Laying on his cot inside the maximum-security prison near the California-Oregon border, just eight days into a 56-month prison term and 244 days into sobriety, Thomas Henderson began writing the toughest letter of his life to the man partly responsible for him not securing a potentially lighter sentence.

Henderson was writing a lot of letters from his Susanville Correctional Facility cell in the latter part of 1984 -- to former Dallas Cowboys teammates, coaches, and friends. It was part of Step 9 in the 12-step program he was undergoing for alcohol and substance abuse: Make direct amends to people you have harmed wherever possible.

But this letter, written on July 9, 1984 -- the first of three he would pen to Gil Brandt, the former Cowboys executive who will be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday -- was particularly agonizing. A few months earlier, while Henderson was awaiting sentencing for the sexual assault of an underage girl, among other serious charges, Brandt had provided a non-glowing statement to a probation officer that would help determine the fate of the player he had scouted, drafted and signed a decade earlier.

The statement brought to light an incident that involved Henderson asking Brandt for money to support his $10,000 a week cocaine habit. Brandt didn't believe much leniency should be granted by the sentencing judge, that the Pro Bowl linebacker -- formerly known as "Hollywood" for his flamboyant and outspoken nature during his playing days with the Cowboys -- needed significant time in prison to fully appreciate the consequences of his actions.

Henderson's conundrum: Should he express forgiveness or blame?

He chose love and hope.

A few weeks ago, Brandt was checking messages on his answering machine when he came across a voicemail from a man he had drafted more than 50 years ago. The accomplished offensive lineman had called to belatedly congratulate his former boss on his Hall of Fame selection.

After a few words, there was a pause. The man, now in his mid-70s, continued.

"I'm just very, very grateful to have had you in my life at a time when I really needed you, and you helped me tremendously," he said, his voice cracking. "So, I wanted you to know I care …"

Through tears, the man hurriedly said goodbye and hung up the phone.

Ask Brandt about the impact he made in the front office of the Cowboys, and he'll talk your ear off, regaling you with stories from yesteryear, half of which sound beyond belief. Like the time he held up the 1964 NFL Draft for six hours waiting on medical reports for a player who was so distraught over the assassination of John F. Kennedy that he punched a mirror, cutting his wrist badly. Or the time, as a 26-year-old, he signed his very first player, out-bidding Chargers GM Frank Leahy, who had drafted the kid -- Dartmouth halfback Jake Crouthamel -- in the first round of the AFL draft.

But ask Brandt about the impact he's made in the lives of the players he discovered, signed and befriended along the way, and he is suddenly at a loss for words. This 86-year-old extrovert is clearly not comfortable talking about his feelings.

Others, however, are more forthcoming, if not in words then by their actions.

He still draws a crowd at events where his former players are gathered. At his Ring of Honor induction last November, Drew Pearson escorted Brandt everywhere he went in AT&T Stadium, treating him with the gentleness he received from Brandt as a player. And there was Mel Renfro (the player who had injured his wrist after the JFK assassination), placing a kiss on the side of Brandt's head shortly after Brandt had delivered his speech at halftime of the Cowboys-Saints game, formally joining a group that includes 15 of the players he personally acquired for the Cowboys.

There is an unmatched executive-player reverence, a genuine love and affection for a man who has meant so much to so many for so long.

The first time Brandt saw Thomas Henderson, he was scouting Clint Longley, a Small College All-American quarterback from Abilene Christian the Cowboys would eventually trade for in 1974 (and whom Brandt would trade two years later after Longley infamously sucker-punched his teammate, and everybody's All-American, Roger Staubach). Abilene was playing a playoff game against Langston in Henderson's junior year at the all-black NAIA Oklahoma university.

Despite its enrollment of just 1,100 students, Langston entered the game undefeated, thanks in large part to Henderson, who, in Coach Big Daddy Nivens' Sic 'Em defense, was destroying opposing quarterbacks (sack statistics weren't around then, but some estimate Henderson accounted for more than 40 on the season). Langston lost the game, but not before Brandt took notice of Henderson's dominant day; he was named the game's defensive MVP.

A decade earlier, Brandt had hired Dick Mansperger as a scout. One of Mansperger's main responsibilities was to provide the Cowboys lists of draft-worthy players from black colleges, along with their height, weight, 40-yard times and a rating. This quantitative data was placed into the Cowboys' computer system and out spit names of players many had never heard of, or from schools – particularly the black colleges – most NFL teams didn't bother sending their scouts to.

