How USC’s Bear Alexander found his ‘match made in heaven’

LOS ANGELES — In the offseason, Tony Jones’ phone would buzz, and he’d pick up to hear Bear Alexander’s voice crackling from the same location.

“Just got through talking to Henny,” the defensive tackle would tell his guardian.

Again? 

“Yeuh.”

And sometimes Jones would call ahead, and still catch Alexander in the same place, the lost 14-year-old he once took in now finding a safe haven inside defensive line coach Eric Henderson’s USC office.

Where you at? 

“Gonna go holler at Henny.”

Damn, again?

“Yeuh.”

“I’m like, ‘What the hell do y’all be talking about?’” Jones chuckled, in a conversation with the Southern California News Group this summer. “And Henny don’t seem to mind, bro.”

“Like, it’s a match made in heaven.”

Years into Alexander and Henderson’s relationship, their journeys have converged at USC, forging a bond much deeper than the game inside that office. One is a 21-year-old junior on a lifelong quest to find stability, a defensive tackle who attended five high schools, displaying NFL-ready talent but consistency that’s waxed and waned. One is a Super-Bowl-winning defensive line coach on a lifelong quest to find mentees, driven to help young men who’d endured the same storm he’d once grown up in.

It was Henderson, in part, who helped reel Alexander back amid an apparent brush with the spring transfer portal. The junior simply needed someone to trust, and someone to trust in him, and that foundation, Henderson said, has allowed him to push Alexander. He heads into USC’s Week 1 matchup with LSU as a lynchpin of Henderson’s line, a front needing him to equate potential with production.

“No flashes,” Alexander said at the end of July, when asked his goals for 2024. “Just being a consistent player, making sure I’m well-rounded in all areas, whether that’s ball, get off, understanding key defensive situations.”

“Just, making sure my motor’s at the top, so other guys’ motors is just trailing as well.”

USC – and Alexander himself – is betting on Henderson to get that out of him.

The deeper connection

For 15 years, Alexander knew his father as just a legacy. A stigma.

In Terrell, Texas, the elder Alexander was a “drug kingpin,” as Jones put it. He spent much of Alexander’s young life in jail, and the boy’s small hometown began to close in around him.

“He had access to (expletive),” Jones reflected, “that the typical 14-year-old shouldn’t have access to.”

Alexander was a kid, and needed to be a kid, and so Jones – a teacher at Terrell High when Alexander was a freshman – took him in. In recent years, Jones said, as Alexander’s father was released from prison, the two rekindled a relationship.

But in the past year, Alexander’s father has been experiencing health issues, Jones said. So the defensive tackle, who’d played his freshman year at Georgia before transferring to USC, began to consider heading back closer to home in the spring.

“I don’t care who you are, your dad is like Superman, so,” Jones reflected. “To see your dad with a reputation of, like, this hardass, and to see him now in a more fragile state, I think any kid’s going to be like, ‘Damn, you haven’t really been here for me much. But whatever’s left, I want to be able to tap into that.’”

Henderson, Jones said, knew every bit of Alexander’s story. For years, even as he’d pursued jobs in the NFL, the coach kept an eye on some of the top defensive-line recruits in the country, always with a mind to return to college football. When he arrived at USC in January, Henderson reflected at the end of July, Alexander was one of the first in the program to step into his office.

Before long, Henderson opened up to Alexander about his own story, a once-promising defensive end himself.

Henderson grew up in New Orleans with no father. His mother died when he was young. His grandmother died during his senior year of high school. Henderson navigated youth, and collegiate recruitment, all while heeding his late mother’s words to protect and provide for younger siblings James and Erica.

“His background, and his past, he would always think that he had to work extra-hard to be average,” said Willie Brooks Jr., Henderson’s old defensive coordinator at his alma mater Edna Karr High. “But he had to work double hard to be great.”

He was vulnerable with his players, Henderson said, so they could feel comfort and understanding with him. And Henderson talked to Alexander and Jones in the spring – “not, damn, off the ledge,” as Jones put it – with a true feel for the young star, a coach who could understand Alexander’s very core.

“That is the one thing that truly connects them,” Jones said, “and they have spent time kinda diving into that part of everything.”

“He knows everything,” Jones said of Henderson, “that’s going on.”

A day after transfer rumors had spread and Alexander looked all but gone, he typed out a tweet that exploded among USC fans.

““I’m not crystal clear on all of the noise or what any of this portal mess is about…I’m here to finish what I started,” Alexander wrote, “and that’s chasing a natty here at USC with my teammates.”

Fistfight with a Bear

On Tuesday, highly touted LSU offensive tackle Will Campbell told reporters that the Tigers were heading to Vegas, for Week 1 against USC, to “be in a fistfight.”

On Twitter, the 6-foot-3, 315-pound Alexander quote-tweeted Campbell’s comments with six alternating emojis. Devil. Ninja. Devil. Ninja. Repeat.

After transferring from Georgia in 2023, Alexander immediately asserted himself as a force on USC’s interior defensive line, racking up 15 hurries in the Trojans’ first four games. He disappeared for stretches, though, throughout the remainder of the season, and missed much of spring ball with injury.

Early in August, Riley didn’t mince words that USC’s fall camp was “very, very important” for Alexander.

“Whether it’s effort all the time, whether it’s being in the correct gap, playing blocks the way we want to play them and aligning correctly,” Riley said, “I feel like all those little things where you step up from being a guy that flashes to a guy what I’d truly term – a great player.”

Alexander had become so close with Henderson, Jones said, that he’d simply wander into his new coach’s office when he’d get bored. This was the man who’d coached Aaron Donald, and Alexander would pepper him with questions: counter schemes, zone schemes, random conversations both related and unrelated to football.

“I can’t get him out of my office, you know what I mean?” Henderson said in late July. “He’s a guy that’s been thirsting for knowledge, and you love that.”

The program was counting on Alexander, edge rushers coach Shaun Nua said, to execute at a high level consistently. They needed him, Riley affirmed, to take more steps in that direction. And Alexander will face a massive initial test against a physical LSU front, a group that returns four key linemen from last season’s unit.

“As a leader, I’m going to bring guys with me and challenge guys – so I think going out there and proving it,” he said at USC’s media day in late July.

He’d stayed, Alexander said then, for Riley. He’d stayed for the new staff. He was trying to go through it, he emphasized, at USC.

And back in the spring, Jones said, Alexander’s father relented when he caught wind his son was thinking of returning home.

“He encouraged him to stay,” Jones said, “and finish the mission.”