MR. FIX-IT? : As a Youngster, He Was Handy Around the House; Dan Henning’s Next Odd Job Will Be the Chargers

When Walter F. Henning moved his family from the Bronx to Queens nearly half a century ago, his wife, the former Mary Riley, was pregnant with her fourth son, Daniel, who would be born on the first day of the summer of ’42.

Queens was positively pastoral then. There were two parks within walking distance of the new Henning home. There were woods. And there were no next-door neighbors. Urban sprawl would be the next generation’s future shock.

Walter Henning worked as a detective in the Manhattan theater district. He spent most of his adult life bearding murderers, tracking rapists and boxing the ears of the occasional gate crasher. When duty kept Walter from returning to Queens at the appointed dinner hour, Mary would set the table, call her sons, say grace and then explain matter-of-factly, “We’re going to eat early tonight. Your father has a homicide.”

The Rileys had arrived in the Bronx from Ireland in 1840. The Hennings had emigrated from Germany. Dan Henning was the fourth of six boys. Much later, his father would single him out along with his oldest brother, John. He would upbraid them for their choice of professions.

“You two are doing all right,” the New York detective would say. “But when are you going to find a more stable line of work?”

John Henning is an anchorman and political reporter for WBZ-TV in Boston.

Dan Henning is the new head football coach of the San Diego Chargers.

“Boys Town,” is John Henning’s two-word description of growing up a Henning in Queens, New York, in the ‘40s.

From his family’s two-story home, Dan Henning had to take a bus, a subway and an elevated train to get to school every day. Nevertheless, he was an all-city quarterback at Brooklyn’s St. Francis Prep. He also starred in basketball and baseball, the two sports pursued more regularly by his brothers.

“Dan was always playing over his head because he was always playing with the older guys,” says John Henning. “But he was always a leader, and he always played quarterback.”

Eventually the boys grew up.

No. 2 son, Jim Henning, was the free spirit. He never married. He drove a cab for a while. He worked for a security firm. He lives in Manhattan.

No. 3 son, Michael Henning, runs the New York office of the accounting firm of Ernst & Whinney.

No. 5 son, Paul Henning, works in public relations for Wang Computers in Lowell, Mass.

No. 6 son, Peter Henning (17 years younger than John), manages McGovern’s, a restaurant and bar in New York City.

“They were all different,” says Mary Henning, who still lives in the same house. “They all had their good qualities. Dan was always very helpful at home. He would fix things. I depended on him a lot. I just wish he would stop smoking. Neither of his parents ever smoked.”

The Atlanta Falcons were depending on Henning to fix the mess they had created for themselves before they hired him as their coach in 1983. Henning was the trusted lieutenant who had helped Coach Joe Gibbs lead the Washington Redskins to a Super Bowl victory following the strike-torn 1982 season.

But the Falcons were a franchise in disrepair. The Rankin Smith family lacked direction. Members of the media compared the Smiths to the buffoonish Clampetts, the fictional TV hillbillies who jalopied their way to Beverly Hills in the early ‘60s.

Henning wanted to mend the Falcons’ ways in the worst way. But the defense he inherited was mostly a collection of slow overachievers. His quarterback, Steve Bartkowski, never terribly mobile, was nearing the end of an injury-plagued career. William Andrews, his best back, would soon suffer a devastating knee injury from which he would never fully recover.

Still, Henning’s Falcons beat the Bears at Chicago in his first game as coach. They did well to finish 7-9. But two miserable 4-12 seasons followed. And the Smiths wanted to fire this wise-cracking northerner who certain Atlantans were beginning to perceive as an outsider.

“I think a lot of people thought he was a smart-(aleck) New Yorker,” says sportswriter Glenn Sheeley, who covered Henning’s Falcons for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He had trouble talking to the average southerner.”

Not everybody shared that opinion. After St. Francis Prep, Henning had received a football scholarship to attend William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. At subsequent family reunions, his brothers would chide him about his accent, which had gradually become more “y’all” than “youse guys”.

By the time he got to Atlanta, Henning had coached in Tallahassee, Fla., Blacksburg, Va., Houston and Miami. “Dan’s a southern boy now,” John Henning says. “He’s much more of a southern charmer than he is a Hell’s Kitchen kid.”

