The consensus from Damian Lillard’s teammates and coaches at Weber State: Nobody worked harder on the court to get where he is today.
And also, nobody worked harder to avoid spending money off it. That’s right: Damian Lillard was comically frugal. He loved rapping, water balloon fights and Burger King during his four years at Weber State, and with a singular focus, he willed himself into becoming the sixth pick in the NBA draft.
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This is the story about Lillard before he was famous.
Randy Rahe, head coach: I remember when we took him to the arena on his recruiting visit. He ran down the steps, got a ball and started shooting. We couldn’t get him out of the gym that first night. I mean, we had dinner to go to; we had other stuff planned. I said, “Screw it. If this is what he wants to do, let’s just stay here.” So we stayed in the gym for a long time.
Trevor Morris, center: He came in as a freshman, and I vividly remember us all going to one party together and the night going kind of long. And then after that, he was very selective of when he went out, just because he had a goal.
Lindsey Hughey, guard: He didn’t drink alcohol. He woke up every morning to go work out, then made himself go to sleep at 10 while everyone else was running around the dorm.
Byron Fulton, forward: I was a partier, for sure. I used to get really drunk, and I would always try to get Dame to drink. “Take a shot of this, take a sip of this.” But Dame never drank. Never. He would have fun with us. He’d be the life of the party, dancing, having a good time, and he was probably the only one not drinking. That’s his personality. He doesn’t need that stuff to have fun.
Josh Noble, guard: The first time I got to school I was trying to go out and party. But Dame told me, “I don’t party, I don’t do none of that stuff. I’m trying to get to the NBA.” He told me that in our first conversation.
Phil Beckner, assistant coach: He was so damn tight with his money. He was the biggest tightwad ever.
Fulton: Oh Lord. Dame was probably the cheapest teammate I ever played with.
Beckner: He had a broken window in his car and he wouldn’t get it fixed. He couldn’t get the ice off his car one day so he had to put his head out the window to drive to class.
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Kaden Kirk, video coordinator: I started my days pretty early, and one day it was a snowstorm. I went to get breakfast at Burger King, and I’m looking at this old car. This guy had his door open the whole time and was leaning out the car door to order. Of course, he had a beanie on so I couldn’t really see who it was, but the more I looked, the more I realized it was Damian. He wouldn’t spend money on getting his window fixed.
Kyle Bullinger, forward: Every single day Damian Lillard ate Burger King for lunch. Every. Single. Day.
Kellen McCoy, guard: We all killed some Burger King. But Dame loved it. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
Noble: He always ordered off the dollar menu and always used coupons. If he found a coupon somewhere, he would use it. He wasn’t paying full price for nothing.
Eric Duft, assistant coach: There’s a pizza place here and they would send me texts like, “Get two mediums for $10.99.” I sent it out to our players once and was like, “If anybody wants cheap pizza, go here.” Damian was the first one to text me back within like 30 seconds, and he said, “Hey, coach Duft, anytime you get something like that, send it to me.”
Fulton: He would eat the meals the coaches would give us in the locker room, like PB&J sandwiches. On the road trips, he’d freaking fill his bag with as many Powerades and Gatorades as he could.
Morris: He used to borrow my car in college and I keep joking that one of these days I’m going to call him up and say, “Dame, you never filled up my car with gas. It’s time you pay up.” I swear to you he never filled up my car with gas. He was just as cheap as he can be.
Beckner: He goes to Adidas Nation and forgets his phone charger. Instead of buying a phone charger while he’s out there, his phone just dies and no one can get in touch with him. Well, I’m supposed to pick him up from the airport. I get to the airport, and I cannot find him.
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Duft: Phil was not happy.
Beckner: I had to ask the people at the airport to page Damian Lillard. So they were like, “Damian Lillard, your ride is at station one.” And then he tells me they gave him little cash gift cards to pay for his bag fee. Damian said, “I put both my two bags into one and saved the other card” — and he still didn’t buy a phone charger.
Duft: Ask Byron about his Netflix account.
Fulton: Oh my God, man. This guy. His last year at Weber he moved in with us. There were four of us in this house. Dame asked me for my Netflix password so I gave it to him. Then after he got Rookie of the Year, I went on my Netflix one day, and this dude had himself his own account on my account, with his own little display box on there. I’m like, “Hold up.”
Kirk: About a week or two after he got drafted, he sent me a text asking me for my Netflix login.
Fulton: And then one day, I forgot to update my credit card info with Netflix. We’re on a road trip, and Dame texted me, “Hey, what happened with Netflix? Why isn’t it working?” There were at least two or three years where I was paying for his Netflix.
Beckner: So one weekend, after he was MVP of the Big Sky, he wanted to work out. It was on a Sunday. I told him, “Dame, the only gym that’s open is the Ogden Athletic Club, and it costs $10 to get in.” Guess what he said? He said, “I’m not paying $10 to work out”…We went back and forth, and I said this phrase: “Is $10 worth the price of your dream?” He goes, “Phil, I’ll pay the $10.”
Rahe: God bless him.
Bullinger: I’ll never forget this. We played BYU at home during his freshman year, and they drummed us by 30. That was a Wednesday. The next morning, we had two-a-days on both Thursday and Friday.
Rahe: Basically, I got pissed. I said, “OK, let’s go.” I told our staff: “We’re either going to head north or we’re going to head south. I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but we’re going to find out the toughness, the competitiveness of our team.” I remember walking down to our practice and I asked our staff, “What about Dame? He’s a freshman. Think he can handle it?” He hadn’t really shown who he was yet. And they said, “We don’t know yet.”
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Bullinger: They were the two most brutal days in terms of physical exhaustion that I had endured in my life. It was essentially two hours of a fistfight on the basketball floor.
McCoy: I’m pretty sure we practiced six times in two days.
