Hollywood Henderson, once one of the top linebackers in pro football, now has all the time he needs to think back on how his life got turned around as a result of drugs. : Suddenly, He Found the Party Was Over

The sign promises an arts and crafts exhibit and welcomes visitors. And, indeed, there is a corner of the guardhouse featuring some macrame, which is strange when you think about it, since rope would seem to be one of the last things you would give to inmates at a Level 3 institution.

But there’s prison and there’s prison. And while the Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo features lots of the traditional prison charm of chain link and coiled barbed wire, not to mention gun-toting guards in watch towers, there’s also a strange sense of tranquility here, as if this one slam were devoted to the purposes of recuperation instead of rehabilitation.

Men lounge in the sun-lit yard. Others lazily pump iron in a weight pen. Through the latticework of iron bars are views of the Santa Lucia Range, with lonely stands of oak on the slopes. The Pacific Ocean is just beyond the silent volcanic peaks across Pacific Coast Highway.

Thomas (San Luis Obispo, nee Hollywood) Henderson smiles as a guard pats down his prison blues. “As punishment goes this is a farce,” he says. Moving from one lock-up zone to another, Henderson explains his new life of leisure. He has his own “house,” has his own television and “stamps up the wazoo.” He pays no rent, no bills. Breaks no rock. Does not, in short, do anything resembling hard time.

Says the prison guard, shutting a barred door behind Henderson (yes, they do clang): “It’s a real country club.”

Only thing different, of course, is dues. Here you hardly even have to spend your stamps, the prison currency. All you spend is time, which most cons in general and Henderson in particular have plenty of.

“The one thing you have to remember,” he says of the latest of life’s little detours, “I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway.”

Hollywood Henderson, once the most famous defensive player in the NFL, is now quite simply the most famous con at San Luis Obispo, a high-security prison in the California system. And he’s not going anywhere, fast or slow, for another 19 months, the earliest possible release date on a 4-year 8-month sentence for sex crimes.

He was once No. 56 on the cover of Newsweek. Now, he’s C-87983 on your program, which is a great fall by most accounts, even his own.

“Sometimes, I look around and see where I’m at,” says Henderson, no longer quite as neat in the waist, as he used to describe himself. “I’m in the psychiatric ward because of my therapy, and it ain’t purty. Guys talking to themselves, having entire board meetings. I had it all and that’s the real pitiful thing. Think of it, I’m just 32. If I was still playing linebacker for the Cowboys I’d be making $700,000 and angry about that. But, now, I’m just a prisoner. Helluva lesson in that, don’t you think?”

We’ll see who learns it. Henderson, who by his own admission was “wired to the gills” for lots of his up-and-down career, says he has had neither cocaine nor liquor for 16 months, eight of those before he was jailed. His 12-step program is in place. He has sponsors, support and dedication, not to mention confinement. On the other hand, he has said something like this coming out of drug rehab programs before. Even he admits he’s only “one toot away from being an addict again.”

But before he takes another one, he says, he’ll have to remind himself of that November night in 1983, when Long Beach police knocked on his door. To Henderson it had been pretty much just another typical night in the life of girls, sex and cocaine--in no particular order. Even holding a .38 caliber pistol to the head of a 15-year-old girl, as eventually charged, forcing her to perform oral copulation while an older teen-ager in a wheelchair watched, was part of the program.

“If I’d have thought it was a big deal, why would I have stayed there and gone to bed after I put them out?” asked Henderson.

If he’d have thought he was going to be convicted on sexual offense charges and then on additional charges of bribing them (the one thing he admits to), he agrees, he’d have maybe gone someplace else.

Oh, well, he adds, something was going to happen anyway. That or something else. The only thing about this he really regrets is the girl in the wheelchair. Put a bad light on his sexuality and, as he says: “Nothing wrong with my sexuality.” But there was, all the same, an inevitability to it. “The madness just had to stop,” he said. And he couldn’t stop it on his own.

Henderson’s particular madness was almost entirely drug induced. His mostly wonderful pro career, highlighted by three Super Bowl appearances with the Dallas Cowboys, was fueled to a large extent by drugs. In 1975, Henderson, a rookie, noticed a 12-year veteran washing back some speed with black coffee. Henderson inquired: “Hey, how can I get on this here pill program?” He says half the Cowboys defense was taking some form of drugs at the time. In fact, he says: “I played loaded most of the time.”

But it was the cocaine that broke him down, made the one-time Pro Bowl player waiver material, and an undependable human being besides. Not that he took it so much during games--he only played three or four games on coke and didn’t like the way it interfered with his respiration--but that it came to dominate his life more than, say, Tom Landry did.

Well, he’d have broken with Landry, anyway. He can’t blame that on the coke. “When Landry fired me (in 1979), he did what he had to do. I was too arrogant, too disrespectful. If he told me to do one thing, I’d do the opposite. I just defied him, just felt that way.”

Up to that point, Henderson was everybody’s favorite weak-side linebacker, not to mention personality. In his brief prime, Henderson was one of the quickest linebackers around, a big-play guy who wasn’t afraid to talk about himself. The week of Super Bowl XIII, the flamboyant Henderson held center stage and allowed no bit players to steal lines, even as he snorted them.

But the next year Henderson played poorly and his demands (“Mail me the game plan,” was one regrettable remark he made to his coach.) made him suddenly dispensable. When Landry caught him clowning in front of a TV camera during a loss, well, that was it. Landry sat him down and Henderson decided to retire, so that he might eventually join another team.

“I wanted to get traded, not fired,” he says. “I felt like the hardest working man in show business at Dallas, playing linebacker, playing special teams. I was making just $90,000 and I became disenchanted. I sure didn’t want to get fired. I needed the money for cocaine.”

