The dedication of Barbara Kingsolver’s searing 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead, is three simple words: “To the survivors.”
Kingsolver expounds more on that in the final words of her acknowledgments at the end of a Pulitzer Prize–winning work that is a modern adaptation of the Dickens classic about marginalized and exploited children, David Copperfield: “For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.”
Kingsolver might as well have been writing that to Kentucky running back Ray Davis. The book is for him. It is about him. The main character, to a profound extent, is him.
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Ray Davis, former ward of the court in San Francisco, former foster-home vagabond, former child who was homeless, former couch surfer and pallet crasher, is one of the survivors. He has, like Demon Copperhead himself, football to thank for giving him a place and a purpose—but unlike that character, who was ensnared by opioid addiction after a football injury, Davis has so many more happy things in his life.
Ray Davis is no longer invisible. Far from it. He has a degree from an elite university, having graduated last year from Vanderbilt before transferring to Kentucky. He is a college star blowing up in real time, second nationally in yards from scrimmage, fresh off a 280-yard running game against Florida, now preparing to face the daunting defense of No. 1 Georgia in prime time Saturday. He will get a chance to earn a job in the NFL in 2024.
He has young people who look up to him and cheer him on. He has parental figures who care: a woman whose willingness to give a random ride home from an AAU basketball tournament turned into a life-changing influence; a biological father who has overcome incarceration and his own youth spent on the streets to be a presence. He has peers who support him: current Wildcats teammates, those on previous teams at Vandy and Temple, a 25-year-old personal trainer in Philadelphia who shed happy tears with him on the phone after that breakout game against the Gators.
“He’s dug himself out of a grave life put him in,” says Bryan Haire, an assistant at Saint Joe’s Prep in Philadelphia, who began working with Davis on running back skills five years ago. “He’s had to scratch and claw for everything he’s got. I don’t care what he does for the rest of his life in football. I’ll always be proud of that kid.”
She asked me what I wanted to be whenever I grew up. I had to think about that. … I told her nobody ever asked me that question before, about growing up and what I wanted to be, so I didn’t know. Mainly, still alive. —Demon Copperhead
In a part of the world where dreams are cultivated instead of crushed, it’s commonplace for kids to envision themselves doing exciting things in later years. Astronauts, musicians, movie stars, athletes. Famous people doing fun things.
Like Demon Copperhead, Ray Davis grew up having no such fanciful daydreams about a far-off future. Fame? Fortune? Impossible to foresee. In his Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, the concerns were far more immediate.
“I was just thinking about where my next meal was going to be—it sounds cliché but it’s true,” Davis says. “I’m not the kid who had NFL dreams. I’m thinking about what clothes I’m going to wear the next day.”
Ray’s parents, Jessica Blazer and Raymond Davis, were largely absent due to legal problems. Other family members occasionally took him in, but nothing was permanent. He spent time in a homeless shelter. By age 8, he was part of the California foster care system.
One of the rules within that system is that foster children need to have their own room with a family that takes them in. For part of elementary school, Ray says he deceived case workers by concocting a scenario in which he would live with his grandmother.
“We had to lie and say I had a room in there so I could continue to live with her,” he says. “Hey, I could be in the shelter again, or I can continue to make this pallet on the floor and live with family and just accept it. That’s what I had to do.”
Sports were the respite from the grinding reality of the rest of Ray’s life. The son of a standout running back at Galileo High School who broke O.J. Simpson’s record for most touchdowns in a season, he had natural athleticism and competitiveness. He excelled at football and basketball and was in demand to join hoops travel teams.
But questions came with his participation. Why wasn’t his family at the games? How did he get to and from practice? Ray just seemed to come and go on his own, sometimes asking for rides from teammates but usually requesting to be dropped off short of where he actually was staying. If there was such a place.
Putting up a false front became a way of life. He had answers when questions came about his circumstances, and most of them were lies.
“I had to put on that persona going to school every day that everything’s great,” Ray says. “Then when I left it was back to living with someone who I didn’t even know what their last name was, sleeping on the floor, sleeping on the couch, whatever.”
At 12 years old, Ray wound up in a homeless shelter for about two months, living in a basement beneath Zuckerberg General Hospital in San Francisco. At that age, he was less likely to be taken in by another family than a younger child would be. He spent days texting everyone he knew, asking whether he could live with them.
Ray eventually moved back in with his grandmother, but the circumstances were bleak. Not enough food, not enough clothing. But he kept going to school, kept playing sports.
“I had to adapt,” he says. “If I had just accepted what life had given me at the moment, I wouldn’t be here today. I kid you not.”
He got through eighth grade when a couple of teachers, Ben and Alexa Kraus, let him move into their apartment for a while. Then in the spring of ninth grade, a six-hour car ride changed everything.
