ORCHARD PARK – There are some days in your life that you never forget, and there is such a wide variance of reasons why that might be — sadness, happiness, accomplishment, occasion, trauma and on and on and on.

For 24-year-old Buffalo Bills rookie running back Ray Davis, he’s already had a lifetime worth of monumental days that span every emotion and have shaped his implausible journey from being homeless on the streets of San Francisco as a child, through earning a college degree from prestigious Vanderbilt University, to hearing his name called in the fourth round of the NFL Draft, to learning this week that he had made the Bills’ final 53-man roster.

“Crazy,” Davis said when recounting everything that has led to this point in time where, rather than still seeking food and shelter, or perhaps being incarcerated, or maybe even dead — all of which were possible early life outcomes — he’s about to start his NFL career. “Yeah, it’s pretty crazy when I think about it.”

Sign up for the Bills Blast newsletter Delivered straight to your inbox, additional Bills analysis, insight, stats, quotes and team history from Sal Maiorana

Pivotal moment in Ray Davis' life

But there is one day in particular that will probably always stand out to Davis and everyone in the small village of people that helped him negotiate all the pitfalls on his way to Buffalo, the day that changed what had been an impossibly troubling adolescence and set him on a path that he never could have dreamed was attainable.

Davis was in a San Francisco County courtroom when he was 16 years old where a judge named Catherine Lyons literally had his future in the palms of her hands.

Davis was there as a ward of the court in the state of California seeking permission to leave in order to attend a boarding school just outside New York City where he could use his athletic talents to help him obtain a proper education, to have a chance of attending college and to lead him somewhere productive from there.

It was certainly better than where he’d been — periodically homeless while both his parents were either in prison or otherwise out of the picture; bouncing around the foster care system; occasionally sleeping on the floor at his grandmother’s, or on couches at the homes of some of his basketball teammates; moving in with one of his teachers and ultimately living there for three years; to finally coming under the care of a family willing to fight and advocate for his escape from his difficult past and help him pursue a promising future.

Davis sat there in court with his social worker, his legal representative, his biological father who had come back into his life and was supporting his move to New York, and Lora Banks and her husband Greg Ley, who had become his legal guardians. It was supposed to a low-stress day because everyone involved fully anticipated that he would be granted permission to enroll via an athletic scholarship at Trinity-Pawling, an all-boys prep school in the Hudson Valley.

And then came a blindside blow, a sucker punch, really, that staggered everyone. A county attorney assigned to the case stood up at the hearing and said the state would be opposing Davis’ move to New York.

“I mean, my jaw just hit the floor,” said Banks, who filled out the endless paperwork and had taken every step possible to help ensure that Davis would be able to leave. “His grounds were something like, 'he’ll be 2,500 miles away from home, he won’t have any family support, there won’t be any safety net there for him, and he won’t be in the foster care system because foster care is his safety net.'”

The county attorney offered the suggestion that it would be better for Davis not to attend a highly-respected prep school but rather be placed in a group home where he could possibly attend a vocational school.

Here's Friday's link to the BLEAV in Bills podcast where we have some thoughts on Davis' path to playing time:

Bleav in Bills

“In my mind, they had no model for how to do it,” Banks said. “They didn’t have other placement options, but they didn’t have a model for how to take a kid out of the foster care system and move them to another state. I was kind of like, ‘You’re not going to let the kid take advantage of this opportunity?’ We were flabbergasted.”

Davis’ juvenile attorney, Patty Fitzsimmons — who never expected to have to defend and then plead his case because everything seemed set in stone — explained all the benefits to Davis leaving and all the downfalls of him staying. Judge Lyons took it all in, then looked at Davis and asked him to stand up and tell the court why he should be allowed to go to Trinity-Pawling.

Ray Davis speaks up: "I felt proud"

“Being such a young kid who didn’t really have a voice and relied on adults to make very important decisions for me, that was my opportunity to speak up and say how I felt for the first time, really,” Davis said.

At one point he looked at the county attorney and said, “You say I won’t be supported out there, but going back to when I was young, when have I been supported here?”

When he finished his remarks, Davis recalled how he felt in the moment and he said, “I felt proud. I felt like I had done something. But at the end of the day, I kind of still knew my journey was in the hands of someone else making that decision for me.”

Fortunately for him, Judge Lyons knew what the proper decision was, and she made it. She granted him permission to go to New York and reboot his life and now eight years later, he’ll be playing at Highmark Stadium on Sept. 8 when the Bills open the regular season against the Arizona Cardinals.

“To know the right person made the right decision, which was that judge, I’m forever blessed,” he said. “If I didn’t go to boarding school … I don’t know where I’d be today, wouldn’t know where I’d end up living at. There were so many outcomes, but to know that the system at that time wanted me to just stay in the system, it was hard. It was rough at that time, but now I look back at it and I’m just proud that I was able to speak up.”

It was a triumphant day, for sure, but there was still so much more that needed to happen before Davis made it to Buffalo, especially when you consider what preceded it.

