The Storyteller of the White Sox

“OK,” he says. “This is years ago — maybe 2011, I think — and I’m doing a double-header of high school basketball games in East Syracuse.” (Jason triple majored in broadcasting, economics, and psychology at Syracuse University and got his start in sports broadcasting there.) “It’s toward the end of the first game, and a kid gets off the bench wearing big plastic protective goggles, like lab safety goggles, and me and my partner — he was actually the mayor of East Syracuse — we joke about it, saying things like, ‘Hey, looks like that kid knows his way around a Bunsen burner.’

“Soon as that first game is over, my producer comes over to me and says, ‘There’s a parent here who wants to talk to you, but I told him I was going to talk to you myself about it. He’s the father of the kid with the goggles, and he wants you to know his son lost an eye in an accident months ago, and it’s taken him this long to get his confidence back to get on the court, and that’s why he’s wearing those goggles.’ ”

Something has changed in Jason while he’s telling the story. He’s no longer killing time during a rain delay. He is trying to get us to understand something: namely, why Jason Benetti is so hard on himself.

“So I ask him where the father is, and he points him out, and I get up and I walk across the court to him, and he tells me he talked to his daughter at home who’s crying because I made fun of her brother’s goggles after all he’s been through. And I say to the father, ‘Did you see me walk across the court? Did you watch how I walk? Now, can you imagine how bad I feel right now because I stupidly and without thinking made a joke about how somebody else looked?’ ”

The fact that Jason Benetti was born with cerebral palsy, or CP, and thus limps quite noticeably is usually the first thing mentioned in stories about him — for example, the Washington Post headline “Jason Benetti Refuses to Let Cerebral Palsy Affect His Game” — and I had intended to get it out of the way early in this profile and then never mention it again. Jason has become a friend of mine in the last few years, and I assumed he was deeply tired of being held up as an Inspirational Story. He is — sort of. And yet his disability is a significant part of what drives him, what obsesses him, and what has shaped his life — not so much in how it has limited his physical activities but in how it has suffused his sense of self.