How former USC football superstar Marcus Lattimore turned pain into poetry
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun, if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Marcus Lattimore was poetry in motion on the football field, lowered shoulders and long runs and a succession of empty-handed defenders left in his dust.
He amassed nearly 8,000 total yards, 104 touchdowns and three state championships in four years at James F. Byrnes High School, a pigskin powerhouse in Duncan, where football is life.
He rushed for 1,197 yards his first year at the University of South Carolina, where he still holds the Southeastern Conference school’s career rushing touchdowns record.
An injury smashed his Heisman hopes as a sophomore, but he seemed not to have missed a step as a junior, cleats like lightning, pads like thunder, his whole life a wide open field.
Then, on Oct. 27, 2012, on a play so gruesome it remains hard to watch, he flew to the left and was hit one last time.
His leg bent unnaturally. A broken wing instead of a broken tackle.
Lattimore dislocated and tore all four ligaments in his right knee that day.
He would never play football again.
‘Proof that you can reinvent yourself’
Writing words in a journal would help as he went adrift, unsure of what he wanted in life.
He stood on the sidelines, spent some time coaching, even returned to USC as a director of player development for a spell. But he knew he needed a new challenge. He found it in spoken word poetry.
Now he says the injury didn’t happen to him. It happened for him.
Once he twisted his body all over the field.
Now he turns phrases, actual poetry in motion.
He still cites the football players who preceded him at Byrnes High School as role models but his list of inspirations includes writing legends like Lucille Clifton, Linda Pastan, Toni Morrison.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is his favorite poet — the man’s “The world is a beautiful place” one of his favorite poems — but ask him in six months and that will probably change. The world has too few poets but so many to discover.
In June, Lattimore published his first book, “Scream My Name.” It’s a slim memoir about his short-lived but spectacular football career, a career that until recent months wasn’t mentioned on his Instagram page.
Five years after moving to Oregon from South Carolina, there are still some people in the South who have no idea he’s a poet and some people in the West who have no idea he was a football sensation.
Lattimore liked to keep his lives separate, building a name for himself in Oregon much the way he built one for himself in South Carolina, through hard work, discipline, focus and repetition.
The contents of his book and the release of recorded poems about football on his social media channels this year show that Lattimore is now embracing all the aspects of himself, the football player from South Carolina who writes poetry and the poet from Oregon who once played football.
“That is how I’m seen here,” he told me in an interview this month. “I am a poet or the theater guy or the narrator for the Portland Trailblazers. And then like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he played football.’ It’s a mind trip.... But you know what? It’s also proof that you can reinvent yourself and it’s proof that it’s all just a label.... It’s all arbitrary. At the end of the day, I’m neither one of those things, behind it all. I just am, behind it all. I’m not a football player or a writer. I’m just Marcus.”
With a season of high expectations on tap at USC, Lattimore expects to be glued to his TV for every game, rooting on the Gamecocks. Certain things you carry with you for life.
“My wife gets sick of me during football season,” he said. “It’s just something that happens to my body when August comes around. I start convulsing almost. It’s time, it’s time, it’s time, it’s time.”
Home is where the heart is, where you belong, where you feel comfortable.
Even if it’s complicated.
‘A mindset geared toward mastery’
The first time Lattimore ever boarded a plane was to visit the Nike headquarters in Oregon in high school.
There he was again a few years back, in Oregon, football and the South in his rearview, along with the sounds of cicadas and the Palmetto State’s picture of him as a gridiron god.
“I just wasn’t growing and I needed to be uncomfortable,” he said. “I needed to be somewhere where people didn’t know who I was and just go silent, away from the noise, turn the volume down and see what’s next, and that led me to exploring the city of Portland.”
He’d been drafted by the San Francisco 49ers and got a sizable signing bonus but after two years of rehab, he told the team he was done. He’d started journaling to move past the pain of upended plans and then he heard pain turned into poetry in a recorded performance by Oscar Brown Jr.
“Bid ‘em in!” was like nothing he had heard before.
“Bid ‘em in! Get ‘em in! That sun is hot and plenty bright. Let’s get down to business and get home tonight. Bid ‘em in! Auctioning slaves is a real high art. Bring that young gal, Roy. She’s good for a start. Bid ‘em in! Get ‘em in!”
The pain of it. The power of it. The point of it.
“I was like, ‘This is me, this is how I want to express myself,’” Lattimore said. “I guess there has always been that desire inside of me — because I grew up around coaches and preachers — to teach.
“Oscar Brown was teaching, doing poetry and theater all at once, and I was like, man, what is this and who is this guy? Finding Oscar Brown was the light for me.”
Lattimore worked up the courage to perform a poem of his own, memorized and rehearsed one called “Even in the rain” for two weeks and finally found himself in front of 80 people inside Literary Arts in Portland, as anxious as he’d ever been in front of 80,000 at Williams-Brice Stadium.
He could only compare it to the nerves he’d felt before his first game at USC.
That day, against Southern Mississippi, he had caught two passes for 21 yards and had 14 carries for 54 yards and two touchdowns. One sportswriter said he “displayed great vision and patience.”
Poetry demanded those same skills.
“I knew it was in my body,” he said. “And then I got up to the mic and because it was in my body, I was able to find that cadence. When those eyes are on, everything disappears and I just go into that state of flow, which all reconnected back to football and that moment. Like why did I play the game of football? It was because of that timeless essence that you become when you’re in action, and once action hit, I just delivered the poem, and people absolutely loved it.”
Now, his weeks don’t build toward a big game. They build toward a performance. He’s gone from smashmouth football to slam poetry.
One of Lattimore’s most powerful poems is reminiscent of Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Bid ‘em in!”
It’s called “Popcorn Man,” and Lattimore delivers it with the voice of a hawker at a lynching.
His words, as he did when barreling through defenders on a field, take your breath away.
“Popcorn! Lemonade! Peanuts! Peanuts! Lemonade! Lemonade!
“New people joining in take a look, take a pic,
“But don’t stand under the body because the blood might drip.
“Now don’t be shy, have some fun, make some friends.
“Get your picnic blanket out, lay it down for your kids.”
‘Take care of your soul as well’
Before he and his wife Miranda left South Carolina, he said he was “just floating.”
“Being Marcus Lattimore was the resume, the only credential that I needed,” he said.
But being Marcus was about being more, about not limiting himself, about finding a new hole to throw himself headlong into.
“Mastery is not exclusive to one discipline,” he said. “If you became a collegiate football player, that means you have a mindset geared toward mastery and you can put that mindset into …”
Anything. Into anything. Into the arts.
He tells college athletes now to pursue their passion after playing.
Having embarked on his own path, he doesn’t presume to know what’s best for others, so he doesn’t offer these players advice, exactly. He says they all have to find their own answers inside themselves when their playing days end, as they will, one way or another.
And he says to give it time.
“There may be a uniqueness inside you or a quirk or a hobby that you divested in years ago, that may want to reawaken, that may want to come back out,” he said. “Allow those things that you had to put down because of your investment in becoming a great football player, allow those things that you used to love doing, allow them time to start to blossom again.”
The running back says there is no rush.
“Maybe you want to go to Wall Street, that’s cool,” he said. “Or get a real job. But take care of your soul as well.”
Read part two: A wide open field
Matthew T. Hall is McClatchy’s South Carolina opinion editor. Email him at mhall@thestate.com.
This story was originally published August 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.