REST IN PEACE

A legend takes wing

Lou Henson dies at 88, created a desert dynasty

This photo of the 1969-70 New Mexico State University Aggie men’s basketball team appeared in the very first edition of the Las Cruces Bulletin, Dec. 4, 1969, as part of a season preview. It has appeared a few times since, because this is the Aggie team that reached the Final Four in that year’s NCAA tournament. FRONT ROW: Eddie Huff, Milton Horn, Assistant Coach Keith Colson, Head Coach Lou Henson, Charlie Criss, Tom McCarthy, Jimmy Collins. BACK ROW: Rudy France, John Burgess, Chito Reyes, Jeff Smith, Sam Lacey, Lonnie Lefevre, Roy Neal, Bill Moore.

This photo of Lou Henson and his wife, Mary, was taken at his 80th birthday celebration in Santa Fe in 2012.

Richard Coltharp

Posted Wednesday, July 29, 2020 4:32 pm

The Henson family had great impact on Las Cruces

(EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this article appeared in “Las Cruces: A Photographic Journey,” the New Mexico centennial book created by the Las Cruces Bulletin staff in 2012.)

By Richard Coltharp

Las Cruces Bulletin

One of basketball coach Lou Henson’s most memorable teams was known as “the Miracle Midgets.”

But Henson may owe his biggest debt to the Jolly Green Giant.

In the summer of 1953, Henson, then a junior college basketball player in Oklahoma, took a summer job working for the Green Giant Company, in some farm fields in Lanark, Ill. It was there, one day after work, he met a young lady named Mary.

At the end of the summer, Henson headed to Las Cruces, N.M., to play basketball for the New Mexico A&M College Aggies and their new coach, Presley Askew. On the court, the Aggies were sub-par, finishing 7-12. Off the court, he continued his long-distance courtship with Mary, eventually convincing her to head southwest.

On Dec. 29, 1954, Lou and Mary were married in a ceremony in Las Cruces.

“All of our children were born here,” Mary said. “And I drug all of them to the games.”

The Hensons were instantly fixtures in Las Cruces. Lou went to graduate school, and by 1956 was an assistant coach at Las Cruces High School.

Soon the kids started coming. Lou Jr. was born in 1957. Lori arrived in 1958, by which time Lou was the head coach at LCHS. He promptly led the Bulldogs to three consecutive state championships. After the second one, in 1960, Lisa was born.

Lou left Las Cruces in 1962, at age 30, to become head coach at Hardin-Simmons College in Abilene, Texas. But he came back in 1966, this time to coach the Aggies. And in 1967, Lou and Mary’s fourth child, Leigh Anne, was born.

Soon, Mary, instead of toting kids to the gym at Las Cruces High School, was toting kids to the brand-new Pan American Center on the NMSU campus, which opened in 1968.

Students flocked to the new arena, for Aggie games and concerts too. Lou also found a way to get the faculty involved, with what became the associate coach program.

“There were some engineering faculty members always playing at the gym,” Lou said. “They kept saying, ‘When are we going to come help you coach?’ So, finally I let them. We started the tradition of having two faculty members sit on the bench for every home game.”

Success on the court, on the campus and in the community would culminate in the glorious year of 1970. That March, the Hensons and the Aggies made it all the way to the NCAA Final Four. That May, Lou received NMSU’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. At the time, the university gave only one each year.

“I’m particularly proud,” Lou said. “Normally, coaches don’t get that kind of honor.”

After five more solid seasons, and three more NCAA tournament appearances, Lou accepted the head coaching post at the University of Illinois of the Big Ten in 1975.

But Hensons weren’t finished winning titles in Las Cruces. Lou Jr., a guard at Las Cruces High, helped the Bulldogs to the 1975 state championship. Determined to repeat, he stayed behind in Las Cruces while the rest of the family headed to Illinois. The gamble paid off, and Cruces High won it all again in 1976.

Had that been it, had the Hensons never again set foot in the Mesilla Valley, they would still be Las Cruces legends. And why would they ever return? After all, Lou would coach the Fighting Illini for 21 years, with 12 NCAA tournament appearances, and a second Final Four in 1989.

But in the computer software parlance of the era, there would be a Las Cruces 2.0 for the Hensons, beginning in 1996-97.

Lou retired from Illinois in 1996, with the plan to take it easy, including wintering in Las Cruces. A situation was simultaneously brewing at NMSU, however, that ended with basketball coach Neil McCarthy leaving. Athletics director Jim Paul offered the job to Lou, who reluctantly accepted for a year, with the stipulation he wouldn’t be paid. A salary was required to make it official, so Lou earned a dollar a month, 77 cents after taxes.

