The three Newby brothers lived with their mother, Mary, and went to school in Ohio. They would spend much of the summer in Minneapolis with their father, Ray.

The Newbys were devoted to basketball, and the nearest courts were at Harrison Park on the North Side. Steve was the youngest, 11, in that summer of playing hours of hoops.

“This little guy walked up one day and said, ‘Can I get in the game?’” Steve Newby recalled this week. “He was my age and couldn’t have been taller than 5 feet. My oldest brother looked at him and said, ‘Can you play?’”

And Ronnie Henderson, the short package of athletic prowess that Steve came to call “Bull” for the rest of a lifetime, said with defiance: “Yeah, I can play.”

After that day, any time the Newbys were staying in Minneapolis and visiting the Harrison hoops, they wanted that small 11-year-old on their team.

Steve Newby and Henderson became summertime pals. The boys were in their freshman year in high school in 1972 when Newby came to visit his father during Christmas break.

“Bull was going to Marshall-University High, and there were games being played at Breck,” Newby said. “I was with him and Bull said, ‘You might as well come to the game. Just ride the bus.’”

A few minutes later, coach Ed Prohofsky walked aboard, saw a stranger and said, “What are you doing on this bus?”

Henderson promptly revealed that this was a friend of his from Ohio. Prohofsky let it pass, but made it clear that this was a one-time-only waiver and Henderson, as gregarious as he was, could not be inviting anyone of his liking onto a team bus.

The Marshall-U “B squad” started an informal shoot-around at Breck well before the start of the game. “I was down there in my street clothes, shooting, passing, just messing around,” Newby said. “Coach Prohofsky walked into the gym, took a seat up there in the stands, and watched for a few minutes.

“Then he came down to the court, waved me over and said, ‘Who are you? Ronnie didn’t tell me you could shoot.’

“And when I got back to my Dad’s that night, he said, ‘I got a call from somebody, a coach, Pro-something, saying we should call your Mom and get permission for you to stay here for the rest of the school year and enroll at Marshall-University High.”

The kicker from Mr. Newby was, “What is this all about?”

And, 53 years later, Newby could laugh slightly over a cell phone and say: “It was mostly about Bull.”

Newby did transfer and became eligible for basketball in late January. Mother Mary exercised her influence to make Steve spend his sophomore year in Ohio. He started again there as a junior, but successfully lobbied with Mom to return to Minneapolis and Marshall-University High.

“I got to play those last two seasons with Bull, the best guy as a teammate, and the best player,” Newby said. “If he had been 6-foot-2 and not 5-foot-7, the top basketball schools in the country would’ve been here, fighting over him.”

There was an occasional catch in Newby’s voice during this conversation, since the shocking news had arrived from the Dominican Republic last weekend:

Ronnie “Bull” Henderson, 68, had died overnight while vacationing there. The cause was believed to be a heart attack. And it was no surprise to his buddies that Henderson had escaped the Minnesota cold to find a warm, exotic location.

“He had a job at MSP (airport) with an airline, and I think the main reason was those free flights,” said Willie Braziel, a long-time high school basketball coach now at Simley High School. “Ronnie was the most social guy you could meet. And he played pro in Europe, played Australia, and he loved traveling.”

Braziel is another long-time friend after being a sophomore reserve on Marshall-U’s 1976 state champs.

Henderson has been famous in our basketball world for three reasons:

- What he did as a leader of Prohofsky’s Marshall-U machines that went 50-2 for two state tournament teams (1975 and 1976), including the 28-0 Class A champs in ’76. Remember, it wasn’t four classes then, it was two. So at tournament time, the Cardinals of that era were quick to run into solid competition.

- What he did at Augsburg, with back-to-back MIAC titles and trips to Kansas City and the NAIA national tournament with Rees Johnson as coach.

- What he did by refereeing hundreds of basketball games in this area, high school and other levels.

“Once in a while, Ronnie would be accused of swallowing the whistle, but he loved to be involved in the game, to see the players compete,” Braziel said.

And when he had nothing going, there wasn’t a pickup game that The Bull would pass on, including with the notorious Noonballers in St. Paul. He is remembered for the battle cry “Face ho!” when making an opponent look bad while getting a bucket.

The unbeaten ‘76 team had Henderson, Newby, Rodney Hargest, Ronnie Hadley and Jim Ludgate as the starters. Henderson was the recipient of considerable publicity.

Bruce Brothers, the prep columnist for the Minneapolis Tribune then, described Henderson as “5-foot-7 (with Afro).” Brothers quoted Ronnie with this accurate assessment:

“With a team like we’ve got, the other team has to stop all five ballplayers. They might be worried about me the most, but if they guard me tight, I know it’s a night for assists.”

After high school, Henderson took a scholarship to Elizabeth City State in North Carolina, a historically Black college at a lower level. He stayed a year, but it didn’t take long for Ronnie to realize he belonged back home in Minneapolis.

And an all-time Minneapolis high school great was to become an all-time Augsburg great. Henderson was an assist machine, and he became a 2001 Auggies Hall of Fame inductee and a 2019 inductee in the Minnesota High School Basketball Hall of Fame.

What Bull didn’t receive was the Mr. Basketball Award for which he was a strong contender in 1976. The committee went with a fellow 15 inches taller from Hibbing named Kevin McHale.

And Newby wanted to mention this:

“He was the quarterback in football, and the point guard in basketball, but his best sport — that was baseball. He could hit, and was a terrific shortstop.

“Bull could do it all.”