After medically retiring from football, Tommy West found a new sense of purpose

Like most younger brothers, Tommy West always looked up to his older brother, Jacob, especially on the gridiron.

“He’s why I played football because he died playing football,” West said. “He had a heart attack at practice and he wore 26, so I played for him.”

Jacob had an undiagnosed heart condition at birth called Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia, a genetic disorder that can cause sudden death in young, seemingly healthy people, according to John Hopkins Medicine.

West was just 12 years old when his brother died at 17 and developed a stutter in the aftermath.

After graduating from Danville High School, he went on to play linebacker at DePauw University before an injury during practice would alter the course of his life.

“We were doing one-on-one [drills] and [I] dove for a ball, came down and my elbow broke two of my ribs [and it went] into my spleen,” West said.

Initially, doctors told him he would be alright and to take some Advil. When the pain persisted, he went to another hospital and was immediately sent in an ambulance to Good Samaritan Hospital where he spent a week in the Intensive Care Unit.

At the time, he “had no clue” how bad the injury really was, but his parents were told when they arrived that West had lacerated his spleen.

“My mom started crying. Her face got all pale, and I was like, ‘Mom, I’m fine, I’m right here,’ but they said I was 12 hours away from bleeding to death in my dorm room if I didn’t go to the hospital,” he said.

West fully recovered, but returning to football would require a complex protection system due to his injury. Even with said system, if he were to take a hit in the spot of his injury again, it could be life-threatening.

The writing was on the wall for his athletic career.

“I love football. It was my whole life until [then]. I hated watching people play when I couldn’t play,” West said. “I saw my love fall away from me.”

He would need to spend the next three months recovering in his dorm room. On top of that, the then-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had students in lockdown. West said he felt like he was going stir-crazy in his dorm room when he decided to try something creative to break the boredom.

“I just tried singing on a beat that I made one time in my dorm, then I made seven more of those,” he said. “I had a collection where I was like, ‘I can kind of do this. I’m not good yet, but I know I can do this.’”

West had always been interested in music but had not spent much dedicated time giving it a shot. The recovery time in his dorm turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“That’s when I realized, maybe football doesn’t have to be my life because I can find other outlets that can make me happy,” he said.

The following year, West transferred to Ball State, majoring in media with an audio production concentration, and sought training to improve his vocal skills. Making music helped him work through his stutter and overcome his interactions with others.

“I can hear myself back, and I finally don’t hate how I sound,” he said. “I’m also a tour guide here, and I’ve gotten a lot better at speaking to people. I used to not be able to make eye contact because I was so nervous about stuttering.”

Now a fourth-year, he has been creating R&B and pop music under his given name for three years now.

“I taught myself everything about making music. I love it,” West said. “I still miss football. I know it’s just a game, [but] I’m never going to play it again, and I think that’s why I love music. Because it can give me that dopamine hit.”

Fourth-year audio engineering major John Marino, who makes house music under the name JXHN, produces music for several artists and has collaborated with West numerous times.

“A lot of the time, we’re in the same room together because it really is a collaborative process,” Marino said. “When you’re making music and trying to create lyrics and a story behind it, I think it’s really important to have a person who is singing on it [provide] their input as you’re creating it.”

The two met at a house party early into West’s time at Ball State and got to talking about music. West mentioned that he sang and Marino brought up his own interest in making music. The two were in the studio a few days later.

“When I play something or find something, anything that piques his interest [and] he’ll let me know,” Marino said. “It is a collaborative process, like, I’m driving the car if you want to put it that way, but he’s giving me directions.”

The two are currently working on a song called “The Feeling” that will be released in November.

“For [this song], I was digging through an old sample pack on my computer that I hadn’t opened in a really long time, and I found a one-shot of, I think, a Daniel Caesar song of him saying the feeling — an ad-lib or something,” Marino said. “I put that into my keyboard and started sampling it, [and] we created this whole story just based off of that: the feeling of falling in love.”

As he’s grown as an artist, West has collaborated with other students across campus, including fourth-year communication and media studies major Bachka Batjargal. Batjargal said the two got acquainted through a mutual friend who also creates music. The two got off the ground while meeting up in West’s dorms in Botsford/Swinford Hall.

“I just started talking to him, and I think it just clicked because our perspectives on music were very similar,” Batjargal said. “We had a lot of similarities in terms of artists that we were into, the kind of music that we like and the kind of music that we produce.”

While music brought them together, Batjargal said the two grew close as they continued to create music.

“Chemistry is a very big thing with music,” he said. “If you can work with different kinds of people and be able to bounce off ideas, that’s the kind of partnership and friendship that just works.”

Batjargal, who uses his first name Bachka as his artist name, has collaborated with West on the songs “Body Shots,” “What’s the Vibe” and “hear it once say it twice,” among others.

Batjargal introduced West to fourth-year media production major Reggie Goins, who said they clicked almost immediately.

“One day, we talked in person, hung out [and] made a song,” Goins said. “We just really vibed together instantly that first night and have been close ever since.”

The song titled “When Nobody’s Home” was released last year and helped kick off their relationship. Goins, who goes by the artist name RazeGuage, said his musical style is very diverse but finds new avenues when working with West.

“We tend to meet in the middle, and we tend to do more acoustic stuff,” he said. “That stuff where I feel comfortable on and he feels comfortable on. It just meshes very well when we are able to come to that common ground where we are both like, ‘We can do this.’”

More than 10 years after Jacob’s death, West has grown through his grief thanks to his music. About a year ago, he dedicated a personal, unreleased song to Jacob titled “Forever Swollen.”

“It’s actually exactly a minute and 26 seconds long. It just happened,” West said. “That’s like some God stuff going on right there.”

Contact Daniel Kehn via email at daniel.kehn@bsu.edu or on X @daniel_kehn.