Virginia Tech’s Marcus Davis dedicates career to adopted family

BLACKSBURG, Va. — On Dec. 23, 1989, Lillian Tann received a phone call from Virginia Beach’s Department of Human Services.

“Do you want a baby? His mom just walked out the hospital and left him.”

It wasn’t totally unexpected. Tann’s house on Beautiful Street, less than two miles from the Atlantic Ocean, had long been a haven for forgotten children. A school bus driver in Virginia Beach for 30 years, Tann and her husband, Wilford, had become foster parents years earlier and taken in a number of children.

So Tann made the 10-minute drive to Virginia Beach General Hospital, not realizing how that decision would resonate almost 23 years later.

“Usually I just kept [foster children] three or four months and then their parents would come pick them up,” Tann recalled last week. “Ain’t no parents come pick up Marcus, so I kept him. I had him at two days old and he felt like mine. He’s been my baby ever since.”

Marcus turned into Virginia Tech redshirt senior Marcus Davis, a tantalizing yet polarizing talent who could become the program’s first 1,000-yard receiver this year. Every play he makes, though, is a tribute to the people who raised him in place of the family he hardly knows.

“Every time I do something, I thank them just for keeping me. It’s a blessing. Things like that usually don’t happen. I don’t think I’d be here without them,” Davis said recently. “I don’t know what my life would have been like if they hadn’t did what they did for me.”

‘It is what it is’

Now 80 years old, Tann initially couldn’t remember the first name of Davis’s birth mother last week. Davis doesn’t know it, either. He has spoken to her only a few times, mostly over the phone, and neither Tann nor Davis have met his father.

But Tann called back, her memory of Michelle Davis jogged after a conversation with a reporter. Michelle grew up across the way on Beautiful Street, but moved away years before Marcus was born.

Tann knew about their long-ago connection when she picked up Marcus at the hospital. She even took Marcus to see his mother in those first days, “because social services told me to since [at that time], he was just in foster care.” Every now and then, Michelle Davis would return to her old neighborhood to see her son.

“She’d then leave to go wherever. I didn’t ask no questions. I didn’t want to know,” said Tann, who eventually gained full custody of Marcus. “When he got school-sized, we didn’t see her that much. She didn’t have enough sense to keep in close contact with her son, so why should I keep in contact with her?”

Outside of the circumstances that brought him to the Tann household, Marcus Davis calls his upbringing “a good childhood,” with many days spent playing football and basketball with his cousins at Seatack Recreation Center. He became an honor roll student in school, stayed out of trouble and continues to go to church to this day.

Davis joined his first organized football team at age 5, around the same time Tann had to address the situation involving his birth parents. Tann said Davis initially learned of his mother and father from a member of the Virginia Beach Department of Human Services.