As an unemployed skeet shooter, Tony West, then 18 and a college dropout after only one week, became restless. For reasons unknown he left his parents home and moved to Tulsa where there were plenty of employment opportunities as well as many shooting venues. While there, he lived with friend and fellow shooter, Fred Peters, until he could get his feet on the ground. According to former skeet shooting friends, Tony bounced from one job to another, never quite finding the right situation. He then tried a stint of living on his own, but after about six months decided that hed had enough, and returned home to Richmond to live with Joe and Mary.
Being at home again and convinced he was not college material, Tony found employment with Commodore Home Systems in nearby Ottawa. At Commodore, Tony was on a team that built mobile homes.
The full-time meant there was less time for skeet shooting, but he kept at it.
In 1980, Tony was once again named to the 1980 Field and Stream All American Skeet Team. This time, however, he was named to the Open Second Team, not the Open First Team, most likely because of his good but not outstanding performance at the 1979 World Champion Shoot and other competitions. It was probably a disappointment for Tony, but a big win was soon to come his way.
One hundred thirty-six competitors showed up for the 1980 National Gun Clubs 400 Target Roadrunner Open Skeet Championship held in San Antonio in late March.
In Texas, March can be a month of unpredictable weather from hot to cold, wet to dry, and windy to calm. Wind is not the skeet shooters friend. It can do unpredictable things to targets by causing them to float or dip by altering the trajectory or even change the velocity. These types of changes can affect the timing of the shot and result in a miss. Veteran skeet shooters say that these sudden surprises happen almost exactly at the wrong moment; just as the trigger is pulled. Only the very best shooters can compensate for these challenges and maintain high scores.
In the two-day event the wind was gusting to 35 mph on Saturday and 29 mph on Sunday. Despite these conditions, Tony broke a 396×400 over the two-day event. The strongest winds of the event were on Saturday morning during the .410 event and Tony was the only shooter among 97 to score an amazing 100×100 to capture the championship.
Robert Paxton won the 20-gauge event and Tito Killian won the 28-gauge event. In the 12-gauge event Tony took his second championship in overtime.
The write-up in the May 1980 Skeet Shooting Review said:
The special added-target Rolex Handicap was decided in a shoot off with the .410 between HOA Champion Tony West (396) and the HOA runner-up Preston Douglass (394). In the overtime, West put the icing on his cake by winning the $1,800 gold and stainless-steel Rolex Oyster.
It was pure Tony at his best.
A YEAR LATER, theres little record of Tony competing anywhere other than a smattering of local contests.
Tony was now a working man at Commodore, and Mary believes that the demands of the job took away from his ability to participate in competitive skeet action. A weekend shoot in San Antonio, for example, meant travel days on Friday and Monday.
The year 1982 arrived in typical Kansas fashion with cold, windy, short days and long boring nights. The West family was in its third year in Richmond, and at age 21, Tony was still living with his parents. He continued to work at Commodore building mobile homes. Life for the West family seemed stable.
According to Mary, on the evening of Friday, Jan. 8, 1982, Tony said he was going to drive the short distance north to Princeton, to visit some friends. She replied that since he had been fighting a cold he should stay home and rest, but Tony insisted that he would be fine and left in his 1969 Mustang.