Up to then, he says, cocaine was strictly for recreational use. It wasn’t ruining his life yet, although it did make suggestions on how he might conduct himself. His bubbling personality, for example, was as much pharmaceutical as pure good nature.

“Don’t think I was loaded all the time,” he says. “But that natural ebullience, sometimes it wasn’t just the champagne. At Super Bowl XII, a guy gives me an ounce (of cocaine) for two tickets. I go into the john, come out and the press is talking to me. I suddenly got a lot to say.”

But he had a handle on it. Until he was fired-retired and eventually traded to San Francisco. “It was strictly recreational until I was fired after Dallas,” he says. Afterward, it was practically vocational. The cocaine high was what he worked for and it wasn’t much of a secret. Did they know in San Francisco? Well, a trainer followed Henderson around on the practice field (when he practiced) with a bottle of Afrin, for his sniffling nose.

After missing more than 25 practices in preseason training, he was quickly traded to the Houston Oilers, where his habit escalated. It was in Houston that he took a big hit in his car before a game with the Steelers. It was also there that he took his own freebase pipe right into the locker room before a game and smoked cocaine in a toilet stall. “We’re talking ill,” he says.

He was hospitalized after his release in early 1981--he knew he was in trouble because of the time he went hunting ducks with a rake, not to mention the time he spent $500 on coke, money intended for his daughter’s Christmas present--then was given yet another fresh start with the Miami Dolphins. He was just 28 and coming back from everything bad that can happen to you. But he was playing well. And then he broke a vertebra high in his neck and that was it for football.

“I went back to Dallas hurt and disgusted,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t going to play again. In Florida I had been doing well. Don Shula had me going to (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings Wednesday nights. But then, after I broke my neck, I went crazy.”

Henderson, who was still getting payments on a one-year, $125,000 contract, thereafter posted a desperate vigil by his mailbox every Tuesday, waiting for a check he would turn almost directly into cocaine.

“I was sweating bullets on the delivery,” he says. “You have no idea how much I was hoping they’d get into the Super Bowl,” he says. “Cocaine money.”

It was a life of “sex, parties and girls,” all by way of cocaine, which Henderson found not only made him feel good but made everybody feel more cooperative. It had an amazing power. In truth, he used it more for its power over other people than himself because, increasingly, cocaine didn’t work for him.

“You know what, the coke never worked,” he says. “I always wanted that first feeling I had. I tried everything to get it, two gins, a beer and then a toot. Every combination there was. There was a time, playing football and doing coke, that was a good time. I spent three years and all the money I made trying to get that feeling back. If I kept up, I’d probably be dead, just like my brother Alan. He turned me on to freebase, my expertise. Died a suicide.”

Henderson was heading for a fall, all right. He was going to end this high life on a low note. Which brings us back to his party life. “I’ve had a lot of parties, some real parades in my time,” he says. “I partied in all the cities. I mean, my name was Hollywood.”

Of course, that night in Long Beach. . . . “That one you could circle on your calender.”

To Henderson, whatever happened was a result of drug abuse and did not involve any criminal intent on his part.

“The whole point of that night is that it was drug related,” he says. “They (the police) took out two bags of drug paraphernalia. I wasn’t armed to do anything. “Things just got out of hand.”

Henderson likes to explain that these girls were not Brownies. He says they came in for cocaine and seemed to like it. “Not on the dean’s list, OK?” There was a dispute over $100 and, he says, he made them take their clothes off, pointing an unloaded gun, to recover the money. “I was wired to the gills, amped. You could have plugged a TV in me.” He says he never had sex with the girl in the wheelchair--”Oh, she made good copy”--and sex wasn’t the problem anyway.

“The problem,” he says, “is that I put them out. That’s when it got out of hand. The sex didn’t get out of hand.”

Henderson compounded that problem further when the case was about to come to trial and he offered the girls money to drop the case. “I figured they wanted something,” he says. “They sure wanted my cocaine.” The charges were not much mitigated by yet another drug rehab program. It may not have been too little in the judge’s eyes, but it certainly was too late.

And that’s Hollywood Henderson’s version of why he is doing time, his horrible progress finally brought to a halt. He says, actually, he’s grateful. “I would have died like John Belushi,” he says. “I certainly can’t take credit for being alive--I took enough coke to kill me, that’s for sure.” So no wonder he’s so happy here. Still alive.

Henderson has reduced his term day-for-day by helping in the prison classroom, helping the other cons with their fractions and their English. He’s trying to get publishers interested in a book on his life story but has had trouble. One publisher told him his story was dated.

He’d like to put his time here to better use, maybe get out and preach the evils of drug abuse. The main reason he thinks his punishment is such a farce is that he could somehow be used, “better than as a teaching aide, maybe in a youth camp.”

That’s his life plan, anyway, once he gets out, to perform with a missionary zeal. “I have a gift of gab and I could share my story,” he says. “Doctors, they can talk till they’re blue in the face. From me, it’s a strong message.”

Here, on his own, he does mostly cell time, only mingling a little bit, though the mingling is sometimes instructive. “Con tells me he’s in 17 years and I say what for. He tells me. I say, ‘I did that.’ ”

Doing time, this little bit, isn’t the worst thing in the world. And if he’s going to look back he can easily see how he might have come to a far worse end than this. Better to look ahead. “Lot of years in front of me.”

As for the present, the real life of being an inmate in the men’s colony at San Luis Obispo, “It’s just a day at a time.” He repeats con wisdom on this issue: “Breathe in, breath out.” He passes through the patterned shadows of prison with a strange contentment. He is safe, for the moment, from cocaine, from everything, even from himself.