After the disastrous 1986 season, Henning charmed the Smiths into another year as head coach. They had wanted to hire former Eagles’ Coach Dick Vermeil or UCLA’s Terry Donahue. Vermeil and Donahue balked at the Smiths’ reputation. Meanwhile, Henning moved quickly to hire Marion Campbell, the former Falcon head coach, as his defensive coordinator when the Eagles dumped Campbell for Buddy Ryan. It bought Henning one more year on the job.

Henning had always focused on the offensive side of the football. But the 1986 Falcons had allowed more points than any team in the NFL. Henning wasn’t blind to the needs of the defense, but the beginning of the end for him in Atlanta was the 1986 draft, during which he allowed Campbell to stock his 3-4 defense with the Falcons’ first two selections (second and 17th overall).

The picks turned out to be Oklahoma nose tackle Tony Casillas and Syracuse linebacker Tim Green. Campbell’s 1986 defense improved from 25th in yards allowed the previous year to seventh. And the Falcons got off to a surprising 5-1-1 start.

But Casillas and Green weren’t the players Atlanta hoped they would be. Still aren’t. Instead of Casillas, Atlanta should have gone for Purdue quarterback Jim Everett. Houston gladly snatched Everett with the next pick after Casillas before trading him to the Rams.

The Henning drafts came under increasingly close scrutiny. Why, people wanted to know, had the Falcons selected defensive players with their first two picks in 1984 when Maryland quarterback Boomer Esiason was still available?

The fact is, Cincinnati selected three players in the 1984 draft before choosing Esiason. And the fact is, Falcon personnel boss Tom Braatz, now with Green Bay, was more responsible than Henning for the failure to land Esiason. But in the four Atlanta drafts in which he participated actively, the Falcons chose only one offensive player, Pittsburgh guard Bill Fralic, with one of their first two selections.

When the Falcons lost five in a row after their fast 1986 start, Henning withdrew publicly. His cigarette consumption increased. “Even at Washington, Dan would always look like hell by about Thursday of every week,” says Joe Theismann, the Redskins’ quarterback during Henning’s first stint there.

The low point came in Week 14, when winless Indianapolis showed up at half-empty Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and beat the Falcons, 28-23. It was Ron Meyer’s first game as coach of the hapless Colts, who scored late on a blocked punt after a penalty had nullified a Falcon punt that would have pinned the Colts deep in their own territory.

Undaunted, the Falcons marched 70 yards in 35 seconds. But when tight end Arthur Cox, now a Charger, dropped a pass at the goal line, the game was over. “It was maybe the most embarrassing moment in the history of the franchise,” Sheeley says.

And in the week that followed, Henning clammed up even more. He instructed his players to do the same. “We’ll make our statement on the field,” Henning said. Their statement turned out to be a 14-9 loss at home to the then-lowly Saints.

The 1986 Falcons finished 7-8-1. The Smiths replaced Henning with Campbell. So Gibbs hired Henning back as a Redskin assistant. He had to outbid Giant Coach Bill Parcells. Neither was deterred by the Henning’s 22-41-1 record in Atlanta.

Gibbs, Parcells and Henning had all worked together on Bill Peterson’s staff at Florida State in the late ‘60s. Florida State was Henning’s first job after a spotty professional career as a strong-armed, slew-footed quarterback.

Henning’s playing career included stints with the semi-pro Springfield (Mass.) Acorns and the Norfolk (Va.) Neptunes of the Continental League. After leaving William & Mary in 1963, he also spent four seasons, off and on, with the Chargers, where he studied at the foot of Coach Sid Gillman, the Socrates of offensive football. Henning and Gillman loved each other.

“I called him my ‘blackboard quarterback,’ ” Gillman says. “Because he was so bright. He understood the entire concept. He had the total picture.”

The picture had come into focus at William & Mary where, in the pre-multiple substitution era, Henning called his own plays. “He couldn’t run worth a damn, but he could throw beautifully,” says Milt Drewer.

Drewer was William & Mary’s coach at the time. And the skinny backfield coach he had hired away from Jerry Burns at Iowa to help tutor Henning was a fellow named Lou Holtz. “Lou Holtz hasn’t changed,” Henning says of the man who coached Notre Dame to the national championship of college football last year. “He was very demanding.”

