On his left forearm is a tattoo that reads “Child of David.”
“I pretty much grew up under his arm. Wherever he was, I was going with him,” 2023 undrafted free agent linebacker D’yontae Johnson told The Post of his father, David, after another Giants training camp practice had ended. “If he was walking to the store, I was right with him. I looked up to him. Whatever he was doing I tried to do. He was always lifting weights, I would be right behind him doing push-ups, whatever the case may be. We had a dumbbell set in the basement. … It kind of just started from that.”
It ended too soon, too tragically, when his father David succumbed to a seizure at age 45 in March 2020. D’yontae was 18.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” D’yontae said.
David had been found at his home.
“Nobody knew he was at home,” D’yontae said. “Kind of he was just there by himself. Just nobody heard from him in a while, which is unlike him.”
His father and mother, Makita Jones, had divorced eight years earlier.
“We were looking for his dad, so we were anticipating bad news,” Makita told The Post over the phone. “I let him know that the worst news has now come to be confirmed, and your dad has passed away and is no longer with us.”
D’yontae and his older brother Davion were together.
“I was downstairs in the basement watching ‘Ozark,’ actually,” D’yontae recalled.
She remembers him screaming “No, no, no! …”
“He was angry, and sad, and devastated,” Makita said.
She comforted him: “I hugged him as a mother would. I reassured him that he was great just as he is, his dad was very proud of him, I’m very proud of him, he can still make him proud. He’s not lost, we know where he is. It’s just when our mind goes to thinking of him no longer with us is when we’re sad. So just always know that he is with you, and keep pressing. There is still work to be done.”
His father and grandfather had ignited the NFL dream with flag football.
“It was difficult for me to get him on track and stay focused,” Makita said. “He wanted to communicate with him more. … His drive was to make us proud of him. And so he felt that he had not reached high enough in where he wanted to be to make his dad proud before he left here. So it’s more of a drive for him now. … It was difficult. It was difficult.”
D’yontae could not bring himself to speak at his father’s funeral.
“At the time, I couldn’t put the words together to figure out how I was feeling,” he said.
Soon it would be time to honor him.
“After that I got him tattooed, and then he’s just been with me ever since,” D’yontae said.
He would summon the strength to open up in an emotional speech to his University of Toledo teammates about the hardship he endured.
“Just how hard it was kind of dealing with his death and how I overcame that, and how I used that as motivation to keep going,” D’yontae said.
He broke down when he called his mother.
“My son is very prideful, and just his public display of vulnerability was extremely powerful,” Makita said.
D’yontae earned a degree in mechanical engineering and grew into a leader for a family — which includes his sisters Dari and Tamia, and stepmother Shameeka Johnson.
“I knew he would want me to be happy and to continue to strive in whatever it was I was doing,” D’yontae said.
Now, following a year on the practice squad, he pushes to realize his NFL dream. He intercepted a tipped pass on Thursday.
“He’s shown me great instincts,” Bobby Okereke told The Post. “He’s a true pro, from his preparation to his mindset, and he’s a heck of an athlete. He’s got all the intangibles of a great linebacker in this league.”
Makita would call D’yontae “Son of David” to uplift him even before his father died.
“It’s biblical. … His dad is still a king,” she said. “He embraced it, and that was his statement to his dad to do that in honor of him.”
D’yontae has a chain made in his father’s memory.
“I try to keep it with me either in my locker or with me on game day for sure,” he said.
