“I told Todd he needed to look into this kid from Bartow, that I had heard from his high-school coach he probably was going into the transfer portal after the season,” said Frost, whose name is on the UF practice floor. “I’m sure Todd thought, ‘Yeah OK, here’s this booster from Bartow who thinks he’s a scout,’ but I know what I’d seen with my own eyes.”
Clayton was not a high-major college basketball player, Frost was told.
He couldn’t play high-major basketball.
“I just remember thinking, ‘If this guy can’t play high-major basketball, who can?’ ” Frost said.
Jacksonville, Florida Gulf Coast and Stetson were the lone state schools that offered. Clayton ended up at Iona, and entered the portal two years later, as Frost predicted.
The night of that dinner, Golden, not quite a year from making the jump cross-country from the University of San Francisco, called up Clayton’s numbers on KenPom.com and was like, ‘Wait … what?” His tape on Synergy confirmed the digits.
How in the world did everyone get Clayton’s recruiting so wrong?
“He probably plays with a chip on his shoulder,” Broome said of Clayton this week. “I do the same thing.”
Just 40 miles separate Lake Wales and Plant City, yet two future first-team All Americans — both finalists for National Player of the Year — went un-recruited by the best basketball programs in the state and throughout the south.
What are the odds?
Clayton, the first first-team All American in UF basketball history and as bright a star at this loaded Final Four as anyone left playing, fielded a bunch of questions this week about the lack of interest that came his way during at spectacular prep career that started at Lake Wales High (two years) and ended at Bartow High. Covid was a major factor, like it was for so many prospects of that cycle, but Clayton’s status as a four-star football recruit – a safety – was probably more significant.
Basketball coaches figured Clayton, who had football offers from some of the top programs in the country, wouldn’t bypass a chance to play high-major football, but it still doesn’t explain why no basketball programs pursued him harder.
Eventually, Rick Pitino saw a tryout video of Clayton that one of his Iona assistants happened upon. The Hall-of-Fame coach was intrigued enough to reach out.
“Walt was a football player,” Pitino said Friday from the Final Four, where the now-St. John’s coach accepted the 2025 NCAA Coach of the Year Award, which he shared with Auburn’s Bruce Pearl. “What I liked about Walt, he won championships. And I wanted a winner at Iona. He was a winner. Even though he was a football player, I liked the way he passed the ball and what he was doing.”
As a freshman, Clayton started just four games and averaged 7.3 points. That Gaels’ season ended with a loss at Florida in the NIT. Clayton had eight points and four steals that night.
The next year, Clayton was sensational on the way to being named Mid-Atlantic Athletic Conference Player of the Year and leading the Gaels to the league title and NCAA Tournament berth by averaging 16.8 points, 4.3 rebounds, 3.2 assists and topping the nation in free-throw percentage at 95.3.
And, yes, he was thinking about hitting the transfer portal.
That was two years ago. Now he’s one of the biggest names in the game after Golden committed to making Clayton a scoring point guard and gave him the freedom to be himself.
“He’s always been able to make plays out of the ball screen and, obviously, been able to score at an elite level, but I think it was us providing that opportunity for him to play the lead guard and obviously surrounding him with guards that fit to lift up all the good parts of his game,” Golden said. “It’s the jump we expected him to make by having that opportunity. We had a lot of belief in him coming into this year and, obviously, he’s rewarded us for that belief.”
Last week, when Clayton drained his ridiculous fall-away game-ahead 3-pointer with less than a minute to play against Texas Tech, he got a text from a former Iona teammate.
“They said Coach P thought it was a bad shot,” Clayton laughed.
Advantage Clayton … for that one.
“He played great. He made every shot that we didn’t defend correctly,” Tigers associate head coach Steven Pearl said. “Anytime we went under a ball screen or under a [dribble-handoff] or didn’t go over the top of a player, he banged a shot. We had a couple of execution flaws on the defensive end and he made us pay for every single one of them.”
Similar words came from a handful of SEC coaches during the Gators’ rampage of 16 wins over the last 17 games, as well from the coaches of Connecticut and Texas Tech, who Clayton practically took down single-handedly with circus-like 3s in crunch time.
With 668 points, Clayton needs nine to set the UF single-season scoring record.
Turns out, he was a high-major college basketball player, after all.
Nice job, John Frost. When’s the next dinner for four?
“Coming from the west coast, Todd wouldn’t have known Walter Clayton from Adam’s house cat,” Frost said. “I guess nobody else did, either.”
Now, everybody knows him.
