MT. PLEASANT, S.C. — In the beginning, two generations before the big rookie with the round face was dropped like an anchor on the port side of the Falcons offensive line, Jake Matthews already was being built.
If the kid came into his first NFL training camp swinging, squaring up with a veteran teammate from the get-go as if to establish his rank in the pack, well, that was only natural. Genetics made him do it.
Speaking for every Matthews everywhere, softening his words with a chuckle, Jake’s granddad said, “We like to say we didn’t start any (fights), but we finished most of them.”
If, ahead of schedule, the Falcons slid their first-round draft pick from right tackle to left, throwing him to the world’s best pass-rushers ready or not, Jake had almost no choice but to accept the assignment with a shrug. A commitment to whatever is needed always has been part and parcel of the Matthews makeup.
The rookie speaks: “I’ve always been a guy who shies away from attention. I don’t like the public eye. I like coming out, working with the o-line, being with the team, being a role player. That’s all I’m trying to do. I’m grateful I was drafted where I was and I understand there are expectations, coming in and playing right now.
“If they want me to play right tackle or left tackle, I’m going to do whatever they tell me.”
And you can almost hear in a 22 year old the very philosophy of the man who more than 60 years ago started the most layered pro football tradition ever: “You don’t ever quit,” said Clay Matthews Sr., 86, says of how he and his kin approach their work. “You give it 100 percent. Don’t ever blame the other guy. Go out and do your damn job.”
Someone had to start the Matthews royal line. One man had to establish a proud football brand. For what the Fords are to motorcars, the Yuenglings to brew and the Barrymores to stage and screen, the Matthews clan is to the primitive art of football.
The patriarch today lives outside of Charleston, in comfort befitting a former president of Bell & Howell. He still wears the ring he received upon entering the Georgia Tech Athletic Hall of Fame, for his exploits on the now defunct wrestling team, not for his play at end for Bobby Dodd’s Yellow Jackets of the late 1940s.
Clay Sr. may be a little forgetful these days — diagnosed with the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that so often accompanies a life of running into others. His second wife Carolyn subtly fills in the gaps. He seems a gentle man of good humor, a high schooler nicknamed “Brusier” who 70 years later is about to display some of his paintings at a senior center he frequents. He possesses a sense of whimsy that can ambush the listener at any time and the pride of family that shows itself with the least bit of prompting.
What a line his is. Clay’s own professional career, interrupted by a two-year hitch with the 82nd Airborne, was limited to four seasons with the San Francisco 49ers (1950, ’53-55). Among his five children, Clay Sr. begat two sons who played a total of 38 years in the NFL — Hall of Fame lineman Bruce and linebacker Clay Jr.
Clay Jr. begat Clay III, the long-haired terror of the tundra in Green Bay, and Casey, a Philadelphia fourth-round pick in 2011.
Bruce begat Kevin, a center who was on and off with the Tennessee Titans for four seasons, and began this one in Carolina’s camp.
And, just over 22 years ago, of keen interest now to every Falcons fan, Bruce begat a first-round draft pick being prepped for the kind of long, sturdy career on the line. The kind we used to see when the likes of Jeff Van Note and Mike Kenn played in these parts.
You haven’t heard such raves about a rookie since a tall, slender quarterback from Boston College was making like Picasso on the white board, drawing inspired patterns for the coaches, in 2008.
“(Matthews) is light years ahead of other rookies in terms of his ability to retain the information. We saw that when we spoke to him at the combine,” Falcons coach Mike Smith said. “You could tell he was on a completely different level.”
Comforting words for the aforementioned quarterback, Matt Ryan, who got batted around like a cat toy last season. Much already was expected of Matthews at draft time, tasked with saving Ryan. Then Sam Baker was hurt in the preseason, and the Falcons immediately threw Matthews into the breach at left tackle, the main gate of the o-line. He got even more important overnight.
Given who he is and where he is from, how could Jake Matthews not be ready?
“In athletics 90 percent of it is the right mom picking out the right dad,” Smith smiled.
Granddad’s scouting report is direct and reassuring.
“He’s a big boy. He’s smart. He keeps his mouth shut.
“And he doesn’t back off.”
Clay Matthews Sr.’s South Carolina home is not a museum to the family exploits. He could fill the joint with photos and trophies. Yet there is scarcely a hint of history.
