Remembering Rickey Henderson, who was even better than he said he was

Before he was a somebody, Rickey Henderson was already a constituency of one.

Professional athletes are a different species, world-class talents whose sense of self and possibility do not often fit within the confines of the doubts and fears natural to the rest of us. But Rickey, the man who thought he could play baseball forever before he died at 65 on Friday night in Oakland, California, from complications with pneumonia and asthma, stood even beyond his most gilded peers on the confidence scale.

I once asked him when he knew he had the talent to play Major League Baseball, to be on the same field with Reggie Jackson and Nolan Ryan, to play the same game Willie Mays and Henry Aaron played. To live at the altitude of the gods. As easily as telling the time, Rickey answered, "I don't know. Somewhere between fifth and sixth grade."

When Henderson was a 10th grader at Oakland Technical High School, his new baseball coach, Bob Cryer, fanned the players out and pointed to those he wanted to report to the varsity and then junior varsity. Rickey was sent to the JV. The other kids protested, tried to tell the coach that Rickey, who might have looked smaller than everyone else, was a legend. The kids told the coach he was making a mistake.

Taking matters into his own hands, Rickey walked up to the new coach and said, "You must not know who I am."

After he was a somebody, everybody knew who Rickey Henderson was. Start with the name. A one-namer. That meant he was a star. Ubiquitous. Baseball used to have one-namers -- Ruth, Reggie, Willie, Pete, Rickey -- now it'sso desperate for a show-stopper like them, the league is likely to put a security detail on Shohei Ohtani.

When it was done, Rickey had finished a 25-year career having scored more runs, stolen more bases, hit more home runs to lead off a game and drawn more walks than anyone who ever played. He had fulfilled his own prophecy to be one of the best who ever did it, the greatest ever when it came to hitting first and stealing bases.

We protect our own time, and for those who saw him, Rickey Henderson spanned time, from the early days when he and Billy Martin resurrected the A's and put Rickey on the map, to the days when his iconoclasm chafed the old guard so much that many did not think he was the automatic Hall of Famer he would one day become.

Rickey amassed a career so big it was impossible to not concede that he knew what he was doing all along. The stories that were once proof that he was bad for the game became the nostalgia we missed, the personality we craved. His personality hadn't necessarily changed; the numbers were simply too big to dispute. He wasn't as good as he said he was. He was actually better.

Buck Showalter recalled a game in the early 1990s when the New York Yankees were in Oakland. Showalter was a coach on the Yankees' staff, and late in the game, the manager was giving out instructions.

"Rickey was hitting against us, and he has us playing no-doubles defense," Showalter said. "Guarding the lines. Don't give up anything big. Don't let him get in scoring position. Then Mattingly turns around and yells into the dugout, 'What for? If he gets a single, it's a double anyway!'"

Wherever you look in baseball, there is Rickey. When you see Kyle Schwarber and Ohtani and Aaron Judge hitting leadoff, you see Rickey: It is because no true leadoff hitter has ever been able to replicate his power that the sport has resorted to letting cleanup hitters start the game.

When baseball laments its lack of action, capitulates to the truth that dry, analytical no-risk baseball has been a failure by enlarging the bases and just giving stolen bases away, you see Rickey, for there was nothing like Rickey leading off, stalking the pitcher, prowling ... and attacking.

No one loved Rickey more than the analytics guys, because Rickey did everything they want, with a video-game efficiency.

Get on base more than 40 percent of the time? Check.

Hit for average? Check.

Hit for power? Check.

Hit for leadoff power? Double-check.

Steal bases at an 85 percent success rate? Check.

As a baseball player, Rickey was everything in one. As the analytics godfather Bill James once said, "If you cut Rickey Henderson in half, you'd have two Hall of Famers."

There were so many moments. There was 1982, when Rickey shattered Lou Brock's single-season record of 118 stolen bases with 130. There was his first season with the Yankees in 1985, when he scored 146 runs and believes he was robbed of the MVP. There was 1990, the year Rickey did win the MVP.

But his Mount Everest for me was the 1989 postseason, starting with the American League Championship Series destruction of Toronto in which he hit .400 with two home runs and scored eight runs in five games to earn series MVP. Rickey followed it up with a World Series in which he hit .474 as the A's swept the San Francisco Giants.

Over those nine games, Rickey went 15-for-34, scored 12 runs, hit three home runs, walked nine times (with only two strikeouts) and stole 11 of 12 bases. The numbers were impressive but the value was in Rickey proving, at long last, that he was a championship-level ballplayer, a winning ballplayer. As remarkable as it sounds, there was once a belief in the game that Rickey did not always make a team better. The 1989 playoffs erased any doubt that Rickey was one of the great impact players of his time.

His toughness had always been underrated, and that toughness destroyed the Blue Jays. It was what his Oakland teammate Dennis Eckersley said made him so dangerous. He could not be intimidated.

