As NFL teams prepare to open training camp, Matt and Lakiescha Jones view this development with a mixture of excitement and dread.
Jarron and Jamir Jones, their two Notre Dame-educated sons, will be reporting to camp as hopefuls with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Houston Texans, respectively. As COVID-19 cases spike again across large swaths of the country, the Jones family can only hope for the best.
“I’m just reminding them to be safe, basically, on their travel to the facility,” Matt Jones said in a telephone interview. “Once they get there, I’m pretty sure they’ll put a bubble around them and test them and not let anything in or out. They should be safe. Hopefully by the time the games really start, we’ll have a better handle on things.”
As Matt Jones spoke this week from the Rochester, N.Y., area, he was taking a break from daily rehab sessions intended to remind his body and his brain how to walk. The 51-year-old private-duty nurse spent two months in the hospital, including two weeks in a medically induced coma, after being diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 23.
His oxygen levels dropped almost 15 percent below the acceptable minimum. His temperature climbed to 103 degrees. Yet initially, as his health spiraled out of control, he insisted on continuing to work.
“I was kind of a little bit in denial,” Jones said.
He called his physician, described his symptoms and was advised to check into the nearest hospital.
“I was kind of confused,” Jones said. “I told the doctor I wanted to wait. When I hung up the phone with the doctor, my wife said, ‘Nope, you’re going right now.’ We called, the ambulance came and took me right in, and within 15 minutes of arriving I was intubated and put into a coma.”
Married for 21 years and together for the past 33, Lakiescha Jones had saved her husband once again.
“If I had waited a few more hours, I probably wouldn’t be here now,” Matt Jones said. The medical bills are still piling up, and the family truly has no idea where it will end.
A GoFundMe account was started with a modest goal of $10,000; at last check it had raised more than $17,000.
As college football, built on the backs of ostensibly amateur student-athletes, attempts to power through the pandemic and barrels toward a pseudo-normal season this fall, Jones is asked what he would say to the parents of those young players.
“I mean, there’s nothing I can tell them,” he said. “You’ve got 100 people coming from all different corners of the country. You would hope Notre Dame would be responsible, and I’m sure they are responsible enough to put a bubble around them, but you’ve still got 100 guys interacting and weightlifting and (moving) around campus. It’s not going to be an easy thing.”
Jones doesn’t see the point of the Big Ten and Pac-12 going to league-only football schedules, especially when schools such as Minnesota and Wisconsin still must travel all the way to Maryland to play within the Big Ten.
He just hopes the 18- to 22-year-olds being thrown back together on college campuses, many of them in the name of national entertainment, can stay strong and smart.
“I hope they can be mature and just take it as one year of their life that they can pump the brakes just like the rest of the nation has to do,” Jones said. “There are other people that aren’t college age and they want to go out and do whatever. We all have to try to be safe. Hopefully this thing doesn’t last forever. I don’t believe it will.”
His natural optimism allows Jones to believe the NCAA will be able to navigate a full season without having the shut things back down again.
“The hardest part is going to be the startup, just getting everybody in and getting them tested,” he said. “Once the season starts and they’re starting to play and they’re more used to the safety measures that are in place, I believe (college football) will make it through.”
Even with regular testing and additional layers of safety for college athletes, some skeptics fear it will take a player falling gravely ill or even dying for a university and NCAA officials to stop this dangerous experiment.
“I hope not,” Jones said. “It’s going to be up to the coaching staffs to make sure their players are safe. They have to quarantine their own team, just like a curfew. They’re going to have to keep a close eye on their kids. Hopefully the schools do more online than actual classroom (learning) so they’re able to quarantine those kids and just keep them safe.”
As Jones slowly makes progress toward his goal of returning to work as a nurse on the front lines of this once-in-a-century health crisis, he just wishes he could turn on his television or scroll through social media without seeing so many Americans resist covering their face.
“It really makes the hair on my neck stand up,” Jones said. “I know how hard it is (to recover). A lot of these younger kids, they might not even come down with symptoms. They might end up being positive and not even know. When they end up taking it to their older uncles or grandmothers or parents, that’s what really scares me — the fact that they’re willing.
“Of course, when you’re young, you feel like you’re invincible. Then you go and you hug your mother or your father or you’re around your grandmother and their (immune) systems aren’t as tough. That’s what really goes through my mind. I cringe every time I see videos of these pool parties and these beaches that are packed or these house parties. It just makes me cringe.”
I have worked in mainstream media as a sports journalist for over three decades with stops at newspapers in Durham, Augusta, Fort Lauderdale, St, Paul and Indianapolis.
I have worked in mainstream media as a sports journalist for over three decades with stops at newspapers in Durham, Augusta, Fort Lauderdale, St, Paul and Indianapolis. In that time I have covered multiple Final Fours, Super Bowls, World Series and Olympics as well as the Professional Putters Association national championship — which is slightly different from the Masters. Now based in South Bend, Ind., I’m still trying to make my next story the best one yet.