Titans' Angelo Blackson 'found a way out'

National Football League defensive linemen come with brute strength and massive frames constructed upon fast legs and nimble feet.

Those qualities are obvious to the naked eye. Angelo Blackson, who is 6-foot-4 and 320 pounds, possesses them.

They allowed the Wilmington native to excel at Red Lion Christian Academy, where he earned a football scholarship to Auburn University. There, he played for a national championship and was chosen 100th overall in the 2015 NFL draft by the Tennessee Titans.

Equally crucial in Blackson’s athletic ascension have been the characteristics the eye does not see.

But he considers them his foundation: the resolve to beat the odds as a fatherless, African-American child of the city; the love and oversight of an older sister, who has been his primary caregiver since he was in grade school; the comfort and stability that comes from faith and family; the good fortune that landed him at Red Lion; the nurturing camaraderie of a white family that provided a second home during his Red Lion days.

Blackson, 23, made it where he is today, he said, because of all that.

In the process, he has emerged from a difficult upbringing that handed him two early obstacles: His father, Angelo Blackson IV, died after being addicted to drugs and contracting AIDS before Angelo V started school. His mother, Faith Newman, had drug problems of her own and was unable to care for him soon after.

“All I wanted to do was be different,” said Blackson of the thought that drove him. “I’ve had a lot of guys look at me and say, ‘It’s possible. If he can do it, I can do it.’

“I’m trying. I’m working every day. Somebody showed me coming up. There’s a lot of guys who had opportunities and didn’t take advantage of them, and that’s what I wanted to do, be prepared when my opportunity came.’’

His opportunity came. He has seized it.

“He found a way out,” said Isiah Johnson, Blackson’s former Red Lion teammate.

There were plenty of adults leading him in that direction, most prominently his sister.

Sister shows the way

Dalila Newman, 41, still lives in the brick rowhome on Wilmington’s East 10th Street where she and Ray Jones, her husband, moved in 2002. By that time, she had been awarded full custody of Angelo, then 9, and his sister Bianca, who was 10.

A mother herself since she was 14, Dalila had three children of her own – two sons older than Bianca and Angelo and a daughter slightly younger. But she and Ray, who also has a son from a previous relationship, went about the process of running a family with all its various branches and providing the love, stability and supervision to make it work.

“It was a rough period,” Dalila Newman said one recent afternoon at her home, sitting in front of a shelf where framed diplomas, not athletic trophies, and family photos were prominently displayed.

“My dad [who was different than Angelo’s] had passed away. My mother and I were estranged. She was struggling with addiction, and that was the primary dynamic that brought my brother to me.’’

Angelo and Bianca had spent time in foster care. So had Dalila and Ray when they were younger, which fueled their determination to keep Angelo and Bianca with them. Ray had even lived in a children’s home.

“I just looked at it like, if I’m going be with Dalila, that’s going to be the way it is,” Ray said of their large brood. “We’re going to pack them in! All [Angelo] needed was a stable home.’’

Hearing the suggestion that young Angelo was fortunate to have an older sister willing to serve as his substitute mother, Dalila turns it the other way.

“I was lucky to have him,” Dalila said of her brother. “I think we were lucky to have each other. The dynamics of our relationship are totally different than what I have with my children [now ages 27, 25 and 22]. He realized at a certain point in his life that I had made a choice to have him.’’

Dalila also made sacrifices, sometimes having the two older of her three children, the two boys, live with their father.

She also worked long and odd hours at places such as Ikon Document Services in Wilmington, including the night shift.

“One time I was knocked out [asleep], and I just popped up and got ready to go to work,” said Dalila, who is now between jobs as a medical aid. “CeeCee [Angelo’s nickname] was like, ‘You just left work.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but I’ve got to go back. It’s got to be done.’ ”

Jones, who drove a school bus and now works as a truck driver, provided the necessary father figure.

“That’s why I love my husband,” Dalila said of Ray. “He did all the stuff I couldn’t be there for, taking the kids to concerts, stuff like that. The support he was able to give me to provide and give them that strength was so important.”

Blackson views Dalila in heroic fashion.

“Just growing up,” he said, “not a lot of people have a person they can look at every single day, see how hard they’re working, see them fail and see them still get back up and see them succeed and see them work like they haven’t succeeded.

“That’s one of the biggest things. She never stopped working. It was almost like she never gave in. There’s no stopping her. If she puts her mind to something, it gets done. I’d look at her and I’d be like, ‘Gosh, if I can just be like that.’ So that’s what I do. I put my mind to it and I work at it. If I get there, I just want to go farther. If I don’t, I keep working until I get it.’’

