By Dustin Dow
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Amos West, David's father, sits in the stands of the Cintas Center watching the Musketeers play Rhode Island on Sat. February 15, 2003. With him is David's girlfriend Lesley Stewart and family friend Robert Clark (see zoom). (Ernest Coleman photo) | ZOOM |

Eddie Gray will never forget the first time he saw David West - a meeting that changed both of their lives.

It was Aug. 29, 1996, West's 16th birthday and the first day of classes at Garner (N.C.) High School. West was a gangly 6-foot-8 junior, his head awkwardly poking out a half-foot above everyone else.

"He just appeared in the lobby out of nowhere," Gray says.

Gray, the boys basketball coach, didn't know West's name, but given that height, he figured West played basketball. The school office told him West was a new student, imported from Teaneck, N.J.

Gray followed West from class to class, keeping his distance until there was enough time to have a conversation. Finally, an assistant coach brought West to Gray's U.S. history classroom before the final bell.

There Gray met a kid, angry at being displaced from his childhood home, who couldn't have cared less about basketball - or anything else in Garner, N.C. West took little interest in Gray or playing for Garner.

But today, West plays his final home game at Xavier University against Temple at Cintas Center. His retired No. 30 jersey hangs in the arena, never to be worn again at Xavier. Next week, he will win a record third Atlantic 10 Conference Player of the Year Award. He is expected to become Xavier's first-ever consensus first-team All-American and remains a leading candidate for National Player of the Year honors.

West will leave Xavier as the school's No. 2 all-time leading scorer behind Byron Larkin. He could finish as high as No. 2 on the all-time rebounding list.

In June, West likely will be selected in the first round of the NBA draft.

He has Gray to thank.

"David came home from that first day of school and told me he felt like a freak," says West's mother, Harriett. "He said, 'Mom, the basketball coach was following me around all day. I didn't know what to think.'"

West certainly didn't think he had much of a future in basketball. His sophomore year in Teaneck, he spent much of the season on the junior varsity team.

"My sophomore year, my growth spurt came, and there really wasn't a place for me," West says. "I was 6-4, 140 pounds. If someone touched me, I'd fall over."

For West, it was a disastrous year. His growing disinterest in basketball led to a nosedive in his academic performance.

As a youth-league standout since age 6, West wanted to be like his older brother Dwayne, now 38, who played at Jersey City State College. But by age 16, West was ready to give up the dream.

As much as West dreaded the move to Garner, it gave him a chance to start over on the court and in the classroom.

"I think he really wanted to play at Garner," his mother says. "He was just so hurt by his experience in Teaneck. But David loves basketball. For him, not playing basketball is like not drinking water."

By his senior year, he was a physical specimen, still a shell of his current 6-foot-9, 240-pound frame, but intimidating enough at the high school level, where he averaged 21.3 points and 11.0 rebounds. West was first-team all-state and dominated like no one in Garner's history.

The Trojans lost just one regular-season game in 1997-98. West had injured his ankle in gym class the morning before that game and was unable to play. In the end, West took Garner to the regional finals before scoring 40 points in a losing effort.

"We had never been to regionals before," Gray says. "And we haven't been back since."

David West kids around with his father Amos outside the Cintas Center. (Ernest Coleman photo) | ZOOM |

A plan to fail

Near the end of his senior year, there was no doubt West would play college basketball. But because he received such poor grades at Teaneck, West would not be academically eligible to compete as a freshman at the Division I level.

He had three options:

Attend a university that accepted partial qualifiers and sit out a season.

Go to a junior college.

Or go with the plan Gray devised. It had the most risks, but the payoff would benefit West most long term. West would fail to graduate, then attend a year of prep school, improving his grade-point average and becoming more disciplined on the court.

If he could handle the rigors of Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Va., for one year, he would be better prepared for Division I basketball.

"I really had to get the family to trust me on this," Gray says.

