Metro Pulse/Cover/The Football Issue

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Brooks Makes Book
Former Sports Illustrated writer Brooks Clark's patented SEC preview and predictions for the season ahead.

Big John Meets the Press
Mike Gibson gets some face-time with big Vol on campus John Henderson at UT's Media Day feeding frenzy.

Going Long
Just in case Brooks is wrong, Adrienne Martini consults some more dependable sources (like a Magic 8-Ball).

Referee Reveries
Mike Gibson sits down with some of our more experienced local referees to find out what wets their whistle.

Stranger in a Strange Land
Katie Allison Granju recounts the horror of discovering that, despite your best efforts, your son has turned out to be a football fan.

At UT's Media Day, the pack searches out the star

by Mike Gibson

When the day's quest for University of Tennessee football star John Henderson finally reaches its culmination, it's almost, well...a let-down for this reporter. It's the team's annual summer media day, and this sense of anti-climax perhaps owes to the fact that the build-up, the sheer weight of anticipation was so great, almost bigger than the man himself.

Leaning anxiously forward in a chair in the conference room of the Neyland-Thompson Sports Complex, the big All-American defensive tackle is of estimable stature, a veritable monolith at six-foot-seven. But he's not the team's tallest player. (That honor falls to 6'8" offensive lineman Will Ofenheusle.)

And he's massive, an oak-legged 305-pounder. But he's not the largest man on the team. (That would be Sevier County freshman Paul Monroe, who weighs in at 335.)

In fact, milling around with so many of the other human derricks on the squad at the Gibbs Hall athletic dormitory, he looks not-so-out-of the norm. He's not the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest or most agile fellow in this group of athletic superlatives. He's simply the best football player.

"It was just me going out there and working every day, listening to coaches, whether it was negative or good...it's a mind thing," Henderson says of his rocket-like ascension to the ranks of college football's elite. Henderson is unassumingly draped in a red T-shirt and black shorts on this day; a silver cross and a black Reebok elastic band with attached dorm key around his neck; and hair cropped close with none of the corn-rows he usually sports in-season.

His media patter has obviously improved since his rise to gridiron prominence, his speech carefully peppered with all the proper "team" and "hard work" aphorisms. But the clichés sound somehow less jaded when they fall from his uncertain lips. And he's palpably uneasy, soft-spoken, his voice an unassuming drawl, fingers absent-mindedly fidgeting and scratching his girder-like calf muscle as he addresses the reporters who swarm him like ravenous weevils. Unlike so many more media-fluent football stars, Henderson is still, quite obviously, a big, humble, nervous kid.

Or maybe "man-child" might be a better descriptor. In the 2000 football season, this Nashville Pearl-Cohn product fairly erupted, registering 12 sacks, innumerable big plays and ranking third teamwide in tackles. These are all truly Herculean feats for a DT, a player whose primary role is that of human road block, the Samsonian disrupter who collapses opposing linemen and enables smaller teammates.

His greatness points to a confluence of talents and qualities—the alluded-to work ethic; his Everestian size; his panther-like speed and agility, rare in a man so large; and his strength, which among other things enables him to bench press 440 pounds despite the considerable biomechanical disadvantage of two exceptionally long arms.

That Henderson's presence is not more overwhelming owes partly to that balance of attributes, to the symmetry and complementary nature of both his talents and his physique; unlike so many shapeless, sloppy gridiron big men, Henderson's weight is evenly distributed over his lengthy iron frame. He's proportioned more like a discus thrower or a big decathlete than a lineman.

But mostly, his accessibility, his aura of engaging ordinariness, derive from the almost total absence of big-star savvy, his refreshing lack of guile. "People kinda look up to me back home now..." he tells one of several journalists who've shoved miniature tape recorders in his face. "I haven't really adjusted [to the attention]. I owe my teammates..."

To the uninitiated, UT football media day is an odd-ish sports journalism ritual. Dozens of reporters and camera-folk—local, regional and national—gather noontime on a Thursday in the blandly comfortable Gibbs Hall lobby and line up for lunch at the training table, the athletic dorm cafeteria.

Most of the players and a handful of other UT athletes are there, too, and it's not difficult to separate the visitors from the regulars, even without taking into account age and size differentials; the reporters are the fellows wearing goofy coach's shorts (think polyester and Magnum, P.I.) and collared knit Ts, each shirt distended centrally by an age-appropriate paunch. (Alternative weekly journalists are even more conspicuous in this milieu; this one is responsible for the only pair of jeans in attendance, and most certainly the only rock-concert T.)

