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Archdeacon: Year’s best turnaround story has most tragic end

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 11:55 PM Thursday, December 17, 2009

After a game early this season, I stood with Chris Henry at his locker in the Cincinnati Bengals dressing room and listened as the soft-spoken receiver told me how he was trying to turn his life around.

To make his point, he turned and grabbed a photo he had on display of his fiancee, Loleini Tonga, and the three little children they were raising in their Cincinnati-area home.

As he handed me the picture, I noticed the NFL logo he had tattooed across the back of his right hand when he was still in high school in Louisiana.

Back then, he was obsessed with making it to the league, but when he finally got there, it was painfully and often so publicly obvious — after a litany of arrests and NFL suspensions — that he knew little about being a pro athlete.

I asked him if now — five years into the league and by all accounts making the most of this last chance — that tattoo meant something different to him.

He smiled and nodded and said it signified his commitment to football and life and everything that’s important.

He said it stood for “better days ahead.”

But two months later, the 26-year-old Bengal is dead. He was taken off life support early Thursday morning, Dec. 17, after suffering a severe head injury when he fell from the bed of a moving pick-up truck driven by Tonga near her parents’ home in Charlotte, N.C.

The couple had been making plans — even picking out rings — for their March wedding.

Police say they were involved in a domestic dispute, Tonga drove off and Henry — his left arm still in a cast from a break he suffered against the Baltimore Ravens last month — jumped in the back. A half mile later he somehow fell out.

In an instant the greatest turnaround story in the NFL this year became the league’s saddest story.

You feel for Henry’s children, his family and fiancee and the Bengals, too.

Henry was one of the most talented receivers the team ever had. But while he could outrun and outleap defenders, he never quite seemed able to fully outrun trouble. Much of it was his own doing, in part because he was easily led.

But he was making strides. He finally had learned a lot of his so-called friends — some who followed him up to Cincinnati after Hurricane Katrina wiped them out in New Orleans — were bad influences.

He realized those who cared about him most were part of the Bengals inner sanctum. Mike Brown had a soft spot for him — “What I saw was a good person at heart,” the owner said — and quarterback Carson Palmer had taken him under his wing.

Many Bengals players were devastated Thursday.

“My grandma always says you never question the Man Upstairs on decisions he makes,” a tearful Chad Ochocinco said. “But I don’t see how Chris was supposed to go already, especially when he was on the right path.”

This year you saw that on a couple of fronts. Although under-used early, he didn’t pitch a public snit. Off the field he talked about how his fiancee always was there for him, how she was “the love” of his life.

“I’m trying to do right, and I will,” he told me that day. “You’ll see.”

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