Opportunity, family at Red Lion

Dwayne Thomas, then an assistant coach at Red Lion Christian Academy, burst through the front door on East 10th Street.

Blackson had missed a postseason weight-lifting session during his first year at Red Lion. Thomas wanted to know why.

“D.T. didn’t knock or nothing,” Ray Jones said, chuckling at the memory. “He said, ‘Angelo! What are you going to do?’ And we’re looking at Angelo, ‘What you going to do?’ And he’s like, ‘OK, I’m coming.’

“[Blackson] was just having a problem, and he didn’t know if he wanted to go. We [Ray and Dalila] just said, ‘You made this commitment; you’ve got to go.’ It was over after that. There was no looking back.’’

Thomas, now the head coach at Eastern Christian Academy in Elkton, Maryland, laughs when the day he challenged Blackson is brought up. He remembers it clearly.

“I recently spoke at a clinic at the University of Michigan, and I told that story,” Thomas said. “Angelo, at the time, was what I call ‘very slippery.’ ”

Thomas explained that further, saying Blackson, just 16 at the time, hadn’t yet developed the focus and diligence that would become his trademarks. He spoke very little and was still trying to overcome academic deficiencies, which included struggles in reading.

“I drove up and I hit the brakes real hard, and all the little kids in the neighborhood run, like the police had come or something,” Thomas said of arriving at Blackson’s home. “Angelo was standing in the doorway, and I grabbed him by the collar and I ran him into the house.’’

In no uncertain terms, Thomas explained that Blackson was destined for failure if he didn’t begin to demonstrate a consistent performance.

“He started to be more dedicated to the process after that,” Thomas said. “I recall that being the incident that really made him focus on what lies in front of him.  … The program [at Red Lion] was set up for kids like Angelo.”

Blackson had attended Stubbs Elementary School, Gauger Middle School and, in ninth grade, Newark High, where he struggled academically, Dalila said. He’d played some football for the Wilmington Panthers parks and recreation team, but he didn’t go out for the team at Newark, despite its long-term prominence in the sport. Blackson preferred basketball.

But one of his Wilmington Panthers coaches, Chris Purnell, was on the football staff at Red Lion. A private school, Red Lion was in the process of attracting student-athletes with financial aid in an effort to develop prominent football and basketball programs. Blackson, who was already close to his present height of 6-foot-4, was easy to spot. He’d begun weight-lifting and conditioning in the F.L.A.S.H. Training at Red Lion. The acronym stands for Faithful Leaders Always Serving Him.

Feeling Angelo needed a change of academic scenery, Dalila also considered since-closed Pencader Charter School before enrolling him at Red Lion in the fall of 2008.

“My brother earned his way into Red Lion. He tested,” Dalila said. “What I most liked about Red Lion was the atmosphere was great for him, and the push for education was great for him. He succeeded there. They gave him every tool he needed to succeed, and he absolutely did work his tail off. He earned everything.”

Though he had completed ninth grade when he entered Red Lion, school officials felt Blackson still needed to meet many of that grade’s requirements. He basically completed four years of school in three years by taking summer school.

“I don’t think he had a summer his whole high school career,” Ray Jones said.

While at Red Lion, Blackson struck up a friendship with assistant basketball coach Matt Haney and his sons, who were Red Lion athletes. Before long, he had practically become the sixth child in the Haney family, which also consists of mom Amie and she and Matt’s children Nathanael, now 21, Johnathan, 20, Emilie, 16, Lizzie, 9, and Natalie, 5. The Haneys live on a horse farm in Chesapeake City, Maryland.

“It kind of started with ‘Why don’t you come over to our house to do your homework?’ ” said Matt Haney, who co-founded PRO Physical Therapy and is now president of WORKPRO Occupational Health. “I’ve never seen a kid work so hard, and we just fell in love with him. Since then, he has been like our own son. We consider him part of our family.”

Along the way, Haney came to recognize what he calls “the fantastic job under the most difficult circumstances” that Dalila, whom he calls “an amazing lady,” did in raising Angelo. Now, the two families, one black and one white, one from the city and one from the country, are entwined.

Becoming part of the Haney family gave Blackson the chance to flourish even more, he said.

“They were there for me,” Blackson said. “I had the opportunity to stay with them. Those stretches that I used to have, I didn’t really have any more. I put all my focus on grades and trying to get to college. They definitely took a burden off of me.’’

Blackson now has regular contact now with his biological mother, who is doing well and living in Philadelphia.

