TOM BEAN -- Twenty years ago this week, the promise of a bright future was cut tragically short on a stretch of highway not far from here.

Joe Davis had the height, skills, and smarts to become an excellent collegiate student-athlete. Even though he departed before realizing his dream, he continues to affect those who knew him and played with him.

"It doesn't seem like 20 years to us," said Joe's mother, Carol Davis. "When you lose your own son, you don't think in years.

"You never get over it as a parent. Life goes on, but it's always there. It's like something's raw inside of you that never heals. You go on and live through it."

Joe was a giant of a young man in multiple ways.

He stood 6-feet-9 and weighed 230 pounds, and was one of the top center prospects in the nation that season. Joe, who had numerous scholarship offers, had signed a national college letter of intent in November to play basketball for Gene Iba's Baylor Bears.

In the classroom, Joe was an excellent student who regularly made As and Bs. He liked math and sometimes would tutor other students in math. His good grades made him attractive to college recruiters, and there were many who came calling.

"He was completely a guy who would have fun," said Chad Ashlock, who was a teammate and classmate of Davis and is today a coach at Tom Bean High School. "But any extra minute he had, he was driving around with a basketball in his car trying to find a game. That was his life."

Joe was averaging 28 points, 15 rebounds and four blocked shots per game in his senior season. In his final game, a 93-53 rout of Howe, he scored 23 points, pulled down 21 rebounds, and blocked five shots.

Joe Davis' gravesite at Vittitoe Cemetery in the Kentuckytown community, just a few miles from the home he grew up in, is in what will become the Davis family's final resting place.

"When you have to bury somebody, it's (surreal)," Carol Davis said. "You never think about where to bury someone. It's like sleepwalking."

Joe's grave marker displays the mementos of his high school days. On the back of his stone is engraved an image of a basketball and his No. 15 jersey and the words, "You touched so many lives."

•••

Carol Davis said Joe played football in his younger years, but never got into it and decided he liked basketball more.

"He would practice, then work out in the gym or in the weight room," she said. "A lot of times he would go up to Sherman High School and work out with the kids there. Wherever he heard there was a game, he'd be there.

"Basketball was his whole life. He had a key to the gym, and if you needed to find him, you'd find him at the gym."

His height had a lot to do with his love of basketball. Joe stood 6-foot-1 in eighth grade, but by the time he was a sophomore, he was 6-4 or 6-5, and continued to grow.

"His older brother is 6-8, I'm 5-10, his sister is 5-11, and his dad is 6-3," his mother said. "We're all kind of tall."

By Joe's junior year, the Tomcats, coached by Brent Hollensed, had become a force in Class 2A basketball. In the 1988-89 and 1989-90 seasons, the Tomcats won back-to-back District 11-2A titles with undefeated records. In the 1989 playoffs, the Tomcats made it to the Region II semifinals.

Joe Davis was named all-district and all-region following both his sophomore and junior seasons, and was voted all-state by the Texas Association of Basketball Coaches as a junior.

Joe, of course, wasn't the only weapon Tom Bean had. Ashlock, fellow senior Brent McLain, junior Brad Low and sophomore Adam Ball were also talented starters, and the Tomcats were deep as well, with two bench players who could dunk.

"We were extremely blessed," Ashlock said. "The talent level we had for a 2A school was unbelievable. I've been coaching for 16 years now, and I had no idea how blessed we were."

Craig Brooks, a senior reserve that season, said he knew as early as their seventh-grade year that the Tomcats had the makings of a great team.

"Our seventh-grade English teacher was also the varsity basketball coach, and he'd invite us to come out and play against the varsity," Brooks said. "Even in the seventh grade, Chad and Joe were respectable against the varsity players. By the time we were freshmen, Chad and Joe were on the varsity, and by the time we were sophomores they were the focal points of the team."

•••

It was a Monday night -- Jan. 22, 1990 -- when Joe and a teammate left the school after practice and headed west on State Highway 11. The Tomcats were 21-3 on the year and the No. 5-ranked team in the state in Class 2A. They had an important game against Van Alstyne scheduled the next day.

Joe was taking his friend and teammate, McLain, to a hospital in Sherman so McLain could visit his mother Paula, a teacher at Tom Bean High School who was undergoing cancer treatment.

Near Luella, according to police, Joe's 1989 Dodge pickup crossed the center line and struck another vehicle head-on at around 6:30 p.m.

Rescue workers had to cut open the vehicle to free Davis and McLain, who was also a Tom Bean starter. Both were transported to Wilson N. Jones Medical Center.

