Damon West was in Stillwater Trying to Turn Cowboy and Cowgirl Athletes into Coffee Beans
STILLWATER -- Inside the Sherman Smith Training Center, Oklahoma State's football team is going through their pre-practice walk thru. In the south end zone inside the Sherman Smith, several coaches, including director of football operation Mack Butler, offensive analyst Chris Thurman and Oklahoma State's director of tennis and women's tennis coach Chris Young are talking with Damon West. West is very comfortable in an Oklahoma State Nike Dri-FIT t-shirt. West has worn orange, crimson, blue, green, purple and about every college color you can imagine. He has been a speaker in front of some of the best college sports teams and most powerful football programs in the country.
The former University of North Texas quarterback runs down to the other end where the Cowboys quarterbacks are throwing and he delivers a couple of passes into the target net just like you're supposed to and then comes back to join Young to talk about the presentation he will give to the Cowgirls and Cowboys tennis teams later that afternoon.
West isn't selling hard work or divine intervention. He may have been a former collegiate quarterback, but since then he has been a methamphetamine addict, a notorious burglar, and the recipient of a 65-year prison sentence that took a jury all of 10 minutes to deliberate and deliver to West.
West was arrested in 2008 after he fed his meth habit by working with a partner and earning the name of the "Uptown Burglars" in Dallas. It was July 30 and this is where his presentation to college athletes and all others that he speaks to begins.
"He came in and spoke to our team and I think he had their attention," Oklahoma State head football coach Mike Gundy said. "He had a power point presentation, so the lights were off and the players had masks on and all you could see were their eyes. They were all up front and focused on Damon. His story is really compelling and there were a bunch of our guys that stayed after and wanted to talk to him one on one, so I would say he was a great speaker with a great message to get in front of our team."
It was that way for all the teams he spoke to on the Oklahoma State campus on Oct. 8. As a result of his Oklahoma State visit, he was on Big 12 Today on Sirius-XM Radio's Big 12 Channel 375 a week later.
His first speaking engagement to a major college sports team was to Clemson the summer after they had won their first national championship under Dabo Swinney. Listening to West speak in the back of the team meeting room, Swinney called Nick Saban and a month later West was speaking to Saban's Alabama Crimson Tide squad.
It was natural for West to speak to coaches and athletes. He grew up around sports.
His father was Bob West, a sportswriter in Beaumont-Port Arthur for some 50-years that covered athletes and sports personalities like National Championship and Super Bowl winning coach Jimmy Johnson and Oklahoma Sooners star Joe Washington. He came from a good family and his mom was a nurse. It was a last meeting with his parents before going to prison that was one pillar of his story.
"My mom says, 'You know Damon, debt is life demand to be paid and you just got hit with one helluva bill from the State of Texas,'" West recounts. "'She says you did those things they said you did in that trial and you have to go pay that dept to society, but you owe your father and me that too Damon. We gave you all the opportunity, love, and support to be anything you wanted to be in life and that is how you repay us.' She said, 'Here's the debt you will pay to us. You will not get in one of these white hate groups, one of these aryan brotherhood type gangs because you're scared and you're the minority in there. She said it is not going to work. You were never raised to see race and it's not going to start now. You are not going to get tattoos while you are in that prison.'
She said no gangs and no tattoos and told me to come back the man they had raised or don't you come back at all. This was tough love from my mother," West concludes.
He has no tattoos and as far as the gangs, his strategy and motivation to avoid all of that came from his version of Kevin Hart.
You know the 2015 comedy "Get Hard" where Will Ferrell is going to prison and seeks advice from Kevin Hart thinking Hart can prepare him for prison. It's a comedy. West going to the Mark W. Stiles Unit, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice men's prison in Beaumont, Texas was no joke. He knew that, so he asked a fellow inmate in the Dallas County Jail, where he was tried and held during the trial.
This is the foundation of West's story and his presentation.
"I was asking all these guys back in jail how was I going to survive and what was I going to do," West explains. "Every single guy I spoke to, black, white, Asian, Hispanic all said I had to get into a gang. The gang was your family and you couldn't survive in prison without a gang."
West said there was one guy, an older guy named Mr. Jackson. West says he was probably in his 60's and that he never really knew a lot about him other than he said he was a career criminal that had been in and out of jails and prisons his entire life.
"Mr. Jackson comes up to me one morning and says, 'don't listen to these idiots about having to get into a gang,'" West said.
Mr. Jackson then told West about the coffee bean. He told him to imagine prison as a pot of warm water and he said imagine putting three things into that pot of warm water and see how they change. The items were a carrot, an egg, and a coffee bean.
"He walked me through it and he said the carrot turns soft in the warm water. It goes into prison hard but then gets softened, gets raped, beaten, maybe even killed," West tells the story. "You don't want to be the carrot. The egg turns hard like a hard-boiled egg. He told me the egg has a shell on the outside that protects it physically, but on the inside that soft liquid core becomes hardened and he said if your heart becomes hardened then you are incapable of giving or receiving love. He said if you are incapable of giving or receiving love then you would become institutionalized. You won't come back as someone your parents would recognize because you'd have swastikas tattooed all over you. Then he asked me about the coffee bean?
"I didn't know what a coffee bean would do in warm water," West said, apparently at the time not a coffee drinker.
Mr. Jackson told him that same pot of warm water he was using to symbolize prison would change the name of the water to coffee because he explained that the coffee bean, the smallest of the three items, small like Damon West had the power to change everything in that pot. The power was inside the coffee bean and not on the outside, just like, he said, the power was in West to change his situation.
"The last thing Mr. Jackson tells me before I go into prison is to go out there and be a coffee bean," West said. "He told me that prison was all about race and that first the white gangs would come after me and I'd have to fight them off and then the white gangs would send the black gangs after me. It was just like Mr. Jackson said when I got to the Stiles Unit in Beaumont, Texas. It is one of the toughest prisons in America and I can tell you that with authority because I teach about prisons in America."
West said in that pot of boiling water (the prison), he learned how to become that coffee bean. It took him two months to get through all the fighting. Two weeks fighting the white gang members and then fighting the black gangs and he said it ended on the basketball court, the most segregated place in prison. He was in a basketball game on the yard where no white guys were allowed. It took six days and he took the beating before the black guys told him he didn't have to worry. He was good with them, he had earned their respect.
His transformation in prison earned the respect of the prison staff and eventually the parole board and he was paroled after serving just over seven-years of his sentence.
There are all kinds of morals and lessons to West's experiences. Stay out of trouble is a great start, but I love this one because it applies to everything in life.
"You don't have to win all of your fights, but you have to fight all your fights," West said of what he learned in those early 60 days or so in prison.
It is not at all hard to believe that West, a former North Texas Mean Green quarterback turned burglar, prison inmate, and then morphed again to become a motivational speaker and a professor of criminal justice teaching a class on Prisons in America at the University of Houston, can capture the complete focus of all these coaches and athletes. His story is real and the lessons are valuable. He continues to share it and has authroed two best selling books. The wisdom from behind bars is as critical as any you might pick up in a classroom or lecture hall.
His philosophy on how black and white and all of the other races that make up this country should improve and be more fair in justice, in education, and in life in general are just as interesting and derived from the same source, from behind bars. Who knew a stay in prison could be so enlightening. It's just a damn hard place and path to find knowledge.
