Steve Henson
Steve Henson covers the fault lines where sports intersect with crime, discipline, money and personal consequence for the Los Angeles Times. He works as a breaking news and enterprise reporter, using investigative and narrative tools to explain how off-field decisions shape athletes, teams and leagues. His recent work ranges from legal investigations and fraud schemes involving players and impostors to the economics of major league payrolls and the human cost of tragedy around games.
Off-field crime, discipline and deception
Henson’s most distinctive work tracks criminal cases, alleged fraud and disciplinary failures that arise around professional and college sports. In a recent piece on LSU reducing a football player’s punishment for rape while a district attorney investigates, he follows the disciplinary timeline, prosecutorial scrutiny and institutional responses in precise, sequential detail. His analysis of the Terry Rozier bribery case focuses on why an NBA guard would risk a large contract by joining an alleged scheme, highlighting the financial stakes and legal questions the investigation raises.
He has reported extensively on a man who posed as a San Francisco 49ers wide receiver to woo women and extract more than $1 million, laying out how fake identities, doctored images and investment pitches were used to build trust before the money disappeared. As the FBI case against the same alleged fake NFL player widened, he documented the growing victim count, the charges in federal court and how the scheme spread across multiple states, giving equal weight to charging documents, law-enforcement narratives and the voices of women who came forward.
Across these pieces, he returns to the mechanics of deception, the scale of alleged losses and the institutional gaps that allow such cases to progress, treating athletes and fans as potential victims rather than headline props.
Money, power and the business of major leagues
Henson often uses financial data and policy decisions to show how money shapes competitive outcomes and player experience.
In a story contrasting the woeful Mets with the Dodgers and small-market teams, he notes that the Mets turned one of baseball’s largest payrolls into a last-place finish while the Rays, Guardians and White Sox reached the playoffs with payrolls under $100 million, framing the season as a lesson in how spending strategy, not just raw dollars, drives success. His coverage of the Yankees ending a 49-year ban on facial hair explains the new “well-groomed beards” standard and places it in the context of organizational culture stretching back to the 1970s, linking a seemingly cosmetic change to broader questions of player autonomy and brand image.
In a feature on the “Enhanced Games,” a proposed Olympics-style competition that would permit performance-enhancing drugs, he explores the push to legitimize doping, the promised world records and the ethical fault lines between commercial spectacle and traditional sporting values. Across these business-focused pieces, he favors clear numbers, direct quotations from decision-makers and a straightforward description of how policy or investment choices alter the landscape for athletes and teams.
College, youth and niche sports narratives
Beyond major professional leagues, Henson covers college football, youth teams and niche events with a mix of results analysis and human detail. His College Football Playoff quarterfinals takeaways emphasize the rise of “new blood” over traditional powers, using game specifics and coaching decisions to show how shifting competitive balance is reshaping the postseason.
In the LSU disciplinary case, he treats the player’s status, institutional discipline and prosecutorial interest as inseparable from the broader culture of college football. A piece on a Santa Clarita girls hockey team winning a title shortly after a player’s father was killed in an accident focuses on grief, resilience and how the team and family navigated the season’s emotional weight, while still conveying the on-ice stakes of the championship.
He has written about Southern California golfers seeking a first major win at the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, tracing career arcs and local ties to explain what the event represents for players beyond prize money. Earlier work in high school sports and basketball shows a long-standing interest in how competition and city life intersect for young athletes.
Across these assignments, he uses simple, unadorned language to connect games to the lived experiences of participants and those around them.
Long-tenured sports reporting and editing background
Henson brings decades of institutional memory and editorial experience to his current reporting role. He is in his second stint at the Los Angeles Times, having spent more than 20 years in the sports department covering the Dodgers and UCLA and working on enterprise, investigative and feature stories.
Over that period he held reporting and editing roles, including beat work on major teams, general-assignment features, investigative projects and assignment and copy editing responsibilities. After leaving the paper in 2007, he spent more than a decade in national digital sports newsrooms as a senior editor and columnist focused heavily on Major League Baseball before returning to the Los Angeles Times. His professional profile notes that he oversaw baseball coverage and later moved into a reporter position writing breaking news and enterprise pieces across all sports.
This combination of long-run beat experience, investigative work and newsroom leadership shapes his current approach: he treats sports as a system of power, money and accountability and writes with the confidence of someone who has worked both on the field-facing and desk-side parts of the job.
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Albert Burneko
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Albert Samaha
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