Derrick Henry Goes 99 Yards: A Gift To My Dad (and To Us All)
In December 2018, the Titans were playing out another mediocre season. Derrick Henry, in his first year as the starting running back, had yet to come into his own. His 99-yard TD run against the Jaguars changed his career, crowned him as King, and inspired this essay, which I wrote for my Dad for Christmas.
Author’s Note: I originally wrote this piece for my Dad as a Christmas present in December 2018. Performed a dramatic reading of it with the play itself running on loop on a big screen in the background on Christmas morning. Publishing now for the first time in advance of Derrick Henry’s potential last game as a Tennessee Titan on Sunday. Enjoy (and maybe also have the play running on loop on a big screen somewhere).
The play is nothing special, a pretty straightforward handoff. Nothing about it suggests anything spectacular is going to happen, which is when it always does.
There is 7:25 left in the 2nd quarter, and the Tennessee Titans lead the Jacksonville Jaguars 7–2. The Titans line up with an eight-man front on first down. Marcus Mariota is under center. Corey Davis is out wide. Derrick Henry is lined up in the backfield. The Jaguars have crammed ten men within five yards of the ball.
Ben Jones snaps the ball to Mariota, who hands it to Henry — there are no holes, and just a modest push. Calais Campbell, Jaguars defensive end, beats his man and very nearly trips up Henry, ending history before it even begins. Still two yards deep in the end zone, Henry jump-stops on two feet, and surveys his options. Planting his right foot in the ground, still about a yard and a half into his own end zone, Henry bursts left, aiming for an as-yet-non-existent hole in the line. Tashaun Gipson, Jaguars cornerback, perhaps expecting Henry to bounce his run outside, sprints directly to the outside, just as Henry darts inside the left tackle. Slipping through a hole between Jonnu Smith (who was injured and lost for the season on the play) and MyCole Pruitt, Henry places his left hand on the small of Pruitt’s back, a little redirecting push. Henry twists, re-supporting himself from the slightly awkward push off Pruitt’s back.
Henry hits the 1-yard line and begins to sprint — the stadium roars. Viewers at home would be excused for questioning the provenance of the crowd’s cheers — on TV, this still looks like a basic 3 yard gain. But those chilly believers at Nissan Stadium — those believing enough to roar on a Thursday in early December as the average 6–6 Titans play the timorous 4–8 Jaguars — could see the future: there was no one in front of Derrick Henry. If you go back and watch the play on YouTube 76 times, you pick up on it: there are ten Jaguars in the frame, already beat.
As the crowd’s first hiccup of joy erupts, brash Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey stands watching at the 10-yard line. Henry’s run has taken him to the opposite side of the field from Ramsey, who has been baited into half-hearted coverage by second-year Titans receiver Corey Davis. At the snap, Davis pulls a double hesitation fake, and then, presumably thinking that the play, as called — a get-out-from-your-own-end-zone 3-yard scrum — would be over by now, turns around to look. Davis and Ramsey, top five picks in successive years, stand and watch.
Titans guard Quinton Spain blocks two Jaguars: halting Malik Jackson and Myles Jack. Taylor Lewan tag-teams with Spain, flattening Jackson as Spain moves on to Jack. Luke Stocker stands up Yannick Ngakoue and runs him half-way downfield. MyCole Pruitt chips Jaguar rookie Ronnie Harrison, and blocks Telvin Smith long enough to free Henry. Jonnu Smith sustains Pruitt’s initial block on Harrison.
At the top of the sports bromide pyramid is the assertion that Everyone has to do their job. This is never more true than during a spectacular football play. Eleven large, aggressive men must be kept at bay, lunging, yearning, empty, for seventeen full seconds, for this is how long it takes from the snap until Henry eventually struts across the goal line. Any failure by a blue-clad football player, even for one forgotten second, and this play would have died. Any number of foibles could have done it: a stumble, a hiccup, a mistimed lunge, a lack of strength, agility, awareness, and this play would have been stillborn, a two-yard run, utterly forgotten by every earthbound spirit inside Nissan Stadium, watching on FOX, from Nashville to the Atlantic coast. A run so utterly meaningless as to provoke larger questions: what are we really even doing here, stumbling across Earth’s crust, two yards at a time? The line between ecstasy and nothing is thin.
