Beatrice Henderson has a message for the Chicago high school basketball community: Leave my son alone.
She says she doesn’t want to cause trouble, that she never wanted to talk to a reporter. But she also never expected her son to become the rope in a recruiting tug of war. Not while he was 15 years old.
She certainly never expected that war to leave him confused and crying. Now, she says, “This has gone too far. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but they hurt him.”
So she, her husband, Leo, and her 8th-grade son, Lakeith, settled into the living room of their West Side apartment Saturday morning in the hope that telling their story will make it all stop.
It’s a story of phone calls day and night, of a child agonizing about how to say no to adults he likes and of a bizarre encounter with two coaches from Class AA state champion King.
The recruitment of Lakeith Henderson began after he started to display his basketball talent as a 7th grader at Spencer Elementary School. Despite a new Illinois High School Association rule intended to eliminate the recruiting of students for athletic purposes, coaches soon started calling-as many as a dozen of them and at a rate of four to five calls a day.
“I never had a moment’s peace,” said Beatrice Henderson, who works nights and therefore had her slumber regularly interrupted.
Although the Hendersons estimate that Lakeith drew interest from more than 15 schools, the most serious contenders for his services were Farragut, Crane, Hales Franciscan and King.
Henderson had known Farragut head coach William Nelson since he was in 6th grade. He started to hang out at that school, and Nelson would sometimes swing by the Henderson home to pick Lakeith up for games at a local community center where the coach often officiated.
Starting in 7th grade and through last summer, he played on Nelson’s age-group team with Farragut players in several local tournaments.
Henderson also started playing for Crane frosh-soph coach Anthony Longstreet in similar tournaments beginning last spring. At times he played on a team consisting mostly of Crane players and at times with a grammar school all-star team Longstreet ran.
Longstreet acknowledges he hoped Henderson would attend Crane and that he pointed out the school’s academic and athletic merits.
Henderson became familiar with Hales, a South Side college preparatory school for African-American males, through a friend who attends the school and through a former Hales assistant coach who coaches Lakeith on a grammar school all-star team. He says he chose the school because of its academic program.
He said King made its recruiting move March 27. According to Henderson, he met someone he knows only as “Billy” during a Saturday morning social center program at Farragut. Billy told him that King assistant coach Ormon O’Quinn wanted to meet him, and the two left for O’Quinn’s house.
O’Quinn, Henderson said, told him the well-known King program could do a lot for a basketball hopeful. He gave the youngster a used King warmup jersey and a new Jaguars T-shirt containing the immodest inscription: “King H.S. Recognized Worldwide.”
The coach made it clear other goodies would follow once Henderson decided to attend King.
“He said if I come to King, they’d offer me all these things, like gym shoes, sweatsuits and a King coat,” Henderson said. “I knew something was wrong when he told me if I signed a little piece of paper that I was coming to King, I’d get all this stuff.”
O’Quinn said Henderson showed up uninvited and by himself at his doorstep, saying that he wanted to play for King. He denied giving the player the T-shirt or jersey.
“The kid came to my house and sat down in my living room,” O’Quinn said. “Before that, I didn’t know what the kid looked like.
“I don’t know any Billy. Anybody can get a King T-shirt, they’re all over the world. We’ve given the whole team T-shirts. That’s nothing but lies.”
Henderson says he told O’Quinn he was headed for Hales, but that the coach called the Henderson home Sunday morning, and after talking briefly with Beatrice Henderson, told Lakeith he would take him to the house of King head coach Landon Cox.
According to Beatrice Henderson, O’Quinn asked to talk to her when he picked up Lakeith, but that she was ill in bed and unable to speak with him. Lakeith, who says he thought O’Quinn had cleared the trip with his mother on the phone, left for Cox’s home.
King’s head coach lives in a large house on Chicago’s Far South Side. Henderson said he and O’Quinn entered through the garage so he could see the large supply of gym shoes and sweatsuits in it.
