Stutterer gets his voice back

It's a point that bears repeating. Silencing a stutter is a matter of pitting mind over mouth, according to Marcus Hill.

That's what the 20-year-old did to become the country's top speaker last month by winning a national public-speaking contest for community college students.

The Los Angeles Valley College sophomore has stuttered since he was seven, when he suffered a deep cut on a leg and was so traumatised that he couldn't explain to his family what had happened.

Elementary and middle school were traumatic in a different way. Schoolmates teased him mercilessly when he became tongue-tied.

"I stuttered in front of other kids a lot. You get slammed for it, especially when you're younger," he said.

By high school, Hill had come to accept stuttering as a way of life, particularly when he was nervous or under stress.

His moment of truth came when he enrolled in a required speech class as a freshman at the Valley College campus in the San Fernando Valley.

Teacher Duane Smith challenged the 40 students at the opening-day session to memorise every classmate's name.

"Nobody raised their hand after we went around the room and introduced ourselves. So I did. I repeated everybody's name," Hill recalled.

"I'm really weird about remembering small things," he said. "They're big things to me. And people always appreciate that you remember their names after hearing it only once."

Impressed, Smith asked Hill if he wanted to join the college's speech and debate team. But Hill shook his head. "I have a stuttering problem," he confided.

Smith set out to change that. "The speech team is for anybody with a pulse and a mouth," he explained.

It was slow going at first.

"In my class he couldn't get through a sentence without what we call a flub in speech competition," Smith said. "His tongue was always getting tied."

"After three or four months, I wasn't certain how much competitive success he'd have. You have to get through a speech perfectly because your competition can. If you can't, you're not going to win."

Hill was urged by Smith to coordinate his talking with his thinking.

"He said it's just a matter of clearing my thoughts and having confidence when I speak," Hill said.

"I repeated a catchphrase over and over to clear my mind. I'd repeat 'I'm here to win gold' again and again. Early on, stuttering would get the best of me. I'd forget what I was saying. It cost me a couple of tournaments."

Encouraging

Finally, in a competition at Azusa Pacific College, Hill seemed ready to give up after he stammered and flubbed a few lines of his carefully prepared speech.

"I looked at the judges, and instead of frowns on their faces, I saw smiles. They encouraged me to go on," he said. And he came away with his first competition medal.

Hill plans to study political science and communications at California State University, Long Beach, this fall and eventually attend law school. After that, he wants to teach at the community college level.