Happy 40th Birthday, Thierry Henry!

August 16, 1977, 40 years ago yesterday: A King dies, Elvis Aaron Presley in Memphis, Tennessee.

August 17, 1977, 40 years ago today: A King is born, Thierry Daniel Henry in Les Ulis, outside Paris, France.

On the same day, elsewhere in the Paris suburbs, in Asnières-sur-Seine, William Éric Gallas is born. He would be an opponent of Henry's for Chelsea, but a teammate for France, and a team at Arsenal in 1 season, 2006-07. But I would prefer not to talk about him.

I don't know if Elvis Presley ever saw a soccer game. I do know he played high school football, loved to listen to Harry Caray broadcast St. Louis Cardinals baseball on the radio, posed for a photo with Muhammad Ali, and attended the 1st game of the Memphis Southmen of the World Football League in 1974.

He couldn't have known Thierry Henry. I'd like to think he would have appreciated Henry's talent, style, and flamboyant celebrations.

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Henry was born in Les Ulis, in Paris' southwestern suburbs. Actually, "suburb" is not the right word. It's a "planned community," what the British call a "new town," and the French a "banlieue." Many of these, including Les Ulis, are loaded with what we call housing projects, and attract the poor, and in France's case immigrants, particularly from former colonies of France, in the Middle East, in Africa, and in the Caribbean. In Henry's case, his father was from the Caribbean island, now nation, of Guadeloupe; his mother, from neighboring Martinique.

But Les Ulis had good soccer facilities, and Thierry was playing at age 7. In 1990, just 13, he was signed by AS Monaco, which plays in France's Ligue 1 despite being in a separate (but tiny) country. Their manager at the time was Arsène Wenger.

Henry made his debut at the start of the 1994-95 season, just after turning 17. Wenger started him on the left wing, even though he suspected he could score more goals as a striker. It would be some time before Wenger would be able to prove it.

In his 2nd season, 1995-96, Henry was named Young French Footballer of the Year. In 1997, with Wenger having moved on to North London club Arsenal, Monaco won the League 1 title, under Jean Tigana, who had been one of the first great black footballers in France. That got Monaco into the UEFA Champions League for 1997-98, and Henry scored 7 goals in the competition, a record for a French club player at the time.

He was selected for the France team at the 1998 World Cup, on home soil, and won it, scoring 3 goals in the tournament, more than any player on the team. (Zinedine Zidane famously scored 2 goals in the Final, but only scored in the Final.)

Thierry Henry and David Trezeguet at the 1998 World Cup

That got the attention of Juventus, of Turin, Italy, and they bought him in January 1999. But Italy still played the catenaccio (padlock) game of defense-first, and he did not adjust well. On August 3, 1999, his former manager Wenger brought him to Arsenal for £11 million, an astounding total at the time, particularly for a player not quite 22 years old.

"He was a winger when he came here," Wenger would later say about his decision to finally move him to center forward, to take the place of Arsenal's departed younger French forward, the talented by moody and greedy Nicolas Anelka. "At first, he didn't think he could score goals, but he scored a few."

A few? Thierry Henry ended up scoring more goals for Arsenal than any player in the club's history. That 1st season, 1999-2000, he helped them finish 2nd and reach the UEFA Cup Final, and helped France win Euro 2000. In 2001, he charged forward in the FA Cup Final, but was stopped by a handball by Liverpool's Stéphane Henchoz. Which foreshadowed a later incident in Henry's career. Liverpool won the game 2-1.

In 2002, Henry led Arsenal to "the Double," winning both the Premier League and the FA Cup. Early in the 2002-03 season, he scored a goal against Tottenham, Arsenal's North London arch-rivals, that ended with a kneeslide celebration that was chosen as the pose for his statue outside the club's new Emirates Stadium. Arsenal won the FA Cup again.

But the 2003-04 season was the year. Arsenal went through the entire League season unbeaten, which had never been done in the professional era. Henry scored 30 goals in League play alone, including 4 in a game against Leeds United -- the last of which while being tripped, for what would have been a penalty had he not scored anyway. The fact that Henry did not win the Ballon d'Or (Golden Ball) as world player of the calendar year in either 2003 or 2004 proved that the award has no meaning.

Arsenal would extend its League unbeaten streak to 49 games before finally losing in controversial fashion early in the 2004-05 season, but Henry would help them win the FA Cup again. The 2005-06 season saw Henry elevated to club Captain, and was the last at their old stadium, Highbury, and in that season he broke the club's career goalscoring record (it had been 185 by Ian Wright), scored the goal that made Arsenal the 1st English team ever to beat Real Madrid away, and notched 3 goals in the stadium's final game on May 7, 2006.

No wonder they called him the King of Highbury. After the last goal, he knelt down and kissed the grass. Who else but Thierry Henry could be on his knees and still be called a King? Indeed, one of the neat coincidences of sports history is that the 1st hat trick at the stadium, in 1914, was scored by Harry King, and the last by Thierry Henry -- Henry King and King Henry.

