
LOUISVILLE — Tim Henderson eases into a chair at a wobbly table in the corner of the coffee shop off the lobby at Southeast Christian Church, an evangelical megachurch on the outskirts of town. It’s a few minutes before 8 o’clock on a Wednesday morning in early March, and the lights in the coffee shop aren’t all on, dimming the room. He doesn’t realize it, but over his left shoulder, older men who are carrying on an inaudible conversation at another table look in his direction almost in unison.
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They all know who he is. Of course they do. This is Louisville, and in Louisville, everyone knows who Tim Henderson is.
It’s been almost six years to the day that the blond-haired 6-foot-2 guard became a hero in this city, an NCAA Tournament savior whose lightning-strike 3-pointers 42 seconds apart sparked Louisville’s second-half rally against Wichita State at the Final Four in Atlanta. Henderson’s shots are considered the turning point in the last chapter of Louisville’s march to the 2013 national championship. They earned him the nickname, “Wichita,” and changed him from Tim Henderson, Louisville native and former University of Louisville walk-on, to Tim Henderson, Louisville native and University of Louisville legend.
Alas, that legacy is now complicated for reasons beyond his control, and no one is more keenly aware of it than Henderson.
It’s funny how the mind works. This is a pivotal moment in Henderson’s life, the defining game of his basketball career, and he doesn’t quite recall a ton of specifics unless prompted by visual or verbal triggers.
“It almost does feel like a dream,” Henderson says now.
He remembers a lot of the big stuff, things like how Louisville, the top seed in the NCAA Tournament field, got to that point. By the time they reached the Final Four, the Cardinals were 33-5. Winners of 14 consecutive games, their last loss had come in a five-overtime thriller at Notre Dame on Feb. 9. They stormed to the Big East tournament title in New York after sharing the regular-season title with Georgetown and Marquette. They beat Duke in a famous regional final, recovering from Kevin Ware’s gruesome leg injury to secure a second consecutive trip to the Final Four.
It was April 6, 2013, at the Georgia Dome, with a little more than 75,000 in attendance. Louisville faced ninth-seeded Wichita State, by far the tournament’s biggest surprise, in the first game of the night.
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“You look around and you realize it, but at the same time you’re not fully processing everything,” Henderson says. “When you’re 17, 18, 19 or 20, you still think you’re in your own world. You really don’t see the significance of your situation, or you don’t grasp what this means to hundreds of thousands of people back home. You’re just looking around like, man, this is awesome.”
Henderson never liked watching film of himself — “I’m my own biggest critic,” he says — but he admits that the times he has seen film of the game, the memories rush back. He remembers warming up and then sitting on the bench, thinking he might get in. Before the Final Four, Henderson had appeared in 25 games for a total of 88 minutes, but coach Rick Pitino wasn’t afraid to use the walk-on guard in key moments or to spell his primary guards. Henderson was only 6-of-20 from the field through the season, including 4-of-17 from 3-point range, but he’d gotten into both games the weekend before and was considered a sharpshooter. He remembers checking in at the 12:45 mark of the first half, spelling All-America guard and leading scorer Russ Smith for 58 seconds. He appeared for another three-plus-minute stretch later in the half. Then he came in with 1:09 left in the half, again for Smith, who’d picked up his second foul. Louisville was down one and needed a spark.
Point guard Peyton Siva walked the ball up the floor, dribbled right to left before shoveling a pass to Luke Hancock, who drove the lane. Henderson snuck into the corner, where Hancock found him wide open. But Henderson’s 3, his first attempt of the game, drew front iron.
“The hardest thing to do is warming up and then you go sit on the bench and you’re there for 10, maybe 15 minutes,” he says. “Then you first come in and you have the first open look. It is the hardest thing to shoot a 3 when you’re cold. Sometimes I could make them, sometimes I’d clank them, but it was pretty tough.”
Henderson checked in again with 13:15 left, the moment before the moment. Louisville was down 47-35, and Wichita State was riding an 11-4 push. A foul was whistled under the basket on a rebounding fight and Wichita State was headed to the line, but Pitino clapped his hands and tried to stay positive with his team.
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After Ehuman Orukpe air-balled his free throw, Siva brought the ball up the floor and handed it off to Henderson, who passed from the right wing to the top of the key. Hancock, as he had in the first half, drove the lane and kicked the ball to the corner for Henderson, who swished the 3-pointer.
“He had to guard (former star Preston Knowles) every day in practice, then me, then Russ,” Siva says of Henderson. “We had battles with Tim. Tim was one of those guys who never backed down and never gave up. He was tenacious. He was deceptively strong, and he really worked on his jump shot. We saw him every day, every individual (instruction). He put a lot of time in on his jump shot. When he’d get in the games over the years, we’d always tell him to shoot it.”
