It is easy to see their storY AS A TALE OF THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF SPORTS: A cop harnesses a kid's football prowess to lure him away from gangs, guns and drugs. But look beyond the clipboard and football pads, and the relationship of Derwin Henderson ('83) and Terrance Flournoy has less to do with sports than with the redemptive power of love.

 

Today, Terrance is a hardworking high-school sophomore and a budding star on the gridiron. But once, he was a streetwise kid so wild that he was kicked out of elementary school for wielding a knife in a playground brawl.

And Henderson, a Los Angeles police officer and JMU alum, is more than just his football coach. He is a surrogate father of sorts for Terrance and for a half-dozen other teenage boys trying to find their way through the thicket of crime and drugs choking their Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Henderson, who himself played football for JMU in the mid-'80s, met Terrance seven years ago, when he caught the 9-year-old and his friends breaking into a high school in Compton, a low-income community near Los Angeles best known as the home of hard-core rap music legends. Henderson was off-duty, volunteering as a coach for a youth football team that practiced nearby. When he spotted the young burglars, the other boys broke and ran. But Terrance stood his ground and met Henderson's eyes.

He wasn't stealing, he said, just sneaking around inside the closed school "because I don't have nothing else to do." Henderson had heard that before. In his 10 years with the LAPD, he had arrested hundreds of bored young men -- burglars, drug dealers, rapists, robbers -- and hustled them off to juvenile hall. "Hook and book;" that was his motto. But he had recently begun a new assignment: visiting schools for the nationally known DARE program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) and talking to children about gangs and drugs. He met boys like Terrance in every class, aimless kids destined to drift into trouble, all energy and audacity. He believed that football could teach them discipline, keep them busy and channel their destructive energy. So he convinced Terrance, as he had a dozen others, to join his youth-league football team.

From the start, it was a struggle. Most of his players came from families too poor to afford league fees and uniforms. So Henderson ponied up the money himself. When they had trouble getting to practice, Henderson took the money he was saving for a house and bought a van big enough to carry them all. Many failed to show up for Saturday morning games, so he began taking them home with him on Friday nights.

On those overnights with his players, Henderson tried to simulate the middle-class childhood he knew growing up with his parents and sister in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, 30 years earlier. He gave each boy chores. Then "we'd go to sleep at a certain time, get up in the morning all together, have breakfast as a family and head for the game. I wanted them to see what that felt like."

Discipline, he would tell his players, means investing in something outside yourself. His boys couldn't be late for practice, be disrespectful to teammates, talk back to coaches or get bad grades.

To some boys, the hard-nosed Henderson seemed more warden than coach, and many of them quit the team. Others were kicked off for breaking rules, but Terrance soaked up the attention. Even though he was big, he wasn't much good at football; he didn't know his left from his right. However, he seldom missed practice, even when it meant he would have to walk the three miles to the park. Henderson's lessons seemed to be sinking in; the officer realized the boy was coming around when an 11-year-old teammate stole the coach's cell phone, and Terrance came to him and fingered the thief. "That went against everything he'd learned on the streets," Henderson says.

Terrance's hard work on the football field began to pay off. A running back with size, speed and tenacity, he began attracting the attention of high-school coaches when he was in elementary school. But off the field, his life was careening out of control. His dad was in prison, and his 25-year-old mother was struggling. He would argue with her, battle her boyfriends and fight his schoolmates. He was failing his classes, in part, because his mother disappeared for days at a time, and he'd have to skip school to tend his three younger siblings. He was running the streets with older boys, who called him Duke because he was always ready to brawl.

"Terrance was so streetwise," recalls Henderson. "He knew everybody, knew where to get drugs. When he was 10, I'd call his house. ... It would be 1 a.m., and he'd be out with his friends. He was 10 years old, and nobody knew where he was!"

At the age of 11, Terrance clinched his outcast status when he was expelled from fifth grade for brandishing a knife and sent to an alternative campus full of teenage gangbangers. Teachers there were surprised to see the soft-spoken, strait-laced policeman show up whenever Terrance gotin trouble. "I don't know why you bother," they'd say. "The boy will never amount to anything." "Prove them wrong," Henderson would tell Terrance. "That's how you fight it. Prove them wrong."

But behind the bold talk, Henderson was questioning himself. How had a cop who never gave a second thought to hundreds of delinquent boys become a man who couldn't stop worrying about one? He realized that his work with DARE, designed to change young lives, had actually changed him. "I saw kids I would have put in juvenile hall and realized they were crying out for help," he says. "I saw their lives, their families, their neighborhoods. It changed my views about young people. Some never had the opportunities ... like you had, like I had. Didn't every kid deserve that chance? I just wanted Terrance to have a chance."

So he started picking up Terrance after school, feeding him, taking him to football practice, taking him along on errands. They would run, lift weights and watch football together. "I told him to watch me, listen to how I talk, how I conduct myself. Do what I do." It's the way boys have been learning to be men forever.

Terrance didn't consider it a lesson. He just knew: "If D was rollin', I wanted to roll with him." Rolling with D became his way out of trouble. Terrance began telephoning the coach when he felt angry and overwhelmed: "Come get me, D, before I hurt somebody." And Henderson would drive across town to get him, wrestling with feelings of pride and dread. Football could be Terrance's ticket to college, just as it had been his. But first the boy had to sidestep trouble, and there was plenty of that in his neighborhood. Henderson had seen other talented players spiral off his team and wind up in gangs, on drugs or jailed. One boy he had kicked off the team for a bad attitude turned up the next week in a dumpster, dead.

