Damon Dunn (1994-97) was a dynamic receiver and kick returner during his time playing for the Stanford Cardinal, and his name can still be found scattered throughout the Stanford record book, particularly in the kick return section, where he still holds the school records for career touchdown returns (3) and longest kick return (100 yards).
Dunn's post-Stanford career has been even more impressive, as he's been a successful real estate developer, dabbled in politics, and focused on numerous philanthropic endeavors. He was also recently named a visiting Fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Because of all this, he seemed the perfect first subject for what we hope to be an ongoing series of interviews with former Stanford players. I give you Damon Dunn, today's Cardinal Conversation. Enjoy...
I want to start with your high school football career. There’s a whole mythology built up around Texas high school football. What’s it really like, and what are your memories of your career at Sam Houston High School?
Damon Dunn:
I think there are probably three different components to that myth. One is the institutional component. A part of it is the cultural component, and the last part is the opportunity component. From an institution perspective, we had booster clubs. I played football with guys in the NFL and at Stanford that didn’t have booster clubs. Booster clubs, all they do is generate funds to support the teams. When we played playoff football games, we would fly to games. Nobody else flew to games. We had not only a full band and a full cheerleading squad, but we had about a forty- or fifty-member dance squad. All of the local businesses in town would sponsor the games, and those sponsorships came with advertising at the game. We’d also have thousands of people at our games. I think we probably averaged five or six thousand fans, and when we’d get to the playoffs we’d have twenty-five, thirty thousand fans every game. These institutional components differentiated the games. And then even just from your organized school activities, having full spring football. Padded spring football, just like they do in college, with full pads and a Spring Game. It’s just bigger and grander and more important. Our games were televised on local television, we had radio people that were covering our games. The better teams, the media coverage in an entire region where people would find out about a team just permeated throughout all the different venues for communication, so everybody was on the front of people’s thought processes.
And that’s a good segue to the cultural thing. Football’s important. Where do you spend your time? Where do you spend your money? A lot of families that have young sons -- or daughters that are involved in band or cheerleading or dance team -- but particular guys that are involved in football. You’re sending your kid to football. Because if your son plays football, then that’s what’s talked about at work. Everyone talks about what happened with the local high school team, how good your son is, who’s gonna win the state championship, who won last week’s game, what the rivalries are. It gives you a certain amount of significance in the community. You wear your jersey around town and people know you play for a certain team. It’s just a normal part of the dialogue in the local communities in Texas about how the teams are performing and who the key players are. Towns don’t necessarily shut down the way they do in the movies or in "Friday Night Lights," but everybody comes to the games. You’re getting representation from people who don’t even have kids that are playing. People from the town are coming because they’ve gone to those high schools or known those rivalries. So you have a large representation of people coming. You don’t see that in California. The market is so fragmented, so fractured, there’s not a lot of momentum. The culture of football is not very dynamic, and so probably the people who show up are a few hundred people or the kids who go to those schools. In Texas everybody shows up.
And so being a part of that for me was a thing that gave you an opportunity to network. There were businesses that were more open to you working with them as interns. And then there was opportunity. You understand that if you are an elite Texas high school football player, you’re going to get a scholarship to go play college football. And for me, growing up as poor as I grew up, that was probably the most important thing. If I had the grades and standardized test scores, and if I was a good enough football player, I could leverage education and football and create a new life for myself. I was really poor. I lived in a trailer with ten people, my mom had me at sixteen, my father was killed when I was three, three of my friends were murdered when I was fifteen. I had no other outlet to a new life. I knew no rich people that would give me an opportunity. I didn’t have a great network. So really I was down to the only golden ticket I had, which was leveraging football and education to create an opportunity for a new life.
GMC:
What was your recruitment like? Were there other schools that you considered? What was is that finally attracted you to Stanford?