So the crowd yells. It is an interesting yell, a yell of a fanbase in need of something for which to yell. A yell of anticipation, for this yell begins with Derrick Henry — at this point, through twelve games, having earned only 474 yards, a measly 3.7 yards per carry — still 97 yards from the end zone, much closer to providing a second Jaguar safety than scoring an historic touchdown.
Joe Buck, broadcasting the game for FOX, lilts his voice as Henry strides to the 5. It is at this point that AJ Bouye, Jaguars cornerback, who went undrafted out of Central Florida and signed a five-year $67 million contract with Jacksonville in 2017, emerges into the frame. Bouye had been the lone untelevised Jaguar, the one white-garbed man disregarded by the hollers of the Nissan Stadium crowd. When we first see Bouye, he stalks Henry, pacing him from the 12. Henry, whose right foot is by now planted at the 6 and a half, angles toward the sideline, away from the other ten erstwhile Jag tacklers, luring Bouye into a corner. Bouye takes what appears to be a good angle on the hulking Titans running back — perhaps this is all due to Henry’s frame, luring defenders into thinking he’s some ‘90s-era fullback, lumbering for yards — stalking him lengthwise to the sidelines. In a matter of strides, as the Nissan Stadium yell has found its note, its sustained AHHHH that will last longer than they know, Henry usurps Bouye’s angle. Henry is at the 12 himself now, the ball of his left foot preening off the turf, and Bouye opens his hips into a run, the swift kick into gear his body’s exclamation — oh crap! — the last line of defense, desperate to be in front of Henry. Despite Bouye’s backpedaling, he is in technically decent tackling position — this does not have the whiff of the longest run in NFL history.
Derrick Henry, you might know, is famous for his stiff-arm. Before this night, Henry had utilized the stiff-arm to great success in the past. In the 2015 College Football Playoff, Henry threw a particularly rowdy stiff-arm at Michigan State defensive end Shilique Calhoun. Calhoun was a three-time second-team All-American, three-time first-team All-Big 10, and a third round draft pick of the Oakland Raiders, thirty picks after Henry. Calhoun is 6’4”, 250 — Henry’s stiff-arm flipped him. Three weeks before this very run, ESPN ran a segment in which Henry gave Jac Collinsworth, son of Chris, a detailed stiff-arm tutorial. Henry’s stiff-arm was well known to Alabama residents and Titans fans, but it hadn’t quite gone mainstream.
And so we return to the travails of AJ Bouye, who has positioned himself… we’ll say… adequately at the 16. Despite football’s inherent straight-ahead violence, its in-the-trenches battles, its mano a mano faceoffs, the general strategy and trajectory of an offensive football play is somehow to avoid defenders: around, beside, past, over. These are football’s prime avoidance techniques. Henry himself has been critiqued for his habit of “bouncing” runs to the outside, critical football speak for someone either averse to contact or too concerned with hitting the big play, or both. It is amid this criticism (even on this very run, Henry manages somehow to meld his critics into one, hitting the hole and bouncing to the outside) that Derrick Henry arrives at his own 14-yard line, kinetic energy pushing southeast, towards the Jacksonville bench, AJ Bouye straight ahead, pacing him.
It is at this point that Derrick Henry does something so totally terrifying, unusual, and brutally bold that it makes the spine shudder. Henry reorganizes his feet — a quick 1–2, right-left — not to cut, as former Titan Chris Johnson might have done, but to run straight ahead, and not straight ahead towards the end zone, but straight ahead into the living room, the cranium, the barely beating chest of Bouye. Henry’s cut, his feet reshuffling, is not an effort to juke, it’s a truck shifting into gear, a weightlifter with perfect form, an ox charging forward. Bouye is in good position in the longitudinal and latitudinal sense. Kinetically, metaphysically, spiritually, however, Bouye is not in good position.
