Hattiesburg, Miss. – April Clapton walks out of the white Chevy Tahoe ready for football.
Wearing her very festive Southern Miss top, jean shorts and brown sandals, Clapton kept an arsenal of black-and-gold gear in a clear bag lying on his left shoulder. You wouldn’t know it, but she was smiling from ear to ear, a cloth facemask pointing just north of her nose.
It’s hard to believe that a month ago, a bedridden one-year-old in a hospital bed in Brooklyn, Mississippi, had a pain in her body, a mind called “covid fog” in her mind, and she was the only outlet of the outside world facetime conversation with her son and husband.
April fought for her life. And she won, now smiling and happy, about an hour south of Jackson, she was breathing very easily during those five days at King’s Daughters Medical Center. With a six-week battle with Covid-1, April is returning to society in a way that Southern moms can do in its first public appearance.
“My kid plays football,” she says of her 6-foot-2, 285-pound son Trace, a two-year-old starter at the center of Southern Miss. “No matter what goes on, I’m not missing. That
Claptons, April and husband Tommy, witnessed the first game between the two FBS teams, which is sure to make the 2020 college football season memorable, historic and one-of-a-kind. They watched their son’s USM team, two touchdown favorites, dig themselves a big hole and never get out – a 32-21 defeat to South Alabama in the atmosphere of MM Roberts Stadium, which felt like an SEC spring game.
No marching bands or gatherings. No hugs or high fencing. But there was football! Maybe not pretty football, but it was football. Initially there were signs of conflict. When the Southern Miss players took to the field amidst fireworks, the show’s costume mascot, an eagle named Seymour, led the way holding a giant USM flag – hovering on the turf until it hovered around midfield.
Cam Bonelli / Hettisburg American-Imagan Content Services, LLC
The Turf Monster was the best tackler of the night. On the third play of the game, South Alabama receiver Jillian Tolbert took a short pass 73 yards for touchdown, Slipping out of at least three Southern Miss Defenders – the start of the first quarter with a fire for the Jaguars. The 13-point favorite, Southern Miss, went down 13-0 in the first 12 minutes of the game, provoking frustration from the stand. A USM fan, holding a Miclob Ultra light in each hand, declared, “They’re whipping our ass!”
Ah, yes, the football of the college ledge is back.
On the field, there were shanked pants, duck-like deep unda passes and offic formal abuse. But in the midst of an epidemic, it seems pointless to worry about the value of sports performance.
Here in this hulking hee of concrete (surprisingly no locals call it Rock K), everyone seemed quite happy with the live college action – the first such tournament between the two clubs at the highest level of the NCAA since the last conference basketball. The period between those events?
– About six months
– 25 weeks
– 175 days
– 4,207 hours
– 252,440 minutes
– 15,146,400 seconds
In short, just be happy. After all, 53 of the 130 FBS programs are already scratching the fall ball.
“It’s been emotional everywhere,” says Southern Miss Athletic Director Jeremy McClean. “The thing that has been very difficult during the summer has been ‘Can we come here?’
The short answer is yes. Even though it seemed really strange. Southern Miss sold enough tickets so that the Mississippi governor’s capacity would not exceed 25% of the maximum stadium. In The Rock, there are about 9,500 tickets, many of them players or coach families and long-term season ticket holders as well as – fiction – 1000 students (school officials may reconsider later at some point). Tickets designate a section, but not a seat. People who were not part of the same household with the remnants overseeing the policy were required to keep a space of six feet in their section. Masks could only be worn while sitting, and a lot of people took advantage of it, wearing it to drink the warm, humid night air.
Cam Bonelli / Hettisburg American-Imagan Content Services, LLC
Hand sanitizing stations laid this combination, the concessions became cashless and on the side, the team boxes were extended a few yards to allow players to socially distance themselves.
“We’re on national television, in front of everyone,” says McClain, a native of Mississippi himself. “We want people to see us as trying to do it right and be an example of ‘you can do this’. The stadium can have your fans. You can play college leg football and stay safe. ”
Who would have swallowed it? Southern Miss vs South Alabama captures the national spotlight. Because of the seating arrangements in the press busses, the school really had to do Look back For the game between the media conference USA and the Sun Belt, some media requests, McClain says. Yes, 2020 has been the strangest year in recent history.
Fantastic Clapton isn’t really used to describing this summer. Painful. Scary. Trouble. Stressful.
Tommy Clapton, a high school principal, and April, a school librarian, both contracted the virus sometime in late July. His initial COVID-19 test came back negative. When a few days later, the relief quickly turned to despair when the symptoms came.
Tommy and April Clapton
Clapton are healthy people with no underlying conditions, perfect candidates to become an asymptomatic career. Yet, Tommy and April fought some of the worst given by Covid-19. There is intense pain in the body to wake you up at night. Fever-induced cold COVID fog clouded mind and worst of all, fatigue and shortness of breath from the lowest part of the activity. “We just fall into talking too much,” says Tommy.
On Aug. 4, April’s oxygen levels dropped alarmingly enough as there was a rush of travel to different rooms for about two weeks. She was hospitalized for five days. All the while, Son Trace was preparing for the 2020 season. “It was emotional,” says April. “He couldn’t see me.”
Facetime was all that. FaceTime and Sonic. One day in the ER on oxygen with her mom, Trace left the campus, drove 90 minutes home to Brooklyn, was swung by Sonic and rushed to the hospital. The nurses delivered meals from there until April.
While his parents were battling the disease, Trace was dealt with by his own team. COVID hit Southern Miss’s offensive line early in the morning during the camp. At least two linemen missed time and both lost at least 10 pounds. Cocker Wright, in fact, was out for a whole month when he was in quarantine. Thanks, Trace never got it. Back in Brooklyn, it wasn’t.
The five days he was hospitalized in April were the worst. Even two more members of the Clapton family who were fighting the virus couldn’t help it. To communicate with his wife, Tommy made her facetime in the hospital parking lot with her tahoe. Why “Getting closer to the bus,” he says. “It simply came to our notice then. I just needed to get closer. “
Trace learned that her mother had been cleared to return home during about a week of practice in the camp. It happened about a month ago now. Here it is still not quite 100%. Tommy had just fully recovered last week and it has taken an extra week of April to feel better. “The hardest thing is that he’s just rude,” says Tommy, a longtime high school coach in the state, who quit coaching to travel for two years to see Trace play. “Usually you get the flu and within two to three days, you will be fine. With Kovid, on day five or six, you feel a little better and you feel like you’re turning corners and the next day you wake up and the bus is like a bus hitting you. “
Still, they are all behind them now. They have found normalcy in their lives. In the Deep South, it is called Ftb .l.
The couple met Thursday at MM. Roberts stormed into the stadium, an hour before the kickoff, hand in hand, mask to mask. They’ve got a new perspective on Covid-1 on, a different perspective on the disease that has killed more than 1,000,000 people in the United States. But football is football and family is family. And maybe they feel a touch of invincibility. Antibodies should pass through their veins for at least another two months, doctors say.
Tommy points to his chest and says, “We say, ‘We’ve got it!’
.
