armchair cultural observation since 1995

Chess-playing IT guy named Jordan Henderson is Twitter famous

Meet Jordan Henderson. He’s Catholic, lives in Centerville, Ohio, works in IT, plays chess, has been happily married for 25 years and has an autistic son.

He looks nothing like the Jordan Henderson who is currently starring for Liverpool in the English Premier League. But that hasn’t stopped his Twitter fame from growing each time his Googleganger does something impressive on the football pitch the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Ohio Henderson has been on Twitter since January 2009, six months after the English international and Liverpool vice-captain Henderson, or Hendo as Ohio Henderson has taken to calling him, signed with hometown club Sunderland. He’s been playing for Liverpool since 2011 and made his international debut in 2010.

He only has 571 followers, but seems to be inundated with tweets from fans paying no mind to his gray-haired profile pic and the Cedarville, Ohio, location of the account when tweeting things like:

  • “played well yesterday jordan, great ball for sturridges goal”
  • “Hey, I saw you today in London with your missus, guess you stayed for a day after the game yesterday, didn’t you?”
  • “Well here’s to you Jordan Henderson, Brendan loves you more than you could know, Woah hohohoh!!”
  • “Wilshere is twice as good as you mate and he’s injured most of the season you should just retire imo”

For his part, the Ohio Henderson doesn’t seem to be ready to relinquish the account. Instead, he’s playing along (and most likely turned off email notifications), tweeting things like “The only club I play for is the Dayton Chess Club” in a response to a fake Daniel Sturridge account telling him to leave the club.

He’s also drawn sympathy from Ravi Visvesvara Prasad, an Indian chess player whose @rvp Twitter handle has drawn him similar attention from fans of the Manchester United and Dutch football star Robin van Persie.

All of this of course makes me think of the movie Office Space and the character named Michael Bolton, who in the days before Twitter couldn’t escape sharing a name with a pop singer. “Why should I have to change; he’s the one who sucks” went his reply.

Jordan Henderson is anything but the Michael Bolton of English football these days, but he might want to consider getting a Twitter account of his own so his Googleganger in Ohio can go back to tweeting about This American Life “hit” pieces and Obama golfing.

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