DD:
I was the number two recruit in the state of Texas as far as wide receivers. I was recruited by every college in the country. I received over 30,000 letters -- hand-written letters. Every college would be at my practice because we had five or six guys that were going Division I. We had colleges at our practices every day. They were at our Spring Game. Anywhere I wanted to go, I could’ve gone. When it was time for the coaches to call, I was receiving twenty calls a night. It was a tough process. My mom kind of ruled out the Florida schools, because they were getting a bad rep. Florida, Florida State, Miami -- this was 1993. My mom ruled that out. The team that recruited me the hardest was Syracuse. Then I had a trip to Michigan. I tripped to UCLA, which ended up being my number two choice, I went to Stanford, and I went to Notre Dame.
My recruiting experience... I’m not gonna call out any programs, but suffice it to say they had to tighten up their ships because I can’t say that a lot of what happened was within NCAA guidelines. There was just poor education of the players that were hosting you. I don’t think the players had a real good understanding of what can be done or what can’t be done. They didn’t get a good education on how or who to introduce you to as far as boosters.
GMC:
So what was it that tipped the scales in Stanford’s favor?
DD:
I think I was realistic. I was like 5’9” or 5’10”. I wanted to play great football, but I think that I understood where I needed to be to give myself the best chance to be successful if football didn’t work out. But I did want to play good football. The difference is, Bill Walsh came to my house with Doug Cosbie, who was recruiting me for Stanford. Obviously, Bill was one of the greatest coaches in the history of football, and Doug Cosbie obviously had a great career with the Dallas Cowboys. Doug was primarily recruiting me, but Bill came to my home and Bill just basically said, “If you are a first-round type of talent, it’ll speak for itself. Anybody with the size, the agility, the speed, the numbers -- you’ll play in the NFL no matter what.” But the advantage that he was bringing was that he said, “But if you are a guy that, for whatever reason, the numbers don’t tell the whole story, I can make a phone call that will just put you in the NFL. Teams will give you a shot. Plus you get the added bonus of getting a fifty-some thousand dollar a year education for free to create good opportunities to do whatever you want to do in this life even if football doesn’t work out.”
My grandmother summed it up. I was only the second person in my family to go to college. My mom had gone. She said, “You’re going for a lot more people than just yourself. For a young, black man to put his name on a Stanford degree, I just don’t think you can pass it up.” They let me make my decision, but at the end of the day it was right. When 1,500 people get in out of forty or fifty thousand applications a year, for me to go there was an honor. It became easy after that.
GMC:
You had a great career at Stanford as a receiver and kick returner, culminating with your first team All-Pac-10 selection in 1997. You won Big Game three times and went to two bowl games. What are your greatest football memories from that time from a football presepctive? Does the 1996 USC game make your list?
DD:
It’s funny. That was a great return. The older I’ve gotten...
GMC:
The better it gets?
DD:
[Laughing] Well, that too! It’s funny to say that, but the reality is for me it hasn’t. Everybody’s value system is different -- what you value, what you remember, what you deem is important. I heard a quote, and this really sums it up for me. I’ll read this to you. “The duration of an athletic contest is only a few minutes; while the training for it may take many weeks of arduous work and continuous exercise of self-effort. The real value of sport is not the actual game played in the limelight of applause; but the hours of dogged determination and self discipline, carried out alone, imposed and supervised by an exacting conscience. The applause soon dies away, the prize is left behind but the character you build is yours forever.”
For me, that is really the value of what I got from football, and I’m not just saying that. All those values, all those things, have driven me to be the man I am in everything I do, from how we handle the business, from the hours I work, the willingness to understand there is no 9 to 5, you work until the job is done. When we built our company, that was huge to understand. In football, it’s all you can do -- every day, all day. You dedicate your entire life to it. Starting a business, being that committed to a business, is one of the four or five key principles that allowed us to be tremendously successful.
