Life gets better as life goes on for this Husky left guard

In the end, it was just another thing that didn't really go as planned during the five years Stanley Daniels played football for Washington.

"I'm actually Stanley Daniels II," he said this week. "Not Stanley Daniels Jr., but The Second."

But for whatever reason, he was never listed that way during his time at UW.

He was just plain, old Stanley Daniels.

And who is Stanley Daniels I? Good question. One Stanley Daniels II wishes he could really answer.

Instead, he has only bits and pieces that lead to a partial understanding. Any chance at really knowing his father evaporated one night at a San Diego liquor store. A brawl broke out, and his father suffered injuries that caused a coma from which he never awoke.

Daniels was 3 years old at the time and didn't find out for about a decade what really happened, saying it was later determined that his father was deliberately murdered.

And thus began a road that led Daniels to UW that was rockier than anything he encountered once he got here. Not that it has been smooth sailing with the Huskies. As Daniels plays his final game Saturday in the Apple Cup in Pullman, he has had three head coaches, four position coaches and more losses than he ever could have imagined — a mark of 13-32 that is the worst in Huskies history for a four-year class.

"I've been through a lot just to get here," said Daniels, who will make his 26th career start Saturday and has taken every snap this season for UW at left guard. "I feel like I'm blessed to be where I am because most of the things I've gone through, the things I've seen at a young age, most of the time, people don't make it out of that. So I'm happy I'm here. I'm happy I made it."

His father left behind some good athletic genes — he was the most valuable player of the 1967 Pony League World Series champions — but his death created a muddled extended family situation.

His mother eventually had eight children, with Stanley the oldest. But she struggled for years with drugs, due in part, Daniels says, to his father's death.

His mother's struggles with addiction often meant that Daniels, as the oldest child, was often left as the caretaker, trying not only to keep himself out of harm's way in a tough neighborhood, but also his siblings.

"That guy is so strong," said UW linebacker Scott White, who also is from the San Diego area and has known Daniels for years. "He grew up in the Lincoln Park area, and it's heavily gang infested, a lot of gang violence, drugs. He'd tell me all the time about seeing syringes and pipes in the house. That's nothing for a kid to see.

"But he had to be positive when his mom was struggling with her addiction. He had to try to be a positive example for others and make sure they get all of their stuff taken care of, because who else was going to do it? He had to really take that family over."

His mother, Daniels says proudly, has since gotten clean, about three years ago, and works as a counselor at the same rehab center where she weaned herself off drugs.

But for years, Daniels had to find direction on his own, and he increasingly found it in sports.

"That was my getaway, my excuse not to be home," he said.

He and White were initially basketball stars, teaming together for years on youth traveling squads.

"Sports were the way out for him," White said. "It got him some meals paid for, some travel, he got to have some experiences he wouldn't have been able to have coming from the background he came from."

Daniels also quickly realized the classroom was just as good an avenue to a better life, and it was his solid academic work that helped earn a scholarship to Marian Catholic High School in San Diego.

There, he evolved into a football star recruited by most of the big schools. He received eight out of 10 votes on the Long Beach Press-Telegram's Best in the West Poll in 2001. He and White had long talked about going to college together, and when White committed to Washington, he gave Daniels almost daily recruiting pitches.

Daniels, however, struggled with the decision, wavering between Nebraska and Washington, before casting his lot with the Huskies on signing day.

He admits Rick Neuheisel was a big reason he ended up coming here, and that he sometimes wonders how things would have gone had Neuheisel not been fired.

"I think if coach Neuheisel would have stayed, we would have won a lot of games and been to a lot of different bowls," he said. "Because he knew how to use us as players, where other coaches have had to come in and feel us out. If he had stayed, we would have been successful. We would have been very, very good."

If that sounds like divided loyalties, three coaches in five years will do that.

Daniels also has been one of the players most vociferous in his praise for Tyrone Willingham this season, saying that while "it's frustrating how it went down, losing your coach and going through those seasons," he would "definitely make the same decision" if he had to do it over again.

"Those were just the cards I was dealt."

He knows he's been handed worse.

Willingham said Daniels carried around a lot more anger about his past when he first met him two years ago, something that university life, and simply growing up, has helped to soften.

"His outlook on the world is just so much different now," Willingham said. "He's lost some of that cynical edge that some of us have when you come up with things being difficult in your life and not having the things everyone else has. I think he's seen that there is a broader perspective out there and he's gravitated to that and that's just wonderful."

Says Daniels: "I'm a little more open to life. And I kind of understand that all the things that happened in my past, I have no control over. All I have control over is me. When I was younger, I struggled with that a little bit. I got down on some of the things that happened."

Now, he's looking nowhere but up, with a degree in political science already in hand and, he hopes, a shot at the NFL.

Where maybe they will know him as Stanley Daniels II.

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com. Read his blogs on Washington football and basketball at www.seattletimes.com/huskies.