LOS ANGELES — A lifetime later, the man is a Super Bowl champion, and yet Eric Henderson’s high school guidance counselor still finds herself wondering how the boy even survived.

By the time he was a senior at Edna Karr High in 2000, the recruiters were on him, a household name in New Orleans. They would call at all hours of the night. They would swarm campus in the morning. Henderson had lived years in the span of one, but he was still a kid, vulnerable and overwhelmed.

He walked into counselor Judy Lee’s office at Edna Karr one day, because he had few else to turn to.

“I can’t deal with it anymore,” he confided.

So she’d invite the college coaches in, and tell them his story, the buttoned-up young man they called “Ickey” along the West Bank of the Mississippi. Henderson never knew his father. He lost his mother, Ramona, when he was 9. Extended family took him in, and his grandmother had raised him for years, but she was dying of cancer.

He grew up, amid it all, neatly tucking his shirt into his pants by the time he was in elementary school. He’d erase his chalkboards for his teachers at the end of the day, and help them carry their supplies to their cars. In high school, his uncle DJ would point at an offensive lineman across the line of scrimmage – “That’s a big ol’ boy” – and the young defensive end would grin back, tell him “watch this,” and careen off the edge at their chest.

He had a dream to get out of Algiers, Louisiana. No – he had a need. One much larger than himself, one he had understood since he was 6, Ramona telling him he had to take care of his younger brother and sister. Football was the purpose. But his heart was guarded, and Henderson struggled to let coaches in, Lee felt, because many in his life who’d committed to him were gone.

“He’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Lee would tell recruiters. “He just needs a chance.”

He got a chance at Georgia Tech, and it’s turned into a blossoming coaching career years later. This past winter, Henderson left a high-quality NFL defensive-line job with the Rams – where he’d won a Super Bowl ring and coached all-time great Aaron Donald – for a job at a collegiate program in USC coming off a defensive collapse. Externally, it seemed a curious lateral move to a lower level.

But those closest to Henderson, for years, have known he’s long itched to return to college. He has careened down the recruiting trail with sheer aplomb in the spring and summer, his personal slogan “#DAWGWork” circulated by the biggest prep names from California to the South, because he took the USC job for a simple reason.

“To help young mens like him,” uncle DJ said, simply. “That’s all I can say. To help young mens like him.”

He used to be wary of sharing his story, beyond Lee, beyond those he kept within his heart. No longer. There are thousands of Eric Hendersons out there, kids sitting in chairs in offices like Lee’s, overwhelmed and desperate for an opportunity.

He wants to find them, whether they come to USC or not. He wants to know them. He wants to help them.

He is them.

“I just embrace everything,” Henderson said, in his introductory presser at USC in February. “I want it all. I know I can be a factor in so many ways.”

“So that’s why I do what I do.”

The path out of Algiers

In 2022, Edna Karr held a jersey retirement for Henderson after the Rams won the Super Bowl, and he returned to his alma mater. So Lee, introducing him at an assembly, dug up his essay from his Georgia Tech application and read the words he’d penned as a high school senior.

I’m most proud of the fact that I managed to succeed in a hostile environment. I was able to overcome tragic times, bad influences, and even being around the wrong people to become a better person. 

This has been my greatest joy, of knowing that I am beginning a path in life that’ll take me to a higher level. 

In the audience, the words struck Corey Adams Jr., then a young defensive lineman at Edna Karr.

“Really what I learned is, it’s possible,” Adams Jr. remembered. “Making it out of New Orleans, it’s possible.”

Lee’s kids, she remembered, used to tell her they’d act one way at Edna Karr and act another when they’d get off the bus for the walk home. This was Algiers, about two decades before “Algiers, America,” the Hulu series focusing inside the plight of Edna Karr football players to simply stay alive amid rising gun violence.

Before Lee really knew Henderson, his high school coaches – the late Don Wattigny and defensive coordinator Willie Brooks Jr. – would walk into her office and tell her she had to stay on him. He could’ve gotten lost, uncle DJ reflected, young and fast.

He almost did. He had friends slinging drugs, and shoplifting and drinking in cars and running in the streets, and that path beckoned.