When looking for clues to where the Matthews’ tradition began, Carolyn goes on a dig in a closet and retrieves a scrapbook with clippings from another era.
They date back to the report that Clay Matthews, the son of Citadel boxing coach H.L. “Matty” Matthews, had signed to play football at Georgia Tech. It had been a simple courtship. “To tell you how first-class it was, they put me on a bus,” Matthews remembered. “I had never been in a big city. They were nice to me; I was fascinated, so I signed.”
At Tech, football was almost a hobby for Matthews. Of course, the boxing coach’s son boxed, he was a two-time Georgia Golden Gloves champion. Unbeaten as far as he could remember. Never lost? Really? “Not yet,” Clay Sr. said, eyes alight, “and nobody’s going to get me now, either.”
He wrestled, too, unbeaten at Tech back when it was in the SEC and when schools in the south still grappled. Got his industrial engineering degree in the meantime.
There were no harrowing war stories coming from his experience during the Korean War, not once a general learned he had a lieutenant in the unit who had put in one year with the San Francisco 49ers. The guy with the star on his shoulder had a team on base, and he wasn’t one who liked to lose. So long as he aided the football effort, Lt. Matthews was staying stateside. Trained as a paratrooper – “If they told me to stand up and hook up and get ready to jump, I’d hook up right now,” the 86-year-old said – much of his duty still was to football.
Returning to the 49ers after short his stint in the Army, Matthews was a 6-foot-3, 225-pound end on defense who seemed to have an appetite for the ball (he had 11 fumble recoveries in four seasons). He never, however, felt he had an exclusive relationship with football. In fact, when something better came along — like a job offer in the corporate world — he put down the game after his fourth season, squeezed himself into a suit and never looked back.
Clay Matthews Sr. didn’t intend to build a family empire around football. He never limited his vision for his children that way. But the Matthews’ body type and the Matthews’ attitude was too much a natural fit for the game to be denied.
Jake couldn’t disavow that even if he wanted.
He played quarterback through middle school in Texas and his father Bruce, the hulking lineman, had hopes. “At that stage, he wasn’t as well marbled as the other Matthews men,” Bruce said. “I thought it would be kind of cool having a kid who might touch the ball other than just snapping it to the quarterback.”
Alas, the Matthews in him had to come out. Jake grew. And his father noticed that even when he ran the ball, rather than trying to elude a defender, the boy seemed to seek one out in order to plow him under. “He was wired for contact,” Bruce said.
Both Bruce and his son Jake got the same speech, about the same point in their lives when they were wavering about playing another sport, basketball, and spoke out loud the most forbidden of words: I want to quit.
“I was coming back from a basketball practice, fifth grade,” Jake remembered. “My grandfather was in town visiting, he was in the car with me and my dad and I had a rough day. I didn’t feel like going back the next day. He gave me the speech: Basically, you commit to something you never quit from it. If you put your name to something, you’re locked in.”
Chastened then, Jake is grateful now. “I’m really proud to have a grandfather like that,” he said. “That’s where it all started, our whole family, the reputation for guys who do it the right way. He’s the start of that.”
Jake is the grandson of a former Golden Gloves champion, and thus made himself known in his very first Falcons training camp practice by scrapping with Kroy Biermann. His mother was aghast when she watched that outbreak on HBO’s Hard Knocks. His father just smiled. “I said, ‘Honey, do you realize I’ve probably been in 5,000 of those kind of episodes,’” Bruce told his wife.
He is the son of the Hall of Famer who played every position along the line, and long-snapped, too. “If a coach had enough faith in me to move me (to another position), I always took it as a compliment,” Bruce said. You think Jake is going to carp about moving to left tackle at this tender age?
Jake is the product of an unbreakable line. Both his father and his uncle Clay hold the record for the most games played at their respective positions. Other than the memory issues, his grandfather to this day complains of not a single football-related ache.
What does all this say to the next generation of player faced with meeting a Matthews on the field?
Better buckle up says the fountainhead of a singular football family:
“He can expect the best a guy’s got to give. A Matthews is going to be aggressive…
A brief pause here while Clay Sr. sets up the punch line.
“And he’s going to be all over you like a bad smell.”
About the Author