One season became eight, and Lou led the Aggies to four more 20-win seasons and another NCAA trip befor retiring in 2005 with 779 victories. Add in his high school wins and the total is 924.

In May 2005, at NMSU’s graduation ceremony, Lou and Mary were both presented with honorary doctorates, for their service to the university and Las Cruces. In another honor, New Mexico Hwy. 28 was named the Lou Henson Highway.

Mary, a breast cancer survivor, became involved with the NMSU Aggies Are Tough Enough to Wear Pink campaign in 2009, helping raise millions in funds for research and awareness of the disease.

In 2011, the Las Cruces Association of Realtors recognized Mary and her three co-chairs of the Pink campaign as Citizens of the Year. Lou had received the same honor in 1971. The bookended awards, 40 years apart, neatly illustrate the lasting impact Lou and Mary Henson have had on Las Cruces.

Legendary NMSU and Illinois Basketball Coach Lou Henson died Saturday, July 25. He was 88.

He coached at NMSU from 1966-75 and 1997-2005. He was one of only four NCAA coaches with 200-plus victories at multiple schools. The courts at both NMSU and Illinois bear his name. Henson was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015 and was Big 10 coach of the year in 1993.

This year marked the 50^th anniversary of Henson’s leading the Aggies to the 1970 Final Four. He leaves behind legions of fans and friends.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column originally ran in February 2016)

By Richard Coltharp

Over consecutive weekends here along Interstate 10, universities honored legendary basketball coaches.

On Jan. 30, New Mexico State University honored longtime Aggie coach Lou Henson. And on Feb. 6, the University of Texas-El Paso honored longtime Miner coach Don Haskins and the 50^th anniversary of his 1966 national championship team, back when the school was known as Texas Western. That championship was significant because it was the first time a team started five African-Americans during a title game. Fate helped make the game more historic by pitting the Miners against an all-white Kentucky squad.

Under the respective leadership of Henson and Haskins, the two programs flourished in the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s. Henson led the Aggies to the Final Four in 1970.

How did these two programs gain national prominence in that time, operating from an isolated spot in the desert?

Primarily because these two coaches cared more about the size of a player’s heart than the color of his skin, and they actively recruited black and Hispanic players.

Henson and Haskins grew up about 180 miles from each other in Oklahoma, a state with a checkered past when it comes to race relations. My hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, saw one of the nation’s worst race riots in 1921, and has been battling uphill ever since. I grew up in the state in the 1970s and 80s when racial prejudice was as common as bass fishing. That said, Oklahoma is also home to some of the most genuine, good-hearted, hard-working souls I’ve ever known, people who care more about a person’s inside than the outside. Count Henson and Haskins in that latter group.

When Henson took his first head college coaching position in 1962 at Hardin-Simmons in Abilene, Texas, he did so only after the school said they would allow him to recruit African-Americans.

Haskins was doing the same at Texas Western.

During this period, the big schools of the Southeast Conference and the Southwest Conference and many colleges, primarily in the South, refused to integrate their teams. In the Northeast and the West, integration came more readily, as did basketball championships. The University of San Francisco, with black stars Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, won back-to-back titles in 1955 and 1956. John Wooden, at UCLA, won 10 championships in 12 years from 1964-75, with several key black players, the greatest being Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who was a nemesis for Henson and the Aggies. The Aggies made the NCAA tournament in 1968 and 1969, only to get knocked out each year by Alcindor and the Bruins, who went on to win it all. And when Alcindor was gone, in 1970, the Aggies made the Final Four, but once again were ousted from the tournament by Wooden’s UCLA team.

Even though it’s been 50 years now since the Miners won their title, and 44 years since the Aggies were in the Final Four, the leadership of Haskins and Henson, and the efforts of those pioneering players left an indelibly positive impact on the two programs and, I believe, our communities.

One of Haskins’ protégé’s was El Paso’s own Nolan Richardson. Richardson, who is African-American, finished his UTEP playing career before the 1966 team, but went on to become a Hall of Fame coach himself, winning a national Junior College title with Western Texas College, an NIT title with Tulsa and an NCAA title with Arkansas, one of those very late-to-integrate schools.

The Aggie men’s basketball team has now had four African-American coaches, incuding Marvin Menzies, who is working toward his sixth NCAA appearance in seven years.

We should be proud of the foundation Coach Henson built under our Pan Am parquet floor, and of Menzies and others who have carried it on.

And even though it’s difficult for Aggie fans to be positive about the Miners, we should be proud too of our neighbors in the Rio Grande Valley.

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