Gray also had to convince West's English teacher, Judith Darling, to fail West, even though he carried a B-plus average. Darling, the 1996-97 Wake County (N.C.) Teacher of the Year, couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"It went against everything David and I worked for that year, getting his grades up," Darling says.

But she went ahead with the plan, only after asking West repeatedly if that's what he wanted.

Hargrave was only 21/2 hours away from Garner, but a world away for West.

"I didn't want him to go," Harriett West says. "I wanted him to graduate from Garner, but he came home one day and said, 'Mom, I'm not ready to play against men.' He was soft back then."

West grew into a man at Hargrave.

From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., every minute of every day was the same, from breakfast to class to practice to chores. West hated the routine. But now he's grateful for what it taught him.

The year at Hargrave gave West a chance to mature mentally and physically.

"When he came in here, he wasn't built like he is now," says Scott Shepherd, Hargrave's coach at the time. "The lifting program at the academy did that. David wasn't real happy about that. He liked the basketball. Just not the rest of it."

Hargrave's top-flight schedule gave West a chance to test himself against college-caliber players. But he was still under the radar of most Division I programs, except for Marshall, in Huntington, W.Va., which offered West a scholarship in the fall 1998, before Hargrave's season even began.

"He pleaded with me to sign that letter of intent," says West's father, Amos. "But I wouldn't sign it. It was too early. He hadn't even played a game yet. I wanted him to keep his options open."

Xavier? In Ohio?

Jeff Battle couldn't believe the size of the kid's hands. The Xavier assistant coach, now at Wake Forest, had traveled to the Charlie Webber Tournament in Maryland that fall looking for a post player. He found a big man with gigantic hands.

"He rebounded everything right off the backboard," Battle says. "He just palmed the ball right off the glass. I told Skip (Prosser, then Xavier coach), 'This kid has a chance to be real good.' I just didn't know who he was."

Battle and Prosser became regulars at Hargrave's games, and Xavier became the frontrunner for West.

"I had never even heard of Xavier in Ohio," Amos West says.

The daily UPS packages from Xavier to Garner helped the Wests learn more about the small Jesuit school in Cincinnati.

"That's what David wanted," Shepherd says. "He wanted a small school with a big-time basketball program."

Virginia and Pete Gillen, Prosser's former boss at Xavier, were also in the running, and West made his visit to Charlottesville, Va., just days before he would visit Xavier in February 1999.

"I went to Virginia on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday," West says. "They were going to offer me a scholarship. On Thursday they played Duke and got beat by 60 points. It just turned me off. That morning I was supposed to sit down with Virginia coaches and talk with them. That never happened. I got on a plane and came up (to Cincinnati)."

West saw Xavier beat Temple 62-60 at Cincinnati Gardens on Valentine's Day. West says he loved Xavier's campus from the moment he arrived. Three weeks later, he gave XU a verbal commitment.

Makings of a superstar

West came to Xavier as a 6-foot-8, 225-pound forward, ready to play. He started his first game and every game since.

"I knew he had a chance to be something special after his first practice," Battle says. "His work ethic, his leadership. It was all there."

West averaged 11.7 points and 9.1 rebounds that year and made the Atlantic 10 All-Rookie Team. He came of age as a collegiate player Dec. 18, 1999, when he guarded Cincinnati's Kenyon Martin, the consensus National Player of the Year, and held him to 16 points in a Xavier upset win.

The next season, West collected his own Player of the Year hardware, earning the A-10's award as a sophomore after averaging 17.8 points and 10.9 rebounds.

After that season, talk about West and the NBA became serious. By his junior season, it seemed clear it would be West's last year in Cincinnati.

West adapted easily to a new coach when Thad Matta came from Butler to replace Prosser, who left for Wake Forest.

Again West was the conference Player of the Year, and the Associated Press named him second-team All-America. West led Xavier to A-10 regular-season and conference tournament titles. After a second-round loss to Oklahoma in the NCAA Tournament, West's Xavier career seemed over. One week before the team's postseason banquet, he went home and told his parents he would enter the NBA draft.

