KC native ‘was prepared to take a bullet’ in Jacksonville mass shooting terror

The booms shattering his ears were close, maybe 15 feet away, and they weren’t stopping.

Pro esport gamer and Kansas City native Matt Clark doesn’t know how many sounded before he realized it was gunfire.

He fell to the floor with others around him in the jam-packed room of Madden NFL 19 gamers in Jacksonville, Fla., on Sunday, throwing his arms across his face.

“I was prepared to take a bullet,” the 25-year-old said in a phone interview with The Star Monday. “I didn’t want it in the head.”

Clark was speaking from his hotel room in Jacksonville, waiting for a flight out of town that couldn’t come soon enough. He had been at the Jacksonville Landing Complex, a waterfront entertainment zone along the St. John River, competing in the Madden NFL 19 tournament when the shooting started.

Three of Clark’s competitors died in the gunfire, including the man that authorities say was the shooter and turned the gun on himself after killing two and wounding nine others.

“I just want to get home,” Clark said. “I’m thankful I’m alive.”

The community of elite professional Madden players is small, Clark said. They share a lifestyle of full days of work, perfecting their gaming and vying for high-dollar prizes in the growing world of professional competitive video games.

He knew well the two men who died — 22-year-old Eli “Trueboy” Clayton of Woodland Hills, Calif., and 27-year-old Taylor “SpotMePlzzz” Robertson of Ballard, West Va. Multiple gaming community sites have identified them as the men who were killed.

Robertson was a father. Both of them were “great guys,” Clark said.

Clark also knew the man police said shot them, 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore.

Clark understands the intensity that comes in high-stakes professional gaming, but what happened Sunday was not simply a case of a defeated player losing control and taking his anger out in a shooting rampage, he said.

The way he and the rest of these competitive gamers blew off steam in intense battles was to carry the fight forward on the virtual playing field, Clark said. You talk it up, put your own money on the line and try to beat them in the game. “It stayed in the game,” Clark said.

“There was more to it,” he said. “There was a beast in him.”

Clark grew up in Kansas City, graduated from West Platte High School, and was one of the top contenders in Sunday’s tournament.

He won a $50,000 prize in a Madden NFL 17 national tourney last year in Burbank, Calif.

He has played Madden football since 2003 when he was 10, started playing competitively in 2011 and has been a full-time professional for two years.

Clark had three more tournaments lined up, all leading to a championship Madden tournament in Las Vegas in October.

But now the thought of playing the game is buried in the terror that Clark felt as he and the people who had crowded around him for cover unpiled. He barely looked at the fallen bodies because everyone who could was fleeing for safety.

No one knew then who or how many were shooting. No one knew why it was happening or if it was going to stop.

Outside, as everyone took stock of what had happened, Clark’s head was buzzing. He knew he needed to call his mother in Weston. He had run out leaving his phone behind, but he borrowed a friend’s.

Clark’s mom, not recognizing the number, and not knowing the breaking news, didn’t answer. So he followed it with a text.

He thumbed out something along the lines of: Hey Mom it’s Matt. Don’t know if you heard. There was a mass shooting. I’m safe and I love you.

Clark recently moved to Dayton, Ohio, to team up with another pro gamer. But he said it’s hard to imagine how he’ll go forward from here.

“Right now I’m canceling all my flights,” he said. “I assume they (the upcoming Madden tournaments) are going to get canceled anyway.”

He is concerned that Sunday’s tournament in Jacksonville provided no security that anyone could see — no security guards, no checking entrants at the door.

Clark doesn’t know if he’ll be able to take up Madden contests in the future.

“It’s traumatizing,” he said.

For now, Clark is taking a plane home, hoping the gaming community and its sponsors will comfort and support the families of the dead and the wounded. It’s hard for him to think beyond that.

This story was originally published August 27, 2018 at 5:10 PM.