The vision jostles the memory bank, recalls sights seen on sidelines in Champaign and Evanston, in Bloomington, Columbus and West Lafayette, and in who knows how many other cities over a career that began at Las Cruces (N.M.) High School in 1957. Lou Henson, 72 years old now, is up, taut and staring attentively.
In front of him, on the floor of Western Kentucky’s E.A. Diddle Arena, his New Mexico State basketball team is facing the Hilltoppers, and Henson is intent on not missing a thing. His mouth is slightly open. His arms hang out from his sides. His face is plastered with that familiar look of eternal consternation.
For long moments he holds this pose and then, suddenly, he spots a mistake and is in action. His arm snaps up, his finger points, he barks instructions, twirls and begins talking to assistant coach Tony Stubblefield.
“He hasn’t changed at all,” Stubblefield says later.
“Not at all,” echoes Kelsey Crooks, the Aggies’ fifth-year senior forward.
“It’s just like any other year as far as coaching,” Henson says, “but it’s different, too, because every 3 1/2 weeks I take chemotherapy.”
He takes chemotherapy to fight off the cancer now lurking inside him.
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Last July, Henson and his wife Mary returned to their home in Champaign. This is where they lived during those 21 seasons Henson coached Illinois, where they raised their family, still have close friends and learned the tragic news their son Lou Jr. had been killed in an auto wreck in 1992 in Urbana.
Four years later, at the end of the 1995-96 season, Henson retired, but the next year New Mexico State beckoned. This was his alma mater, the place he was coaching when Illinois hired him, and now it wanted him to help stabilize a program in chaos that was under NCAA investigation.
He agreed, yet each summer he flew back to Champaign to visit friends, to see his daughter Lori and his grandkids, and to get his annual physical from Illinois team physician Jeff Kryouac.
“In a way I felt physicals were a waste of time. They fool around and then you go on and everything’s OK,” says Henson, but on this day last July that was not the case. Kryouac felt a lump the size of a fist on the right side of Henson’s abdomen.
With that he ordered a CT scan and later he called Henson’s home. Mary Henson answered.
“I want to see you and Lou in my office at 3:30 tomorrow,” the doctor said.
“I can’t come. I have a hair appointment,” she said.
“Cancel it,” he said.
“I knew something was up then,” she says now.
“But she didn’t say anything to me about that,” Henson says.
The next day, when they returned to Kryouac’s office, her worst fears were confirmed when she noticed the distressed look on the doctor’s face.
“Jeff,” she said then, “whatever you have to tell us can’t be any worse than the news we got the night our son was killed. We can handle it.”
“It might be something along that line,” Kryouac said.
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Lou Henson has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for which he has undergone six cycles of chemotherapy. On Monday, he and Mary are scheduled to visit the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to see just how effective those treatments have been.
“If you’re going to have cancer, it’s the good kind to have,” Henson says bravely.
“Though it’s not curable, it is highly treatable,” Mary says. “It can be put into remission for a number of years and at 71 (which Henson was when he got the news), when they say a number of years, you feel pretty good.”
But there was no such feeling on that July afternoon when they heard only that Henson had some form of cancer.
“It was a shocker,” Henson says, describing his feelings when he got that news, and there was more than a little reason for that. His mother had died from liver cancer, his brother had died with a body wracked with cancer and he and Mary had five sisters or sisters-in-law die from cancer.
“I didn’t think I would coach this year,” he says.
“But we took it in stride,” Mary says. “We never cried. It was, `This is it. We’ll do what has to be done. We’ve always been a team and we’re going to lick this as a team.'”
They went from Champaign to Houston, where their daughter Lisa lives with her family, and during his three weeks there, Henson’s attitude changed. He learned at the Anderson Center just what type of cancer he had, which was encouraging enough, and he learned too that he could get the needed chemotherapy treatments in Las Cruces, which meant he could go on coaching.
“After [he learned] that, it was a moot point. It was not even a matter of discussion,” Mary says.
In Las Cruces, the school released news of Henson’s condition and then set up a Web site for those who wished to send him their regards. These messages poured in from Champaign, from New Mexico, from around the world. Eventually more than 1,000 were sent to him in Houston.
Each day, as they made the hour journey between Lisa’s home and Anderson, she drove and Henson sat in the passenger seat. From her seat in the back, Mary read these messages out loud.
“It’s amazing how many people have cancer. It has affected most families in some way,” he says. “You hear from a ton of people and all of that was very uplifting.”
“It was just fabulous,” Mary says. “There were so many great survival stories that give people hope. We just knew it was going to work out. What we didn’t know is how well he’d tolerate chemo.”
She pauses here and then, with a laugh, she says, “I don’t know. Do you think he’s lost any hair?”
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The news reached Henson’s players shortly before it was made public.
“The first thing that went through my mind was, `Can he coach? Are we going to get a new coach?'” says James Moore, a senior forward from Dolton. “But knowing coach Henson, I’m like, `Nah. He’s going to pull through it. He’s a strong man.'”
Henson, his Lou Do undamaged, has done just that even as he guides a team ripped apart by graduation, defections and suspensions. It is down to seven scholarship players, has no true point guard, has untold difficulty scoring and, after two straight 20-victory seasons, is limping along with an 8-9 record.
This is what bothers Henson most, not the cancer inside his body. That he ignores, carrying on as he has in the past, coaching still with all the avidity of a young assistant on the make.
“You can’t tell he has cancer at all,” says Crooks, whose mother has survived breast cancer.
“Actually,” Moore says, “he has gotten a little tougher on us. I don’t know what it may be. Maybe he’s not taking every day for granted. He’s trying to live every day to the fullest and I respect that.”
He provides an example to all.
“To see a guy his age come to work, work hard everyday, I respect that,” echoes Stubblefield, the assistant. “Then to fight cancer, it’s even more of an inspiration. `Hey. You have to fight through it. You can overcome all obstacles.’ That’s what he’s showing us.”
Henson is not certain if he will coach beyond this season. But he has not missed a practice, has not missed a game, has manifested unflagging willfulness and perseverance in the face of an insidious disease.
He still arises each morning before 4 and soon he is at his school’s Pan American Center, where he walks for 45 minutes around the concourse above Lou Henson Court. Six times he has endured a cycle of chemotherapy, receiving four hours of treatment on Monday, two hours on Tuesday and an hour each on Wednesday and Thursday. But on each of those afternoons he returned to the gym, where he did what he had done at Las Cruces High and Hardin-Simmons, at Illinois and his other seasons at New Mexico State.
He has coached teams into the Final Four (both New Mexico State and Illinois) and teams that couldn’t eat in certain restaurants because they were integrated (both in high school and at Hardin-Simmons). He has spanned ages, survived cultural changes, feuded with Bob Knight, made up with Bob Knight, won big games, lost big games, lost a son, now lost any notions of immortality, yet still he is there, on the sidelines.
“We’re doing great. We really are,” Mary Henson says.
“You just block it out of your mind,” Henson himself finally says. “And it’s probably good to work. Like I was coaching at Illinois when Lou was killed, one of the best things is to stay busy all the time. You think about it when you spend three weeks in Houston. But after a while, you block it from your mind and keep going.
“It’s the old saying. It’s not the stimulus or stimuli. It’s how you react to it. That’s so true and I think I’m going to be OK. I think everything will work out.”
