Damon D. Transcript

My name is Damon Dunn. I’m 49 years old. I grew up in Texas, poor kid, lived in a trailer with 10 people. My mom was 15 years old when she had me. My father was killed when I was three, and my grandparents didn’t finish middle school. And so we were really poor—10 of us in a three-bedroom trailer—and there really was no path for anybody in my community to go to college.

All the kids were graduating high school, moving back into the trailers. None of my uncles, who I lived with, went to college. Two of them sold crack cocaine, went to prison for murder and for armed robbery. I actually slept with them the first 10 years of my life because we were in a three-bedroom trailer. We had to sleep three and four to a bed.

And so I just saw on television one day—I was eight years old—that Tony Dorsett earned a full football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. The Dallas Cowboys were playing the Washington Redskins. And then that became my dream. That was one good piece of information that I had to be able to see beyond the trailer park that I was in, to see beyond the probable and plausible outcomes for my life.

And so I went all in on being a good student and being a good football player. I wrote, “I’m going to earn a football scholarship and be a 4.0 student” on a piece of paper and taped it on the ceiling of my bed when I was eight years old. And so it was the first thing I saw every morning, last thing I saw every night, and I started playing peewee football.

I would show up before practice. I would stay after practice. I told the coaches, I told the other players, “I’m going to earn a football scholarship” at some point. And so I just started committing myself to the sport. Ended up being pretty good. Became number two recruit in the state of Texas as a wide receiver, was recruited by over a hundred universities.

I took five college trips—because you could only take five back then—to Stanford, Notre Dame, UCLA, University of Michigan, and Syracuse. I chose to go to Stanford University because of the opportunity that it would provide me, even if football didn’t work out. And in my era of playing football, the 5’9″, 5’10” guy didn’t really play a lot in the NFL. My last year of playing was 2001–2002. So it was a “two bigs on the outside” type of game, and now everybody’s got three receivers on the field and a guy in the middle on option routes that’s 5’8″, 5’9″, 5’10”.

I didn’t know that I ever had concussions when I was playing, but after all this information that’s come out about concussions and the media’s reporting on it, and you see the concussion protocols on the sidelines during NFL games, I realize now that what I had back then were concussions because of the symptoms. I probably got my first one in peewee football.

I was on a kickoff, and I was running down. The guy blocked me, and he hit me—our helmets collided—and I kind of blacked out, went to the sideline, the sun was bothering me. I didn’t finish the rest of that game, and my head was bothering me probably for maybe a week. I was maybe eight, nine years old. But I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was just getting buzzed. It was just part of playing football.

I didn’t get any concussions in high school. I was really good, so it was hard for guys to get to me and get clean hits on me because I had so much speed and so much quickness. But I did have them in college, playing as a returner—running back and guys catching me in the head—and then you go to the ground and you’re dizzy and you’re disoriented. The trainers would come to you and break an ammonia stick under your nose, you breathe it in, and it kind of opens you up, makes you more alert.

I probably did that six times throughout my four years at Stanford. I played in the NFL for four different teams over a five-year window. One of those years, in between my year three and year four, I played in the XFL and had a really bad hit in the XFL where a guy hit me at the top of my shoulders and my feet came up, and my head hit the ground first—backwards.

I kind of felt like I was still falling, even when I was on the ground. You could see my arms moving because I thought I was still falling. I had headaches for three months, but went to the sideline, they broke an ammonia stick under my nose, and I got back in the game. I just thought headaches were normal.

There was no concussion protocol. There was no concussion education. There was no concussion tent on the sideline. You only would go to the doctor if you proactively told them that you thought something was wrong—and I never did that. I thought it was just part of the game. You get hit, your head hurts, hits the ground first, you’ll be fine over some window of time.

So that’s been my experience with concussions. When you’re in an era where you don’t have a lot of concussion education, it’s hard to diagnose it. And when I played, I don’t think anybody was diagnosing or self-diagnosing concussions—not when I played the game.

The first and most important thing is reporting. If you know you have a concussion and that you’re in some type of progression to have therapy and to be on the right track to get healthy—you’ve got to report it so that you can actually receive that help. I never reported it, and I never went through concussion therapy or a concussion process.

So it’s difficult for me to share anything about how someone should deal with it. The one thing I can share is that I had them, but most importantly, they eventually went away. The symptoms went away, and for me, they didn’t come back. From my limited experience—without any education in it, without it ever being diagnosed—you kind of get hit, you have a concussion, and over some window of time, it goes away.

I would tell people that at some point it’s going to go away—at least that’s been my experience. There might be other people with different experiences. There may be other people who’ve gotten therapy and can share advice on what you should do, what the treatments are, what doctors you should go see, how you can make improvement in your progression. I didn’t have any of that, so I don’t have any data or experiences to share.

All I can say is I had a bunch of concussions and eventually I got through all of them, and I don’t really have any issues today. I know there are probably a hundred other stories with a hundred different outcomes than what I’ve had.

I would just say, if you get hit and you have any level of disorientation, you should consider that a head injury and you should report it so that you can get the right treatment. You should lean into the education pieces on it. I think sports programs at the collegiate level and professional level are doing a great job of that education for people.

I think on the high school level, students really need to be aware of that, because I don’t think that every high school is operating with the same regulation of how to manage, diagnose, treat, and determine how long a player shouldn’t play as a result of getting concussions. So the most important thing you can do is report it and then take the treatment seriously.