By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

            A stadium in Macon is named after his son, and one in Athens is named after him.

            But Billy Henderson wasn’t much for tribute and praise, unless he was handing it out.

            Humility, humanity, and a granite-strong work ethic were only a few traits that defined Henderson, who touched lives throughout the state during a legendary playing and coaching career and afterward, leaving forever an imprint on lives in Macon and Central Georgia and Athens, and beyond.

            Many of those people are now in mourning with the death in an Athens hospice of the 89-year-old Henderson Wednesday afternoon, eight years and 12 days after his wife Fosky died.

            Henderson’s impact was epic, in all phases.

            A Georgia Trend magazine story in 2005 was titled “Great Coach, Better Man” which is how thousands will eulogize Henderson in the coming days.

            “The biggest thrill Billy Henderson ever had was not winning three state football championships, nor was it whipping coach Wright Bazemore's Valdosta Wildcats three consecutive years. It wasn't even having the Clarke Central High School Stadium renamed Billy Henderson Stadium or being honored by the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame.

            “Although there were many victories and honors - 286 to be exact - they aren't what Henderson is all about. "My fondest football memory is the first time our team gathered in the gymnasium for a Thanksgiving meal. Besides the players, there were mommies and daddies, brothers and sisters.

            "We bowed our heads for the invocation. I did not close my eyes. I looked around the gym and saw white hands holding black hands; hands of the rich and prominent holding hands with poor kids form the other side of the track. And I was thinking, if all human beings did something like this there would be few problems in this world."

            So began one of so many stories on William Bradford Henderson, who was born in Dublin on June 2, 1928, and grew up in Macon.

            He dazzled locals as a high school athlete at Lanier, now Central, and went on to play baseball and football at Georgia. He spent two years as a minor-league baseball player in the Chicago Cubs organization.

            He coached a few years at Jefferson High and Athens High, then at Furman and South Carolina.

            His head football coaching career began in 1958 in Macon at Willingham –which became Southwest - where he went 63-42-15 in 12 seasons and was part of a heyday in Bibb County high school football. Four years later, he took over at Clarke Central and went 222-65-1 as head coach with three state championships.

            In between, he was at Mount de Sales, as a football assistant and baseball head coach, being part of two football and two state baseball titles. He was a national baseball coach of the year in 1972 with the Cavs. Henderson coached with another Macon legend, Mike Garvin, who led Mount de Sales to three state GHSA football titles in the early 1970s but started his coaching career under Henderson at Willingham.

            Henderson Stadium in Macon is named after his son Brad, who was killed in an auto accident in 1964, he and his girlfriend Diane Driggars dying when their car was hit by a drunk driver. Brad was a multi-sport standout at Willingham, and Macon paid tribute by naming the stadium after him less than a year later.

            Clarke County began playing its football games in the newly named Billy Henderson Stadium in 1996, a year after health issues forced Henderson’s retirement.

            Henderson began working at the Athens YMCA in 1996, and with improved health was on the verge of un-retiring in 1998. He accepted the head coaching job at Central early that year, was approved by the Bibb County Board of Education and started working, but the 69-year-old changed his mind within a week and remained retired.

            “Reversing my field is a hard thing to do,” he said in the book “It Can Be Done,” authored by longtime Macon Telegraph sports writer, sports editor, sports columnist and general columnist Ed Grisamore, released in 2005. “But there’s no question it was the right thing to do.”

            He said in the book that he started second-guessing his decision during the interview process when board members “asked some hard an honest questions that needed to be asked and had to do with concerns that I had not given a thought: ‘Why does a person who is 69 years of age consider coaching?’”           

            But locals no doubt wondered what kind of magic even an older Henderson, who had lost hearing in one ear and still wasn’t in the best of health, might have had. After all, his name and presence still humbled and awed adults who worked with him and played for him, or simply knew people who worked with him or played for him.

             “Hiring coach Henderson was the best decision I ever made,” former Clarke Central principal Don Hight said in that Georgia Trend story of the 1973 decision. “He was a great coach, but an even better man.”

            That will be repeated nonstop for awhile.

            Henderson is 15th all-time in wins in Georgia, 15 behind Rodney Walker, 17 behind Valdosta’s Nick Hyder, and 20 ahed of Wright Bazemore and 25 ahead of Conrad Nix.

            Henderson coached in Macon when the city was a hotspot in Georgia high school football.

            Goot Steiner was a Central Georgia legend, having coached at Jones County, Hughes Vocational, Lanier, and Central, going only 86-74 overall in his career, but 28-5 at Lanier and 30-3 at Central. Gene Brodie was 28-5-1 at Central from 1973-75 and was the last Bibb County public school to win a state title, in 1975.  Garvin was a stellar 160-80-5 in 23 years at Mount de Sales, and coaches Bobby Brown and Edgar Hatcher, among others, were part of a quality era in local football.

            Henderson was a pioneer among a list of Central Georgia coaches who had hall of fame – any hall of fame – careers, his time in Macon overlapping with or somehow being connected to area legends like Dan Pitts, Robert Davis, Nix, Barney Hester, Jim Cavan, Bobby Gentry, among others.

            For all of his success record-wise as a head coach, Henderson’s legacy is as a humble, humane and compassionate leader who had no bias or prejudice, indicated with one example by that Georgia Trend lead. He was at the forefront of integration in an era when that split the nation.

            Hundreds of players will have similar stories of Henderson’s remarkable unselfishness in a profession that has its share of selfishness, of an ego-free man in an ego-filled career. To say he was always looking to protect his players, figuratively or literally, is an understatement. Whatever it took.

            Stan Baker was on one of Henderson’s last teams at Clarke Central. One day after practice, Baker awaited his mom’s arrival to pick him up, and it was rainy. So Henderson gave Baker his coat to stay dry, as per a story in Clarke Central’s “Odyssey” magazine in 2009.

            “That’s not something a normal coach would do for you,” Baker told the magazine. “That’s something a father would do.”

            And a thousand or two sons with their own version of a similar story are mourning the loss of a father.