Class clown Dion Dawkins has always looked for a laugh, even through childhood struggles

Dion Dawkins’ smiling face beams on television, online, on billboards. The reason changes sometimes, whether he’s selling or advocating or simply reveling in his glory as the Buffalo Bills’ star left tackle and class clown.

You can almost hear the exuberance blurting from Dawkins’ picture on the box of Buffalo Shnow Crunch, his cereal that raises money for his foundation, Dion’s Dreamers. Even after difficult Bills losses, he faces the cameras and microphones because he insists it’s a leader’s obligation. The answers aren’t canned. Although frequently ridiculous, his metaphors are meant to provoke thought. He savors his grand platform.

But there was one topic Dawkins wasn’t OK to explore, at least not on a sweltering afternoon at Bills training camp.

“There is luck, definitely luck,” Dawkins said, tears filling his eyes. His usually booming voice dipped to a whisper. “I’m thankful and I get real emotional because I’m very in tuned with who I am. I say ‘Thank you’ a lot, a lot, a lot.

“I know that I’m not perfect, but whatever angel is there? Who knows, bro?”

Unable to choke out any more words, Dawkins emitted a nervous chuckle and terminated the interview with a respectful fist bump. He made eye contact as he did so, looking for reassurance that he didn’t need to elaborate.

No explanation was necessary.

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Dawkins discussed his origin story in a series of interviews with The Athletic. He’s proud of how he grew up in Rahway, N.J.,  and all he overcame — a profound stutter, a penchant for petty crimes, situations that derailed many close to him, coaches who insisted he wasn’t Division I-caliber, the arrest at Temple University.

Dawkins realizes how incredibly close he came to not tasting any of his fruits.

Monday night, 20 miles from his boyhood home, Dawkins and the Bills will play the New York Jets at the Meadowlands. Since his last visit, he signed a three-year contract worth $60.06 million, including $37.46 million in guarantees. He has been selected to three straight Pro Bowls. Teammates voted him the Bills’ nominee for the prestigious Walter Payton Man of the Year Award the past two seasons.

“Dion is built different,” said his older brother, Kirit Dawkins, who served five years in prison on a gun charge and inspired Dion to speak out on criminal justice reform. “With the way he grew up? He has such a well-rounded character. That’s a blessing.

“It’s hard to make the right decisions, but he made more steps forward than steps back, and he learned every step of the way.”

When Dion Dawkins returns to where it all started, it will be obvious how far he continues to go.

Everybody in Dion’s family refers to him as “the baby.” Never mind that he’s 6 foot 5, 320 pounds. First off, he’s the youngest of five. Yet perhaps more significantly, he still acts like an adolescent.

“I have this wonderful, gigantic, teddy bear of a son,” Lisa Dawkins said. “He’s warm and loving and giving, full of energy, full of life, never sits still.”

She laughed as she spoke, but her words were tinged with exhaustion, like young Dion put serious mileage on her patience. She described him as a “busy, rambunctious, annoying little boy.” Kirit called him a “little Tasmanian devil.”

“He thought he could fly,” Lisa Dawkins said. “He was running into walls, falling off dressers, bouncing all over the place. He split his mouth open from his lip to his jaw. He always had a dent in his head, bruises all over.”

Dion struggled to speak until he was 3. He couldn’t repeat the alphabet, say his numbers or spell his name. He concocted a language to communicate the best he could.

“He stuttered terribly,” Lisa Dawkins said. “You hear all those clicks and noises he makes, that’s normal to me because he’s always made those funny noises. He spoke a different language.”

The Stuttering Foundation says 1 percent of the world’s population stutters, and about 5 percent of all children cope with the disorder for at least six months. Common issues related to stuttering include anxiety, embarrassment and avoiding social situations.

Dion Dawkins didn’t experience any of those. His spirit was undeniable. Rather than wilt, his personality blossomed in contempt of his stutter. Among the tricks he adopted was to acknowledge his stutter before others could beat him to it.