Henry has somehow up-shifted: this forward-facing cut has thrust, power. His right arm, his head, his chest, his left leg, his entire being hurdles headlong into Bouye. At this point in the run, it is not clear where Henry might end up, and it’s not even clear whether he cares, whether he has a destination in mind, so intent is he on pulverizing the human life force that is AJ Bouye.
By the 18, Henry has Bouye in a, well, compromising position. Henry looks to be pushing an inanimate tackling sled, so perfect and unharassed is his form — left foot planted, right knee raised, driving, arm fully extended, locked in a grip on Bouye’s face mask. Bouye himself is cooked. He is, briefly, lifted off the ground entirely.
The viewer’s eyes, watching this run, are correctly trained on Henry, the author of this run. Henry is such a pure runner, his shift into 5,000-horsepower thrust so clean you don’t notice the violence. But watch, if you will, Bouye — specifically, his head. It’s ghastly. Violent. Awful. His head yanks back and then forth again. His entire body and life, in this moment, is in Henry’s hands. Lifted by Henry’s right arm at the 18 and a half, Bouye is set down again at the 24 and a half — Henry has carried him eighteen feet, each step against Bouye’s will.
As Henry ushers Bouye into another dimension, MyCole Pruitt has done such an unexpectedly good job at blocking his man, former Florida State linebacker Telvin Smith, that he’s almost shoved Smith back into the play. Smith is, at least, as Henry officially unencumbers himself of Bouye, in the TV frame. Also there, hesitantly tiptoeing into the octagon to be Henry’s next victim, is Leon Jacobs, a rookie out of Wisconsin. Jacobs, born in Nigeria and picked in the seventh round, 26 picks from dead last, held for a time the FBS record for most collegiate games played. Jacobs has had a modest 2018 for the Jags, endearing himself more for his hustle than his results. No one begins this particular play (other than Jalen Ramsey), in worse position eventually to be body-slammed then Leon Jacobs. This is a testament to Jacobs’s hustle, then, what happens next.
Jacobs begins the play hunched, ready to strike, lined up just outside Titans right tackle Jack Conklin. Jacobs secures the right edge, but it doesn’t matter: Henry goes left. Conklin doesn’t hold his block long — maybe two seconds — but again, the play is going the other direction, and Conklin surely figures that Henry’s been tackled by now. Jacobs kind of lumbers himself Henry’s direction, and by the time Henry hits the 6 — the Bouye decimation project just beginning — Jacobs knows the angle he must take, knows Bouye is the last line of defense. Jacobs hightails it towards his own 40 — his angle is seemingly a pretty good one. The problem, again, is Henry.
Eschewed of his Bouye responsibilities, Henry plants his left foot at the 23 — already his longest run of the year, still 67 yards from paydirt. Though he’s been running fast to this point, Henry at last has a straight ahead run to complete, and he burns it down the sideline. He seems to transport from the 23 to the 40 — Jaguars with hands in pockets are blurs on the sidelines. If you, imitating a radio broadcaster, attempt to narrate the yard markers Henry is eclipsing — 25, 30, 35, 40 — you will, as all radio announcers do, get behind. Henry is outrunning even our ability to describe him, outchasing the English language.
By the 40, Leon Jacobs, he of the 59 college games, has found his angle lacking. He is a quarter-step behind Henry. In this kind of tackling pursuit, with both players running at full speed in the same direction, the faster player (Henry) and the one ahead in the race (Henry) have the advantage. Any move by Jacobs — a dive for the legs, or an upper-body shove — can be enough to throw the pursuer off balance enough to lose stride, lose pace, and allow the ball-carrier to continue. Adding to Jacobs’s conundrum is Henry’s size — this is not someone he can unfurl his weight upon, sending him out of bounds. Jacobs, 6’2”, 245, and Henry 6’3”, 247, are the same size.
