Taken From NFLfanhouse.com

SAN DIEGO — Much of Chad Ochocinco’s media-savvy life is carefully crafted for maximum exposure. Sunday was not. Sunday, the actions and emotions were spontaneous. The Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver did not wear his friend Chris Henry’s jersey onto the field at Qualcomm Stadium, but he took a piece of his late teammate’s soul with him.

He hung the No. 15 jersey in a locker stall next to his. A “15” nameplate appeared above the empty locker.

“Surreal,” Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer called the past few days.

There is no script for how NFL teammates should act and react after a teammate suddenly dies. Henry, 26 and still finding his way in life after years of wrong turns, fell out of the bed of a moving pickup truck driven by his fianceé last Wednesday. Police described the incident in Charlotte, N.C., as a domestic dispute. He sustained catastrophic injuries.

Henry, on life support, died early Thursday, leaving behind three children, a shattered family and teammates, and an NFL fraternity shaken to its core.

On a team wracked by grief, Ochocinco was the most visibly crushed. He wept at his locker last Thursday, then poured out his heart on emotional UStream videos. And Ochocinco made certain that Henry would be remembered on Sunday.

It was a heavy burden, and uplifting at the same time, acting in memoriam while trying to win an important game. So it was no wonder that when Ochocinco slipped past the Chargers’ man coverage and caught a 49-yard touchdown pass from Palmer in the second quarter of what would be a taut 27-24 San Diego victory, the NFL’s most charismatic player reacted in the end zone.

He dropped to his knee and put his hands to the sky. He seemed to be speaking. Was he calling out to Henry, the troubled young receiver Ochocinco tried to mentor the past five years, all for naught?

” ‘Slim.’ That’s it,” Ochocinco said with a smile, recalling his favorite nickname for Henry. “Eighty-five (Ochocinco’s number) plus 15 will always be 100 ways to be great. I just kept saying it over and over. It’s a little thing we had, and we just used to say it all the time. So I said it over and over and over.”

There was no agenda. “You don’t plan that. You can’t plan that,” Ochocinco said softly.