Terrance was on the verge of his own epiphany. He had seen buddies brought down by gangs and drugs. When one of his best friends was shot, he wanted out of his neighborhood. "I realized that could happen to me," he says. So he called his coach, "Because I knew he'd come. Because whenever I called him, he always showed up." Neither of them may have realized it then, but Henderson was the first adult the 12-year-old Terrance had learned to trust.

The coach hesitated that night when the phone call came. He was growing weary of the drama of Terrance's comings and goings. "If you're sure you're ready," Henderson told him, "pack your things. And take all your stuff, because we are not coming back to Compton." When he got there, Terrance was waiting, holding one tiny duffel bag. A frustrated Henderson exploded: "I thought I said get all your things!" "This is it," Terrance told him softly, tossing his bag on the floor of the car. He had one pair of pants, a shirt, two pairs of socks, the shoes on his feet and a set of underwear. They headed to Henderson's suburban home and a life together that would challenge them both.

There, the creature comforts would be plentiful -- a big screen television, video games, a closet full of clothes and shoes. But the restrictions on Terrance's freewheeling life would exact a heavy toll. "I run a kind of militaristic household," admits Henderson, who at the time was single, with no children. "Everything here is by the book. There's a schedule for everything: what time you wake up, when you do your homework, what hours you can use the phone." Terrance chafed at the lack of freedom, at having to account for every hour to a man so cautious that he wouldn't let Terrance walk to school alone. They argued about bad grades, a messy room, too much time on the phone with girls -- the typical things that cause friction between fathers and sons. And sometimes they clashed in ways that reminded them that they are not, after all, father and son. Their relationship is one that can be undone.

"I put him out once," Henderson recalls. Terrance had yelled at him during an argument. "I'd told him from the start: I will not tolerate that in my household. You raise your voice at me and you're out the door. I don't care where you go, but you've got to go." Terrance returned the next day, contrite. But the push-and-pull continued. Even now, four years later, Terrance, now 16, occasionally takes off in a huff and returns to his mother's inner-city home. But he is becoming aware of the hazards and costs. Last year, on a weekend visit to Compton, he was at the home of a childhood friend when a fight broke out and a girl he'd never met stabbed him with a pair of scissors. He blocked her blow with his hand; but she nearly severed his finger, jeopardizing his football season.

Their life together, Henderson says, has been a learning process for them both. He has learned to live with less time, less money and the constant undercurrent of worry that comes with raising a teenage boy. And Terrance has learned what it means to have someone care enough about him to make sure he stays in bounds. "The rules are posted on the fridge, and he knows that if he breaks a rule, he's got to give up a privilege," Henderson says.

Now Henderson is trying to shift the focus of Terrance's life from football to his education. Colleges are showing interest, but the sophomore has a lot of academic ground to make up because he missed so much school as a youngster. "The big job now is to get him prepared for college, because that's what's going to give him possibilities if football doesn't work out," he says. Henderson himself is an example.

He was a football star with big dreams in high school, but wound up disillusioned, playing at a local junior college. "I realized I was a decent player, but I wasn't going to be the star I thought." His coach thought he was good enough to merit a football scholarship, so he sent his game tapes to college coaches across the country. The coaching staff at JMU figured he was worth a look, and one cross-country flight and visit later, Henderson was ready to enroll. "At that point I was being recruited by several schools, and some of them were offering me scholarships. At James Madison, I'd have to be a walk-on," he says. "Why I went there, I have no idea. I just liked the coaching staff, the way they treated me. It seemed like a nice place to live. Mostly, I just appreciated the opportunity to get away and to play the game I loved."

Looking back, he can relate to Terrance's troubles adjusting to a new environment. Moving from Los Angeles to Harrisonburg "was a hard transition," he says. "I had never been to the South. I was a Southern California dude. I didn't like the weather, and I didn't really have the mindset that I wanted to go to school. I hated it at first."

It was the "southern hospitality" that won him over. "The people there were just so nice. That idea about southern hospitality, it's true. There, it was not so much about money, like it was in L.A. People were real. I wound up making a lot of friends down there, had a lot of fun, learned a lot. I guess I grew up. …" After studying administrative justice at JMU, he considered making Virginia his home and applied for a job as a Virginia state trooper. But during the hiring process, he visited his family in Los Angeles and realized he'd miss them too much if he stayed away. A year later, he joined the LAPD.

Now Henderson is confronted with a host of new opportunities. While he continues to work for the LAPD, he has also taken a job as assistant coach with a Los Angeles high-school football team. Two more teenage boys have moved in with him, soaking up his mentoring. He is engaged and plans to marry next year, and has a baby on the way, due this spring. A newspaper story in the Los Angeles Times about his relationship with Terrance drew the interest of dozens of movie producers; a film about his life with Terrance is in the works by 20th Century Fox/Searchlight studios.

If Henderson sometimes feels overwhelmed by his responsibilities, he cannot help but be gratified as he watches Terrance emerge from his hard-core street kid persona. "If he was still living the way he was, I have no doubt he'd be in jail or dead. I have to hope I've taught him something, shown him a different way to live," Henderson says. "I know a lot of people wonder why I'm doing this. My own mother gets a little upset -- the money, the time. She says I do too much. Sometimes I think about that. But then I look at Terrance ..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.

 

Story by Sandy Banks

Photos by Gary Krueger