The deal here was, I would get a do-over. … New grade in a new school where I was the new boy. —Demon Copperhead
At the end of an AAU basketball tournament in Santa Barbara, Ray Davis asked teammate Bradley Ley whether he could catch a ride back to the Bay Area in the family’s Chevy Suburban. Lora Banks, Bradley’s mom, said sure, under one condition. She was going to give Ray a good-natured interrogation.
“I’m kind of nosy,” the mother of four says, laughing.
She could see how talented Ray was. She also could see that he was largely on his own. She set out, across the course of that drive north up the California coast, to find out why.
“I could have hopped in the car with three other people who would have not talked to me for six hours,” Ray says. “It was this woman having room in her car. She asked me over a thousand questions, and life took a different turn for me.”
Lora made Ray take off his headphones. She peppered him with questions. Some he ignored. Some he batted back with short answers. She asked whether he thought about going to college, and he just shook his head.
“My goal was to get to high school,” Ray says. “I wasn’t thinking about college, wasn’t thinking about the NFL, just getting to high school to play ball and see what happens.”
By the time they got back to San Francisco, a baseline of rapport had been established, but not much more. When Lora insisted on taking Ray to his house, he became evasive.
He wanted to be dropped off on a street corner. She said no.
She asked him to call his grandma to make sure she was home. He said his phone was out of data.
She offered him her phone. He said he didn’t know the number.
“Two and two is not equaling four here,” she thought. “There’s plenty of Eddie Haskells [from Leave It to Beaver] who will give you all the right answers, just saying what you want to hear. Ray’s not one of them. He was more than a little vague and aloof. I understand why now.”
Lora dropped Ray off on a corner as requested, troubled but not sure what else to do. At that moment, she certainly did not foresee where this was all headed.
“If you had told me he would become part of our household?” she asks. “I’d have thought you were high.”
But in the ensuing days, Ray began “dropping by” the house in a largely white neighborhood to hang out. Often around dinner. He was welcomed in, but with more questions: Our kids are doing their homework, where’s yours?
“He had a backpack with no homework,” Lora recalls.
Lora and her husband, Greg Ley, were determined to help Ray get his academics in order while he kept playing on the AAU team. Ray logged her into his school portal so she could see where he stood, and she steadily became more involved. Ray began sleeping on their couch.
By mid-summer the family had a handle on Ray’s home life, or lack thereof. Lora met with his case worker. They scheduled meetings that would prevent Ray from making practices, and the family pushed back. They knew how important sports were to him.
“It’s the difference between the system raising a kid versus a community or a family doing it,” Lora says.
She agreed to become Ray’s temporary legal guardian, in part so he could travel with the AAU team to a tournament out of state, in Las Vegas. While at that tourney, fate intervened again.
Word got back to friends who had young basketball players in San Francisco that Ray was playing with Bradley’s team in Vegas. Given Ray’s talent and questionable home circumstances, they suggested to Lora that she help him look into out-of-state high school options. They suggested finding a boarding school.
Lora, who grew up in a blue-collar household in Antioch, Calif., and was the first in her own family to go to college, didn’t know much about boarding schools. But she had a friend who had attended one in New York, and that friend also had a son playing travel basketball. She called him, and he jumped at the chance to help make introductions for Ray with the people at Trinity-Pawling, an all-boys prep school 60 miles north of New York City.
Ray, Lora and Bradley took a redeye flight to New York so Ray could sit down for an interview. Then there was a second interview over the phone. He expressed his desire to go, and a scholarship was offered.
But there were legal entanglements. Ray Davis Sr., who had been released from prison a while earlier, needed to become Ray Jr.’s legal guardian and sign off on him leaving the state for boarding school. Ray Sr.—“Mr. Ray,” as Lora calls him—had come a long way, holding down jobs and reconnecting with his children.
He met Lora and formed a partnership of sorts with her, signing over educational rights to her, realizing that his son staying in the same crime-ridden neighborhood for high school was a bad idea. “His dad has been able to flourish,” Lora says. “Mr. Ray has been completely a stand-up guy doing the right thing.”
At a court proceeding, 15-year-old Ray Jr. had to stand before a judge and express his desire for his dad to resume legal guardianship so that he could attend boarding school. “I want to go to college,” he told the judge, finally articulating a goal he previously couldn’t envision. “I want an education.” The judge granted his wishes.
When it was time to move Ray into the dorm at Trinity-Pawling, the travel group was Mr. Ray, Lora and Ray. As it turned out, that trip was Mr. Ray’s first time on an airplane.
They were a curiosity upon arrival. The culture shock was significant for Ray. But this unimaginable opportunity that evolved out of nowhere in a matter of months was not lost on a kid who entered foster care at age 8.
“He’s always been amazing at marshaling his resources,” Lora says. “He finds good people. He listens to everything. Even when he was living in chaos, he always got things done. He never whined or was a problem for anybody.”
