The microphone dangled from his right hand, a notebook perched in his left, the prose taking a minute to hit De’jon Benton’s tongue.
He was a thinker, not a rusher. And a sanctuary of creatives waited for him this August night, an artist development workshop the brainchild of Leila Steinberg, the founder of emotional-literacy foundation Aim4TheHeart and the first manager to one Tupac Shakur.
Participants, as required by Steinberg, must bring an artistic response to a particular topic for every workshop. And for two weeks, when he first showed up, Benton didn’t speak, Steinberg remembered. Not one word. No contribution. No discussion.
“Always hard with ballplayers,” Steinberg said, “because we have an impression that they’re not thinkers.”
But he came back. Always. So she figured there was something.
It hurts Regina Sherman to say, as a mother. But many simply never saw her son’s potential. Benton grew up with a stutter, taking speech classes through his time at Pittsburg High in the Bay Area, birthing a highly intentional and oft-deliberate approach to speaking. He had learning differences, his Pittsburg football coaches came to find, that sometimes necessitated explaining his assignments repeatedly. Sherman, herself, never anticipated Benton going to college for financial reasons, a largely single mother making ends meet on a nurse’s assistant’s salary.
But Benton was recruited by USC out of Pittsburg, and he has stuck out four tumultuous years as a Trojan to become a key piece of USC’s defensive line. He found himself, too, through lyricism and spoken-word, an outlet that’s grown since he first started putting pen to paper in high school.
When the 6-foot-1, 270-pound redshirt senior finally shared at the workshop, Benton gave an off-the-cuff, “Shakespearean” spoken-word performance, as Aim4TheHeart outreach director Louis King said, that blew the group away.
“I was like, ‘Oh, (expletive)’ … this kid’s mind is…
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