From the Washington Post

"I'm tall, talented, neat in the waist, cute in the face, and they call me 'Hollywood.' How can I lose?" -- Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, 1979

Hollywood loved holding forth for sportswriters. He'd start with his self-appraised greatness as a football player and segue to other facets of his all-around magnificence. He'd run his mouth like Muhammad Ali in pads.

For Dallas, at linebacker, number 56.

Go back to when Billy Kilmer was under center for George Allen's Washington Redskins, then Joe Theismann for Coach Jack Pardee. Go back to the second half of the '70s, to the full-throated, blood-lust years of the 'Skins-Cowboys rivalry, when there wasn't a more arrogant, comically outlandish, athletically gifted chest-thumper on Dallas's side than that meteoric madman Thomas Henderson.

He made you sneer and made you smile--and then he was gone. A first-round draft pick in '75 who went to three Super Bowls with the Cowboys, an all-pro in '78, he was dumped by Dallas in '79--ruined by cocaine. You heard later he wound up in prison.

Before you meet the sober Hollywood now and see how he resurrected himself--and before you marvel at the bolt of good fortune that struck him here last spring--remember his embarrassing final Sunday with Dallas, 21 years ago this month. He stunk up RFK Stadium in an ugly loss to the 'Skins; he mugged for a sideline camera as his teammates were being mugged on the field; he got in the faces of coaches who dared to reprimand him. Fed up with his antics, the Cowboys canned him the next morning.

Reporters flocked for his reaction, and he laughed. His brain was coke-fried by then. He said he'd make out fine in the world; fate was on his side; he was tall, talented, neat in the waist, cute in the face--he was Hollywood!

"How can I lose?"

The Strain of Winning

"EX-COWBOY HOLLYWOOD HENDERSON HITS $28 MILLION LOTTERY"--Associated Press, March 25.

A little wire story ran on sports pages all over the country. Henderson hadn't made the papers nationwide since 1984, when he got a 56-month prison sentence in a cocaine-and-sex case.

"Man, this physical strain came over me," he says now, recalling his Lotto Texas win. "I felt like the weight of the world was on me that night. I felt the fear. Y'know, could I handle it? Could I stay sober? Because it was a great moment for champagne. It was a great time for some cocaine."

Other people thought that, too. But being Hollywood means you know you're better than people think.

After opting for a $10.4 million lump-sum payment, Henderson recently proposed using $1 million of the prize to build affordable homes for poor families in his native East Austin. His generosity as a benefactor of youth sports programs in that blighted community in recent years has made him a hero there, a role model of sobriety and civic responsibility. He also says he'll donate a sizable chunk of his winnings to East Austin Youth Services, the charitable foundation he started after moving back to Austin from California in 1990.

"I knew I was going to win," he says matter-of-factly. In 14 years, he says, he spent about $30,000 on jumbo-jackpot lottery games in the unwavering belief that he was destined to hit. "I can't explain how I knew," he says. "I just knew."

That's part of the Hollywood package--the big-play instinct, born of brash self-confidence. It served him on the football field, until he lost his mind to coke. And it has served him in his recovery, which began 17 years ago. By the time his numbers came up (a 60-million-to-1 shot), Henderson already had rebuilt his life, largely on the strength of his king-size personality and his faith in himself.

"I'm an optimist," says Henderson, now 47, and not as neat in the waist as he used to be. "I've never been a guy to focus on the possibility of failure.

"He began his climb out of emotional ruin on his sobriety date, Nov. 8, 1983, he says. Then, after being paroled from prison in 1986, he launched what has become a lucrative career as a motivational speaker and anti-drug lecturer. Before the lottery win, he says, "I was already worth a couple of million dollars.

"This fall, he surprised local officials by proposing to use $1 million to jump-start a long-stalled city plan to build 74 moderately priced homes in East Austin. After forming a nonprofit corporation, Henderson would develop about two dozen lots, then use the sales proceeds to build additional houses.

"Thomas wants to make a difference," says Paul Hilgers, the city's housing director. "He's committed and he's sincere. I really hope we can find a way to make use of his passion for East Austin."

But myriad legal and financial details remain to be worked out. And Henderson has no experience in housing development. "I'm working with him," says Hilgers. "Thomas's feeling is, the rules and regulations be damned--let's just get it done. And I keep saying it's not that simple."

Henderson was just as hard-charging in raising $150,000 in 1993 to build a stadium for an East Austin youth football league that had been playing for years on a scruffy baseball field.

One of his half-siblings, Frank Rivers, recalls planning the construction: "Thomas says, 'Let's go, get the shovels.' And I'm like: 'Well, we need to go to the library, get some books. We need to make some calls, talk to some engineers.' And Thomas is like, 'No, let's go, we'll just start digging.' "

East Side Field at Yellowjacket Stadium is a community jewel today. "I want to rebuild East Austin one step at a time," Henderson says now, calling it part of his recovery.

"When I was with the Cowboys, I used to think community service was showing up on time for a charity golf tournament and signing some autographs," he says. "But I'm not who I was then."

Flying High

He'd been a small-college star in Oklahoma. The Cowboys gambled on him with the second of their two first-round picks in the National Football League's 1975 draft.

"Thomas was probably as good an athlete as we ever had on our football team," says Gil Brandt, the player-personnel boss who helped build Dallas's powerful teams of the '70s. "If Thomas had settled down and been the way he is now, with his natural ability, there's no limit to what he could have been.

"Not until his rookie season with the Cowboys did he get a taste of top-dollar cocaine, during the party swirl before his first Super Bowl, in January '76. After that, his nose habit grew with his celebrity.

He partied with Richard Pryor. He got high with Marvin Gaye. He fell in love with the media lights, strutting in his calf-length beaver coat. He led the Cowboys in tackling in his second Super Bowl, in January '78. Then a year later, in the media ballyhoo before Dallas met Pittsburgh in Super Bowl XIII, he shared the cover of Newsweek with Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw.

Coming off his all-pro year, Hollywood rolled into Miami ready for his close-up, extolling his greatness and making fun of Bradshaw's country dimwit rep.

He was 25 and wired round the clock. He had wads of cash and lustful lovelies undressing for him any night he wanted. He was flying on his fragile celebrity. He should've glanced down and seen the ground coming up. That self-adulation Super Bowl in '79 was the apex of the Hollywood Henderson trajectory. He arced to the bottom fast.

After Dallas got rid of him the next season, he tried coming back with other teams, but he didn't last. He wound up broke in Long Beach, Calif., where he was arrested on Nov. 2, 1983. Two teenage girls told police that he'd sexually assaulted them while they were partying. Henderson says he didn't know they were minors and that the oral sex was consensual, paid for with crack, a routine transaction in the squalid junkie culture. In 1984, he pleaded no contest to sex felonies.

Before he went to prison, though, he got sober in a rehab center, starting Nov. 8, 1983. And he says he kept that date in mind during the champagne moments after his Lotto numbers hit. He felt the fear, all right. But he passed a liquor store and walked into a 7-Eleven.

"A pint of milk, some white doughnuts and a sausage-and-egg sandwich," he says. "That was my celebration."