Benson Jerry. The kid with the fancy footwork. The kid that borrowed 30p for the bus. The kid that had never tried lasagne. The kid that had never flown. The no-longer-a-kid becoming the inspiration kids like him never had.
Every team needs a Benson Jerry. Every community needs one. And in Benson Jerry the NFL Academy has unearthed an exemplary beacon of its life-altering legacy.
Hunger built on hardship, an unteachable defiance, a no-corner-cutting work ethic and an infectious energy, forged in an environment designed for him to fail.
Jerry lived in the self-described "trenches" of Nigerian capital Abuja. He escaped said trenches to answer his calling on a football field. And now the defensive lineman is seeking to rule the gridiron trenches.
"Your mindset needs to be different for you to survive," Jerry tells Sky Sports. "There's this saying that if you can survive (where he's from) in Nigeria, you can survive everywhere.
"The whole journey, the NFL, the Academy, it's all changed my life. The Academy is my family. They showed me the world in ways that I couldn't imagine I would ever see in my life."
Benson Jerry during the NFL Academy's game versus. Schw..bisch Hall Unicorns Juniors
Image: Jerry during the NFL Academy's game versus. Schwabisch Hall Unicorns Juniors
Jerry's first answer in an interview with Sky Sports lasts roughly 15 minutes, uninterrupted, as he relays the winding journey from the outskirts of Abuja to the Loughborough-based NFL Academy. This interviewer considers jumping in, only for it to become a fitting reflection of how he made it here. Relentless, impassioned, breathless. All behind an unwavering smile and immovable blinkers.
"My parents trained us really well because the hood I grew up in there was lots of cultism, fighting," he explains.
"I've seen where somebody was killed and his body was just on the floor because of the fighting.
"There was no role model there, my brother was my motivation because he was always correcting me. I was using dance to leave my community, that's where I had the fun, when I'm dancing that's where the joy was."
These days Jerry is shimmying and slaloming on a different kind of dancefloor, where chop, spin and swim feature in his new-look catalogue of moves.
Back in Nigeria he and his family lived in a cramped and noisy compound made up of around 100 rooms housing multiple cultures, situated within an area riddled by violence, drugs, poverty, fear of police harassment, loitering and a shortage of clear pathways to success.
He credits the discipline and values instilled by his mother and late father, who passed away when he was 11, as his route to repelling the obstacles laid before him.
Benson Jerry
"Me and my best friend Michael would always leave the community, we would come back from a dance show and they'll tell you people have been fighting," he explains.
"I would come back from rehearsals and I would be very tired so I wouldn't have time to go outside and see what was happening, I would just go straight to bed."
As a familiar face, Jerry was often left alone by those that incited trouble in the area. But that wasn't the point. It wasn't the life he wanted.
Too tired to succumb to the chaos. Too smart to let it consume him. Too focused to surrender to the same mundane routine he witnessed others follow.
"Everybody in the compound is doing the same thing every day," he recalls. "You just wake up, you go outside, you sit. Nothing is pushing you. You're not pushing yourself.
"What's the goal of you waking up? You're looking for somebody to try and be like, but there was nothing."
Football had been alien to Jerry until 2019 when a school coach encouraged him to take part in trials in front of a friend travelling over from the United States, who was seeking talent to send back to America. Nothing came of it, apart from a football itch and a pair of funny shoes.
"After that they gave me football cleats, the shoe was massive, like a limo shoe," he laughs. "I took it home and everybody was like, 'what kind of shoe is this? Why is this shoe so big?'"
Benson Jerry
Image: Jerry: 'So many people back home are saying my story is their motivation'
The obsession was born. Jerry began consuming every snippet of football available on YouTube and immersing himself in every rule, every technique and every position. It was then during a dance competition that a director spotted him practising a football move in the background, approaching with intrigue before informing Jerry he was cousins with then-Texas A&M offensive lineman Smart Chibuzo.
From there the two began exchanging videos, Chibuzo providing tutorials to which Jerry would showcase his progress in reply. With equipment and facilities limited, he would set up chairs to pose as opponents in order to practice.
He eventually found his way into flag football in a nearby town a bus journey away in Abuja, initially ushered towards a role at cornerback and tasked with studying Jalen Ramsey clips. Soon afterwards he explored full contact football in addition to flag, juggling both formats with gym and dance as a story of perseverance others deemed worthy of investment.
