Editor’s note: In August 2022, Dejon Lloyd was convicted of two domestic violence offenses, a felony charge of strangulation and a misdemeanor charge for fourth-degree assault.
Dejon Lloyd’s coworkers know he’s friends with Damian Lillard, so after Lillard has a monster game, Lloyd usually hears something like, “Your boy was killing it last night!”
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Lloyd gets it. Dame Time is a full-on phenomenon in Portland, and Lloyd lives in Beaverton, not far from the arena formerly known as the Rose Garden.
But there’s just so much that his coworkers, Blazers fans, everyone doesn’t know about Lillard.
“I want him to be praised and appreciated for his success,” Lloyd says. “He deserves it. But I also want him to be praised and appreciated for the lives he’s changed before this.”
So Dejon Lloyd starts telling his story.
Lloyd went to Weber State, but his decision had nothing to do with Lillard. He wanted to leave Oakland, and because his godparents lived in Utah, he could get cheaper in-state tuition.
During his first week of college, Lloyd was walking near his dorm — or maybe doing laundry, he can’t remember exactly — when he heard: “Hey, I know you.” It was Lillard. The two had met four years earlier at a high school basketball camp in Los Angeles, when Lloyd was a freshman and Lillard was a sophomore. Lloyd shared a dorm with one of Lillard’s friends, so they spent the week together, cracking jokes.
“I was literally rocking a bald head as a ninth grader,” Lloyd says. “Dame let me have it the first time he saw me.”
That was the last time they’d hung out until randomly reconnecting in Ogden, Utah, but they became close right away. Lloyd rebounded for Lillard; Lillard welcomed Lloyd into his circle of teammates. Near the end of Lloyd’s first semester, he rode a bus back to the dorms. Lillard and his teammates lived in a different building, so Lloyd walked to his room alone, but when he got there, he saw a note on his door.
It said he had to move out.
He knew his family had financial issues back in Oakland, but the notice blindsided him. He stood there for a while, embarrassed, confused. Would he have to move back home just a few months after graduating high school? He had no clue. Later that day, he broke down in a parking lot and cried when he told Lillard the news.
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Nearly a decade later, he still remembers what Lillard told him next: “You’re not going home.”
Lillard and Weber State teammates at the Big Sky Conference tournament in 2009. (Colin Braley / Associated Press)That same day, Lillard helped Lloyd pack up and move into room 5106: the dorm Lillard shared with three teammates. Each had his own bedroom, and they shared two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room in the middle of the dorm. That’s where Lillard had Lloyd put his stuff.
Lloyd put some clothes in Lillard’s closet and the rest behind the couch, now his bed. He displayed his basketball awards and prom pictures, which Lillard loved giving him shit for. But Lillard also stayed on his friend.
He made sure Lloyd went to class, drove him to his part-time job at Babies R Us and brought home extra meals from team dinners. He got on Lloyd when he left spilled Cheerios on the counter, or whenever he was late — “almost essentially raising me,” Lloyd says.
Lloyd admits he was “rough around the edges.” For most of his life he didn’t have a father figure to teach him how to be a man. All of Lillard’s friends admired the obvious things that made him successful: How he didn’t drink in college and spent many Friday nights in the gym. But Lloyd paid just as much attention to the small, anonymous ways in which Lillard structured his life, like how he got out of bed, went to the sink and washed his face, morning after morning.
“Some people make fun of me and some people laugh,” Lloyd says, “but I told somebody, ‘Dame taught me how to get up and wash my face.’ As small and as weird as that sounds, somebody did that for me.”
One morning, everyone was getting ready for class. Lloyd was in the living room, “being a fucking goofball, per usual,” he says. “Dame’s like, ‘Boy, you need to go put on some lotion.’ In a funny way so he’s not acting like my dad in front of everyone else but still telling me: Put on some lotion.”
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Lloyd did not put on lotion. “Like I said, I was rough around the edges.”
So he walked outside and the brutal cold attacked the back of his neck. “It looked like someone dumped a giant box of baby powder on my neck,” Lloyd says, cracking up. “Dame pointed it out when I was at the bus stop and I couldn’t go back to the dorm to put lotion on my neck. I had to walk around like that, and I was embarrassed.”
The message stuck: Put on lotion.
“I had somebody there to remind me: Make sure I’m doing the little things,” Lloyd says. “It’s OK to have fun. But make sure you’re handling your priorities. Make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”
He says this all in a downtown Portland bar, an hour or so after the Blazers lost game four against the Nuggets, and his eyes start to water.
“He did it because he wanted to,” Lloyd says. “He changed my life because he wanted to. He didn’t get a dollar. He didn’t get a book. He had plenty of friends. You know what I mean? It’s crazy to say, but for people who are believers, he was honestly like my guardian angel.
“The guy never wanted shit from me. He never asked me to do anything for him. It’s gonna sound fucking crazy, but it was almost like he was designed for that reason and for that exact moment in my life. And if I didn’t go to Weber State, where the hell would I be?
“I don’t know.”
Just think about it, he says. Lillard wasn’t famous or rich. His only accolade to that point was Big Sky freshman of the year. Not only that but other than one week at a high-school basketball camp, he and Lloyd had been friends for less than five months. But that was enough. Lloyd slept on the couch in Lillard’s dorm for a year and a half.
So yes, Dejon Lloyd’s eyes water because now he has a good job and a college degree, and he has no idea if any of that would have happened had Damian Lillard not said, “You’re not going home.”
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He has tried to make his friend proud ever since.
(Top photo courtesy of Dejon Lloyd, pictured center)
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