Bellying up to the cafeteria's abundant feeding trough is a singularly claustrophobic experience, one that involves weaving carefully through a redwood forest of players, men large enough to demolish small automobiles in a head-on collision: Will Bartholomew, the burly senior fullback with deltoids like bowling balls; burr-topped offensive lineman Reggie Coleman, whose arms are like legs and whose legs are unlike any bodypart on any normal human being; senior defensive end Will Overstreet, one of the team's "smaller" linemen at a mere 265 pounds, his chartreuse fiberglass cafeteria tray laden with slabs of lasagna and stacks of sandwiches and a pile of promiscuously heaped chicken fingers dripping with mashed potato gravy...

It isn't until after lunch, as people trickle out of the lunchroom and into the Gibbs lobby and migrate in clusters to the Neyland-Thompson Sports Complex, that Big John finally makes his appearance. And his engulfing shadow is a relieving sight, because Metro Pulse, though by no means ostracized by UT officials, hasn't quite yet achieved favored nation status, and this may be the magazine's best-and-only shot at gettingup-close-and-personal with the team's top player.

Once reporters and players have collected in the aforesaid conference room, sports info chief Bud Ford gives the scribes leave to mingle, to consort with the dozen-or-so notable and mostly-senior contributors gathered here. Sophomore quarterback Casey Clausen, his surfer-blond hair short and wickedly spiked, and mild-mannered kicker Alex Walls are seemingly the only underclassman in attendance.

Henderson, of course, is swamped with inquisitors from the outset; the remaining players draw the reportorial flies chiefly in proportion to their name recognition and the glamour of their position. QB Clausen and probable starting tailback Travis Stephens are plentifully attended; well-recognized (for a lineman, that is) offensive guard Fred Weary averages about three questioners at a time for the duration of the session; oft-neglected Bartholomew, the powerhouse blocking back, begins the Q & A with a lone reporter, a young woman from a small paper, at his side.

Sports interviews, by nature, are fundamentally mundane, repetitive, sometimes comical in their banality; there are only so many ways these players can size up this year's UT-Florida game, or compare this year's team to the '98 national championship squad, or hold forth on the fuzzy abstractions of teamspeak...

But surely the strangest—not to say outright weirdest—question asked by the assembled journalists is posed by a certain 60-ish fellow, a stringer for a Knox-adjoining small-county paper. He approaches each player in turn and ambushes them with the query, "——, what does the name Bob Neyland mean to you?", as if these 20-year-olds from far-flung parts of the country are liable to break into wistful and teary tribute at the mere mention of a long-dead WWII-era football coach's name.

Overstreet, voluble, articulate and agreeably cocky, is the slickest respondent when asked the Neyland question, holding court with around 10 reporters after arriving late to the media session. "The Old General?" he quips. "He's the one who wrote all the maxims and got his name on the stadium down there. I don't know too much about him, but I know the Tennessee tradition, and he's the main guy."

Poor Henderson fares less well, fidgeting more and letting the question hang in the uneasy stillness of a long, uncomfortable silence before asking, tentatively, sheepishly, "Who was he?"

"He was the head coach here from 1926 to 1952," the old-timer tells him, somewhat curtly, and he clicks off his recorder and moves on, having seemingly lost interest in the most exceptional and dedicated athlete in this talent-laden room. "I didn't know," Henderson says in a small voice to the not-unsympathetic scribes who remain.

John Henderson may not be the university's foremost scholar of sports history, but he has earned his own special place in the annals of Voldom. Like Peyton Manning before him, he endeared himself for all time to Tennessee fans when he announced that he would pass on an early entry into the NFL draft (and immediate riches) and return for his senior season at UT.

His announcement came upon his receiving the prestigious Outland Trophy (in essence, the lineman's Heisman) in New York City at the end of the 2000 season, and there was a joyously impromptu quality about it. Says the big man, he had originally planned to save the disclosure until the holiday break, but found himself swept away in the triumphant spirit of the moment.

"I made up my mind before the award banquet and all that," Henderson grins. "But they kinda brought the question up, asked me to comment on it ahead of time, and I just went ahead and said what I was gonna say. I was gonna save it almost as a Christmas present for Vol fans, but it ended up happening on TV.

"There's a lot of money out there, but it's not going anywhere. You need to enjoy yourself in college because you get up in the next world, it's all business. I want this experience in college; I won't have it again."

Though he's a leading candidate for nearly every college football award in 2001—including the Heisman, which is rarely mentioned in the same sentence as the word "lineman"—and the odds-on favorite for first pick in next year's draft, Henderson isn't looking for an easy year. He spent spring and summer scrimmages warring against the double- and triple-teams he's sure to see throughout '01. "I gotta stay low," he says, echoing his personal on-the-field mantra, the eternal positioning sine qua non for exceptionally tall players such as himself. "It'll be frustrating sometimes, but you gotta deal with it...if it means my teammates get to make the plays, then that's how it's got to be."