As though we needed it, there’s even more gristle for the Illini to gnaw on this week. But the “other news” is so stark, perhaps it will help put the Illini loss into perspective.
Trulon Henry was shot in the early morning hours of Sunday following the loss to the Wolverines.
At a house party at 1004 South Lincoln, U, across the street from the Lincoln Avenue dorms, a party started to get rowdy. Some football players were present, and called Trulon Henry to come and pick them up, and to help encourage other players to leave.
The call to Henry was a logical one. Henry, 27 years old and married, occasionally brings his beautiful young daughter Tatum to post-game interviews. His advanced maturity compared to the rest of his teammates is palpable, a stark contrast that only serves as a reminder of just how young the rest of the players really are.
After Henry arrived at the party, someone fired into the crowd. Three people were hit. Henry was shot in the hand. His wounds were not believed to be life threatening, and he reportedly underwent surgery on Sunday. He will miss the remainder of his senior season. It is not presently known whether he will be available to play in a bowl game for the Illini.
Trulon Henry won’t get to play in Senior Day next week against Wisconsin. And truthfully, this saddens me more than the current state of the Illinois football team, or the frustrating loss to Michigan. One team is going to lose every game. It’s the nature of it. Give or take, half the teams every year are going to finish up with a losing record. That’s the way it is in a game that doesn’t allow ties, where there are no gentlemanly offers of a draw.
The fact that Trulon Henry will not get one more opportunity to suit up for the Illini before the home crowd is truly saddening to me, and it should be to you as well.
Trulon Henry has been candid about exactly why he is so much more mature than his teammates, and it isn’t just his chronological age, or the fact that he played football at College of DuPage before transferring to Illinois.
Henry, or “Tru” as he’s known to friends, has been candid that he has grown into the responsible father and husband that he is today, not in spite of, but because of, the fact that he spent four years in a federal prison in West Virginia. When he was 18, Trulon Henry was arrested after robbing a Safeway grocery store with his uncle in Washington, D.C. I encourage everyone to read Bob Asmussen’s outstanding article from The News-Gazette, detailing that incident and Henry’s road back to college.
There will be people out there who see this recent event as vindication of their suspicions, that many college football players generally, and those with a troubled past like Henry particularly, are irredeemable thugs, destined to be further entangled with trouble. That stories of people learning and changing are just so much whitewash. That people don’t change. Those critics might be right, or at least sometimes right.
But I refuse to believe that.
I will never stop believing in redemption, never stop believing in the redeeming potential of sports generally, and football particularly. Those who have the ability to physically overpower another, to outrun another, to use their body and their will to subdue or intimidate another so frequently make the newspaper. All too often these stories make the local blotter, tragic tales of violence that we have all become too accustomed to.
But sometimes these stories are on the sports page.
The sports pages were full of the details of Illinois’ loss to Michigan, how the offense is in a “funk,” as Ron Zook repeatedly said. Illinois lost 31–14 and is now on a four game losing streak. The defense once again kept the team in a game they had no business being in, and the offense was unable to capitalize, ultimately falling on too many turnovers, too many missed opportunities.
But losing a football game seems so small and far away when considering how close Mr. Henry and the other two victims of Sunday’s shooting came to losing their lives. I wrote after the loss to Penn State how football is a game of inches. Sunday’s events were a frightening reminder that sometimes life is, too.
Anyone who has even been up close to a college football game knows that it is a game of exceptionally visceral violence. The force and speed with which these young men hit each other over and over is truly staggering viewed up close. Though the hundred-million-dollar stadiums and carefully designed uniforms may sometimes obscure the fact, the game at its essence remains one of brutality: two groups, each trying to physically subdue the other.
But unlike those crime blotter stories, football gives us the opportunity to see such contests fought on an even field, monitored in an agreed upon set of rules, tallied in a neat and mathematical way. Grace and finesse within the context of such violence tell us so much about how we see our lives, and how we want to see our own struggles. College athletics have a special place in my heart because of amateurism, controversial and under attack from within and without though it may be. At least in theory, the players fight and risk their bodies not for themselves or for money, but for their teammates, their institution, their community. They do it for us.
That Trulon Henry concluded his Illini football career away from the field may be an appropriate bookend to his journey. Having freely admitted a stupid mistake, a selfish act outside of the law as a young man, Henry’s redemption may have reached an equally improbable conclusion Sunday. Henry placed himself in danger, sacrificed himself physically, for no other reason than to protect his teammates from that same danger.
What more can we ask from Mr. Henry? What more have we ever asked of him? What more can we ask of ourselves? Stand up for one another. Do the right thing. What happens after that is out of our hands.
