Mickey Matthews still waits for the phone call.

For years, it was a post-game ritual. Matthews' father, Chester, would call his son on Sundays from Texas to talk about the previous day's football game.

"I would know it was him calling 'cause of the caller ID," Matthews said this week. "I'd pick it up and he'd say, 'Mick, this is Dad', like I didn't recognize the voice."

But Chester Matthews passed away in February of 2002, ending a relationship that was always deeper than the conversations the father and son had.

"He was a man of few words," Matthews, the football coach at James Madison, said. "We would speak for a minute or two. I find myself after many games wishing he would call."

Perhaps never would the 51-year-old Matthews have wanted more to talk to his old man than last August, when Mickey's son, Clayton, barely survived a car accident.

Clayton, a former Spotswood High School star and a former Duke himself, was left paralyzed, and Matthews was left wondering if the profession he had tirelessly pursued since he was 21 had kept him away from his family too often.

"I've spent way too much time at the office down through the years, and I do regret it," Matthews said. "There is no question I have regretted all the time I've been gone and I missed when the children were little. I looked up and I had two teenage kids. I was never around."

For Matthews, it was the only model of fatherhood he knew. His dad worked five days a week for Amoco Oil, which Matthews pronounces "ole" in his Texas drawl. On weekends, he kept working - toiling as a truck driver and a contract pumper (maintaining other people's oil wells).

Matthews spent a lot of his time growing up in Andrews, Texas, with his mother, Joyce, who worked first at a launderette and then as a hairdresser.

Joyce Matthews passed away in March of this year. A month later, Clayton and his mother Kay were involved in a second car wreck, and Clayton was back in intensive care.

Somewhere between all the heartache and challenges, between the flights to Texas for funerals, and to Charlottesville, Atlanta, Houston and Mexico for his son's rehab, Matthews managed to shoe-horn the not-so-minor task of coaching James Madison's football team.

He did this last season in the final year of his contract, week after week answering questions about whether he would be fired at year's end.

Last Saturday night, after beating Towson and winning a share of the second A-10 title in his six-year tenure at JMU, the coach and his wife lay in bed and talked about how things had changed from the year before.

A year ago, the Dukes ended the season with a home loss to Northeastern.

"Last year, we sat here in a dark house, we could barely turn on the TV," Kay said. "We thought we were waiting for the phone call for Mickey to be fired."

This Saturday, 12 months later, they're heading to a Division I-AA first-round playoff date at Lehigh.

"We were so excited that we couldn't hardly go to sleep," Kay said.

When Matthews talks about the challenges of the past two years, he often doesn't include himself, speaking of how Clayton's and Kay's lives have been changed. As for himself, Matthews says he's a better father and a better husband since Clayton's wreck.

But while Matthews may have considered himself an absentee father, neither Clayton nor Kay remembers it that way. They remember the efforts of a man trying to balance his career and his family.

When Clayton was born - two weeks overdue - Mickey was there for the delivery. An hour later, he was on plane from Texas to Florida for signing day.

Before he left, he told his wife, "Great job."

"Because I had a boy," Kay said.

Clayton and his father have been close through the years and it's one of the main reasons Clayton chose Division I-AA James Madison over I-A Wake Forest, foregoing the big stadiums and marquee names in ACC football to be there when his father - and the whole family - reaped the rewards of a lifetime spent pursuing a head coaching job.

In Matthews' first season with the Dukes, 1999, he led the team to an A-10 title and a first-round loss in the I-AA playoffs. But the following season, JMU went 6-5, a disappointing mark for a team expected to defend its conference crown. The years that followed saw the Dukes decline, falling to 2-9 in 2001 and 5-7 in 2002. When last season ended at 6-6, it was unclear whether Matthews would be back on the sideline in 2004.

But JMU gave Matthews a three-year contract extension, securing his future and giving Clayton's rehabilitation its biggest boost - a chance to be involved with the team.

After Clayton's first wreck in Aug. 2002, Mickey said his only relief from the stress of the situation - the elder Matthews was staying in Charlottesville, where Clayton was hospitalized, driving back and forth to Harrisonburg twice a day for two-a-day practices - was the few hours he was on the practice field coaching.

Now, for the 22-year-old Clayton, being on the practice field and helping coach the Dukes has given him both a distraction from the challenges he's facing and a way to be a productive part of something again.

"It's been better for me just getting back into the flow of things," said Clayton, who played everything from punter to quarterback for JMU until an injury forced him to leave the team shortly before his car crash in 2003. "Just because in the past year my life's changed so much. Just being around everybody and being back in football has been good for me."

Kay said the coaching profession is uniquely qualified to help a family through what the Matthews have endured the past two years, because it has a built-in support system of people who live on the same schedule and travel to the same places - a college coaching staff and their families are intrinsically linked.

But don't try to tell Mickey Matthews that going 9-2 and winning a share of the league title has made things all better.

"You could win five national championships and go to 10 Super Bowls," Matthews said. "And it's not like how our lives have been changed."

Before Clayton's accident, Matthews had worked steadily to persuade his son not to go into coaching.

"College coaching is a very rough business and, before the wrecks, I was making every effort to keep him out of the business," Matthews said.

As a result of Clayton's accident, Matthews has had to reevaluate his son's future. He now feels a future on the sidelines might suit his son well.

Clayton, who still struggles to cope with the fact that this should be his senior year playing for JMU, agrees. As he continues to work toward a sports-management degree, Clayton plans to increase his coaching workload, balancing school and a budding career.

Clayton hasn't played football since a 41-0 drubbing at Northeastern in 2002. The challenges he's faced and the pain he and his family have endured since that game dwarf anything that can happen on a green field with white lines. Still, the Matthews are a football family and Clayton still longs to be a player.

"When I played that game against Northeastern, I didn't know that would be my last game," Clayton said. " I always had dreams and fantasies of going out a champion."

And so he dreams of playing a game he can no longer play while his father wishes for a phone call that won't ever come.

In the end, they'll have to settle for what they can enjoy: a winning football season they so badly needed.
Copyright (c) 2004, Byrd Newspapers, All Rights Reserved.
Record Number: 109E3C6226C3EDB2