After Florida State, Henning moved to Virginia Tech, where he was the offensive coordinator and the coach responsible for developing Don Strock. He later worked for Holtz as an assistant on the Jets, for whom the quarterback was Joe Namath. And then he coached the quarterbacks for Don Shula’s Dolphins, where he was reunited with Strock, by then a dependable backup to Bob Griese.

“Basically, he’s the guy who made me a quarterback,” Strock says. “He is very meticulous. And he has no aversion to learning.”

When Steve Ortmayer, the Charger director of football operations, introduced Henning to the San Diego media Thursday, he described Henning as a “people person.”

But, says Strock, “He can be serious, tough and aloof. He can be a lot of things.”

During Henning’s two-year hitch with the Jets (he worked with the quarterbacks and receivers), they trained at Hofstra College in Hempstead, N.Y. Mary and Walter Henning would ride out from Queens, set up beach chairs on the practice field and watch their son advise the great Namath.

Holtz had rescued Henning from a position with a security guard firm at the World Trade Center, where Henning worked in 1975, his first year out of football since infancy. From the Jets, he went to the Dolphins and then to the Redskins. Two years after Henning rejoined Gibbs, Washington won the Super Bowl. Henning got much of the credit for fine tuning the Redskins’ one-back offense, which featured a diesel named John Riggins pounding relentlessly off tackle and the sprint-dash rollouts of the garrulous Theismann.

“It was not a coincidence that the Redskins won the Super Bowl again after Dan rejoined them in 1987,” Theismann says. “He was a stabilizing influence. I still do not agree with his firing in Atlanta. He just hit a ton of lousy circumstances.”

Al Davis, himself a product of New York City’s mean streets, apparently agreed with Theismann. He tried to hire Henning last year before finally settling on Denver’s Mike Shanahan as a replacement for Tom Flores.

It was reported that Davis and Henning couldn’t agree on terminology and who would have final say on roster cuts. Henning says the part about roster cuts was never an issue between the two. He also says Davis never offered him the job.

“We had enough differences of opinion as to the way that thing should be put together that I thought it would have been unusual if he had offered me the job,” Henning says.

They disagreed on too many things. Perhaps because they were too much alike. “That might have caused some sparks,” says John Henning. “They are the same way. Somebody’s got to be the boss.”

But the qualities that made Henning attractive to Davis in the first place also made him attractive to Ortmayer. Ortmayer spent nine years in Davis’ organization before Charger owner Alex Spanos hired him away two years ago.

Henning is Ortmayer’s first head coaching hire. If Henning is not successful, Ortmayer and Henning will probably be shown the door at the same time.

Their immediate and top priority is the quarterback position. Incumbent Mark Malone had the lowest listed quarterback rating in the AFC each of the past two years. If the 1989 season started tomorrow, he would be the Chargers’ best quarterback.

In a 13-3 loss to the Raiders on national television in Week 10, Theismann was appalled at Malone’s performance. “He made at least two decisions and threw one flutterball that should have cost him his job right on the spot,” Theismann said.

Henning is aware of the problem. One possibility is the April draft, in which the Chargers currently hold the No. 8 selection. UCLA’s Troy Aikman will be long gone by then. And talent appraisers are split on whether USC’s Rodney Peete has enough promise to merit being chosen that high. Another possibility is Miami quarterback Steve Walsh, who hasn’t publicly decided whether he will make himself available for the 1989 draft. A more remote possibility is the acquisition of a conditional free agent--such as New England’s Tony Eason.

“I think I’m a good football coach,” Dan Henning says. “I think I know how to organize. I think I know how to coach. I think I have to manipulate the system here and massage the computer. What you get out of it, you get out of it.”

Henning and his wife, Sandy, have five children, including a son, Danny, who played quarterback at Maryland and tried out (unsuccessfully) with the Patriots last summer.

He is the Chargers’ eighth head coach in 29 years and still holds the record for the longest completion in William & Mary history, an 87-yarder in the dying moments of a 44-6 loss to Navy in 1961.

One New York paper ran a picture the next day in its rotogravure section of a harried Henning being swallowed by a wave of Navy tacklers. Mary Henning hated the picture with a passion. Still does. But she likes San Diego. And, she says, “I’m sure he will make a great coach in there.”

He is, after all, the son who fixes things.