Larry Henderson’s coaching style was no frills but provided plenty of thrills

 

 

By JIMMY WIGFIELD

One couldn’t tell if Larry Henderson had worked up a sweat during the 1983 state championship game, nor if he had wished to absorb the traditional ice-water bath accorded the winning coach. Those things had been rendered indiscernible and unnecessary because so much rain had been dumped onto Legion Field that night that it could have filled every bathtub in Birmingham and then some.

As he literally and figuratively floated off the field following the 7-0 victory over Austin, Henderson might have wondered if Noah’s Ark was docked outside to take his team away but after years of Mobile teams being excoriated as losers and all the lashings Henderson had taken the year before — when Murphy had its first losing season in 16 years and some critics wondered if he was fit to hold his job — the Ark would have been a more appropriate vessel of survival and triumph than the deck of the coaching Titanic he had stood on.

Now, in his moment of ultimate glory and vindication, Henderson could have let his stentorian side show as he expelled all the accumulated toxins. Instead, the stern coach who distributed sparse dispatches rejoiced with a subtle gesture.

“We beat Austin in that rainstorm and the jubilation was immense,” running back Michael Pierce said. “It was the first time I think I saw coach Henderson relax. He was always tense and to watch him exhale and take it all in and appreciate the moment and what we had just accomplished was wonderful.”

In the days of 50-cent gasoline, eight-track tapes, leisure suits and pet rocks, Murphy was the bully of high school football in Mobile but was routinely dismissed in the playoffs once the Panthers ventured north or east of the Delta swamps.

Henderson changed that. Before he became its coach in 1982, Murphy was 7-10 in the playoffs, including 2-9 against teams outside the Mobile area. Under Henderson, the Panthers were 14-4 in the postseason and in 1983 became the first Mobile team to win a state championship since the playoff system was instituted in 1966. They were also the last team to win the Class 4A championship when it consisted of the state’s largest schools.

“It was an honor to be the first,” said Henderson, now 85, who will be honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Alabama Football Coaches Association on Jan. 25 in Montgomery. “Of course, it’s a reward for so many people, not me, but many of the assistants and players and kids that made commitments and did things. We had some outstanding athletes on that team and kids that were top-notch people and they made up their minds that that’s what they wanted.”

Pierce, who went on to play for Tulane and is now the Mobile Housing Authority’s executive director, said Henderson taught him how to succeed.

“I’m certain that I speak on behalf of hundreds, if not thousands, that he’s definitely deserving,” Pierce said. “He had a tremendous impact in terms of setting goals for yourself and striving for excellence. You’ve got to put in the work in order to enjoy the success. … He taught me just never underestimate your ability. He was the consummate leader. He instilled in us the confidence that we could go do it. There’s a saying that success is sweet but it usually has a scent of sweat about it and that’s so true. I learned that from him.”

But Henderson, who had a long tenure as an assistant coach under Lefty Anderson and Bob Shaw, couldn’t have made a worse debut when Murphy went 3-7 in 1982. The gloomy atmosphere gave no clues of the colossal turnaround to 14-0 the next year.

“At Murphy, we were afraid to lose,” Pierce said. “It was rough when we were winning, so we can only imagine what life would be like if we lost.”

But history began circumnavigating around all that unpleasantness in the offseason when Henderson asked his seniors what had gone wrong and they told him he should moderate full-scale contact throughout the week, which had left them wrung out the year before.

“We were in full pads going at it every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday,” said first-team All-State offensive lineman Bill Condon, who went on star at Alabama and is now retired and living in Destin, Fla. “We felt like we might cut back on it at least one day in full pads and he did. He was willing to listen and he was willing to change.”

Henderson hopes his legacy is about more than winning a state championship.

“I would hope they would say I was fair,” he said of his players. “I know we worked them hard and they worked hard. That’s the closest-knit group of people I ever worked with. I think their commitment to a task is part of a lot of them, the ones I see most often and am able to talk to. They set goals as players back then and they set goals as individuals right now. A number of those kids have been and are successful in their jobs, in what they’ve chosen for their life.”

 

Reigning in the rain

 

The Panthers — who weren’t ranked in the 1983 preseason — seized the Blue Map by beating Austin 7-0 in a cloudburst at Legion Field that was so heavy the players said they felt they were dragging barbells strapped to their cleats.

Pierce — who had laid down his tuba and ended his career in Murphy’s band — showed things had changed for the better by running for 200 yards in each of his first three games behind one of the state’s best all-time offensive lines featuring Condon, Butch Lewis and Andy Oaks. By the end, Pierce was injured and missed the playoffs but the Panthers were so overpowering up front offensively and defensively that it didn’t matter.

