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IllustrateD volume 24, issue 5
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w o m e n ' s b a s k e t b a l l f e a t u r e : l i z a c l e m o n s
BY KYLE CHARTERS
KCharters@GoldandBlack.com
B
y early November, Liza Clemons' weight had
dropped 20 pounds in only a few weeks, a sudden
decrease for which few outside her inner-circle knew
the reasons.
The junior was a shell
of herself, not only in
body — the 6-foot-2
forward was only 153
pounds — but in spirit,
too. A part of her had
been lost.
A month earlier, on
the Friday afternoon of
Oct. 4, Clemons lost her
best friend and fiancé,
Johnny Lee Upshaw,
who was gunned down,
police say, at an apart-
ment complex in Fort
Wayne's northeast side.
Clemons was in town
but briefly stepped away to make a snack run at a gas
station only to return to chaos, with police officers and
emergency personnel arriving on the scene.
"I didn't know what was going on," Clemons said
in late April, giving her first interview about the in-
cident. "I was sitting there waiting for him and I had
people calling me asking 'Where is he?' and I was
like 'I don't know.' I had his phone and his phone was
dead. We couldn't call him and nobody would answer
their phones. We didn't know where he was. About an
hour later, they were like, 'You need to go to the hos-
pital and see if he's there.' "
Upshaw, whom friends called "Jay," died upon ar-
rival of a gunshot wound. He was 21.
That Clemons continued to play through the trag-
edy, and through injury, was recognized April 24 at
the Indiana Roof Ballroom, as she received the Brady
Sports Achievement Award, presented by the Method-
ist Sports Medicine Research and Education Founda-
tion.
But those weeks after the shooting were terrible.
For one, Clemons stopped eating.
And that was atypical, to say the least.
"She eats all the time," close friend and teammate
Torrie Thornton said. "If she's not eating, she's think-
ing of a way to eat. And so being around her and her
not eating, I was like, 'I don't know this person. This
is not you, this is not OK. We've got to get you out of
this.' "
Enduring
Clemons presses on after tragedy
Tom Campbell (right)
Liza Clemons lost her fiancé, Jay Upshaw (pictured above),
shortly before the start of the season, causing her tremen-
dous grief throughout the year, yet she carried on thanks in
part to teammates and coaches.