Henry continues. He is faster than Jacobs. By the 45, Henry is a half-step ahead. The angle of the broadcast camera — facing right, Henry tumbling past yard markers — makes it seem like he’s approaching the end zone. In reality, he’s not even at midfield. It is unclear if Jacobs would have caught him here, but Henry, ever-watchful, turns his head to find out. Even if Jacobs wouldn’t have caught him, the turning of the head does it — it welcomes Part II of the Henry show. Henry swivels to survey Jacobs. In a manner not unlike his here-I-am-come-get-me squaring up on AJ Bouye, Henry scampers from the 45 to the 50 with his upper body turned sideways, looking at Jacobs.
Henry’s stiff-arm lands at the Tennessee 49.
This is such a different-looking run than you ever see in football. With someone in hot pursuit, sometimes you see speedsters pull up, either to use the defender’s momentum against them with a juke, or because the runner is running out of gas. Sometimes, it seems like the runner simply does not care to be shoved out of bounds while running full speed. Perhaps we, as humans, don’t like being pursued, don’t like something we can’t see. Objects closer than they appear? Better to turn around and deal with it, football players seem to think.
But Henry here does something different. This is not a juke, or a low gas tank submission — this is the only way he knows how to run. The stiff-arm is also a grab, right under Jacobs’s left shoulder pad, a Mortal Kombat “get over here” — and Jacobs does. By the 50, Jacobs has both of his hands on Henry — this is the first person to touch Henry on this run, unless you count Bouye, who flailed for Henry like he was a life preserver.
With one arm, Henry shoves Jacobs back. He is a full step ahead of the linebacker. Henry’s hand-to-hand combat, though, has swerved his momentum askew, and Henry is at the Jacksonville 44, facing perpendicular to the end zone, his right foot towards downtown Nashville. It’s not until the 39 that Jacobs and Henry face off again — this is Keanu Reeves fighting someone on top of a bus — flying downfield, fighting at the same time.
By the 37, Henry deems it necessary to utilize the ol’ use-the-momentum-against-them technique, with a little twist. Henry is bent, lower than the up-tall Jacobs, and has him by the back of the left shoulder pad. Jacobs has a futile hand on the small (large?) of Henry’s back. Henry leverages Jacobs’s 245 pounds of downhill momentum, shoving him forward — what looks to be such a promising would-be Jacobs tackle already does not look so good: Jacobs’s left leg is planted at the 35, his left arm helpless at Henry’s side, right arm flailing in the air for balance, his body now facing away from Henry.
For two more yards Henry carries Jacobs — the linebacker’s flailing left hand just barely clutching to Henry’s jersey. The two men are at the 33-yard line now, as Corey Davis (wherefore art thou, Jalen Ramsey?) and Myles Jack, who started the play in the grasp of Quinton Spain, are now visible. It is not clear what happens next to poor Leon Jacobs. Improbably, he gets his legs beneath him, and, perhaps because of his raging bull grasp on Henry’s jersey, manages to sling himself — be slung? — into what technically constitutes as tackling position, however briefly: facing the ball carrier, both hands clinging, his body lower than Henry’s. This is an optical illusion.
Leon Jacobs was not in position to tackle Derrick Henry. Henry throws Jacobs, a 245-pound man, onto the ground. Jacobs does not brace his fall — he lands, the full brunt of himself, on his butt at the 28.
Somehow, this still isn’t over. Henry’s 25-yard long slap fight with Jacobs has left him about five yards inland, and susceptible to Myles Jack. Jack began the play possibly held by Spain, but has tracked the Titans running back all the way downfield — unlike, say, Jalen Ramsey, who has not.
Jack has re-emerged into the play because he was sprinting downfield. He is technically behind Corey Davis, himself running after the play, hoping to provide some kind of aid to Henry. Davis briefly flirts with getting involved with the whole Jacobs kerfuffle, but thinks better of it — the problem for Davis is he’s out run everyone himself. Jack, quick on the heels of Davis (who is unaware of Jack’s presence) has, again, seemingly a good angle on Henry, even if the Jags are running out of Nashville real estate in which to tackle. But with Henry’s bodyslam of Jacobs at the 25, and Henry’s subtle shift in trajectory and speed, Jack briefly downshifts himself, not wanting to overrun the play.
