This article first appeared in D Magazine
Clay Jones’ gravestone is in the shape of a football.
It sits near the middle of a cemetery in Forney, about a half-mile from the yellow house on Center Street he grew up in—the baby of the family, who became an athletic and sports-crazed 16-year-old. If you leave the cemetery and head east down the dirt road, it’s one mile to the old field where he spent so many hours playing football, back before the Forney High School Jackrabbits played in City Bank Stadium, back when practice and games took place on modest grass turf. Drive south past the old high school, and it’s 18 miles to Kaufman, where, one afternoon in August 1995, football players for Kaufman High told their head coach that it “felt electric outside.” If you instead hang a left and turn on to Highway 80, it’s 20 miles to the Baylor University Medical Center. It’s there that, as Clay Jones lay in a hospital bed late one summer more than two decades ago, his mother took note of the red dot on her son’s foot, where the lightning bolt had exited his body.
To read more please log in or subscribe to the digital edition. http://www.etypeservices.com/Forney%20MessengerID423/
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.