For Colts scout Chad Henry, cancer didnt kill him, but it changed him

Even after weeks of long and punishing late-summer football practices, the Indiana High Little Indians could never truly assess their preparation for upcoming seasons until making their annual 90-minute bus ride to scrimmage Aliquippa High.

Those familiar with football-rich western Pennsylvania will know Aliquippa is a benchmark program in the region. It’s the home of Darrelle Revis, Ty Law and Mike Ditka. Want to know what you’re made of? Fine. Go play Aliquippa – on its home field.

And good luck. You’ll need it.

This is exactly why Chad Henry could hardly contain his excitement that day. Entering the fall of 1988, the junior was embracing his first chance at extensive playing time for his Indiana, Pa., team. Henry had recently changed positions, now playing a hybrid role that allowed him to rush the passer. This was going to be the night he proved he belonged. If he could perform against Aliquippa, he could perform against anyone.

There was just one problem.

“Riding there, I had my head in my hands the whole time,” Henry said. “Then we get there and I’m throwing up.”

But Henry did what any football-loving Pennsylvania kid would: He shook it off.

“Hand to God,” he says all these years later, “I had maybe the best game I ever had. I almost killed their quarterback. I had a great game. And I’m out there throwing up between plays in the huddle.”

By this point, Henry had been experiencing unusual abdominal pain for a while. During baseball conditioning sessions that summer, Henry would consistently get sick. This was not typical for a kid who was renowned for being in impeccable shape. Concern was mounting, even though doctors initially could not determine the source of the problem.

Chad Henry as a senior in 1990. (Courtesy of the Henry family)

Eventually, further investigation revealed a stunning reality.

“I had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe in my abdomen,” Henry said.

The diagnosis was sobering and terrifying. Henry had developed a rare form of cancer. It was spreading, and fast. He was already at Stage IV. That’s as bad as it gets. Stage V is not a thing.

Henry was about to embark on a fight like none he had ever encountered, against a foe tougher than any team that vaunted Aliquippa could ever field.

Fourteen months of brutal chemotherapy, one major surgery and three decades later, Henry is a widely-respected talent evaluator, scouring the Midwest as an area scout for the Colts. His football career, which seemed destined to continue in college, effectively ended with that cancer diagnosis. But maybe that’s why it is so remarkable that Henry still managed to make football his life’s work.

His primary job is to help the Colts unearth talent and win games. But, at an organic level, the job is something simpler: He’s searching for young men worthy of playing at football’s highest level, young men he will help live their dreams – a dream that never came true for Henry.

Henry can’t remember a time when football wasn’t a part of his life because it’s been there from the very beginning. Growing up in the Henry family, football was a lifestyle. His father enjoyed a college and pro coaching career that spanned four decades. So, football was there when Henry was a middle schooler, sitting in on offensive meetings at Wake Forest, where his father worked for head coach Al Groh. And football was there when, during a summer break from college, he met longtime Redskins and Chargers executive Bobby Beathard, an event that ultimately changed his life.

Today, as the NFL Draft nears, the 48-year old Henry is a key piece of the Colts’ scouting staff, roaming his territory, evaluating prospects at schools big and small. He’s been the primary scout on Colts draft picks like Khari Willis, Parris Campbell and Anthony Walker in recent years.

None of this could have been envisioned during those dark days in 1988, during a months-long hospital stay.

Until that point, football was everything. And not because of his father. Henry just gravitated to the game.

“It wasn’t like I expected my son to be a football player,” said Jack Henry, who worked for legendary coaches like Chuck Noll and Johnny Majors. “It was coming from within him. That’s what he wanted to do. It’s what he wanted to be.”

Jack goes on to describe a treasured photo from 1980, an image of 8-year old Chad and another coach’s kid playing ball together in Boone, N.C., where Jack worked on Appalachian State’s staff.

Chad and football were inseparable. He’d hop in the passenger seat when his dad took off on recruiting trips. He’d roam the sidelines during Wake Forest games. Later, when Jack returned to work at his alma mater, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) – Chad was in high school by that point – Chad began participating in offseason workouts with his dad’s players.

These were a version of the infamous “mat drills” popularized by former Florida State coach Bobby Bowden’s staff, a dizzying circuit of conditioning exercises that no one would conceivably sign up for voluntarily. Well, almost no one.

“You had these college guys who are dragging their asses out of bed,” Henry said. “We had one drill where I just killed it. And I’m 15 years old. A guy high-fives me and says, ‘Are you a new transfer?’ I tell him I’m in high school. He says, ‘Why the fuck are you here?’ ”

Henry, without hesitation, offered the following:

“Because I want to be the best.”

Football clichés are among the most overused, but Henry was a cliché.

“He was the epitome of the first guy on the field, last guy on the field,” said former teammate and longtime friend Mike Woods. “He just worked so hard. His work ethic was incredible.”