In a time when many teams were still drafting players out of Street & Smith's magazine, it was a system that helped Brandt discover and procure small-school stars like Bob Hayes (Florida A&M), Jethro Pugh (Elizabeth City State), Rayfield Wright (Fort Valley State), Cliff Harris (Ouachita Baptist), Harvey Martin (East Texas State), and Ed "Too Tall" Jones (Tennessee State).

So, by the time Henderson entered his senior year at Langston, the Cowboys' scouting system was well-established and dominating the NFL competition, turning the expansion franchise Brandt joined in 1960 into a dynasty that became known as America's Team.

"Gil was brilliant at finding people," Henderson said.

To drive his point home, Henderson begins to tell the story of how Brandt supposedly found Pugh, a fictitious yarn that "Bullet" Hayes often told in the locker room, and one that was repeated by Wright at Pugh's funeral in 2015.

As legend has it, Brandt was headed in his car down a rural road in North Carolina in the early '60s, attempting to uncover the next great hidden gem for coach Tom Landry to develop. When he came upon a young man plowing a field, Brandt stopped and asked for directions to the house of a player he had traveled more than a thousand miles to meet. Without saying a word, the young man lifted the plow and used it as a pointer. Brandt's eyes widened.

"Forget about him," Brandt said excitedly. "What's your name?"

The Cowboys took Pugh in the 11th round out of tiny Elizabeth City State in 1965. Henderson's wait – exactly 10 years later – lasted only 18 picks into a draft that saw Brandt select an unprecedented 12 players who would make the final roster that year and fast-track the Cowboys' rebuilding project. And while Dallas had enjoyed a lot of success with small-school players by that time, including the selection of "Too Tall" a year earlier, not everyone was completely on board with Henderson.

"A couple of years ago, I asked Gil, 'When you were in the draft room there with Landry and he wants to take someone from Penn State or Notre Dame or Michigan or UCLA, how the hell did you get him to pick me in the first round?' " Henderson said. "And Gil replied, 'I was pounding on the table, saying this is the best player on the board, we should have picked him earlier.' "

Brandt confirmed the story. He and scout Red Hickey were the only two from the Cowboys who had personally seen Henderson play. Back then, game film wasn't readily available, and for small schools like Langston, it was virtually impossible to acquire. But the Cowboys had scouting systems in place they trusted, and even though Henderson might have still been available in the third round, Dallas took its shot in the first, much to the surprise of other front offices around the league.

When Henderson showed up at the Cowboys' headquarters the next day, he met Brandt in person for the first time. In his autobiography, "Out of Control," Henderson described that meeting and his first impression:

"Most of what I noticed about Gil Brandt was the way he assaulted his chewing gum. I'd never seen anything like it. The guy was pretty speedy. He had no chin and his mouth was yapping and he just loved to attack that gum."

After some small talk, Brandt got down to business.

There might not be two people more different than Gil Brandt and Thomas Henderson.

Brandt grew up in a modest neighborhood on Milwaukee's East side in the 1940s and '50s. His father was a district manager for a grocery chain, and his mother stayed home to raise the couple's two children.

He was a starting defensive back on his high school's football team. He also played basketball and ran track. For the most part, he stayed out of trouble.

He attended the University of Wisconsin for two years before dropping out and moving back to Milwaukee, where he started a baby photography business. He arranged for nurses at three local hospitals to take photos of the babies, then he'd turn around and sell them to the new mothers, pocketing 75 percent of the profits.

On weekends in the fall, he scouted players in the Midwest for Tex Schramm, who at the time was the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. Back in Milwaukee, Brandt had struck up a friendship with ex-Badgers great Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch, who played for the Rams and recommended the young scout whose hobby during his college days at UW was watching film of players and figuring out the qualities that separated the good ones from the great.

When Clint Murchison purchased the expansion Cowboys in 1960, he pegged Schramm as his GM, and Schramm asked the 25-year-old Brandt to run his scouting operation. He was making $14,000 selling baby pictures, very good money at the time; Schramm was offering less but a bigger opportunity.

Henderson, on the other hand, grew up "no-toilet-paper poor" and was raised by his teenage mother in Austin, Texas. He watched his alcoholic stepfather physically abuse his mother and, at 12 years old, witnessed her retaliate by shooting her husband. He hung out with street hustlers and thieves and regularly commiserated with neighborhood junkies.