Henry helped Arsenal reach the UEFA Champions League Final in 2006, in Paris, his hometown, but Barcelona, as they so often do, cheated their way to victory. Then, after disappointing results in the 2002 World Cup and Euro 2004, he helped France get back to the World Cup Final in 2006, where they lost to Italy.

After the 2006-07 season, Barcelona bought Henry's contract. He helped them win La Liga in 2009 and 2010, the Copa del Rey (King's Cup, Spain's version of the FA Cup) in 2009, and the UEFA Champions League in 2009, the one trophy he hadn't been able to win at Arsenal.

During qualifying matches for the 2010 World Cup, France needed to beat Ireland to reach the main tournament. With the game tied and in extra time, Henry handled the ball twice, before passing to William Gallas for the winning goal. Never mind that Ireland wouldn't have done well at the World Cup: They felt cheated.

Henry was willing to offer Ireland a replay, which FIFA, the governing body for world soccer, denied. It also announced that Henry wouldn't be punished.

Since then, whenever Arsenal fans accuse other clubs of cheating, this incident is brought up. The differences being: Henry admitted it, and tried to do the right thing thereafter, and it's one incident, and Arsenal had nothing to do with it. Indeed, at the time, he was under contract by the biggest cheaters in club football, Barcelona.

That was soon to change. In 2010, his Barca contract run out, he was brought to America by the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer. Due to circumstances that were not totally within my control, I never got to see Joe Montana throw a touchdown pass to Jerry Rice, or Michael Jordan dunk, or Wayne Gretzky score a goal. But, as a season ticket holder at Red Bull Arena, I got to sit 30 feet from Thierry Henry scoring goals.

He bought a loft in SoHo, a couple of doors down from Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz. I joked at the time that the reason the Kardashian sisters opened the New York DASH store where they did was because it was around the corner from Henry's loft, and that those noted daters of black athletes were after him. (As far as I know, this remained a joke, and didn't actually happen.) He loved that he could walk around New York and not be mobbed, which couldn't happen in Paris, London or Barcelona. He could be a regular guy.

And he was a regular guy. After a 2010 match between the Red Bulls and the Colorado Rapids, Arsenal's MLS "partner club" (both are owned by Stan Kroenke), a Q&A was set up, with about 200 Arsenal fans (myself included) having bought passes to attend. Another such event happened in 2013. Both times, he was very patient, and there was absolutely no sense of "Don't you know who I am?" to him. A big ego is almost a prerequisite to excel in anything, but there's a difference between having a healthy ego and having an excessive ego. 

He led them to the regular-season Eastern Conference title, but they lost in the Quarterfinal of the MLS Cup Playoffs. They reached the Quarterfinal again in 2011. At the start of the next season, the Red Bulls went to London to play in the preseason Emirates Cup. Since club rules state that a player must have at least 10 consecutive years at Arsenal to receive a testimonial match, and Henry left after 8 years, this was the closest he will ever get to a testimonial. But the Red Bulls did win that Cup.

With MLS having a Summer season, he was loaned back to Arsenal in January 2012. With Theo Walcott now wearing his old Number 14, Henry now wore the 12 that he wore with France. In the 3rd Round of the FA Cup, with Arsenal level with Leeds late, he scored to win. The look on his face was exquisite: He later said that he had just scored his 1st goal as an Arsenal fan. He would score in stoppage time in a League game against Sunderland as well, finishing his Arsenal tenure with a club record 228 goals.

He returned to the Red Bulls, and on March 31, 2012, he scored a hat track against the Montreal Impact. I saw the 1st 2 goals, but after every Red Bull goal, a smoke machine was set off, and it gave me a headache, so I went to the first aid station for some aspirin, and only saw the last Henry goal on their monitor.

In 2013, he helped the Red Bulls finish 1st overall in MLS' regular season, earning them their 1st real trophy, the Supporters' Shield. But, again, the Red Bulls were knocked out of the Playoffs in the Quarterfinal.

He played in the friendly with Arsenal on July 26, 2014, which unofficially served as his Red Bulls "testimonial," although the vast majority of the 25,219 fans who filled every seat in the joint were supporting Arsenal. Including myself: Despite fans of other English clubs telling me "Support your local team," it was The Arsenal who led me to my local team, not the other way around.

Thierry Henry and Arsène Wenger,

in preparations for the 2014 Red Bulls-Arsenal match

Tired of playing on artificial turf at many MLS stadiums, he retired after the 2014 season, having gotten the Red Bulls to the Semifinal. After 2 years as a BBC studio analyst, he now works as assistant manager to Roberto Martinez on the Belgium national team, having retired as France's all-time leading goalscorer.
Bon anniversaire, Titi, et merci.