McLain was hospitalized with multiple broken bones and lacerations, but none of his injuries was life-threatening. The driver and passenger in the other car, Thomas and Deloris Sanderson of Whitewright, were also hospitalized.

"In a small community like ours, we were at the accident before they cut (Davis) out of the car," Ashlock said. "When we arrived, he was still trapped in the car. When they sent us home from the emergency room, they said he was going to be fine. When we went to bed that night, we thought he was fine."

Davis was examined at the hospital and was found to have a compound fracture and dislocated elbow in his left arm. His left leg was fractured in two places, and his pelvis was also fractured.

Nobody knew that Davis also had a ruptured spleen, as an autopsy showed later. He slowly bled to death internally, and by the time the bleeding was discovered, it was too late. He died on his way to the operating table about four hours after the accident.

"I met Joe's mom when we worked together as nurses and I had not known her very long when Joe died, just a few short months, but when I did meet her she beamed with pride in her son," said Sue Kilpatrick, a friend of the family. "She made all his basketball games and was so devoted to him. It nearly killed her when he died. All so senseless and had the hospital done something for him right away, he'd be alive today."

Davis' funeral at First Baptist Church in Tom Bean that Thursday was jam-packed, with overflow rooms and closed-circuit television monitors set up in the adjacent fellowship hall to accommodate the throngs of mourners. His basketball teammates and coaches served as pallbearers.

"We wore our jerseys over our suits at the funeral," said Brooks, one of the pallbearers. "All of the teams in our district were honorary pallbearers. We sat in the front row, and all the next rows were filled with honorary pallbearers."

•••

Without Davis, the remainder of the Tomcats basketball team came together and went on to win the 11-2A championship once again, with Ashlock stepping up to lead the team down the stretch and into the playoffs.

"The first game back we won against S&S," Ashlock recalled, "and we won by 15 points (68-53). That was cool, because that was his jersey number."

Following the 1990 season, Joe Davis was posthumously voted to the Class 2A boys' all-state first team.

Davis' No. 15 jersey was retired soon after his death and, until recent renovations, was displayed at Tom Bean High School alongside the trophies and awards he and his teammates won. In addition, Baylor retired its No. 15 jersey in his honor.

A memorial scholarship was established by the Tom Bean Athletic Booster Club, and is still awarded to this day. The Baylor basketball team even came to Tom Bean the following year and played an exhibition game in Tom Bean's gymnasium to raise money for the scholarship fund.

Carol Davis said following Joe's death, cards came from all over the state of Texas expressing condolences.

"I was overwhelmed with the people who came and sent flowers," she said. "All the coaches who had courted him called, and Baylor was excellent. It's comforting to know when you're grieving, they understand."

She added that the coaches at Baylor were in touch with her family for a very long time afterward.

In the years since Joe's death, the county road upon which Bill and Carol Davis have lived since 1970 -- the year before Joe was born -- was renamed Joe Davis Road in his honor, as a result of a petition drive started by a neighbor.

•••

The memory of Joe and the Tomcats, though two decades in the past, remains fresh for those who not only played with Joe, but also against him.

"Being around here, we hear from people all the time," Ashlock said. "The coach at Honey Grove (Kevin Weaver) was the head coach at Frisco at the time, and he came up and shook my hand (Tuesday night). We still run into people in the area."

Among the players who played against Joe was Brent "Buzz" Williams of Van Alstyne, who is now the head men's basketball coach at Marquette University.

Williams, who was a year behind Davis in high school, recounted in a 2008 Herald Democrat article how his eye was split open from an errant elbow thrown by Davis during a 3-on-3 tournament in Tom Bean that resulted in a few stitches.

Brooks, who was Tom Bean's senior class president in 1990, remembered the first backboard Joe Davis broke in the high school gym. It happened one summer in a pick-up game against some players S&S, which Brooks said was their biggest rival at the time.

"Joe was left-handed, and Chad (Ashlock) would bank the ball off the glass and Joe would catch it and dunk it," he said. "The last time he did, Joe brought down the backboard. It was my understanding that the company that made the backboards put out the word to all the area schools to put extra supports in place."

On a more somber note, Brooks doesn't find it hard to remember the anniversary date of Joe Davis' death. His children serve as a reminder to him daily.

"At times it still chokes me up," he said. "One of my kids was born on Jan. 21, 2000, and one was born on Jan. 23, 2002. My kids' birthdays bookend the day Joe passed."

Joe's legacy also lives on in the Davis family. Older brother Randy is married and has a three-year-old son, and sister Laura has a six-year-old son named Joseph Matthew.

"He has red hair, just like Joe," Carol Davis said.

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