“I’m not going to allow y’all to put me in a pocket,” Dawkins said. “If I were to stutter bad, I would make fun of myself to cure the room. I would give and take the blow myself to avoid the bullets.

“If we were playing pickup ball, I would say ‘D-d-d-d-d-d-dunked on your dumb ass!’ I’d flip it. ‘I’m scoring b-b-b-b-b-b-baskets.’ They’d have no choice but to laugh and feel dumb for picking on me.”

For sure, Dawkins’ size and willingness to throw a punch kept him from being bullied for the most part. But what gave him the most confidence, upon a therapist informing Dion his brain works faster than his mouth can handle, was convincing himself that he possessed a supercomputer inside his head. Nobody else he knew had one of those.

Now he’s an unofficial Bills spokesman, a go-to interview machine who is bound to say anything. He’s an advertising star with West Herr Auto Group. He’s on Buffalo Niagara International Airport signs, welcoming folks back home alongside quarterback Josh Allen, tight end Dawson Knox and special-teams legend Steve Tasker. Dawkins is a pitchman for AAA with a personalized promo code for new member signups. The NFL’s Inspire Change campaign has featured him in commercials advocating youth mentorship, voter registration and criminal justice reform. Buffalo’s chapter of the Pro Football Writers of America voted Dawkins the inaugural Kent Hull Stand Up Guy Award winner.

“My stutter is still kind of there,” Dawkins said. “I might say ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh …’ and the word just won’t come out. I’ll just fight through it. I use filler words I go to immediately. ‘Like’ is one of them. I think ‘and’ is another one for, and I use ‘but’ real subtle. Those words recalibrate me.

“I stayed in front of it. I was, like, ‘I can’t let a stutter defeat me. I got too much life to live.’”

Dawkins always lived life to the fullest. He could engage with adults as readily as children. That’s how a preteen strikes up a lifelong friendship with his neighborhood’s Mister Softee driver.

Rob Perrine would pull his ice cream truck with the iconic jingle onto Bryant Avenue around 8 p.m. and wait for Dion, who’d soon arrive not only with his own bowl, but also to hop inside for the rest of Perrine’s evening rounds.

“He’d get vanilla with extra sprinkles and even more sprinkles and more sprinkles,” Perrine said. “He was a goofy kid. Young and dumb, living the life.”

Perrine shook his head often, but he marveled at the little hellion’s personality. Dion was loyal, helpful, competitive and ambitious.

At 13, Dion started a business. The main job was shoveling snow, different price points for the walkway, only tire tracks or the whole driveway. He’d start cars to warm them up before work. His business card also offered another service.

“No one ever hired him to babysit,” Lisa Dawkins said.

Dion wasn’t a doe-eyed, Rahway cherub. For all his admirable traits, the boy’s devil-may-care attitude could ruin someone else’s day and easily could have destroyed his future.

He acknowledges he was raised better, but risky behavior appealed to him. Lisa Dawkins was a tarmac worker at Newark Liberty International Airport. Across the highway, his father, Eric Dawkins, worked at the Anheuser-Busch brewhouse. The neighborhood around Bryant Avenue is working-class, but on a bicycle — whether it was his or not — Dion liked venturing into sketchier areas.

Dion stole bicycles, went into homes uninvited, snatched Halloween bags from kids, threw snowballs at moving cars to see if the driver would stop to fight.

“Regular Jersey s—,” Dawkins said. “I didn’t pop cars. I was a kid and liked bikes. What do you want? I could’ve been doing way worse.

“If I could change something, I probably wouldn’t have went inside anyone’s house. That’s so whack.”

Lisa Dawkins recalled the moment when Dion finally started to grasp the consequences of being an unrepentant knucklehead. He fished the wallet from a Rahway High teacher’s purse and used her credit card to order pizza. Dion went across the street and sat on the porch, waiting for the delivery, not knowing a police car was on the way instead.

