They were dreamers then, dreamers who never went anywhere without a football in their hands.

They tossed it back and forth as they walked to the store, passers-by honking for them to get out of the street. They ran routes on their way home from practice, and when an errant pass hit a parked car, they took off running, not wanting any trouble over an innocent mistake.

David Montgomery and his best friend, Jordan Dailey, kept a football in their bedroom, too, the one they shared after Montgomery moved in with Dailey’s family early in his high school career.

They covered their walls with pictures of football players. Barry Sanders. Julio Jones. Zeke Elliott. Sammy Watkins. Walter Payton. Calvin Johnson.

And two air mattresses took up most of the floor.

Dailey slept on the queen size mattress, Montgomery the twin, and the two passed time talking football, watching cooking shows and plotting their future.

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Both longed to make the NFL. Montgomery was a dual-threat quarterback in high school whose best attribute was his feet. Dailey, a year younger, was his top receiver.

Both loved to cook, too. They watched Food Network for ideas and practiced recipes with Ramen noodles. They binged “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” with Guy Fieri; “Chopped,” the reality show that pitted chefs against each other; and “Cutthroat Kitchen,” another cooking competition.

Football and food were escapes from reality for Montgomery and Dailey and their hard-scrabble lives in Mount Healthy, Ohio, on the outskirts of Cincinnati.

Until she married Montgomery’s step-father, Montgomery’s mother, Roberta, raised five kids by herself while moving around the city. Montgomery said he never knew his biological father. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, one of Montgomery’s brothers was imprisoned for murder from a drug deal gone wrong. And when times got tough, the family used water from a nearby gas station to bathe.

One day, as they laid on their air mattresses, watching cooking shows and bouncing names off one another for the restaurant they dreamed of owning, they made a pact that 10 years later seems almost surreal: If you make the NFL, I’ll be your personal chef, they agreed, and if I make it, you’ll be mine.

“Every kid that plays football growing up, they say like, ‘Hey, this is the way I can feed my family, this is the way I will make it,’” Dailey said. “We kind of saw (cooking) as another path to greatness, so it was like if we didn’t make it (one way), we had to make it (the other) and there was no other thing to do. There was only a Plan A and a Plan B, there was no C so we had to do whatever we can to get those first two.”

'Reach your hand back'

Football was always Plan A for Montgomery, who is expected to split duties in the Detroit Lions backfield with rookie first-round pick Jahmyr Gibbs this fall.

Lightly recruited out of Mount Healthy High despite rushing for 6,666 yards and 91 touchdowns in his four-year career, Montgomery signed with Iowa State, the only Division I school to offer him a scholarship. He started four games for the Cyclones as a true freshman, led the nation with 109 forced missed tackles as a sophomore and declared early for the NFL after his All-American junior year.

After the Chicago Bears took him in the third round of the 2019 draft, Montgomery made good on his high school pledge and hired Dailey, whose football career ended in high school, as his personal chef.

Montgomery and Dailey first met as peewee football players on the Hilltop Hawks, a top youth program in the Cincinnati area. They played on teams a year apart, but they scrimmaged and practiced together often.

A few years later, Montgomery transferred to Dailey’s middle school and the two built an inseparable bond. Now, they call each other brothers, and anyone who doesn’t know their story believes that to be true.

“We’re similar,” Montgomery said. “We share a lot of the same struggles, but we got a drive and a hunger, just in different areas and aspects of the world but it’s the same.

“That’s always the main goal, to get out of it and reach your hand back once you do, then you can pull somebody else out of it so they can do the same thing.”

While Montgomery was at Iowa State, Dailey spent two years at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College studying to become a chef.

He started working in the school’s cafeteria and got his first break when former Cincinnati Bengals cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones hired him as head chef of his northern Kentucky restaurant, EndZone Pizza.

Dailey and Montgomery met Jones by chance in high school, when Dailey was getting his hair cut at a barber shop near a salon Jones frequented. Montgomery struck up a conversation with a member of Jones’ entourage outside the shop, and Jones took an interest in the young football stars.

“Just seeing somebody that was in the NFL and was able to kind of see like what it looked like to be in the NFL,” Montgomery said. “It was one of those things like, I was starstruck at first but, like, I could be there. It was great meeting him. He was super cool when I met him. He’s misperceived. He’s really a cool cat.”

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While Jones’ success gave Montgomery something to strive for, Dailey was the one he was able to strive with.

The two pushed each other when times got tough and held each other accountable to their dreams.