Despite their striking differences in upbringing, Brandt and Henderson found common ground. It was a practice Brandt tried to foster with all his players, by making himself accessible to them. At training camp, for example, he requested his room be directly across from the entrance of the dormitory on the campus of Cal Lutheran so he could greet players every morning when they came by to check for mail.

"Tex Schramm was a tough guy, some might say even mean-spirited. And Coach Landry was not necessarily friendly," said Calvin Hill, the running back Brandt drafted in 1969 who became the first player from Yale ever taken in the first round of the modern era. "Gil offset the coldness. He was a guy who brought humanity into the (front) office."

Brandt's openness and curiosity about his players' lives -- he inquired about them often -- allowed them to be comfortable enough to bring anything to him, and it worked, although sometimes with unintended consequences.

Before Super Bowl XIII against Pittsburgh, Henderson -- going through his "Hollywood" metamorphosis at the time -- consulted Brandt on how he could stir things up with Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw. According to Brandt, it was he who handed Henderson the famous C-A-T line -- Bradshaw couldn't spell "cat" if you spotted him the "c" and "t" -- and the mouthy linebacker ran with it.

The Steelers, of course, beat the Cowboys, 35-31, giving Bradshaw the last laugh.

On Nov. 28, 1984, Henderson sent his second letter to Brandt from California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he had been transferred after a few months of being locked up in Susanville.

Roger Staubach was Henderson's most faithful correspondent from the Cowboys while Henderson was locked up for his crimes. Brandt was a close second.

Brandt included Henderson on his Christmas card list in 1984, surmising how lonely a place like prison could be around the holidays. Four days before the new year, Henderson replied.

About 15 years after Henderson walked out of prison and about a decade after Brandt's final season with the Cowboys, Brandt sat in his vacation condo in Montana, re-reading the letters that had been left undisturbed in a box at the back of his house for nearly two decades.

He decided to take Henderson up on the offer made in the first letter to "talk to a guy, write someone or anything." Brandt extended an invitation for Henderson to speak to a group of recovering addicts in Big Sky. Henderson, a drug and alcohol counselor who at the time was traveling around the country on the recovery speaking circuit, accepted.

"I can have a dangerous mouth, so Gil was taking a chance on me," Henderson said, laughing. "Gil is a scout, so I really think he was trying to see, Is Thomas OK?"

Henderson made the most of that trip. He told his inspiring story to an attentive audience, learned how to ski, met new friends, and became better acquainted with old ones, breaking bread with Brandt and his wife, Sara, and their young son, Hunter.

When he returned home, he entered the $28 million Texas lottery and won. Ten years later, he remarkably won the lottery again, this time $50,000.

He used some of those winnings to maintain two football stadiums and tracks his nonprofit, East Side Youth Services and Street Outreach, helped build in Austin. He also bought a 4-year-old Mercedes, even though he could have easily afforded a new one.

"Hollywood" was long dead. Thomas, sober and clean going on 36 years now, is alive and well, and thankful to have loyal friends like Brandt in his life who supported him along the way.

He plans to be in Canton this week to celebrate his friend and former boss. Brandt says Henderson was the first to accept his invitation and will be one of his special guests at the Gold Jacket Dinner on Friday night.

"One of the kindest things he's said to me, during a very short conversation recently, I asked him why he was inviting me, and he said, 'Well, you're one of the reasons I'm going into the Hall of Fame,' " Henderson said. "I owe a lot to Gil Brandt for finding me in the weeds. I still feel a responsibility to prove him right."

Henderson has something special lined up for Friday's dinner; he said he might wear a gold jacket to match Brandt's and the ones earned on the field by his previously enshrined Cowboys teammates -- Rayfield Wright, Bob Lilly, Roger Staubach and Randy White -- who will also be in Canton supporting the man who hand-picked them to be Cowboys.

Brandt smiled when told of Henderson's plan. He knows the linebacker's talent level on the field was equal to those players mentioned above, but it's Henderson's sobriety, Brandt says, and how he's spent the better part of the last three decades pulling others out of the darkness of addiction that puts him in a whole different kind of Hall of Fame.

"I never lost faith in Thomas," Brandt said. "As much as he did wrong, I never lost faith in him. I still consider him like one of my children because I scouted him, I drafted him, I signed him. He was -- and still is -- a part of my family."

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