In football you’ve got to fail forward. I didn’t start my sophomore year. I was a return man, but I thought I was going to be a starting receiver. Coach Willingham came in. Under Walsh I would’ve been the starter, but Willingham came in and he wanted more of a senior-run program. He just believed in doing things differently. It was completely different. With Bill Walsh, the best guy was gonna play. He was gonna play our youngsters. He played freshmen over seniors, and the seniors were all mad. These were guys who probably were a little bit more technically sound as seniors, but he played more talented freshmen because he was building for the future. More talented, less sound, more mistake-prone, but that’s what he was trying to do, trying to get these guys ready.
So Willingham came in and did the opposite. So opposed to making me a starter, he chose a fifth-year senior named Mark Harris. Ran good routes, more dependable, but less upside on big plays. Didn’t have the speed, didn’t have the vision.
GMC:
I remember him.
DD:
Right, he couldn’t get a ball and go seventy yards, nothing like that. But Willingham started him over me, and what that made me do -- as we talk about what I gained from that experience and what I remember most about it -- it made me a better player. I had to become more fundamentally sound to play for Willingham. You had to run every route precisely. If you made two big plays in a game, it didn’t mean you were gonna start next week. You still weren’t the guy that was more dependable, running the route at the right distance, catching every single ball, knowing every single assignment. I had to add on all this to my game, and it made me a better player. So I failed, in that I didn’t get to be a starter, but I failed forward, meaning I became a better ballplayer.
Those lessons really transferred to my business and what I’m doing now in the non-profit and private sector. So those are the things I remember most. The games, the trophies, the awards? Not as much. The friendships? Yes. A buddy of mine got married last weekend, Troy Walters, and I was in his wedding in Seattle. Troy won the Biletnikoff Award. He was a young guy that I discipled. He came to my Bible study. He was a freshman, I was a sophomore, so he looked up to me and we’ve been best friends over all these years. Those are the things I remember most. The games, the touchdowns, those things are not as valuable to me. I’ve just changed as a person.
GMC:
That makes sense. You mentioned playing for Bill Walsh and Tyrone Willingham, and I ask this, kind of like you were saying, not from a football point of view but from more of a life point of view. What are your memories of those two coaches, and what was their lasting impact on you as a person?
DD:
I just watched the movie The Godfather III. Michael Corleone, at the end, he just didn’t have it in him to fight. They were plotting and planning, and just didn’t have the energy anymore to do all the plotting. He just kind of fizzled and fazed out as a result of that. But the early Michael Corleone, he was ahead of everybody. He planned to kill all five mob bosses, he was a step ahead of everybody. He understood to transition the family business into the casino business, things like that.
When Bill Walsh came to Stanford, he had already coached at Stanford, he had already been to the NFL and won multiple Super Bowls, he had been an NFL executive. He was seen as the greatest mind in football, the master and originator of the west coast offense which is still successful now. All these coaches -- from Shanahan to Gruden -- all these guys coached under Bill Walsh.
But by the time he got back to Stanford, he had retired and was coming back for his second stint, and he was tired.
He was brilliant, a brilliant mind. He understood what a defense was trying to do, and he basically could get the offense the right plays better than anyone, and he actually called the plays. He had the right game plan. He would script the first fifteen plays to flush out what they would do in any circumstance or situation, and then he would just pick you apart. That’s why Justin Armour and Steve Stenstrom and Glyn Milburn and those guys were so good. They were all developed as players. They were stimulating. They were talented. And then Bill Walsh came in with his system and they were 9-3, 10-3, won the Blockbuster Bowl against Penn State. They were a stimulating team. He was brilliant at in-game adjustments. He just knew within thirty seconds what the right play was based upon the information he was absorbing at the time. He was brilliant.
But when those guys graduated, he brought in all these talented young players. And what we needed, he didn’t have the energy for anymore. We didn’t know how to block. Coming out of high school as a receiver you don’t know how to run a route. You don’t know how to get off bump and run press. You don’t know the fundamentals of the game. In the pros, if you don’t know the fundamentals you get cut. They don’t spend time teaching you how to block or how to run a route. They spend time teaching you the strategy. How to read hot blitzes and how to read coverages. You have be able to catch the football and know how to get open. You gotta know how to do that already.