“The only thing I could do,” aunt Linda Henderson recalled, “was hope and pray.”

But he was Ramona’s son at heart. He was the oldest sibling of three, and she’d taught him to be. When Ramona realized she was going to die, Linda said, the mother ingrained in her eldest son that it was his responsibility to protect brother Kenneth and sister Erica.

And as he took care of his siblings, a village formed around him, drawn to an old soul and an indomitable force of spirit. He went to live with his grandmother in a three-bedroom house in Algiers, and his older aunt drew custody, and other aunt Linda walked him to school, and he dragged uncle DJ to the park to play football.

His grandmother grew sick, and Henderson stayed home. The streets wouldn’t have made her proud. The streets wouldn’t have made Ramona proud.

A month after his grandmother died, Henderson, who’d become a top defensive prospect out of Edna Karr, signed a scholarship to Georgia Tech. At the end of his senior year, he walked into Lee’s office, sat in the chair across from her desk, and broke down.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me, in my life,” he told her.

A young Eric Henderson, right, with high school counselor Judy Lee, a longtime mentor from his days at Edna Karr High in New Orleans. (Courtesy Judy Lee)

‘He was almost unshakeable’

When he first heard he’d be assigned a roommate nicknamed “Ickey” to his apartment at Georgia Tech, Damarius Bilbo felt his stomach churn.

“What the (expletive)?” Bilbo remembered thinking, a former quarterback turned receiver at Tech. “You’re going to put me with a guy named Ickey?”

Bilbo soon found Henderson’s nickname, in fact, was born from celebrating youth-ball touchdowns with a classic Ickey Woods shuffle. It most certainly did not refer to a lack of cleanliness. Henderson had a few pairs of Air Jordans he’d brought, and he’d dust them off and seal them back in their boxes after each use. Bilbo would walk into his room in the morning and be confused if Henderson even slept, his sheets always tucked military-crisp underneath his mattress.

A picture of Ramona sat on Henderson’s desk, too, watching over her little Boy Scout.

Sometimes, Bilbo and roommate Dawan Landry would hear sniffles through Henderson’s wall. They’d walk over, gingerly knock on his door, and ask if he was OK.

“I’m good, I’m good,” Henderson would insist, and stroll outside with a smile, a gregarious face never twisted with loss or a curse at the world.

But his mind was heavy, burdened by thoughts of his siblings back home. Henderson’s oldest aunt, who’d become a matriarch like his mother and grandmother, died during his freshman year. He would call home to Lee, sometimes, overwhelmed again.

You have to take care of yourself before you can take care of them, Lee reminded him.

Old habits didn’t die. When brother Kenneth graduated high school in New Orleans, he had nowhere to go, and the streets in Algiers beckoned if he stayed. Henderson, Bilbo and Landry had a spare room in their four-bedroom at Georgia Tech, and Henderson sat his roommates down and asked them if he could move his brother up. Well – not really asked. It was something he had to do. They understood. Georgia Tech never really knew, Bilbo recalled.

Henderson went through his senior year at Tech, a potential NFL career looming, taking care of his brother. He’d keep him fed from the cafeteria. He helped him enroll in a local community college. He’d tell Kenneth, whom the group affectionately dubbed “Tootie,” to get his behind up in the mornings and make his bed.

“He used to be on him,” Bilbo said, “like he was his father.”

He did it for family, like Ramona wished. He did it for anyone, really. Sometimes, like Lee back home in New Orleans, Bilbo would wonder how on earth his roommate was still standing.

“He had been through so much already, where it was like, nothing can faze this dude,” Bilbo remembered. “He was almost, unshakeable. Unbreakable. And a lot of us got our strength from Eric.”

Sometimes, Bilbo would don a no-contact red jersey in practice, in the early days of his time playing quarterback. When they lined up on opposite sides, Henderson would pop him anyway. He’d pick Bilbo up off the turf, telling him, “I’m just trying to toughen your ass up.”

And Bilbo followed.

Sometimes, they’d wait helplessly by their Georgia Tech apartment for an on-campus Stinger shuttle, needing a ride to the front part of campus. They were often at the mercy of traffic. So Henderson would grow impatient, lateness impending, and declare they all simply sprint to the weight room.