At the Jacksonville 26, Jacobs discarded, Henry instinctively puts out the stiff-arm again — and it’s actually unclear if the hand is directed at his teammate Davis, who, like a puppy, is eager to help but is kinda in the way, or Jack, who’s behind Davis. By the 25, Davis realizes his pursuer, and turns to block, but by this time, Jack has passed him by. Davis, the eager but helpless puppy, chasing a car down the road.
Finally, goodness gracious, will it ever end, Jack has actual, certifiable, NFL-approved tackling position on Henry. Sure, we’ve seen this movie before in the last 74 yards, but Jack, surely, has the best chance at Henry. Jack is the best of the Jaguar linebackers, selected nine picks ahead of Henry in the 2016 draft.
It was not to be. Jack’s hiccup at the 30 deprives him of momentum. Perhaps Corey Davis’s last-second shove of Jack’s arm does something. Whatever it is, Jack tries to grab Henry’s… head (?) — Henry, well, you know. Henry stiff-arms him. Jack is left grasping, and by the 20, Henry has a full step on Jack, and three steps on the courageous and resurrected Bouye. Jacobs sits, forsaken, on his knees eight yards back.
No one else will touch Derrick Henry. And no one else will ever run for a longer touchdown. The crowd, ever believing, continues to roar.
2024 Epilogue:
A season later, Derrick Henry led the Titans to the AFC Championship game, rushing for 182 yards to defeat Tom Brady and the Patriots in the Wild Card round, and romping for 195 more yards to vanquish the Ravens a week later.
The following season — the COVID year — I moved into a new apartment, from which I also worked remotely. Every day, during my two fifteen-minute breaks, I’d go on little walks around the neighborhood. One day, I was on one of my little walks, on the phone with my Dad, and passed a house just a few doors down from my apartment complex. A dude stepped out his side door, taking out the trash. This dude was a large dude. Huge, muscly. He turned, carrying his trash down the steps. I saw the twisted gnarl of the large dude’s dreads falling down his back.
Oh my gosh, I said to my Dad. My neighbor is Derrick Henry.
Many successive COVID walks did prove this to be true: Derrick Henry, his girlfriend, his friendly-barking Rottweiler, and his at-the-time newborn baby were my honest-to-god neighbors. I passed by often enough for us to begin offering each other the classic neighborly What’s up? wave, casual greetings from across the fence.
Meanwhile, on Sundays (and sometimes…on Tuesdays? the COVID season was weird, man), Henry dominated. He went on to become the eighth player in NFL history to rush for over 2,000 yards. I’d wave at him on his way home from games when his Maserati revved down our little side street. I couldn’t see through the tinted windows, but I’m pretty sure he waved back.
One day on my walk, there were moving trucks. Guys lugging couches and TVs. I wonder if they learned they were moving Derrick Henry’s things because one of them was charged with carrying his Heisman Trophy, or if Henry moved that one himself. Anyway, the King’s lease was up, I guess, or he just decided that someone at the doorstep of the NFL record book ought not be living in one of those tall-and-skinnies and sharing a driveway with three other houses, his Maserati parked next to a Toyota Camry. I never did get to wave goodbye.
I cheered him on as he rumbled to 2,000, though. My Grandmother, perhaps misunderstanding the nature of our neighborly relationship (but endearingly so), would call. “Well I watched the game today,” she’d say, “your little friend played great.”
On Sunday, Henry, a free agent to be, may well play his last game as a Titan. And if it is his last game, I’ll be sad, but also happy, content. Henry, the King, my neighbor, my little friend, has given me more gifts — 99 yards, 2,000 yards, countless joys, a few little waves — than I could have imagined.