By this time, Perrine coincidentally had taken a job as Rahway High’s custodian and no longer laughed off Dawkins’ quirkiness. Perrine had watched plenty of good kids make horrible mistakes and believed no other reminder should’ve been needed than the intimidating, iconic East Jersey State Prison dome that looms about 1.5 miles from the Dawkins’ house.

Football didn’t appear to be Dawkins’ ticket. Perrine noted Rahway High’s coaching staff didn’t help him get recruited. Dawkins still doesn’t speak to his former head coach. There were no college offers.

“He was so sad,” Lisa Dawkins said. “That boy cried.”

The most football support Dawkins received was from alumni Daniel and Antonio Garay, the latter a wrestling All-American at Boston College and 10-year NFL defensive lineman who spoke hard truths Dawkins eventually heeded. They convinced Dawkins to knock off the foolishness and to recognize a free college education — if not professional football — was possible. Merely mentioning the Garay brothers’ influence on his life turns Dawkins pensive.

“They made it,” Dawkins said. “When Antonio spoke to me, he was a superstar. He said, ‘Bro, if you stop with all the silly stuff you’re doing, you can do this.’ I said, ‘Man, you don’t got to lie to me.’ But he wasn’t, and I’m thankful for that.”

With only a partial scholarship and help from an uncle who knew the head coach, Dawkins enrolled at Hargrave Military Academy in 2012 to mature physically, mentally, emotionally, academically. One could argue it was the most pivotal autumn of his football life. It led to a few college offers, but Temple University rookie head coach Matt Rhule impressed Dawkins most and landed the raw-but-intriguing prospect.

As a sophomore, Dawkins permanently took over at left tackle for a program that returned to the AP national poll for the first time in 36 years.

And then he almost blew it. The January after his sophomore season, Dawkins and edge rusher Haason Reddick were arrested for assaulting two Temple students in a bar fight. Rhule suspended Dawkins and Reddick. The charges and a potential trial hung over their heads for nearly two years before they were placed into a diversionary program.

“A lot of the decisions and actions that happen can create a giant U-turn or take you off the road,” Dawkins said. “More so, it’s being present in where you are and understanding that in the blink of an eye, everything can change. You have to live life and respect life to the fullest.”

Buffalo drafted Dawkins 63rd overall in 2017. He has been their starting left tackle since Week 9 that year. Only six players drafted ahead of him have been named to more Pro Bowls.

As prominent as Dawkins has been on the field, his organizational presence looms as large.

“He’s always adding, not subtracting,” said long snapper Reid Ferguson, the only player with a longer Bills tenure. “He brings the energy. Having a guy with that big of a plus over his head every day is such an advantage to your team.”

“He has an unbelievable ability to be a social chameleon,” Allen said. “He can blend in with people from any background, ethnicity, race, social class. He just finds ways to connect with people, and it comes from a very good place in his heart. Guys love him for it.”

Few do more work in the community. Through Dion’s Dreamers, he donates food, school supplies and cash. The nonprofit has held fundraising events specifically for the Buffalo 5/14 Survivor’s Fund and FeedMore WNY’s School Food Pantry Program. He has hosted a massive 716 Day event the past eight years in Martin Luther King Jr. Park.

As Dawkins prepares for his annual New Jersey homecoming, he’s mindful of how easily he could’ve failed to recognize all the opportunities that brought this incredible life.

You cannot see it in Dawkins’ jubilant photo on the Buffalo Shnow Crunch box, but on the edge of his left hand is a tattoo that reads “0.001%” – a reminder of the odds against anyone to reach the NFL, let alone a stutterer to snap out of his dangerously mischievous ways to become an outspoken mainstay and make an indelible mark.

“It’s not just football; it’s life,” Dawkins said, this time with a twinkle in his eye. “This is the percent that I am in this world and how I see myself. It’s a very, very small percent beyond the percent. That’s why I live the way I do. I’m thankful. I’m joyful. I don’t fake it.

“I’m just Dion, and I don’t shy away from being Dion.”

(Top photo: Perry Knotts, Bryan Bennett / Getty Images)