Making it at Auburn, in NFL

On Dec. 13, friends, family members and former teammates of Blackson gathered at Foulkstone Plaza on Foulk Road in Brandywine Hundred for a bus trip to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, for the Titans’ game against the New York Jets. They needed 41 tickets.

As she waited for more people to arrive, Bianca Blackson-Newman pulled up her sleeve to show her brother’s name tattooed on her right wrist. It had been there since she was 16 and Angelo was 15.

“He was my right hand,” she said, alluding to her brother’s ability – and willingness – to lead her down the proper path.

Bianca graduated from William Penn High and, now 24, works for Bank of America. She and her brother, so close in age, spent a lot of time talking as kids, she said, appreciative of the comfortable home their older sister had provided and sharing their thoughts. She could see that Angelo had the chance to amount to something.

“He didn’t skip a beat,” she said. “He made it happen. He always said he wanted to be something.”

Often surrounded by strife in the city, Blackson wasn’t tempted the way others his age might have, said Raheem Newman, who is Dalila’s son and Angelo’s nephew.

“He didn’t do what other kids his age wanted to do,” said Moore, who is 25 and works for United Parcel Service. “He kept his head straight.’’

That his success came in football, instead of basketball, was not how Angelo may have envisioned it when he was a teenager. His body grew out more than up. But he was athletic enough to adjust along with it and excel.

Blackson was a senior on the 2010 Red Lion squad that went 7-3 and would have been the No. 1 seed in the Division II state football tournament. However, Red Lion voluntarily removed itself from the playoffs after agreeing to a series of penalties with the Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association for having conducted excessive practices and played additional games.

Red Lion also pledged to better scrutinize “enrollment management and academic eligibility oversight” after accusations it had recruited football players, not closely monitored tuition sources and compromised admissions and academic standards.

The following summer, Red Lion sought and received a membership change from the DIAA that allowed it to provide financial aid in an effort to attract student-athletes. But when Glasgow Reformed Presbyterian Church purchased Red Lion Christian Academy later in 2011, the football program was downgraded. Its chief overseer, David Sills IV, and Thomas, by then Red Lion’s head coach, then started Eastern Christian Academy to take its place.

Thomas figured prominently in Auburn landing Blackson, having sent his highlight tape to then-Tigers assistant coach Tommy Thigpen, whom Thomas had coached with at Tennessee State. One look at that tape was all it took for Auburn to offer a scholarship.

“When Angelo committed to Auburn during a visit there,” Thomas said of a May 2010 trip, “[former coach] Gene Chizik told Angelo this: ‘A lot of people don’t know you. But come Monday, everybody is going to call you because they know that we know.’ That’s a great line.”

In 52 career games for Auburn, Blackson had 65 tackles, including 17 for lost yardage and 4½ sacks, and blocked four kicks. He played in the national championship game his junior year, when Auburn lost to Florida State.

Blackson stuck with Auburn when other schools, such as Miami and Missouri, made strong recruiting pitches. He also graduated from Auburn in just 3½ years with a degree in sociology.

“He was and still is a phenomenal young man,” said Purnell, now a counselor and coach at Eastern Christian. “He deserves every piece of success that he achieves. He made a determination in high school to change his life around and follow the individuals that were guiding him in the right direction to be successful. He put in all the hard work and dedication to get the plan done.”

On the Auburn football team’s senior day, Auburn coach Gus Malzahn pulled Haney aside and raved, not about Blackson’s football acumen, but about his character, which is ironic.

“I used to say it all the time. They got sick of me saying it,” Dalila said. “ ‘Hard work builds character.’ ”

Now Blackson plays in the NFL, where diligence is a daily necessity. He had 11 tackles, including two sacks and a forced fumble through his first 14 games as a rookie.

One of those sacks came when he dropped New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees in the Titans’ 34-28 win on Nov. 8 over the Saints. It was one of three tackles for Blackson that game.

“He is more athletic than a lot of the guys he is going up against,” Titans interim head coach Mike Mularkey said afterward. “He is extremely good with his hands. The combination of that … I think he is going to be a good player.’’

Blackson spent his youth dodging danger and wrestling with the perils that can befall a boy in the inner city. Now his tests come along the line of scrimmage in the NFL, which is equally unforgiving and daunting. Unemployment is a constant threat there, too.

Once again, he’s been up to the challenge.

“At this level, everyone’s great, everyone’s strong, everyone’s confident,” Blackson said. “So it’s just a matter of being able to play with great technique and great effort, and that’s the biggest difference.

“Everybody is playing their hardest and trying to make great plays. I just have to work at it every day.’’

Contact Kevin Tresolini at ktresolini@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @kevintresolini.