So Walsh didn’t have the energy anymore to do the fundamentals, but his mind -- he was brilliant. He was a genius. I think his lasting impact on me was one, getting me to Stanford, because if he wasn’t there I’m not sure I would’ve gone to Stanford. He made it credible that I could’ve played in the NFL. Two, he had a natural genius. He taught me to see things that other people didn’t see. When we were watching film, he would talk about things that other coaches wouldn’t talk about. Like, “Seventy percent of the time on first and long or third and short this is the defense that this guy has run, and this guy has coached at many other teams before this, and we’ve put that together and we know what this guy likes to run. He runs the same blitzes, the same stunts, the same thing every time. So I know that given his history, even if he’s at Oregon now, or what he did when he was in the NFL, or what he did with other teams -- he uses the same plays. So on first and long, this is the defense he’s gonna run.” He taught me to think outside the box. He was more prepared. He saw farther ahead, he saw clearer, and saw before others. He taught me how to be a visionary, and those lessons have made me look beyond the box.
Willingham was a father figure. He had all the energy in the world. He was hungry. He came in and made education more important than just football. He said, “You won’t play here if you don’t show up in class, if you don’t make grades. You just won’t play. Your education is more important than football.”
He was a high-integrity guy. He believed that what you do in private is what you oughta do in public. He just demanded excellence. He was a disciplinarian, and he loved his guys like a father loves their children. He was involved in our lives. One of our teammates’ girlfriend died, and Coach was there with him the whole way. He was just a father figure. And he was a young, black coach, which a lot of the players needed to see. A role model who had his family together, who was an honorable man, who was tremendously successful, who cared about his players, and didn’t use profanity. He was just a man’s man. And he built men. He and I are still really good friends. The lessons he taught us are a lot more valuable than anything we learned from wins and losses in football. He taught me about integrity, about honesty, about discipline, about hard work, failure, and success. He was just a real man.
GMC:
You’ve talked a lot about this in some of your answers -- after football, you spent time working in real estate, then ran for California Secretary of State in 2010. What inspired that leap into politics? Is that something you might pursue again in the future?
DD:
Getting into real estate was circumstance for me. I ended up playing for the Jacksonville Jaguars my first year. My college roommate’s father was from Orlando, and I would go down and stay with his dad during the off-season. His dad was a real estate developer. I was an NFL football player, so he’d say, “Hey, come to the office with me, or fly with me here and sit in on this deal.” And then when I got to the Cowboys I remember Emmitt Smith, I was getting towards the end of my career, but I didn’t know it. It was my fourth year in the league, the last time I was getting ready to play. Emmitt said, “You know, you’re not Emmitt Smith. You’re not gonna make sixty, seventy million dollars. One day you’re gonna get cut.” And he said, “You need to make a move on them before they make a move on you.” I’ll never forget him telling me that.
GMC:
Let me ask you something about that. Was there part of you that didn’t want to listen to that? Because I assume there's a point in every athlete’s career where you realize your role, or you realize your situation, but I bet those around you see it sooner than you do.
DD:
I think for me the difference was I had been there for four years. I was in and out, on the practice squad, I got cut, I got picked up, they sent me to Europe, I went to New York, I went to the XFL, then the Cowboys picked me up.
If he had said that to me Week 1, Year 1? I probably wouldn’t have been receptive to it. But he said that to me where I was in my career, knowing that I wasn’t getting younger, knowing that I’d had four years trying to make it and hadn’t stood out as well as I wanted to, I was more receptive to the message of being ready to transition. But the guys who are on the team and who are starters or primary backups and are playing? Harder message, because they feel they’re gonna make it.
