Pascal Benson, arguably the greatest all-around athlete in Henderson’s history, died Sunday at his home. He was 86.
Benson faced challenges in life, from growing up so poor he couldn’t afford a real baseball to losing his sight late in life.
But as a prep athlete here, Benson was unsurpassed.
“Pascal had to be the best athlete to ever come out of Henderson,” attorney Ron Sheffer, who had known Benson since sixth grade and played football, basketball and baseball with him at Barret High and Henderson City High, said this week.
“If records and all-state honors are used as the criteria, one person heads the achievement list in the annals of local sports. Pascal Benson,” Ron Jenkins, who was a teammate of Benson’s as a Barret High underclassman (before City High opened in 1955) and played against him as an upperclassman at Morganfield High, wrote in a 1976 article for The Gleaner.
Certainly, Benson’s senior year at City High is without parallel.
In football, he played center and linebacker for the 1955 Purple Flash team that went 10-0 and was considered the mythical state champion, four years before the creation of the state playoff system. Benson was selected first-team on the (Louisville) Courier-Journal All-State high school football team.
Then came basketball season. City High posted a 29-3 record, reaching the state championship game but losing to Carr Creek, 72-68. Benson, who played guard and forward, scored 18 points in the championship game and was named to the Boys’ Sweet 16 All-Tournament Team as well as third-team All-State by The Courier-Journal.
Then came the baseball season. The lefthanded Benson posted a 9-1 record as a pitcher—including a rare perfect game in the district tournament against Holy Name High School—and hit .446, playing first base when he wasn’t on the mound. City High went 18-2 and finished as a semi-finalist in the state tournament.
Yet his earliest days in sports couldn’t have been more humble. Having grown up in a family of seven in a four-room railroad house on Fourth Street, Benson in a 2021 interview said he and his friend and next-door neighbor Sonny Peters would collect rags to tie together to make a “rag ball” so they could play baseball.
“He and I were two days apart in birth day and lived next door to each other from age 5 until we got out of high school,” Peters said. “We were close as brothers.” When they weren’t playing “rag ball,” Peters said, they often played “rock ball,” pitching and hitting gravel (and dodging line drives) in a game in which a rock batted over the nearby railroad tracks was considered a hit.
Though a powerfully built high schooler, Benson didn’t necessarily bring traditional tools to his sports.
He “didn’t have blinding speed,” Jenkins wrote in 1976.
“He wasn’t fast at all,” Sheffer agreed. “If you timed him in the 40 (yard dash), you’d have to use a calendar.”
But he was built for his positions on the football field. “With legs like tree stumps, he was indeed an immovable force as a 195-pound middle linebacker,” Jenkins wrote.
“As center-linebacker on City’s football field, he was a perfectionist as a blocker and a tackler. Take my word for it,” Jenkins continued.
“Even though he was a great football player, he wasn’t mean,” Peters said. “He didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
“Pascal was athletic smart,” Sheffer said. “As quarterback at City High and Western (Kentucky State College), I called all the plays. Coaches didn’t send plays in. No one but me could talk in the huddle, except one: Pascal. If he came up with a play that he thought would work, I almost always called it.”
At about 6 feet tall, Benson didn’t have imposing height on the court. “In basketball, his physical appearance was a deceptive factor which caught many an opponent off guard,” Jenkins wrote. While not fast afoot, “he had uncanny quickness and a deft shooting touch.”
“He couldn’t jump at all,” Sheffer said. “He couldn’t jump over a railroad tie. But he always got the rebound.”
And on the pitcher’s mound, “His easy motion belied the steam that was to catch many batters rocking on their heels,” Jenkins wrote.
“‘Natural’ is the appropriate word to use in describing Benson’s athletic ability,” Jenkins said. “He was a gifted athlete who performed with such grace and ease that an opponent’s first impression was that he was lazy. Far from it.”
In nominating Benson for the Dawahares/KHSAA (Kentucky High School Athletics Association) Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 2013, his City High basketball coach, T.L. Plain, wrote, “He was an athlete with natural ability, great versatility and durability combined with dedication and competitiveness. Pascal came to play be it in practice or a game regardless of the sport.”
Benson received a football scholarship from the University of Kentucky. He hoped to play basketball for coach Adolph Rupp as well. But once at Lexington, he received the disappointing news that UK allowed its athletes to play only one sport.
So he concentrated on football, eventually becoming a starting lineman. He had once hoped to pursue professional baseball. But after his senior year, saying his knees were worn out, he gave up his playing career.
After graduating from UK, he returned to Henderson to teach and set up a sports program at the new Bend Gate Elementary School. One day he spied a pretty blonde carhop named Elaine at a local drive-in. After dating, Pascal and Elaine were married for 62 years.
He went on to coach football and baseball at Henderson County High, where he became a driver’s ed teacher, then later had his own driving school. He eventually gave up coaching to become a family man for Elaine and their three children.
He was inducted in the first class of the Henderson County Sports Hall of Fame in 1988.
For all of his sports achievements, Benson proved an unassuming, almost gentle, character in later years.
“I never heard Pascal say anything bad about anybody,” Sheffer said. “Of course, as tough as Pascal was, nobody said anything bad about him.
“I don’t think I ever heard Pascal use a curse word. He never complained about officials. He just played. He was always calm and collected.”
“Pascal and (University of Kentucky All-American and NFL player) Rodger Bird have to be the most humble athletes I’ve ever known,” Sheffer said. “You could be around Pascal and Rodger all day, and they’d never mention football.”
Elaine convinced him to learn ballroom dancing with her, and they eventually taught dance themselves.
Benson began having trouble with his eyes in 2006, and was diagnosed with damage to his optic nerve. An avid outdoorsman, he had to give up hunting in 2016, and over time he went blind, though his son Tracy helped him hit a wild turkey with a crossbow with some technological help in 2020.
“He handled it well,” Peters said of his blindness. “I never heard him complain about it.”
Elaine entered him into a cornhole tournament at The Gathering Place senior center, even though Benson had never played cornhole and by then couldn’t see. But with some guidance from Elaine, his natural abilities kicked in and he started tossing bag after bag through the hole. Though blind, he won the tournament.
Elaine, along with family and caretakers, kept Benson active until his health declined.
But in the 2021 interview, he belied one regret when he turned to his wife. “I’d give anything,” he said, “to see you again.”
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Pascal Benson’s obituary can be read here.
His family has invited those attending his visitation and life celebration to wear UK apparel, as he often did, in his honor.