He said Cox entertained him for more than two hours in a “pure-white” den that contained a big-screen TV, pictures of past King teams and a pool table. Cox discussed what King’s basketball program had to offer, including access to a prestigious summer basketball camp. He showed Henderson tapes of his former teams.
Henderson said he told Cox and O’Quinn he planned to attend Hales. Cox, he said, responded, “When have you seen Hales win (a state title)? Who else has got tapes like these?”
Word of Henderson’s trips to O’Quinn’s and Cox’s homes spread quickly along the prep basketball grapevine, along with a report that the player’s story was leaking to the news media.
O’Quinn apparently heard that report. Beatrice Henderson says he called her Monday morning to ask if she would write a letter stating he had had her permission to take Lakeith to Cox’s house. She refused, saying she would not lie.
She said O’Quinn called again early that evening. She hesitated to listen on an extension because she abhors eavesdropping, but did so because O’Quinn had been asking her to lie.
“I heard O’Quinn tell Lakeith he wanted the jersey back because someone was trying to get into the papers,” said Mrs. Henderson, who said she saw both the T-shirt and jersey.
With his mother looking on, Lakeith met what he describes as an angry O’Quinn outside. He said O’Quinn snatched the garments and then said he was “not going to stop bothering me until I was up at Hales.”
Although O’Quinn retrieved the T-shirt and jersey, Nelson had taken a picture of Henderson wearing the shirt the day the player received it. The Tribune obtained a copy of that picture.
Providing the T-shirt and jersey was only one of what appears to be several King violations in a detailed recruiting policy the IHSA instituted last July 1.
While many of the schools that recruited Henderson may have violated the rule’s general admonition not to recruit for athletic purposes, King appears to have violated more specific prohibitions.
Among them are the offer of clothing and attempting to demonstrate that King’s basketball program was superior to that of another school. According to IHSA rules, persons found guilty of exerting undue influence in the recruitment of a player can be suspended from coaching for a year. Penalties ranging from a warning to expulsion from the IHSA could be levied against a school.
King’s basketball program has been accused on several occasions of exerting undue influence, but was cleared by the IHSA in all cases except one. In that instance, the school was put on probation for the 1991-92 school year.
O’Quinn denied taking Henderson to Cox’s house as well as asking his mother for a letter. Cox could not be reached to comment.
While King was pursuing Henderson, Nelson and Hales head coach Tom Shields were both submitting a roster with Henderson’s name on it to the Centurion Classic, a tournament that took place April 5-10 in Downers Grove.
On April 1, Leo Henderson took Lakeith to register for Hales. April 5, Henderson played for Hales in its 49-48 victory over East Aurora. Three days later, Farragut defeated Hales 62-49.
Henderson says he was taunted by some of the Farragut players for playing with Hales. He took those words to heart, and he was also upset when Nelson responded coolly toward him after the slam-dunk competition April 10.
Nelson said his players felt betrayed by Henderson because he had practiced with them for the tournament. He said it was difficult for him to be friendly toward Henderson with his players watching but that he holds no animosity.
Yelled at by O’Quinn, ignored by Nelson, it had all finally become too much for Henderson. He may be 6 feet 4 inches, but he is still a child, and an intelligent, sensitive one at that. He approached his mother in tears.
“He said, `Mom, how can you tell a coach you’re not going to his school without feeling like you used them?’ ” she said. “I said, `You haven’t used anyone. They were manipulating you.’ “
The next day the two sought counsel from their pastor, Rev. Cleveland Whittington of the New Rising Sun Missionary Baptist Church.
“Lakeith is not a kid who can take things like an ordinary young man would. He takes things seriously,” said Whittington, who describes Henderson as a highly religious young man.
Beatrice Henderson had had enough. She had canceled a scheduled interview with a reporter two weeks earlier, but now she and her husband rescheduled it.
“He’s going through too much for a 15-year-old,” she said.
Her son has an additional motivation for telling his story.
“I really do think this will help kids coming up who probably would go through the same thing I’m going through, because it’s not a good feeling,” he said. “At first it might seem kind of good to you, but the farther you go on, the harder it is on you. I think it was too much pressure.”