The path for Ray Davis was rocky from the start

Davis’ mother gave birth when she was a teenager, and as Davis said, “She wasn’t ready and she was just facing some adversity. She just needed to get better at it. Over the years, she had gotten better and there were some times where she fell victim to whatever she was facing.”

She spent time in prison, as did his father, Ray, a former high school football star in San Francisco who played at Galileo High, the same school that produced former Bills great O.J. Simpson. Ray Sr. broke Simpson’s single-season touchdown record in 1998 on his way to being named San Francisco Examiner player of the year.

Ray Sr. strayed down the wrong path, too, and Ray Jr. — whose birth name is Re’Mahn Walter Zhamar Jamar Davis — didn’t even know he had a father until he was 8 or 9 years old, he can’t remember exactly when. With his parents absent, he and two younger siblings did not have a home life and he became their caretaker, making sure his sister got to school, then making sure his baby brother’s diapers were changed and other needs were met.

At one point, the kids were living at a homeless shelter when a foster family offered to take two, and Davis sent his siblings because it would be best for them. He remained at the shelter, then began couch surfing, carrying his small duffel bag of meager belongings trying to find a place to sleep and maybe get a meal.

A 'big brother' steps up for Ray Davis

The first adult who had a hand in getting him pointed in the right direction was Patrick Dowley who was involved with the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program.

“I was in a part of the Boys and Girls Club at that time, and they came in and they talked about this Big Brothers, Big Sisters and all that stuff, and I remember just picking up the phone and calling the number that they had given me, and I was like, 'where’s my brother at, like I need one,'” Davis said with a smile.

“Pat was the most consistent person that has been in my life, from being at the age where he saw me go from the worst of the worst to being where I am now, he was there through the thick of it and what I was going through.”

Banks loves retelling the story of how Ray and Pat hooked up because it just showed the maturity and wherewithal Ray had before he even turned 10.

“Ray was 8 years old and he asked Patrick to be his big brother,” Banks said. “It wasn’t like Patrick just said, ‘Oh, I’m going to go do some good community work.’ Ray recruited Patrick, and he was 8. This is why I think the kid is just so amazing at such a young age, because he has an amazing talent to pick out something he wants, or somebody who’s doing what he wants to be doing, and he picked out Patrick.”

A teacher gives Davis a place to stay

Next in the support chain came Ben Klaus, a teacher at Bret Harte Elementary who had Ray in both his third- and fifth-grade classes. There were days, even weeks, where Ray would not be in school because he was tending to his siblings, and Ben figured something wasn’t right, but there wasn’t much he could do. That is until Ray called when he was in sixth grade and asked if he could stay with Ben and his then fiancé, now wife, Alexa.

The couple not only took him in, but when Ray Sr. left prison, they helped father and son reunite, enabling them to begin building a relationship that had never existed.

“Ben was actually the main person that got me and my dad to have a relationship,” said Davis, who wound up living with the Klauses for three years. “If it wasn’t for Ben and later on Lora helping my dad get full custody of me, I don’t think without those two, me and him would have the relationship we have today.”

Banks and Ley entered the picture when Davis reached high school and was teammates with their son, Bradley. There was an AAU basketball tournament down in Santa Barbara, about five hours from San Francisco, and the players all needed to get their own rides to and from.

Davis got there with one of the coaches who for some reason couldn’t drive him back, so Bradley said he could hitch a ride back with he and his mom. That turned out to be a life-changing trip.

“Brad came over to me and said, ‘Hey, we got space, my mom said you can ride with us’ and before I got in the car, he warned me that she was probably going to ask 1,000 questions,” said Davis, who originally had no intention of engaging. He just wanted the ride, and Lora Banks’ hotspot password so he could spend the time surfing the web on his phone.

“I did ask a bunch of questions,” Banks said. “I was trying to, you know, where were his parents? What was he doing? Where was he going to school? And he didn’t have really straightforward answers. He had his headphones on and he was just, like, so annoyed with me. I mean, I wasn’t enamored with him. It wasn’t like he was the nicest kid around."

But eventually along the way, the headphones came off and he said, “I answered every question that she asked, and she just learned about me. She was a person that I felt comfortable with, and I didn’t feel comfortable with a lot of people at that time. She just became Mama Bear at that time, and from there on, she became like my mother.”

Once back home, Banks began inviting Davis for dinner, she added him to the family YMCA membership, and occasionally he would sleep over. Eventually, when an out-of-state tournament was scheduled in Nevada, the only way Davis could leave California to play was to have a parent or legal guardian sign off, and that’s when Lora and Greg dove headfirst into their mission of getting him on the path that has led him to Buffalo.

“It was like a societal guilt,” Banks recalled. “He didn’t have a place to live, he didn’t have a parent going to his games, he didn’t have somebody driving his carpool, and it was devastating to me that there was a teenager in our environment whose circumstances were so different from ours.

“Everything begins at home, in your own community. He started showing up and at first it was just, ‘Oh, I was in the neighborhood.’ Well, his neighborhood and our neighborhood don’t look the same, but nobody called to ask for him. So I just started drilling down and I said, ‘Look, I want something more for you than maybe you want for yourself.’”

