 10 – young, but old enough to remember clearly – one of his older brothers, Anthony, was killed.

“He was involved in some things that he shouldn’t have been doing, and he got shot,” Clayborn said. “He got murdered.”

Instead of using personal glory or jealousy as a motivator, Clayborn sometimes uses that.

“Sometimes it’s motivation, knowing that him and my grandma are looking over me,” he said. “I’m pretty much just working for them.”

When presented with the choice for leaving for the NFL or coming back for a senior season, Clayborn’s parents left the decision up to him. He took two weeks for due process but knew, with 99 percent certainty, that he’d be coming back to Iowa. He said it wasn’t a tough decision at all.

It has helped that his mom moved to Iowa City - from St. Louis, where Clayborn grew up - in April. She provides a local home despite his being away at college, and he’s leaning on her to handle the agents that have been showing interest, freeing him up to focus on his final collegiate season.

Despite the nationally-recognized on-field success Clayborn had last season, he had a tumultuous go of things off the field.

Last spring, Clayborn got into an altercation with a cab driver that ended with him spending a night in jail on charges for assault causing bodily injury. As he described it, it was late at night, and a traffic jam left Clayborn and the cab driver both frustrated.

The driver honking at Clayborn wasn’t the thing that ignited the situation, though. His use of a racial slur was. Things turned ugly, allegedly resulting in Clayborn punching the driver.

“It’s a racial slur, but some people out there use the word,” said Clayborn. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to get it again, being on the stage that I am. Now that I know how to handle it, it’s a good thing. I regret doing it, but I wouldn’t take it back because I think that made me a better person."

The other incident left the 6-foot-4, 285 pounder flat-out scared. 

He found out a woman was stalking him, an obsession that lasted four or five months and culminated in her harassing Clayborn from the first row behind the Hawkeyes bench during the Arkansas State game.

“It was scary, dealing with that and not knowing what a person wants to do to you, as far as violence or anything,” Clayborn said. “It was scary. It wasn’t like a kind of fun deal, like ‘oh, I have a stalker.’ It was, ‘I have a stalker, I need to do something about it.’”

But now, with the stalker out of his life, the arrest behind him – he plead guilty this winter – and his mom living in Iowa City to help out, Clayborn can focus intently on his final season.

And that’s a scary thought for quarterbacks around the Big Ten.