"What could we say?" Harriett West says. "Then he left on Sunday and called home Monday night. I picked up the phone and he asked to talk to his dad. He talked to his dad for about 20 minutes. He never talks to his dad that long, so I asked if everything was OK."

"David was having second thoughts about the NBA," Amos West says.

Harriett called David later that night, the night before the banquet.

"I don't feel right," he told his mom. "You know when we went to Xavier before I was a freshman and I pleaded with Dad to sign the letter of intent. And I bugged Dad until he signed it. That was it. I knew I belonged at Xavier. I don't have that same feeling about the NBA."

West had told Matta about his intentions to skip his senior year. But at the April 9 banquet, he stunned the crowd.

"I'm staying," a teary-eyed West announced.

"They clapped for about 20 minutes," says Amos West, who was at the banquet.

The pressure mounts

West's return propelled Xavier into the preseason Top 10 this season and landed him on the AP's Preseason All-America team, a first for a Xavier player.

Xavier lost its second game of the season at Stanford, then dropped back-to-back games to Alabama and Richmond in early January, causing the Musketeers to fall out of the Top 25.

As the season progressed, West suffered emotional letdowns as his ability to play under pressure was questioned. Newspaper articles and sports radio talk shows debated whether West was still a National Player of the Year candidate or even a solid NBA prospect.

The critics didn't bother West. "I think if I'm going to be the guy getting all the hype, I don't mind criticism," West says.

Behind his newly inspired play, and his desire to leave his mark at Xavier, the Musketeers' season turned around. He won four straight A-10 Player of the Week awards from mid-January to February and scored a career-high 47 points against Dayton Feb. 8 at Cintas Center. Xavier is ranked No. 11 in the country and has won 14 consecutive games.

Even Larkin, a radio analyst for Xavier's games, credits West as the best ever to don an XU uniform. West does so much more than score and rebound. Most of all, Larkin says, he wins.

West graduated in December with a degree in communication arts. He's taken individual-study graduate classes during the second semester to stay eligible.

As much as basketball remains his daily focus, there is a woman who receives most of West's off-court attention. Her name is Lesley Stewart, a 2002 graduate of Ohio University who works as a legal secretary at a downtown law firm. They met 21/2 years ago at Annie's, a concert club in Columbia-Tusculum.

"I didn't even know who he was," Stewart says. "I actually forgot his name, then he called me the next day and said, 'Hey, this is David West.' I said, 'Who?' He said, 'You don't know who I am.'"

Friends say marriage is in the couple's future. But the June 25 NBA draft comes first.

Most scouts expect West to be a mid- to late-first-round pick, which would guarantee millions of dollars. West says the NBA won't change his simpler-the-better style.

"That's just the way I am," he says. "My ideal place would be in Vermont. Not that extreme, but someplace where I have my house, 600 TV stations, a mall, a grocery. I'm not into the big, flashy lifestyle."

West likes to say that all his closest friends would not fill up a kitchen table. The group is reserved for family and the difference-makers in his life.

One of those, Gray, will be back in North Carolina watching West on television today. He was touched when West returned to Garner in August and spent a day in Gray's classroom.

"He helped me make some major decisions," West says. "And you've got to give back to people like that along the way."

Gray is proud he could play a part in shaping such a talented basketball player.

"But I think I got the better deal," Gray says. "I feel truly blessed to even know David West."

West at a glance

•Favorite movie: Coming to America.

•Favorite TV shows: Golden Girls, Pardon the Interruption.

•Whom would you like to meet: Malcolm X.

•What makes you laugh: Old funny people.

•What makes you cry: Don't know.

•Favorite city to visit: Philly or New York City.

•Favorite color: Blue.

•Hobby: Video games.

•Favorite midnight snack: Ice cream.

•Favorite NBA team: San Antonio Spurs.

•Favorite NBA players: David Robinson and Tim Duncan.

E-mail ddow@enquirer.com