Pretty soon, Davis started to realize that Banks and the group of people she enlisted to help him could actually provide the light that could guide him out of the darkness.

“She just fell in love with understanding how do we get this kid to the next step and become a better person,” Davis said. “Things moved fast from her becoming my educational rights holder to then she ended up getting a guardianship so I could play these basketball tournaments. That was just somebody I had loved and I’m always going to have genuine love for her and her family. That’s my family, so I’m happy it happened.”

The opportunity to attend Trinity-Pawling came about because a friend of Lora and Greg's had a connection there. Lora and Ray flew to New York, the school officials were impressed and the basketball scholarship offer was made.

Once Judge Lyons approved his move east, Davis made Trinity-Pawling aware that he was also a pretty good football player, too, and he also ended up playing baseball and running track. But for all his athletic success, it wasn’t a smooth ride and he struggled with his grades and to fit into such a structured environment after all the lack of structure he’d grown accustomed to.

The college journey for Davis

He eventually fell in line and graduated, but he still needed a post-grad prep year to become academically eligible for college. So he spent a year at Blair Academy in northern New Jersey, scored 35 touchdowns in his lone season, and colleges began recruiting him and he wound up signing with Temple.

He played two seasons and rushed for 1,244 yards and scored 11 touchdowns, losing most of the 2020 season to the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeking a higher level of competition, he transferred into the best conference in the land, the SEC, and it was at Vanderbilt where he ultimately finished off a degree in communications.

Davis’s first season in 2021 was limited to three games due to a knee injury, but in 2022 he returned and rushed for 1,042 yards and scored eight TDs.

“Going to Vandy, it was a huge adjustment, a culture shock for me,” Davis said. “Coaching was just very different and having to understand that how you do anything is how you do everything. It was very hard in ‘21 but I came back in ‘22, and I just bought into the culture and bought into the standard.”

With one year of eligibility left, he transferred to another SEC school, Kentucky, and it was only then when he began to think that the NFL was a possibility if he could deliver a great performance. And he did with career highs in rushing yards (1,129), receiving yards (323) and touchdowns (21).

“When I got to Kentucky, I just knew … the ball’s in my court,” he said. “I’m the Picasso of this painting and however I want this next year to shape out, I got to be able to paint a nice picture for them to want to look at, and want to buy, and want to invest in.”

How the Buffalo Bills became interested in Ray Davis

The Bills looked, and they made the investment. They met him at the Senior Bowl, watched him at the NFL Scouting Combine and his pro day, and offered him one of their 30 facility visits though he couldn’t come because he got sick.

When their turn came up in the fourth round of the draft, Davis was the choice, and beyond his football talent, general manager Brandon Beane and his staff felt strongly that all Davis had gone through in his life would serve him well in the NFL.

“Definitely, because you’re going to hit adversity at this level, we see it with all guys,” Beane said. “First-round picks, guys you pay a lot of money to, down to undrafted guys having to fight their way. Some guys, if they’ve been a five-star all their life, heavily recruited, everything went well for them, like what are they going to do? Do you really have the answer?

“This dude’s been through a lot, and he’s battle-tested. I don’t think anything he’s going to face out here even as a rookie is going to be close to some of the things he’s overcome in his life. So that’s why it’s important. It wasn’t all pretty at some of the stops and not the same reviews everywhere, but as you went along, he was trending up and was past some of the things that he needed to mature and grow through.”

Coach Sean McDermott began to learn about Davis’ story once the pick was made, and just watching him grind through the spring and summer in his quest to make the team, he knows the Bills made the right choice.

“I know the story and that’s part of, I think, what makes him a winner, right?” McDermott said. “Even before coming here, and then you watch how he goes about his work, he had the injury in the spring, he rehabs it to the point where he can come out now and play. That alone, to me, is a symbol of who he is and I’m sure it connects back to everything he’s gone through in his life to this point.

“Yeah, he’s been impressive. Again, just the maturity that … I mean, he’s been through things in life I’ve never been through, and I’m twice his age, so that maturity that he brings is unique at a young age.”

In that court room eight years ago, Judge Lyons looked at Davis and said, “I’ve been a judge 10 years, and this is something I never get to do. Re’Mahn Davis, you’re no longer a ward of the court. I believe you’re going to graduate high school. And I believe one day you’re going to graduate from college.”

So far he has lived up to Judge Lyons’ prediction. Next, it’s time to become a star in the NFL.

“I knew I had to go right back to work,” Davis said, recalling the night he was drafted. “I knew that I had to go back to proving everybody wrong, and that’s what I love so much about it. That’s why the days when things are hard out here, I love it because I’m like, this is what I was built for, this is the reason why I’m here. I’m here to face every adversity that everybody’s ever thrown at me, and it’s about how do I overcome it and push and have a better outcome.”

Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, and he has written numerous books about the history of the team. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana. https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Ray Davis, Buffalo Bills RB, escaped raw deal in life: His story