Orukpe was fouled again on the ensuing Wichita State possession, but he missed the free throw, giving Louisville another chance to cut into the lead. Smith raced up the floor and drove the lane with a right-handed dribble. His kick-out found Henderson in the exact same spot as the previous shot.
Swish. Pandemonium.
“The funny thing about all this is he got in the Big East tournament,” Siva says. “We were up big and he came in and air-balled a 3. He air-balled again (earlier in the NCAA Tournament). We gave him hell about it. I mean, we crushed him. But we all knew he was a great shooter, and he put a lot of work in. It was no surprise when he got in and knocked down those two 3s. He was never scared of those big moments. We never let up on Tim. We’d press him fullcourt in practice. Back then, if you turned it over in practice, you’d have to run on the treadmill, and we wanted him to go to the treadmill every time. But he just kept pushing. That night, we were so happy for him.”
Thinking about it now, what sticks out most to Henderson is how locked in he and his teammates were in the moment. For that, he credits Pitino, whose voice cut through the buzzing around the court and the ebbs and flows of cheers that echoed across the dome.
“I’d be out there playing, and it almost felt like nothing else was around me,” Henderson says. “All you could hear was him and the guys around you. You didn’t notice the people all the way up, thousands of people in the Georgia Dome. You didn’t notice the celebrities. All you notice and all you’re thinking about is your assignment and doing your job and listening to him.”
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Henderson’s back-to-back 3s spurred a 12-3 run that got the Cardinals back in the game. Wichita State did anything but go quietly, but Louisville proved too much over the final 10 minutes and prevailed, 72-68
Two nights later, Pitino’s team cut down the nets with an 82-76 win over Michigan.
“Those were the 3s, man,” says Louisville point guard Christen Cunningham, who grew up in Kentucky and was a junior in high school at the time. “He was No. 15, right? A little blond-haired kid off the bench. I watched Louisville all the time, and I’m like, I don’t know who this kid is. He comes in and it’s like, bang, 3, bang, 3. It shows how good he was that a coach like Pitino would trust to put him in a game at that level. He goes down in Louisville history, for sure.”
Fast-forward five years, and Henderson is trying to square the memories of that weekend, of that run, of that season, against a painful time for the Louisville basketball program.
The NCAA found that Andre McGee, then the director of basketball operations, paid and provided game tickets for women to dance for and have sex with certain players and recruits. The 35 wins from the title season were vacated along with another 88 victories between 2011 and ’15 as part of the NCAA’s punishment for the scandal. Louisville became the first program to have a national title in men’s basketball erased from the record books, a decision that sent shock waves through the community, fan base and university and still causes consternation and sadness here.
Henderson was never implicated in any of the alleged wrongdoing, and he said in October 2015 that he “never saw one thing” similar to the activities laid out in a self-described madam’s book. Last year, he was among five former players who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA seeking to regain official recognition that the Cardinals had won the national title. In early February, TV station WDRB-41 reported mediation between the NCAA and the players was unsuccessful. The lawsuit is ongoing.
Therein lies the complication that agonizes Henderson. That weekend in Atlanta forever changed his life. So, too, has the fallout from the scandal.
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“Obviously my family is first, but next to that, this is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened as far as a personal achievement for me, and to have it taken away, it hurts,” Henderson says. “At the same time, you know you did it. There’s always a silver lining in everything that I see. Nobody is ever going to take away that experience from me. But it’s just the actual hardware and the history that’s never going to be at the University of Louisville, your alma mater. It won’t be in the history books anymore. The NCAA won’t allow U of L to recognize it. One thing I was looking forward to was the reunions and stuff like that. You get to come back to U of L or go to the Yum Center and you have all the memorabilia in there, but I’m not going to be in there. That’s frustrating. But again, you had that experience and that moment, and I know it happened.”
Meanwhile, Henderson, who is now 27 and married, continues on with his life. Two of his four kids are still toddlers, rambunctious enough that they require constant attention. Between that and work — he dabbled in insurance before becoming a technology specialist for an orthopedic medical device company — Henderson’s time is thoroughly spent. He does keep up with his teammates, though they mostly talk about their lives now vs. regular jogs down memory lane.
Still, every now and then the conversations go back to the old days, and an informal reunion last summer brought back a rush of memories. Right there in the thick of the story was Henderson, who still looks young enough that he could put on a Louisville uniform and walk onto the Yum Center court and a casual observer might think he had gone back six years in time.
That’s a big reason why he’s so recognizable everywhere he goes in town. But even 20, 30 or 40 years from now, no matter what happens around the basketball program or with the lawsuit, Henderson still carries the title no Louisville fan will forget: Louisville native and University of Louisville legend.
“When his opportunity came, he stepped up,” Siva says. “He earned it. Now he’s a legend. He’s ‘Wichita.'”
(Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
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