Jerry recalls once needing to borrow 30p off his friend to catch the bus to training.
"30p is like roughly 600 Naira in Nigeria, if I'm not mistaken," he says. "I would message my friends and be like 'can you help me with money please, I don't have money?' and they would say that they believe in me and love what I'm doing.
"There's this friend I asked one day, he said, 'no, I love what you're doing, because you're not giving up', and he sent me 15,000 Naira to use for transport for the rest of the month.
"It was more motivation," he adds. "Football was new to my hood, they were surprised that I knew this sport.
"If I didn't have food some days this shop in my area would help me. It was an amazing place with help."
Benson jerry
Image: Jerry's life has been changed by the NFL Academy
What is the NFL Academy?
The NFL Academy is a global initiative that provides full-time high-school education and professional American football training. The Academy was launched at Barnet and Southgate College in May 2019 and is now based at Loughborough University.
Suddenly, he was the face of a community and a dream. Now all he had to do was learn a sport from scratch, while competing against the rest of Africa. No biggie.
"YouTube was my close friend," he laughs. "I was then told I should open Twitter so I could post my videos and gym workouts and tag coaches.
"One coach sent me a picture of YaYa Diaby (Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker) and said I should be built like him, like a 'mean ass', so I started going to the gym more and learning outside linebacker and defensive end."
One of Jerry's videos eventually caught the eye of two-time Super Bowl champion Osi Umenyiora, who serves as the NFL's lead ambassador in Africa.
Umenyiora wanted to know who had taught him, before being introduced to Coach YouTube. The former New York Giants pass rusher then asked Jerry to teach others who, like him, were gearing up for the next regional camp in Nigeria.
Having been unsuccessful at a previous camp, Jerry - one of 11 players from Nigeria to make the regional camp - this time impressed enough to become one of 29 prospects from across Africa invited to the three-day NFL Combine-style event at the NFL Africa programme in Nairobi, Kenya.
"That was the first time in my life I entered a plane," he says. "That was the first time I had left Nigeria in my entire life."
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The flights were about to get longer. Jerry ultimately secured a place at the NFL Academy in the UK, where education, world-class coaching and the opportunity to travel further awaited. His gates to the world had opened.
"I'm still learning, I just focus on how to get better and make everybody proud back home," he says.
"Coming to America was just a dream to me, now I'm glad to say I've been to America and other European countries to meet other cultures, other people. Back in the trenches, we could only dream. Football has changed my life."
Such has been his unlikely rise that the tale of Benson Jerry continues to spread around back home, where others are now seeking to make something of themselves in light of his success. One friend rang Jerry to tell him he was becoming a soldier, another informed him he was training to become a police officer.
"They will start mentioning names of people they don't want to be because of how he uses money to maybe smoke or take pills, that's not the motivation they want to see," he says.
"I would come back from dance and these people would be like 'do you have anything for me?', when we should be the one asking you. But now I can say my life has changed and my family are doing well."
The UK still remains relatively new for Jerry. He feels safer, he feels "free", he feels at home. Less violence, less fear, greater prospects and, well, some cuisine changes.
"The people here are nice, they see you and say hello and then you go your way, they go their way," he explains.
"I think the food is kind of new to me. When I came here, that was when I knew about bacon, now things like lasagne I'm trying for the first time. I'm getting used to all this stuff."
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But even in unfamiliar surroundings, Jerry has brought nuggets of home with him. In August the Academy posted a video of their fleet-footed defensive lineman dancing in the middle of his teammates as they celebrated his birthday. As he led, others followed, head coach Steve Hagen just about resisting temptation to join in.
"I've been teaching our head coach also, there's this favourite move that I taught him that he's always doing," laughs Jerry.
"Some days in the Academy we have a fun day or a fun Friday and we'll be dancing. We came back for camp one Sunday so he made me dance and teach the boys how to dance, it was nice."
He never imagined being here. He was never supposed to be here. Now he is, Jerry has college football in his sights.
"I can't just come here and go astray, I'm here because there are so many people up to me, so many people back home saying my story is their motivation. I want to make sure I get to the next level," he says.
From Abuja to Nairobi to Loughborough to... stay tuned.
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