The work started to pay off. One day during a high school practice, Henry talked his way into a pass-rush drill that pitted him against the team’s massive offensive tackle.

“I beat him on the first rep,” Henry said. His coach, surprised such an undersized player had won, matched them up again. Henry beat him a second time. Then a third.

That was the day the staff moved Henry to the team’s “monster” position, a sort of wild-card role that involved pass rushing. Henry, who had dreams of starring at receiver, had mixed feelings. He went home and grumbled to his dad.

“He said, ‘Hey dumb ass, when they want you to change positions it’s because they want you to play,’ ” Henry recounted. “They ended up putting me in a number of different packages where I was featured. It was awesome. I got to move all over the place and do a bunch of stuff. I was still on offense as basically the third receiver. But it was the defense that got me fired up.

“I loved the violence.”

Is it any wonder a player with that makeup would shake off abdominal pains that had him hunched over in one of his best games?

As everyone would soon learn, only a rare disease could impede this spark plug of a player.

It’s called choriocarcinoma, and it’s a beast. At the time, Henry said, only 25 people had been known to have the form he was diagnosed with. The news was incredibly sobering for his parents.

“There’s almost a numbness involved with it,” Jack Henry said. “I remember vividly the doctor coming and saying to us, ‘We’re going to get this. It’s going to be all right.’ I’m thinking, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Meanwhile, Chad was, well, Chad.

“Here’s the naivete of me: I asked the doctor at one point whether I’d be able to play later in the season,” Henry remembers inquiring of Dr. Michael Wollman, the man he says saved his life. “He said, ‘I think we need to concentrate on beating this opponent first.’ ”

What followed was four months of devastatingly strong chemotherapy that, for a time, sent Henry to the intensive-care unit. He says the treatment alone nearly killed him. The side effects were awful. Loss of appetite. Weight loss. Nerve damage in his hands and feet. Then there was just the overall sense of sickness. Nurses told him he once vomited 45 times in a single night.

“If there were 30 days in a month,” Henry said, “I felt shitty for 29 of them.”

Still, football kept him grounded. A steady stream of visiting teammates helped, too. The most memorable of those visits came on the heels of Indiana High’s first league win of the season, against Ambridge, a game in which Woods scored the winning touchdown.

Woods brought Henry the game ball and, to this day, it remains on display at Henry’s home in Pittsburgh.

“I was so honored to be able to give him that game ball,” said Woods, now a police chief in suburban Pittsburgh. “He was a competitor. He wanted to be out on that field. I think it had a real impact on him. I definitely wanted to do that to pay tribute to him. He’s the first guy to congratulate you on anything. First guy there to pat you on the back. But he wasn’t there and that was rough. So, we made a beeline to go give him that ball.”

Football season came and went, with Henry still in his fight. By the following March, doctors determined it was time to attempt a critical surgery. They told the family what to expect: The longer the procedure took, the better. That would indicate doctors were able to access more cancerous tissue and were removing it.

The surgery lasted 14 hours.

“I think we got it all,” Jack Henry remembers the doctor telling him afterward. The fight wasn’t complete, but the worst was over. After missing a full academic year, Henry returned to school the following fall and underwent his final chemo treatment a few months later, in November 1989.

He’s been cancer-free ever since.

Jack Henry, Chad Henry and Mark Zilinskas. (Courtesy of Henry family)

Mark Zilinskas was a new assistant coach at Indiana High in the fall of 1990. All these years later, an otherwise insignificant moment from one of his first practices remains burned in his memory.

“So, there’s this kid and he’s not in that good of a stance,” Zilinskas said. “He’s playing tight end. I went over there and corrected him. He’s having trouble moving around, so I go over and talk to him. I said, ‘Hey, what’s your name? He says, ‘Chad Henry.’

“And then it hit me.”

Zilinskas knew Henry’s story because he’d played for Jack Henry at IUP. He knew exactly why Jack had missed all those practices while Chad was in the hospital. When Chad was at his worst, Jack sometimes would show up for meetings on Monday, unable to return until kickoff on Saturday, when he’d call plays as the offensive coordinator.

Now Henry was back on the field, limited as he was. He was a shell of his former self, and he knew a college career likely was not in the cards. But seeing this through was important to him. He filled in as a backup receiver and tight end and had a blast. But the season would come to an inevitable end and, with that, a cruel reality was revealed.

“The day after the last game I played in, I came home and cried my eyes out,” Henry said. “I had to realize that my football career was over, and I’m 18 years old.”

Football had dominated his life up to that point. A life without it was unimaginable. To stay engaged in the sport, Henry found a job in the athletic department at Penn State during his freshman year there. He’d help out in the weight room then, later, found a similar role with the football program. But it wasn’t stimulating enough for a kid who had been raised on football.

“I wasn’t learning anything,” he said.

Thus began a period of uncertainty in Henry’s life. He transferred to IUP, pitched in as a student coach for a while, until he found it was consuming him and preventing a traditional college experience. So, he quit.

