Coming Home Again
CLEMSON -- In a perfect world, Theresa Davis would have at least 50 tickets to Saturday’s game in Atlanta.
For months she’s been planning a big party at her home about 20 minutes from the Georgia Tech campus, and she’s been trying to round up tickets several of those Clemson No. 1 jerseys.
Everybody will be there -- aunts and uncles and cousins and friends from the old neighborhood, and folks who’ve followed James Davis, Clemson’s No. 1, since his days at Douglass High School in Atlanta.
“She was talking to me the other day about how she wanted a lot of people to be at this game,” he said. “She knows it’s going to be big for me. It’s pretty much a family thing.”
It’s a game they have anticipated for three years, ever since James Davis picked Clemson over Tech, and this will be the last time he’ll play on the field of his childhood dreams.
Davis grew up minutes from Grant Field, and he recalled again Monday how he could hear the band and the crowd noise from his family’s apartment. How it seemed to be calling him.
He said his mother kept him on a straight path with a short leash.
“I just kept him busy,” she said. “He was always a good boy. He was quiet, didn’t like to go out. He’d go to school, do his work and pray.”
James Davis later decided it would be better to put some distance between him and the streets of Atlanta -- just not too much.
“I went to a lot of Georgia Tech games when I was younger,” he said. “I always wanted to go to Georgia Tech because it was right at home.”
At Clemson, he quickly earned the reputation as a money player, one the Tigers can count on to deliver in the big games. Last season in a nationally televised game with Tech, he ran for a career-high 216 yards and two touchdowns as Clemson defeated the Jackets, 31-7.
As a freshman, he shredded N.C. State’s blue ribbon defensive line for 140 yards in the first half of a 31-10 win, but on the first play of the second half, he broke a bone in his left hand, two weeks before the Tech game.
There wouldn’t be enough time for the hand to heal. James Davis knew after one carry his day was done.
“It was very disappointing,” he said. “I had told everybody I was going to play.”
His mother felt his pain.
“He wanted to cry,” Theresa said. “It hurt him, and I hurt, too.”
It was what fueled his intensity for last season’s game, and should again stoke him for Saturday.
“A charged James Davis is a pretty good James Davis,” said Douglass High coach Gary Cantrell.
“Coming back home, you always want to put on a show for the hometown folk.”
James Davis played for Cantrell at Douglass as a freshman, started as a sophomore and was all-state as a junior.
“He wanted the ball, and he was big and strong enough to carry it,” Cantrell said. “Us giving him the ball 20-plus times a game, that was the rule. He was going to get the football, and we knew he would deliver once he got it.”
James Davis showed flashes in last week’s win against N.C. State of what Clemson fans were eager to see this season, with 166 yards on 24 carries.
“It’s a big week for me,” James Davis said, “A lot of family and friends in town.
“I’m just happy to go home and play a game in Atlanta because I didn’t get a chance to play the last (time).”
James Davis said his mother will be coming to the Upstate this week to pick up some of those No. 1 jerseys, although Ms. Davis said she prefers the purple the Tigers wore last year to the traditional orange.
“Right now I’m focusing on the win,” James Davis said, deflecting talk of a repeat of last season’s performance.
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