And the group followed.

Sometimes, they’d mobilize and hit the clubs, in the days of Atlanta in the early 2000s. Henderson was always the rudder, the one to keep a head count, never letting his teammates divide up. He had a sixth sense for trouble, Bilbo recalled, and as the rest of the group tried to talk up girls, Henderson would scowl with a familiar phrase – “something about to pop off” – and drag them away before a fight erupted.

And they’d follow.

“It was a rare occasion that Ickey got slapped,” said Calvin Johnson, recalling those days, a former Georgia Tech and Lions great who described Henderson as a “big brother.”

“And if that was the case,” he continued, “we all were slapped.”

A new standard at USC

Injuries marred any chance of a career in the NFL, but Ramona’s son needed to provide, and Henderson turned up a couple years later in a crisp suit at a convention hosted by the American Football Coaches’ Association.

He landed one of his first coaching jobs working as a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State under Glenn Spencer, then the defensive coordinator. Spencer, knowing Henderson’s personality – a social magnet, a ladies’ man, as Georgia Tech teammates chuckled – turned him toward recruiting.

Once, coaches were milling about in Oklahoma State’s defensive staff room when Spencer overheard Henderson on the phone, talking to a recruit’s mother. Spencer guffawed. The young man was a natural. Smooth. Genuine.

Spencer teased him, and Henderson would broke into an aw-shucks grin.

“If he can just get on a phone with a mom,” Spencer joked, “I said, ‘We got ‘em.’”

He climbed, quickly, to a job with the Rams, becoming a well-respected positional coach who spread the #DAWGWork mantra far and wide. He stayed in touch with his old Edna Karr coach, Brooks Jr., who’d marvel at his success. He was where everyone wanted to be, Brooks Jr. would tell Henderson. He was in the NFL. Heck, he’d won a Super Bowl.

“He’s like, ‘Coach, I really still want to go to college,’” Brooks Jr. recalled.

USC head coach Lincoln Riley came calling amid a defensive rebuild. In February, Henderson stood at a lectern inside the John McKay Center and told the media – in his first presser as a Trojan – that he wanted “all the smoke” in recruiting. He meant it.

Lee once asked Henderson what the difference was between coaching collegiate ball and the pros.

Among much else, Henderson told her, simply, that he had a good story.

“I can relate to ’em,” Lee recalled him saying. “And I can make a difference in their life.”

In the half a year Henderson has spent at USC, that “#DAWGWork” slogan – founded on mental toughness as much as physical – has infiltrated vocabularies of some of the top defensive recruits in the nation. It’s been cited by Justus Terry, a five-star 2025 DL who flipped from Georgia to USC and back again. It’s been cited – repeatedly – by DL Jahkeem Stewart, one of the top 2026 prospects in the nation. It’s been cited by Texas product Gus Cordova, the first USC DL commit under Henderson’s watch.

As USC tries to establish a new standard for its defense entering the Big Ten Conference, Henderson’s efforts in growing stars on the line – particularly pulling talent out of the South – are as important as any.

“Coach Henny’s going to win down there more than he loses,” said T.C. Lewis, father of Georgia 2025 QB commit Julian Lewis, in June.

Adams Jr., who once saw Henderson speak at Edna Karr as a freshman, is now a heavily recruited senior and an Ole Miss commit. He’d notice most coaches would talk to him persuasively, simply trying to get his verbal commitment.

Henderson, Adams Jr. said, “talked to me like a regular person.”

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“I mean, the dude is part psychologist, he’s part therapist,” Bilbo said, an agent and now the head of football at Klutch Sports. “But he’s all real.”

Lee saw plenty of recruiters in her 40-year-career wander into her Edna Karr office. Some sell falsities. Some sell a bill of goods. Henderson, she reflected, could speak to kids like him from the heart, kids who made do just like him.

At that assembly, back in 2022, Lee didn’t read the last lines of his personal essay. But it’s perhaps the most special of all, to her.

I believe all these things happened to me for a reason.

I think if this had not happened, I would not feel that I’m in the position that I could succeed.