The last section of this article was written prior to learning that Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry died early Thursday from injuries sustained when he fell off the back of a pick-up truck Wednesday afternoon.

It’s a pretty crazy story. Henry, on injured reserve since breaking his forearm in the November 8 win over Baltimore, was in Charlotte with the longtime girlfriend that had recently become his fiancée. The two were staying at her folks’ place while working out wedding plans. They got into an argument Wednesday afternoon, at the conclusion of which his lady ran outside, jumped in a pick-up truck, and attempted to speed off. Henry, being a remarkable athlete, somehow jumped into the back of the pick-up before she got away. A half-mile later, he was thrown from the truck, landed on the street, and suffered the injuries that ultimately lead to his death.

For his first few years in the league, Henry was, by all accounts, a major pain in the ass. He was also an important cog in the offense of the most successful Bengals’ team of the last nineteen years. His rookie year, once he got used to the speed of the game, he was borderline incredible. The best moment of my Bengals viewing life appears in the picture accompanying this piece, when Carson Palmer completed a seventy-yard bomb to Henry down the right sideline on the second play from scrimmage in the home playoff game against the Steelers in early 2006.

That happy moment lasted five seconds, because it is the same play on which Kimo von Oelhoffen rolled up on and blew out Palmer’s knee, ending any hope we had of a victory. But that perfectly thrown ball nestling in Henry’s outstretched arms, Henry with a step on the man covering him and accelerating for more yardage after making the catch, was a thing of beauty.

Moments like that didn’t happen enough in Henry’s career. In the months following that playoff game, he would be arrested a number of times, for everything from giving alcohol to underage girls to gun possession. He and Pacman Jones became the poster boys for how “gangster” the NFL had become. Henry was suspended for ten games in the 2006 and 2007 seasons and was eventually cut by the Bengals in April of 2008.

Bengals President Mike Brown signed him back later that offseason, though, believing he could help turn the young man around. Many groaned, but Brown ended up being right. While Henry’s numbers didn’t dazzle the last couple years, he showed up this offseason devoted to working out and improving his game. Everyone in the organization, top to bottom, said the young man they had the pleasure of hanging out with and coaching this season bore little resemblance to the child they shepherded around his first couple years in the league. He’d grown to appreciate his immense talent for how rare it was and recommitted himself to his life and his career. Everyone noticed, and everyone was proud of him. They expected big things, whereas Henry expected nothing more than an opportunity he was determined not to blow for good.

The latter portion of the guy’s 26 years, the ones lived in the public spotlight, were a volatile stew. He obviously had some issues, but he was in process of doing that thing that can seem so impossible for anyone to do, namely getting over himself, growing up, shedding the skin and the persona that got him into so much trouble and becoming the man everyone knew he could become.

And so ends the Chris Henry story, it would seem just as he was getting started.

For those five seconds back in 2005, when he blazed down the sideline and corralled that Palmer bomb in an almost-balletic show of speed and skill, he made this Bengals fan as happy as I’ve ever been watching football.

Everything (that game, the Bengals franchise, Henry’s career for a few years) mostly went to shit from there, but the joy felt in those five seconds is why people watch football. Regardless of anything else, he fulfilled his purpose as a player, the only way the public really knew him, in that moment.

Thanks for the memory, brother.

R.I.P. Chris Henry.

***

It’s insane to profess love for any professional franchise. McDonald’s, Google, Boeing, etc. These are ultimately faceless enterprises built on numbers, chasing dollars, ones that want two things: your money, and to get the most out of employees with as little invested in them as possible.

Profit, basically, is it. Corporations chase profit. If they can’t turn a profit, they eventually cease to exist. Profit is the point of business. I never got the Business Administration degree my pops wanted me to get, but I at least understand that much.

It follows, then, that it would be as foolish to say you “love” a professional sports franchise. The men in charge don’t care about you. Not really. They want you to buy their shit and support their team, but ultimately you, as an individual, are expendable. Rare is the story where a franchise bends over backwards for any one fan. If you don’t buy a ticket, someone else will.

This is how the NFL, in particular, the most popular professional sport in America, operates. They make fans bend over backwards to see out-of-market games if they can’t afford the league-sponsored Sunday ticket, hold local fans hostage by blacking out the home team on local television if the game doesn’t sell-out and then blacking out the other network’s game if it does. They are like the mafia. They get paid, and little else matters (except, of course, touchdown celebrations, which just so happens to open up another revenue stream that Chad Ochocinco has contributed $120,000 to this year alone).

But watching my Bengals get smoked by the Vikings last week (more on that in a minute), I began to understand how my parents must have felt while watching me struggle through unfortunate athletic pursuits when I was a kid. Watching me strike out repeatedly in little league. Watching me miss the ball in freshmen soccer. I wanted my guys to do well so badly, to somehow get it, and to succeed when the possibility of them doing so seemed so far out of the realm of possibility.