Bullinger: It was the conclusion of the Friday practice. There was a loose ball and Damian claws through a guy, sprints over and dives on the floor to get the ball. The whole team goes nuts, and we’re running into the team room. As I was running by, Coach grabbed Damian by the neck, put his arm around him and said, “You just grew up right there.” It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. It was like after that moment he realized how he had to compete at that level.
Duft: He was a stud in those practices, and it reinforced to us that if you challenged him, he was going to respond.
Noble: He was not one to back down from nothing.
McCoy: We were playing Northern Colorado his freshman year. We were down, getting beat pretty bad, but we start chipping away, and I think we were down by two. We had the ball out of bounds, so coach Rahe calls time out.
Rahe: We ran a play for Kellen, they blew it up, Damian said, “Screw it,” came off a ball screen and makes the shot. We go to OT and win. That’s when it hit me how good this kid was going to be.
McCoy: I loved him. I felt like I could ride with him. I felt like he was ready to go battle with anybody, and that was one thing I liked most about him. He wasn’t scared of anybody.
Frank Otis, forward: We had an open gym in Dame’s last year. My boy James Hajek is like 6-11, so Dame comes down the middle of the lane to dunk.
Noble: I don’t know what James was thinking. I think in midair he realized who it was.
Otis: I swear at one point Dame was at the top of the backboard.
James Hajek, center: Well, OK. OK, so. Yes.
Otis: We were like, “That’s it. Coach, shut down open gym. It’s over.”
Frank Otis, forward: Water balloons, man. That was our thing.
Noble: You know out there in Utah it snows a lot. So when we’d get a little bit of the sun coming up, we ran around our whole apartment complex with water balloons. He was the mastermind of it. He would hit everybody first and next thing you know the whole dorm is filling up water balloons.
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Hughey: He don’t play around with those water balloons.
Noble: We played a prank on a guy from our team. You know how you have so many different players from different places, and not everybody has everyone’s phone numbers? There was a guy on the team named Cody Larson. We started texting his phone and we were acting like a fan, like a girl. We were texting him for a few days, and then when he finally asked for a picture, we just sent him a picture of us.
Bullinger: The night before our first conference game as freshmen, there were a few of us that were dumping snow. I remember us going out, and Damian had never ever partaken in a snowball fight. We showed him the ropes. And long story short, I believe the snowball fight ended with us trying to throw snowballs at our friends inside a local business while we were on the outside. Like I told you, he was a great leader, so I accept no responsibility.
Hughey: It was snowing super hard one time at Weber. Dame woke everybody up and told them Phil was checking classes and it was time to go. We all got dressed and left, but for some reason, he didn’t leave. We went to campus and there was nobody on campus. We ended up coming back, and he started laughing instantly. He was like, “You didn’t get the message?”
Noble: We used to rap every day and make music videos on our iPhone. Like, we were really trying to make albums.
Hughey: When I first got to Weber State, he was a freshman at the time. I’m from Texas and he’s from Oakland and he started rapping to me that first day. I was like, “Man, I don’t understand a word you’re talking about.”
Hajek: I really like country music, and a lot of times I would give him a ride. I would always have country music on. Dame was like, “Bro, what is this?” I was like, “It’s good!” He said, “Play me a country song that I’ll like.” I have no idea why — I don’t even really know this song — but I played “Kiss My Country Ass” by Blake Shelton. I played that for Dame one time and Dame was like, “Alright, I mess with this song.”
Noble: He was just all about fun, man. His off-the-court technique is really what makes him so good on the court. It’s what makes the players believe in him because he brings everybody together.
Otis: I’m gonna tell you how selfish he was: The dude had a Playstation with one controller so nobody else could play. You’d just hear Dame in his room: “Oh! Oh!” He was always playing My Player on (NBA) 2K, just trying to get better on My Player.
Fulton: One of the summers it was just us two staying together. All I heard, literally all day for two weeks straight, was him yelling, “Thabeet!” He was playing with Hasheem Thabeet on the game, his player was throwing him lobs, and he would just scream, “THABEEEET!”
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Noble: He always played My Player so he would create himself and play. He related to the grind.
Fulton: It’s kind of testament to how he is in real life. You start off with this guy who is rated like 60 overall in the game, and you build him up.
Otis: He treated the My Player like it was actually him. He was like, “I gotta go work out, I gotta go make my dude better.” I think that’s one of the things that made him obsessed with My Player is because Dame was always about getting better every day, and on the video game you could actually get better.
Bullinger: I don’t know if anybody has ever spent more time in the gym than him.
Otis: Coach Rahe had to literally kick him out of the gym for a couple days just so he could take a break.
Noble: He’d still sneak in the gym or he’d find another gym, like a high school gym and shoot there.
Hajek: In Utah, pretty much every Mormon church has a basketball court. There was a Mormon church right near where our gym was. He must have shot more in that gym than any of the church ball players. Damian Lillard has probably shot more on those hoops than anybody else.
Noble: Nothing could stop him from getting his shots up. Not even coaches.
Beckner: One time we had a team practice, which was tough. Then after that he did an individual shooting session with me. A couple other guys stuck around and were shooting and they had finished and everyone went to shower. Before you know it, that dude came out in his socks to shoot again. I remember looking at one of the other assistants like, “This dude just loves the game.”
Hajek: When I was a freshman, I was driving with him and he was talking about going to the NBA. He was good, he was special, he was different. He was going to get his shot. But it wasn’t really there yet. So he was talking about going to the NBA and I just made some comment off the cuff like, “Me too.” I laughed when I said it because I didn’t think it was realistic for my goals. He said something along the lines of: “Why are you laughing? If that’s your goal, go after it. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”
(Top photo: Greg Wahl-Stephens / Associated Press)