“If you wanted to get in a slugfest, you didn’t want to play us,” Pierce said. “We had really large linemen who were agile and strong. Todd Abrams was literally a middle linebacker playing quarterback and when he would pound in there, they wouldn’t want to see him coming downhill either. That’s the first team from the area to go up and win the state championship and (Henderson) deserves a lot of credit for that. We did kick the door down.”

It’s a moment Henderson and his players will never forget.

“Every time I see it rain, I think of that game,” Henderson said. “I think I have recovered from it. I wouldn’t want to go through another one. There must have been 11 inches of rain that night.”

Fullback Paul Davenport, operating just above the waterline, scored the game’s only touchdown on a 27-yard run in the first quarter.

“Oh, my God, we were swimming,” he said. “They had the camber, the slope, on the field there at Legion Field and if you weren’t out in the center, it was up to your ankles.”

Davenport even more poignantly remembers the giddiness of the normally stoic Henderson before the game.

“It just started pouring when we were walking out of the locker room about to go onto the field,” Davenport said. “Henderson was right in front of me and he had his hands on the shoulder pads of the player in front of him and he was hopping up and down and saying, ‘It’s cold, it’s nasty and we love it.’”

Assistant coach and offensive coordinator Terry Curtis, who went on to win eight state championships at UMS-Wright and become the state’s all-time winningest coach, watched history being made from a lucky vantage point.

“It never quit raining,” he said. “That was one time I really appreciated being in the press box.”

 

Underappreciated coach

 

Curtis, who played for Murphy when Henderson coached the offensive line under Anderson and returned as the Panthers’ coach from 1993-98, feels Henderson is underappreciated 41 years after winning the school’s only football state championship — possibly because he went 5-14 his last two seasons.

“Without a doubt,” Curtis said. “Robert (Shaw) was appreciated, Lefty was appreciated and Larry was the most underappreciated who won. I don’t know if it was his last couple of years that did it but he had a couple bad years. I can tell you when I got there, he didn’t have any players. We beat them real bad (41-3) the year before when I was at Shaw.”

Those final seasons don’t tarnish Henderson’s reputation, Davenport said.

“He was totally selfless,” Davenport said. “We couldn’t have had a better guy. He was a fair man and tough. That’s the best kind of coach you can have.”

Henderson was a fundamentally sound coach whose teams sanded down opponents with the running game and punishing defense. His Murphy teams averaged only 18 points per game, yet they were 83-41 over 11 years, including 75-20 between 1983 and 1990.

Before Henderson became the Panthers’ coach, “It was more complicated than it needed to be,” Davenport said.

Henderson also showed he could adapt. In the offseason before winning the state championship, Henderson not only decided to alter the heavy contact at his players’ request but changed his defense, which clearly became the state’s best in 1983 as Condon, Norbert Dean, Charles Kimbrough, Joel Stallings, Tim Jordan and their cohorts allowed just 77 points.

In fact, since then, only Vigor’s great 1988 defense — which allowed 44 points — is better among the big-class state champions.

“He was willing to change and he actually listened to us,” Condon said. “I think it made a tremendous amount of difference in him being successful as a coach.”

Condon said Henderson and his assistants went to a clinic in Georgia during the summer of 1983 and decided to forgo the 5-2 scheme for a version of the wide-tackle six, which had brought Vince Dooley a national championship three years before and popularized the Bulldogs’ defense as the “Junkyard Dogs.”

“They moved me to linebacker for two games the end of my junior year,” said Condon, who then moved to defensive end as a senior. “The scheme they installed was a very aggressive defense. (Dooley) credits that scheme helping him to be so successful at Georgia.”

Murphy’s 1983 state champions — sculpted by an obsession with weightlifting — were also unusually big and physical, unlike past teams from Mobile.

“I’m not sure there’s been that collection of athletes really since then,” Curtis said.

Condon believes that team, which had about a dozen players go on to Division I colleges, helped open recruiting channels into Mobile.

“Mobile’s always had so much talent but it never really got recognized,” Condon said. “For some reason, 10 years before me, there just wasn’t a lot of coaches and teams — maybe Alabama, Auburn, Mississippi State, but that was about it that came to the state before I was in school — and that’s when the recruiting process started to evolve where it was more nationwide or more Southeastern.”

 

‘Run it again’

 

Players had to earn Henderson’s respect and once they had it seemed to perform on an even higher plateau.