Is this love? Yes. Yes it is. I love this team. The Cincinnati Bengals. I’m not sure why, because over the course of my attention-paying life they have given me little reason to stay loyal. Maybe it’s a regional thing, a slice of Ohio with which I will always identify. Maybe it’s the fact that they finally got good after so many years of being dog shit.

Whatever the reason, these are my guys. I love those tiger stripes, and anyone suiting up in them, as much as it is possible for someone to love an ultimately faceless corporate moneymaking enterprise, the public front of which is a bunch of millionaire athletes I’ve never had any interaction with.

Which makes this Chris Henry news that much harder to take, that much more affecting on a personal level than any of the other celebrity deaths this year. Jay Bennett was up there, mostly because it seemed so sad the way everything played out. But Chris Henry was our dude, injured now but turning his life around, getting married, and ready to dominate into the future.

Or that was the plan, anyway.

This goes a step beyond rooting for a professional football team. I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this phenomenon, but…

Wisdom and love rarely inhabit the same mental real estate.

***

I kind of thought it might happen, having watched the Vikings demolish several teams so far this year, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch Minnesota completely eviscerate my favorite team over the course of three hungover hours in week 14. And watching Favre and that defense rain fire on my boys, I understood why the Minnesota Vikings are the scariest non-undefeated team in the NFL right now.

San Diego and Philly are both getting hot at the right time, but they don’t do the scorched earth bit the way Minnesota does. Throw out the Arizona game: the Vikes got blitzkrieged by a team that decides moments before gametime whether or not they feel like showing up. They also lost to Pittsburgh the last time the Steelers won a game, when the Men of Steel still looked like a valid force to be reckoned with this season.

The Vikings haven’t played the toughest schedule in the universe. In fact, that Bengals game was the only one in the season’s final quarter that figured to prevent them from going 14-2 and getting at least one home game in the coming playoffs and two if the Saints have a couple bad games between now and the NFC championship. Still, of the Vikings’ eleven wins, only three have come by seven points or less. They have scored at least 27 points in every one of their victories.

Brett Favre currently has at his disposal the second-best running back in the league; a talented, speedy, and multi-faceted receiving corps; a brick wall of an offensive line the right side of which (Bryant McKinnie and Steve Hutchinson) features two Pro Bowlers; and as mean of a defense as exists in the league, one featuring everything you want at all three levels (run stoppers and quarterback-sackers up front, fast linebackers who make plays, and an all-world cornerback in Antoine Winfield).

Describing the Vikings’ strengths somewhat misses the point, though. The real factor here begins and ends with…ugh…Brett Favre. There’s a reason Brad Childress threw the entire season on the shoulders of a 40-year-old who flamed out late in the season at his last two stops (the last three weeks last year in New York, in the NFC Championship game for Green Bay). Childress, for the most part, save the receiving corps (Percy Harvin came in this year’s draft, Sidney Rice has ascended in his third season), had all the aforementioned pieces at his disposal last year, and a stinker of a playoff game by Tavaris Jackson ended Minnesota’s Super Bowl hopes.

So with Favre under center, the Vikings believe. You can see it in the way they play. They know they will never get a shot like this again, playing with a capable Hall of Fame QB who does everything he’s supposed to, and well, without taking anything off the table. For all intents and purposes this is a one-shot deal, and everybody on that team knows it.

You can feel it. You can see it. The folks in Minneapolis were able to put together what amounts to a perfect football team with one missing ingredient, and when Favre became available and laid out his terms, they jumped at the chance to get him under contract and procure his services for this season, what might amount to most of the current Vikings’ last best chance to do something magical.

It’s in the way Adrian Peterson breaks tackles. The way Jared Allen rushes balls-out every play and Antoine Winfield crushes someone making the mistake of ending up on his side of the field. In the way Rice goes up for jump balls and Harvin explodes across the middle. These guys know that something crazy has to happen for them to get beat, and that so long as they play hard every down, every day, win as often as possible, and get at least one playoff game and possibly two in their house, where they do not lose, then their championship dreams very well may come true this year.

Right now, at this moment in time.

And while I didn’t exactly enjoy watching them kick the shit out of my favorite team last Sunday, this kind of self-actualizing play, spread throughout both sides of a professional football team, is a pretty cool thing to see.

***

There won’t be a Satire on the Rocks Plea for Sanity this week. When someone dies, cynicism and righteous sarcasm don’t seem particularly necessary. It would be difficult for me to muster such feeling in light of the past couple days’ shocking news regarding Chris Henry, and so that’s going to do it for this week. We’ll see you all back here on Wednesday.