The football came easy. Ray quickly became a standout, although interest from high-level colleges was sporadic at best. He dreamed of returning West to play for Oregon, but the Ducks never called. Outside of Purdue and some Mid-American Conference schools, the primary inquiries came from colleges in the Northeast.
After three years at Trinity-Pawling, Ray transferred to Blair Academy in New Jersey for a postgraduate year—over the objections of Lora and her husband. When invited to a camp at Temple, Ray ran a fast 40-yard dash and committed to Geoff Collins and the Owls in June 2018. Collins left for Georgia Tech in early December, but Davis stuck by his commitment and signed to play for new coach Manny Diaz. Then Diaz jilted Temple for Miami days later.
Nevertheless, Ray went to Temple and excelled immediately. Fast and powerfully built at 5'9", 210 pounds, he rushed for more than 900 yards and scored 10 touchdowns as a freshman. Then the pandemic hit, and during that unsettled time Ray lost his focus.
“I got content,” he says. “I fell into the fame, fell into being the star on campus. Then I realized all that could be taken away. I had to move on. Can I go somewhere else and win a job and showcase the player I was?”
Somewhere else was Vanderbilt. Ray wanted to prove himself in the fabled Southeastern Conference, and Vandy gave him the chance to immediately be a feature back. Nashville also provided an opportunity for Lora and her husband to get closer to Ray—they moved to town and split their time between Vandy games and visits to the Honky Tonk Highway, a favorite destination for Greg Ley.
Davis got off to a fast three-game start before an injury ended his 2021 season. He came back better than ever in ’22, gaining 1,000 yards on a 5–7 team and racking up five 100-yard rushing games.
“Running for 1,000 yards at Vanderbilt, that’s hard work,” Ray says. “That’s not a knock on them. I’m just saying that I had to put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it.”
The NFL draft feedback he got after the season was tepid—a mid-to-late-round pick. So Ray took his communication studies degree and went into the transfer portal, looking for one more college stop.
Kentucky, which has done extremely well building out of the portal, was the choice. The motivation he brought to Lexington was abundant.
“I’m going to show everybody,” Ray says of his mindset upon arrival. “I’m going to increase my draft stock. I’m going to be dominant, and you’re going to have to pay attention to me. I want people on that scouting report to have a big circle around my name.”
Mark Stoops has made a living with big backs at Kentucky. Bennie Snell, the school’s all-time leading rusher, played at 223 pounds. Chris Rodriguez, the No. 3 rusher in school history, was 224. With the smaller Davis, Stoops was willing to alter the attack to add some wiggle, some burst and some pass-catching skills.
“For him to trust me and say he’s willing to go into a new direction with me, I appreciate that,” Davis says.
That trust has been amply rewarded. Davis’s 594 rushing yards and eight rushing touchdowns lead the SEC, as do his 740 yards from scrimmage and 11 total TDs. He’s been the driving force behind Kentucky’s 5–0 start and No. 20 national ranking, with that epic performance against Florida planting the seeds of a potential Heisman Trophy campaign if he can keep it up.
Mr. Ray is thrilled to see his son’s career go far beyond where his own was curtailed, after high school. “He’s a fangirl, for sure,” Ray says with a laugh. “We’re not like an emotional kind of connection, but he’s just really proud. He’s my biggest fan.”
Meanwhile, Lora and Greg also relocated from Nashville to Lexington. They’ll stay through the Alabama game on Nov. 11, which also will be Davis’s 24th birthday, before returning to the Bay Area. He’s been grateful for Lora’s presence.
“She motivated me and gave me a reason to keep going,” Ray says. “She told me I wasn’t going to be a product of my environment and I wasn’t going to go down the route that a lot of my friends did.
“It was like seeing my future in her eyes. She had the belief. There was no Plan B. There was no Plan C. It was a Plan A—You’re going to become great. You’re going to get a great education, you’re going to be a great football player and you’re going to succeed in life.
“She didn’t want nothing in return. She didn’t care about money. She just wanted to see a kid she met and cared about succeed in life.”
A good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it. —Demon Copperhead
Ray Davis is an adopter of what became a famous phrase from Seattle Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith last year: “They wrote me off,” Smith said after a triumphant return from years in NFL obscurity. “But I ain’t write back, though.”
Davis puts his own spin on the saying: “A lot of people wrote me off, but I chose not to write back.”
He says this sitting in a meeting room at the Kentucky football facility, hands folded behind his head, green eyes gleaming. A once-invisible child slipping through the cracks, trying to find his way through life largely alone, is now celebrated. He’s aware of how incredible it all is.
“Being in that foster care system, being in that shelter, being the kid who had to lie continuously saying I lived with someone—all that stuff I went through—it’s the motivation to finally know it was for something,” Ray says. “At the end of the tunnel, there is a light. And God put me through all that for a reason.”
He recites his version of Geno Smith’s catchphrase again. Then adds his own postscript.
“That day when I’m ready to write back, it’s going to be a lengthy text message. It’s going to be a long one.”