But when he told me that I immediately went to the Stanford network, called up a guy named John Foley who introduced me to Richard Rainwater, who had a four-billion-dollar company in Dallas called Crescent Equities, and they owned a lot of office buildings. I interned with the VP in Dallas, Mike Lewis. I worked for free with Mike Lewis every day. I'd do football in the mornings, get lunch, and go from one to five every day, five days a week, with Mike Lewis. I attended meetings, he had me give speeches to his briefing team on motivation -- because they had a Dallas Cowboy in the office. I got to learn the business and it created a bug for me. I got hurt with the Cowboys, hurt my knee, and they paid me for the whole season, which was huge. I went back to Stanford in August with a full check for my entire season, and I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna rehab and I’m gonna go back and play next season.” While I was rehabbing, playing golf and hanging out, my old roommate asked if I wanted to get into real estate.
I was like, “I’m in!” So I signed up, and the rest is history. We were fortunate. We built thirty-one shopping centers between 2001 and 2008. I was really fortunate. The real estate market crashed about that time, so new deals weren’t happening. People weren’t building new malls. I had time to figure out what I wanted to do, so I decided to take some time off. What am I gonna do? Up until this point I was a registered Democrat all the way prior to 2008, but my mentor, though, was Condoleeza Rice.
Some people have this gift to impact just a few people -- your family, your friends, that’s what your calling is. Some people are given more, whether it’s communication skills or talent or background or stories, and they can impact more -- the people on your church level, in your community, your school. And I think some people have been given gifts where they can impact millions of people, and you kinda know who they are -- the Obamas, the Cory Bookers.
I kinda felt like I had been given more. My life story, being poor, going from the worst schools to the best schools, living in all these environments, starting a business. All these things. I had friends with GEDs and friends with PhDs. I was a youth pastor at an all-black church, I was a youth pastor as a white church. I had done so much, and I just felt like all this I could pour out and help a lot more people. I felt like public policy was a place where I could impact millions of people and help improve the lives of a lot of other people. I sort of felt an obligation, I felt a calling, I felt a responsibility.
GMC:
And do you think you'll look at politics again?
DD:
Absolutely. It’s something that I absolutely will engage in. Picking the right fit for what’s next, those things have to be settled purposefully. There are some people who I consider “lifers.” They’re lifers, all they care about is politics. The stuff that comes with it -- the spoils, assets you get or networks you get or notoriety you get. I’ve already been to the best schools. I’ve already been to Stanford and Harvard. For me it’s not about that. For me it’s about working and getting involved to help people. I want to find meaningful opportunities where I can help people, and when that presents itself then that’s an opportunity I’ll follow up on.
GMC:
I want to finish up with just a couple quick questions about football again. What do you think about this resurgence of the Cardinal? Back when you were playing, did you ever imagine Stanford football could reach this elite level?
DD:
Well, I think that I’m open-minded enough say, yeah, any program can do that. People follow people, right? Even in politics. People follow people, not philosophy. For example, Barack Obama got record numbers of African-Americans to vote for him. He got record numbers of young people, a high percentage of women, high percentage of Hispanics. A lot of people registered for the first time to vote in 2008. He won because people followed him. Those same votes aren’t available to Nancy Pelosi, they’re not available to Harry Reid. Why? Because people follow people, and not necessarily a party. You have the Martin Luther Kings, you have the Barack Obamas, you have the Abraham Lincolns, or even the Ronald Reagans. People follow people, not just parties.
If you transfer that to sports, great leaders win games. It’s not that the San Francisco 49ers have been great forever. They were horrible, and then Bill Walsh came in and turned the organization around. And then he left and George Seiffert came in and after that they went down for a long period of time, and now they’ve got Harbaugh, who’s a great coach. You look at any organization. The New England Patriots were horrible. Now you’ve got Belichek. It wasn’t that the organization is so great or so sound. Look at Michigan, or even Notre Dame. Even though you’ve been historically good, it doesn’t matter. At some point, who you have at the top matters.
