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Not the Barefield who was an outstanding high school football player at Stroman. Not the Barefield who performed so well at linebacker at Texas A&I he was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals and was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

Not the Barefield who tackled running back Walter Payton in sub-freezing temperatures at Soldier Field in Chicago. Not the Barefield who came back from a serious leg injury to earn a spot on the roster of the USFL’s Denver Gold and Los Angeles Express. Not the Barefield who played four years for the San Antonio Gunslingers and was one of the few who actually got paid to do it.

Not the Barefield who parlayed the salary he earned and the connections he made playing professional football into business opportunities and a home in Lakewood, Colorado.

Not the Barefield who at 53 stands 6-foot-3, weighs 230 pounds and with the exception of the few flecks of gray in his goatee could still pass as a professional football player.

But the bravado fades and there is a catch in his voice when the conversation turns to Golden Marie Barefield, his youngest daughter who was murdered at the age of 20 in 2003.

Barefield calls Golden Marie his Christmas baby. She was working and preparing to enroll at Arizona State when she was stabbed in the back while herding friends to safety after an argument had broken out in the parking lot of her Denver apartment.

“That was a changing pattern in my life as far as trying to assess the blessings that I’ve had in my life and the travel that I’ve done and the people that I’ve met, it was almost like a fairy tale,”Barefield said. “It was determination, vision, focus, execution in just about everything I did in life. That was the first time I ran into a situation that I could not control. I was just helpless and it was a turning point in my life. Once you lose a child, you lose focus on a lot of things. It’s been five years since her death and I’ve finally become functional.”

Barefield is spending a few days in Victoria after attending the funeral of his brother-in-law Robert Garley before returning to Colorado, where his mother, two daughters, son and four grandchildren reside. He believes playing professional football has helped him cope with the changes life has brought.

“You might be my roommate,”Barefield said. “I might get the opportunity to talk with you, listen to you tell me your testimony about your children and your family, where you’re from and the next day you’re gone. Then, that afternoon you have another roommate and then you may have three or four roommates and than all of a sudden you start thinking am I next? There’s really a lot of mental pressure. Not only physical because every time you go out on the football field you’re being filmed. Consistency and repetition have to be to the point where you don’t make mistakes.”

Barefield counts not obtaining his college degree as one of his mistakes. He wants to correct that mistake and serve the memory of his daughter by entering the field of victims’ assistance.

“It’s a little bit different when you have a tragedy that happens to you,” Barefield said. “I’m telling you, you start questioning your faith, your foundation, your structure and everything that’s out there. The biggest thing you have to come to terms with is why. My whole attitude is bad things happen to good people too. It’s just not a format where you say bad things happen to bad people who do evil, which is the way we’ve been taught. I’ve always tried to be accountable in my life and I was always in the public eye so I carried myself that way. When that happened to my daughter, I came up to reading one of the scriptures in the Bible that said one of the greatest gifts that one can do a servant to God is to give your life for a friend and that’s what she did, even though it took my heart from me.”

Mike Forman is a sports writer for the Victoria Advocate. Contact him at 361-580-6588 or mforman@vicad.com, or comment on this column at www.VictoriaAdvocate.com.