Bengals coach Zac Taylor is named after an underrated OU football player. 'Such a good guy'

Sherwood Taylor doesn’t remember deciding to become friends with Zac Henderson.

For starters, when they were safeties at OU in the 1970s, all the defensive backs tended to hang out together. In the locker room. After practice. During downtimes. Taylor contends they didn’t have much of a choice.

“Nobody else wanted to talk to us,” Taylor deadpanned.

But his friendship with Henderson was about more than shared proximity.

“There’s just kind of certain people you’re drawn to,” Taylor said, “and he was one of those guys.”

Taylor became so close with Henderson that when his first son was born, Taylor and his wife, Julie, named the baby after Henderson.

Now, almost four decades later, Zac Taylor has a chance to take his Cincinnati Bengals to their second consecutive Super Bowl. They’ll need to beat Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City in Kansas City on Sunday night, but a week after dismantling Josh Allen and Buffalo in Buffalo, nothing seems impossible in Who Dey Nation.

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Thing is, Zac Taylor isn’t just carrying the hopes of Bengals fans, he’s also carrying the legacy of an oft-overlooked Sooner.

Henderson arrived at OU in 1974. He’d been a multi-sport star in Burkburnett, Texas, playing football, baseball and basketball and running track. He was so good at baseball that two scouts for the Cincinnati Reds showed up at one of his games senior year. They told Henderson the Reds would make him their first-round draft pick in the upcoming draft if he guaranteed he’d play baseball.

Those were the glory days of the Reds. The Big Red Machine would win the World Series in 1975 and 1976.

But Henderson wouldn’t be swayed. His dad was a high school football coach, and Henderson intended to play football.

And play, he did. From the very start, actually. As a true freshman at OU, he made his way onto a star-studded defense, playing alongside Lee Roy and Dewey Selmon, Jimbo Elrod and Rod Shoate, Tony Peters and Randy Hughes.

Only two years earlier, the NCAA had reinstated freshman eligibility, but it wasn’t until Henderson that OU had a full-time true-freshman starter.

The Sooners would win the national title that season, then win another the following year in 1975.

Teammates knew Henderson to be a quiet guy until he stepped on the football field. Fast and agile, he had the ability to track down ballcarriers and the nastiness to pop them, even in practice.

Legendary Sooner running back Joe Washington once told the OU Daily, “He would tic-tac you for sure.”

In 1976, Sherwood Taylor, a product of Ada, arrived at OU. He says his on-field relationship with Henderson, who was voted the nation’s best defensive back as a senior in 1977, wasn’t always the best.

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“Honestly, he and I as teammates didn’t get along because we fought over the signal,” Taylor recalled. “They would signal in what the defense was from the sideline, and we’d always get in an argument about what it really was.”

Taylor, a future captain, wanted to make sure the defensive backfield got things right, and in truth, that was what Henderson wanted, too. But sometimes their competitiveness got the better of them.

Off the field, though, it was a different story.

“We were just really close,” Taylor said.

Taylor and Henderson never roomed together, but Taylor visited Henderson’s apartment frequently. Henderson had moved out of the athletic dorm as soon as he was allowed and got an apartment.

“That’s probably what drew me to him ― I didn’t have to go to the dorms to see him,” Taylor quipped.

Taylor, Henderson and Obie Moore, a Sooner linebacker who was a year older than Henderson, became close and stayed tight even after their OU careers ended. Taylor and Moore would razz Henderson, whose normally subdued personality would vanish the more fired up he got.

Their bond was so strong that when Taylor got married, Henderson walked Taylor’s mother down the aisle.

In 1983 when Sherwood and Julie had their first son, they were looking for a unique name. (They would later name their second son Press, after Pete Maravich’s dad.) Zac (or Zach/Zack/Zachary) was rising in popularity in the United States then, but it had never even been a top-50 name. The Taylors not only liked the name but also liked someone who had it.

“He was such a good guy,” Julie Taylor said of Henderson.

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The Taylors’ Zac got to meet and know Henderson, who made his home in Oklahoma. He would come to the Taylors’ for birthdays or get togethers sometimes.

For Henderson’s part, he got to see Zac Taylor become a successful quarterback at Norman High, then at Nebraska. Henderson also watched as his namesake rose through the coaching ranks, eventually becoming the Bengals head coach in 2019.

A little over a year later, Henderson died.

He was 64.

“Still seems unreal he’s gone,” Julie Taylor said. “I miss him.”

Yet, Zac Henderson’s name has been carried on by Zac Taylor. He has taken the name to football’s pinnacle, the NFL and the Super Bowl, and he might just take it back to the big game again this year.

But even more than that, he has become a beloved figure in Cincinnati. Fans embrace him, not only for the team’s success but also for including them; Taylor takes commemorative game balls to local bars after playoff wins. Players and coaches say they love to work for him because of how much he cares about them, a spirit that was on display for the world to see when Damar Hamlin was injured and Taylor banded with Buffalo coach Sean McDermott to stop the game.

Even as Taylor has become more known in Cincinnati and beyond, people may not know the story or the man behind Taylor’s first name.

But those closest to him do, and it makes them proud.

“It’s cool because we know that Zac (Henderson) was a good example,” Sherwood Taylor said. “So our Zac is representing the other Zac very well.”

Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at 405-475-4125 or jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

AFC Championship Game

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This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OU football: Bengals Zac Taylor carries name of former Sooner standout