Henry, for the first time in his life, was away from football.

“Smartest thing I ever did,” he said, “because I realized I loved it.”

After enrolling in graduate school, Henry still wasn’t sure where life was taking him. But that changed when he visited his father in San Diego in the summer of 1996, soon after Jack joined the Chargers as offensive line coach.

That’s when Jack introduced Chad to Beathard. The two hit it off. A casual hello turned into a three-hour conversation. By the time they were done, Henry felt like he’d finally have found his calling. He’d always been something of a draft nerd as a kid, bugging his dad to buy him annual draft guides so he could read them voraciously. Jack thought Chad might have a knack for scouting and had told Beathard as much.

“Your dad tells me you have an interest in scouting,” he told Chad. When they parted that day, Beathard mentioned there might be a chance to help out in the personnel department during training camp. Henry was thrilled, but would Beathard follow through? By the time Henry got home to Pennsylvania, Beathard had left a message on his answering machine with the invite.

Henry’s first assignment was delegated by Marty Hurney, then San Diego’s assistant general manager and now the Carolina Panthers’ top football executive. It was a roster study of other teams, but it also was something of a test. Henry hunkered down and spent three sleepless days dedicating every available moment to the project.

When he delivered the finished product, Hurney shot him a quizzical look.

“I thought it was gonna take you the whole camp to finish it,” Hurney replied, “and now I don’t have anything else for you to do.”

When Jack Henry moved on to the Lions the following season, Henry’s passion for scouting only grew. He’d develop relationships with executives like Ron Hughes and Kevin Colbert (now the Steelers’ GM). In Detroit, the education that began in San Diego continued, and the Lions ultimately offered to keep him on with an internship. But Henry had a semester of grad school left, plus he’d made a commitment to Zilinskas that he’d join the coaching staff at his alma mater that fall.

Henry told Hughes of the promise he’d made, unsure of what the response might be.

“OK, the second you’re done,” Hughes told him, “you come back.”

Hughes thought it showed integrity. He liked that.

“Everybody kind of thought he was nuts,” Zilinskas said. “But I knew how much it meant to him to go to that high school and to that program.”

Henry drove back to Detroit immediately following the Indians’ season finale, worked the Senior Bowl and NFL Scouting Combine as part of his internship and parlayed the opportunity it into a full-time gig. He’d work for the Lions for the next 19 years.

Football has dominated much of Henry’s life, but the game doesn’t define him.

First, he’s a husband and father. While Henry was unable to have children because of the cancer treatments, he and wife Holly adopted three siblings and have watched Leah, Madeline and Trent become the center of their world.

Cancer didn’t kill him, but it certainly changed him.

Henry with daughters, Madeline and Leah, son Trent and wife Holly.

“When people go through something like that and survive, there’s a total paradigm shift,” Zilinskas said. “So, it’s who he is as a father, husband, scout, brother. No matter how shitty a situation gets, he’s going to make the best out of it and be positive.”

Cancer gave Henry a unique perspective on life. It’s why he carves out time each summer to participate in the Homeboys football camp, which targets lower-income kids in Pittsburgh. And it’s why Henry never misses the annual football banquet at Indiana High, where he presents an award and scholarship to a player who has overcome particular challenges – just like he did. If you think it’s meaningful to the kids, it means even more to Henry.

“When I’m there giving that award, he said, “I might as well be handing out the Heisman Trophy or the Nobel Prize.”

Still, let’s be honest: You likely wouldn’t be reading a profile of Henry if he were an English teacher or an architect. His chosen profession makes him newsworthy. And the fact that he’s among the best at what he does makes him even more unique.

And Henry’s proud of what he’s accomplished. He proved his value to current Colts GM Chris Ballard despite being a recent hire of former GM Ryan Grigson only months before Ballard took the reins in January 2017 (Grigson and Henry met each other on the road years ago as junior scouts and developed a close relationship). Henry and Ballard did not previously know each other – Ballard was the only GM candidate the Colts interviewed who Henry had never met – but it did not take long for Ballard to view Henry as an asset.

Among Henry’s proudest moments are the time in 2003 he stumbled on an undersized pass rusher at Alabama A&M and lobbied urgently for the Lions to draft him. Detroit ultimately passed on Robert Mathis, but Henry’s conviction about the Colts’ 5-time Pro Bowl selection bought him real credibility within the organization.

But Henry discovered long ago that his purpose transcends football. He mentors young scouts and offers motivation to young players at every opportunity. The advice is informed as much by his experiences in football as those outside the game.

“I get a tremendous amount of pleasure from that,” Henry said. “My oldest daughter told me, ‘Daddy, you should have been a teacher.’ And I thought about it. I told her, ‘Actually, I am. I teach people about life.’ ”

(Top photo of Henry and director of pro personnel Kevin Rogers: Courtesy of Colts)

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