“I know the kids respected him because they knew he was going to put in the work, he was going to do what had to be done,” Curtis said. “And that’s one of the biggest things I learned from him was his work ethic and the time it took and scouting and watching film and doing all the little things it took to win football games.”

Pierce said nothing was handed to him other than a football and a chance to prove himself. In his first scrimmage, he was with the scrubs going against the first-team defense and broke a good run when he reversed field.

“Run it again,” said Henderson, who wanted to see if it was a fluke.

“And I’m thinking, ‘What do you mean, run it again?’” Pierce said. “They know where we’re going. And we ran it again and I gained some yardage and took a big hit. I got back up and went back to the huddle and was ready to go again. I think that probably showed him that I was resilient and not afraid of the contact and just my commitment to doing my job.”

Even after Pierce became a star, Henderson didn’t treat him like one.

“He’d say, ‘Don’t get your head in the clouds reading all these press clippings. We haven’t accomplished anything yet,’” Pierce said. “He coached me harder than he coached anybody and frankly I appreciated that. It helped me as it relates to my football-playing career and my professional career in terms of getting honest, strong feedback from people to help you take a look at what you’re doing. He never backed off. A lot of times, when you have stars on teams, you get treated differently but coach Henderson wasn’t that way. At the time, I’m not sure I appreciated it but as I matured, I realized he was trying to get the best out of you and the only way he knew how to do that was to push me harder than I may have pushed myself.”

The same went for the rest of the 1983 team after Pierce was injured late in the season and missed the playoffs.

“After Michael got hurt, we became even more physical,” Davenport said. “We ran more of the option just straight at them, diving right off those tackles. It was three yards and a cloud of dust.”

Davenport paused to reflect.

“Or five yards and a cloud of dust,” he said.

Davenport said the Panthers snatched the other team’s will to win.

“Oh, God, yes,” he said. “We weren’t blowing anybody out by halftime every game but, by God, at the end of the third, we just killed people, I mean wore them out.”

 

Cinder blocks and burgers

 

Henderson remains close with many of his surviving assistant coaches and has lunch with them every month, including Ron Roberts, Jim Sudahei and Harry McLemore. Former head coaches Billy Odom and Don Jennings often join them and so does Curtis when his schedule permits.

“It’s an enjoyable part of life,” Henderson said.

The coaches are just glad there aren’t any cinder blocks lying around.

“When I was an assistant coach, we were doing some work on the fieldhouse and we had a bunch of cinder blocks that were stacked up outside,” Curtis said. “If they were getting ready to do some work on it, Larry would tell us, ‘Y’all go out there and move those cinder blocks around here.’ Maybe to the front or whatever, so we’d go move all of them. It may be a week or two later and he’d say, ‘Hey, will y’all put those cinder blocks around back?’ We moved those cinder blocks about four or five times. It became kind of a joke. If he thought we weren’t working or we were goofing off too much, he’d tell us to go move those cinder blocks. He wasn’t planning on using those cinder blocks anywhere, he had them there just for us to move.”

If moving the cinder blocks wasn’t superstitious, eating certain food during the 1983 championship season was.

“The cafeteria lady got mad with him over something,” Curtis said, “and she told him they weren’t going to do any pregame meals. We always ate in the cafeteria. This was a day or two before the first game. So, Larry, instead of trying to work it out, he’s going to prove a point. He said, ‘Well, big deal. That’s fine.’ So, he comes in there and tells us, ‘Y’all go up there and get every player two Checkers burgers and a fry and bring ’em back.’ So, we brought them the two Checkers burgers and a fry and for the next 14 games, we ate Checkers burgers and fries every pregame meal. One thing it showed me was as long as it’s something they like, it don’t really matter what they eat for a pregame meal.”

Curtis said Henderson showed him how to balance making his players meet certain demands and allowing them to enjoy themselves.

“A lot of times when you first start out, you want to make sure of the discipline and the toughness and it’s hard for them at that point to realize that,” Curtis said. “But as you look back on it, you say he did have our well-being at heart.”

For Curtis, who is as strict a taskmaster as has ever coached, that meant letting players listen to music at UMS-Wright practices.

“I never had music at practice,” he said. “It’s hard to holler and scream and them not be able to hear you. But the kids like it and, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”

What it’s all about for Henderson these days is enjoying his six grandchildren, chores around the house and being satisfied with the patina on his coaching career.

“I don’t hunt anymore and I don’t shoot golf any longer,” he said. “When I go to a game, I miss it. There are some things about it I don’t miss — the long hours and being away from my family, things of that nature. I could still be happy if I was able to coach but that’s passed me by.”