“It was really easy for me to have a drive and a reason why I want to, just because of the situation that I was in and everything I came from and out of,” Montgomery said. “It was easy for me to be like, ‘Cool,’ like, ‘I don’t want to live like this for the rest of my life.’ So I made a vow back to myself that I would get myself out of my situation and if I didn’t, I couldn’t blame nobody else but myself.

“Us being together was probably the main reason that I was able to do it, just cause like, you go through them times of uncertainties and question marks on like if you’re confident enough to do it and he would be like the reassurance for me. Going through it and while you’re in it, it’s like, ‘Damn, this (expletive) sucks, but it is what it is.’”

Dynamic duo

Montgomery ran for 3,609 yards and 26 touchdowns in four seasons with the Bears before signing a three-year, $18 million deal with the Lions this offseason.

He is one of five backs to top 200 carries each of the past four seasons, and he credits his diet and attention to nutrition as a big reason for his durability.

Dailey, who also worked as a private chef for Bears receiver Darnell Mooney in Chicago and put on events for Andy Dalton and various position groups of Bears players, keeps Montgomery on a strict diet of about 2,500 calories a day in-season and 3,000 calories a day in training camp.

Montgomery’s go-to meals include a chickpea salad with cucumbers and lemon, garlic chicken and salmon.

“It’s important to know the body,” Montgomery said during a break from an appearance at two local pizza restaurants last week. “When you’re breaking tackles you’re pulling out of weird, awkward positions so you got to make sure that I’m stretched, I’m elastic and I’m eating the right things so it can fuel me on them movements cause I’m generating a lot of energy when I move the way I do. Yeah, nutrition and diet is really important. Like, I’m on a diet right now. It’s hard for me to eat pizza. They’re trying to get me to take bites, I’m trying to take a small bite.”

Montgomery said he is healthy after missing the last two weeks of the Lions’ formal offseason program with a minor ankle injury. “Just a little maintenance,” he said.

He will be ready for the start of training camp next month, and when he hits the field he should give the Lions one of the best backfields in the NFL.

Though he’s had just one 100-yard game since going for 106 yards and two touchdowns against the Lions in Week 4 of the 2021 season, Montgomery ran for 801 yards last year and ranked among the NFL leaders in broken tackle percentage (18.4%), according to Rotowire.

Gibbs, the No. 12 pick of the first round, was a dynamic dual-threat weapon in college who adds a speedy receiving element to an offense Montgomery calls the most powerful he’s ever been a part of.

“I think me and Jah will be electric together,” Montgomery said. “He’s already like an electric player. I don’t mind going in there and getting the (tough) yards, but I see myself as a large asset as well. So putting us two together and defenses having to prepare for the both of us, that’ll be hard to do.”

'Doing it our way'

Montgomery and Dailey were watching “Shooting Stars” recently, the movie about NBA star LeBron James. James was close with a small group of high school teammates, and as he’s built his empire outside of basketball, he’s helped some of his friends reach their dreams.

“We were watching that and every other scene we would look at each other and smile like, man, this is real and it’s so cool that they were able to capture that on film and have a story about them and it just made us feel like our story isn’t done yet and there’s so much more for us to do,” Dailey said.

That includes owning that restaurant Montgomery and Dailey talked about years ago.

It will be a hole-in-the-wall somewhere, with homestyle food and enough character that everyone feels welcome. Montgomery, who likes to cook chicken alfredo, lamb chops and steak, has told people he might even want to go to culinary school one day.

But that’s down the road. For now, there are more pressing matters at hand.

Montgomery, who became a father for the first time earlier this year, has plenty of goals he wants to accomplish on the field, though he said he does not want to share them publicly.

Whatever they are, he’s impressed teammates in his pursuit of them in the three short months they’ve been together.

Lions left tackle Taylor Decker called him “responsible, disciplined, professional” and said he has “a productive paranoia” about how he goes about business every day.

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“Always trying to find a way to get better,” Decker said. “That’s what I’ve heard from a coach that I know that was in Chicago. So does it surprise me that we signed a guy like that? No, it sounds like personality wise and mindset, he’s like the cookie cutter for what we want here.”

None of that surprises Dailey, who lived with Montgomery after moving to Detroit this offseason and said Montgomery’s first order of business with the Lions is “to prove to people that he is who they think he is, or he is better than who they think he is” — like the two have been doing in tandem all their lives.

“We’re doing it our way that we said we was going to do it,” Montgomery said. “We said that we’d help each other out and we need each other in order for each of us to (succeed). That’s the funny thing. It’s like ying and yang, you need the other for the other to work.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions' David Montgomery living out his dreams with best friend