Damon West - The Change Agent: How a Former College QB Sentenced to Life in Prison Transformed His World

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

The Change Agent:

How a Former College QB Sentenced to Life in Prison Transformed His World

2019 by Damon West

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-102-0

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-103-7

Cover photography by Justin DeYoung and Michael Orta

Cover art by Cody Corcoran

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

All names of people incarcerated have been changed for their protection and their privacy, as have the names of many others.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author
and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

CHAPTER 6

Fork in the Road

C OLLEGE WAS THE FIRST TIME in my life I had autonomy over much of the decision-making that comes with the responsibilities of adulthood. Had it not been for my full-ride scholarship to play football, I would have been completely unshackled. As it was, I pretty much went off the rails, even with the safeguards of the program and the university.

I arrived at the University of North Texas in June of 1994. My stated purpose for getting there a few months before the rest of the arriving freshman class was to begin working out with the football team. In reality, I could not get out of Port Arthur fast enough. My ego drove me out of Southeast Texas faster than the Pontiac Grand Am I was driving. Mr. Bigtime could not be contained to a small town any longer.

In the beginning, my intentions were good. Workouts went well and the three guys I roomed with treated me well. I got a job working for one of the alumni who owned an oil company. When they told me I was going to have a job with an alum, I was thinking about guys who earned hundreds of dollars a week to watch the grass grow. But the alums in Denton were not giving any money away to cocky quarterbacks from Small Town, Texas.

This oil company operated a bunch of gas stations owned by a guy named Zeke Martin, of Martin Eagle Oil, who had played QB at North Texas decades before. At the time our paths crossed, Zekes gas stations were changing out the underground gas tanks that fed the pumps used to fill your car up. This constituted driving a dump truck, operating a wet saw to cut the concrete in a giant square around the pump, 60- and 90-pound jackhammers to break up a ton of cement, and the back-breaking labor of loading all the broken cement into the dump truck.

I lasted two weeks.

The summer of 1994 was eye-opening. I was drinking every single night, and smoking pot here and there. No red flags were being raised in my mind because so many around me were into the same stuff. Besides, this was the college experience. I was entitled to partake in it.

The women. Oh, my God, the women. I was girl crazy in high school, but that was nothing compared to college. Its not something I am proud of, but I slept around a lot in college. Honesty compels me to not sugar-coat this part of the story. Being a decent-looking guy with an outgoing personality, who also happened to play football, was a perfect storm for an immature raging alcoholic and addict who knew little of adult, loving relationships. I was a player and a real ass.

My freshman year was my redshirt year. A redshirt is when you sit out a year from playing your sport. The NCAA allows a college athlete five years of a scholarship to play four years on the field. Many guys redshirt right out of high school, allowing them a chance to adjust to the fast-paced level of collegiate level sports. It was a great buffer for me, which was solidly reinforced by the fact North Texas had an All-American senior at QB my freshman year, Mitch Maher.

Mitch was exactly what a role model is supposed to be. He had character, and a commitment to God that the Pope would have envied. An excellent athlete, top-in-his-class student, a leader on and off the field, and a guy who tried so hard to instill these traits in me.

While Mitch was my mentor, and I admired him greatly, I thought his lifestyle was boring. In my immature mind, Mitch never did anything exciting. He never went to parties, didnt drink or smoke, and, somehow, the guy was proud he was still a virgin at twenty-three. What the hell was wrong with this guy?

Mitch tried hard to positively influence me. He and my quarterback coach, Coach Steve Kragthorpe, stayed on top of me as much as they could. They saw early on I had character issues. Of course, you cant help someone who doesnt want it or doesnt think he needs the help.

Once, they sent me to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp for college players in San Marcos, Texas. I went into it with the attitude that it was a huge waste of my time. Besides, I was no longer going to church anymore, so why would I bother going to the woods to pray? They never tried to send me to any other character-building program again.

As a redshirt, I did not have to worry about traveling to the out-of-town football games. I was on the scout team, which prepared our defense each week for the offense they would be facing. I took this job seriously. I would study game film of the opposing teams quarterback each week to gain knowledge of his tendencies and mannerisms. If I could spot his tell, I would exploit it for our defense that week. This was my offense, and I ran it well.

We won the Southland Conference Championship that year. Right out of high school, and I already owned a championship ring. Not a bad start. I also won Offensive Scout Team Player of the Year. Throw in over thirty hours of college completed that first year, with a GPA above 3.0, and youve got the makings of a man with delusions of grandeur.

First impressions are often irreversible. Not because you do not have the opportunity to make a better impression later, but because most people immediately make up their minds about someone and become comfortably entrenched in their assessment. This was certainly the case with my head coach, Matt Simon. First impressions cut both ways, though.

Coach Simon did not recruit me to North Texas; he inherited me from the coaching staff that signed me but was gone when I arrived on campus in 94. He never cared much for me, often reminding me I was too short to be a quarterback. He also never forgot the partying fool I was my freshman year. No matter how good my grades were or how solid my performance on the field, he refused to seriously consider me for the starting quarterback job the next season. The first game of the season was at Missouri. He put me in late in the fourth quarter, after the game was out of reach for us. I did not do terrible for the limited time I played. After that, I was relegated to third, and even fourth on the depth chart.

It used to piss me off when we would be losing and he would make a quarterback change, only to go with one of the new quarterbacks hed recruited. Eventually, he found a way to completely get me out of the way. One week, when our secondary was stretched thin with injuries, he offered me to the defensive coaches. His logic was that I was an athlete who could, theoretically, play free safety because, as a quarterback who studied defenses, I knew everything a free safety did in every coverage.

I was never built to play defense. Defensive guys have an aggressiveness about them that cannot be imitated. Being a competitor was never a problem. I was as big of a competitor as there ever was. Hitting people, however, was something I could never get comfortable with. As a quarterback, we spent our entire careers avoiding contact. Now I was being coached to collide with people at full speed.