Career
Played for four seasons with the San Francisco 49ers of the NFL, the first in 1950. His career was interrupted by the Korean War, and became a paratrooper for the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. In 1953, he returned to the 49ers for three more seasons.
He played college football at Georgia Technical and was selected in the 25th round of the 1949 NFL Draft by the Los Angeles Rams, but never played for them.
After playing football, Clay Senior had a successful business career, culminating in the 1980s as the president of Pertec Peripherals Corporation of Chatsworth, California, a manufacturer of magnetic tape and disk drives for computers. While president Clay held quarterly management dinner meetings where he would give a presentation on an aspect of business management.
I"ve seen a lot of businesses that were profitable as heck, but come Friday they couldn"t make their payroll. They were out of business.
I"ve seen a business losing a million dollars a month, but they had $25 million in the bank, they were in great shape." And, "There are fundamentally two types of businesses, those who sell stock for a living, and those who sell products for a living.
If you"re selling products for a living, you don"t announce anything until it"s ready to ship. You can miss your deadlines and suffer blows to your reputation or perhaps even sales contract penalties. Or you might even find you can"t finish the product, and now you look really bad." His father, Matty, coached boxing, baseball, and track at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.
He is the father of Pro Bowler Clay, Junior. and Pro Football Hall of Famer Bruce, as well as the grandfather of Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay III, Kevin (played center with the Carolina Panthers), Jake (currently plays tackle on the Atlanta Falcons) and linebacker Casey of the Minnesota Vikings.
The football dynasty family tree:.