Stanford was one coach away from being a great program, and Harbaugh was the guy that had all the right ingredients to get it done. He brought toughness to the program, which I think was epitomized by what they did running the ball fifteen straight times against USC at home, and then punching it in for the touchdown at the end. And then Pete Carroll coming up to him and saying, “What’s your deal?” And then Harbaugh was like, “What’s your deal?” At the end of the day, he was like, this is who we are. Do something about it. We’re gonna run it up on you if we can. He was changing the culture of the program.
GMC:
Exactly right.
DD:
Those moments were bigger. It was more than just about, “Oh, I don’t want to run up the score. I’m a sportsman.” It was like, “I’m changing the culture of this football team. I’m running the ball, we’re running it down your throats. You can’t stop us. And we’re gonna drive it to the end zone, I don’t care if we’re winning by multiple touchdowns. I want you to know who we are. It’s a new day for Stanford football.”
GMC:
It’s interesting you say that. I was at that game, and I remember when he chose to go for two, that was the exact phrase I used. It wasn’t that he was trying to run up the score -- or I guess he was -- but it wasn’t just that. He was changing the culture.
DD:
Yeah, and you have to do that with a team that historically has had a weak-minded culture, being a finesse football team. When we won, we won with great quarterbacks and receivers, shoddy defense. We never had great running games, we were never tough. He was changing the culture. You have to have moments like that where the guy’s like, “What’s your deal?” And you’re like, “What’s your deal?” What’s up? What you wanna do? [Laughing] That what he was saying -- what you wanna do?
GMC:
Exactly.
DD:
It ignited the players to start thinking differently, and it created a new culture. And look where it extended to, to where it is today.
GMC:
And where it is today, is with David Shaw. You were a freshman when David Shaw was a senior.
DD:
Yeah, I knew D-Shaw. We played together.
GMC:
What was he like as a player? Did you know he’d be a coach one day?
DD:
D-Shaw, his dad was a coach. He was even a coach on the field. He knew every assignment, so I had a good sense he would be a coach. He was a guy that would be a coach. He was a smart guy, he knew all the assignments.
He wasn’t a super-talented guy, so that actually made him better as a coach because he had to win with fundamentals, right? He had to understand how to run routes, what the offense was trying to achieve, put himself in the best position possible, block, line up on the right side of the guy every time, have the right split, run the right steps. Everything had to work perfectly.
A talented guy is one who learns less often times because he’s winning on talent and ability and pays less attention to fundamentals, which has been Randy Moss’s greatest nemesis. As he’s aged, he was not as fundamental and didn’t work as hard, so he’s accomplished a lot less than his superior talent should’ve allowed him to do. And Jerry Rice being the opposite, not being the fastest, but just fast enough to where if you work hard you can be a superior athlete.
GMC:
As a Hoover Fellow, you must spend a fair amount of time on campus. What’s your current connection with the program? Do you get to many games?
DD:
You know what? I don’t make it to as many football games as I would like. I have a daughter, a four-year-old, and I have her every weekend. If I have time to get up there to Stanford I really try to schedule it with her. I haven’t been as actively engaged, but I do the chapel every time they come to L.A. whether it’s UCLA or USC. I go talk to the team pretty much every year before the L.A. game, so I’ve stayed connected to the program that way. David Shaw and I are good friends, so I stay connected to the program that way, but I don’t make it to as many games.
GMC:
Finally, who’s a bigger fan -- you or Condi Rice?
DD:
Condi. She’s definitely a bigger fan. It’s funny, I was with three months ago talking football. Football’s a passion of hers, and she has a lot of free time now. She’s on campus, she’s at the Hoover Institute. She’s on campus, so she probably goes to every game. She loves it. She loves the University, and football is a strong passion of hers.
Photo Credits:
1. Stephen Dunn/Allsport
2. Paul Sakuma/AP Photo
3. Otto Greule, Jr./Getty Images
4. Scott Halleran/Getty Images
5. AP Photo
6. Kyle Terada/US Presswire
7. DamonDunn.com