It reminded me of the time Rickey and I were sitting in the dugout in spring training in Mesa, Arizona, talking about competition and he suddenly said, "Did I ever tell you the time I punched Richard Dotson in the face?"

The date was Sept. 10, 1984, A's-White Sox at the Oakland Coliseum. Dotson was a serviceable major league pitcher for the better part of his 12-year career, mostly with the White Sox. He even won 22 games in 1983 and finished fourth on the Cy Young ballot. In the summer of 1984, he made his first and only All-Star team, on which he and Rickey were teammates.

But later that season, neither team was going anywhere. In the bottom of the first, Dotson starts Rickey off with a fastball ... right under his chin, dropping him to one knee. Rickey eventually flies out to right, but not before Dotson throws another one near his cheekbone.

"Next time up," Rickey says, "I'm standing two steps in front of the plate, damn near standing on the plate, begging this Mother Hubbard to hit me. So he throws four balls way, way outside. OK, I take my walk, but I'm not jogging to first base. I'm strolling to first. I'm jangling to first. I'm taking my sweet time to first. Then I take off for second. Boom. Steal second."

Rickey is on second in the bottom of the third with one out, and Dotson is angry. Rickey stretches out, like he's about to take third. Dotson is so worried about Rickey, he walks Dwayne Murphy.

With Dotson facing Dave Kingman, the giant slugger who never took a check swing in his life, Rickey taunts him, threatening to steal third. Kingman takes two enormous hacks; insulted, Dotson drills Kingman with a fastball to the body. Rickey is watching the whole thing from second base.

"Dave walks to first. Everything's cool -- and then he jets to the mound and punches Dotson. Just unloads on him. Now everybody coming off the bench. Both benches. And here we go. I'm on second base and I come in flying and BOOM! I pop Dotson right in his face."

Home plate umpire Vic Voltaggio ejects Kingman. (Rickey got free punches on Dotson; Voltaggio doesn't toss him.) White Sox manager Tony La Russa, leaves Dotson in the game. First pissed, now punched, Dotson walks Bruce Bochte, scoring Rickey for the only run of the game. The A's win 1-0, all because Rickey performed mental surgery on Dotson. Other than Kingman and Rickey tattooing Dotson's face, Oakland never even got a hit in the inning.

Nobody on the Chicago bench was more enraged than La Russa. The next night, Rickey was chopping it up with another East Bay legend, White Sox leadoff man Rudy Law, who was grim-faced.

"He tells me, 'Rickey, Tony held a meeting, and the meeting wasn't about the fight. It was all about you.' And I was like, 'Me? It wasn't about the team, or Kingman?' Rudy said, 'No, it was all about getting you.'

"OK, so now, it's fight day. And I said to everybody, 'If anything happens, I better see everybody out there, or after I'm done whipping their ass, anyone on our team I see on the bench or slow to get out there, I'm whipping your asses, too.'"

Just before the first pitch, Rickey had one last message to deliver.

"I run over to their dugout and I say to Tony, 'If anything happens out there today, I'm not coming to the mound for the pitcher. I'm coming straight here, right to the dugout -- to get you.'"

La Russa and Rickey would win a championship together in that great year of 1989 and an American League pennant in 1990. In between, the two massive personalities would clash. La Russa was convinced that Rickey's personality prevented him from being even greater.

It was a common sentiment, and it was true: Rickey Henderson understood the lessons of American capitalism better than his teachers. Money was the mode of currency to express all things -- value, appreciation, power -- and if anyone had more than he, they had better have the résumé to prove it. Even if they did, that might not be enough.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rickey would withhold his services if he felt the game was treating him unfairly -- even when he was in the wrong, like the years he took the security of a long-term contract and then fumed when annual free agent deals would exceed his own.

The constant sparring over money convinced La Russa that Henderson, in his words, "wasn't a great player." Talented, yes. Game-changing, yes. But to La Russa, great players never allowed anything to come before winning, and Rickey did.

Meanwhile, Rickey went from one of the most disliked players in the game to one of the most beloved over the course of his career, in large part because of his flamboyant personality and style. Whether the Rickey stories were true or not stopped being the point. Even Rickey would begin to admit to stories that never happened because the legend was more important than the facts. The legends live on.

Rickey, like so many of the one-namers, always seemed so singular, so self-created -- but they weren't. Where there was Rickey, there was Pamela. First an admirer, the Oakland Tech freshman enamored by the senior everyone was talking about. Then, she was the girlfriend, the wife, the mother, whose own dynastic relationship with Rickey lasted a half-century. Where Rickey forgot, Pam remembered. When Rickey was reckless, Pam was responsible. Important interviews with Rickey usually happened -- and certainly were true in my case -- because of Pam. Pamela Henderson never received the credit -- while he was building his masterpiece, some players didn't even know Rickey was married, but she was both the anchor and the captain of the yacht.

She enjoyed the good parts of the life that came with being in his larger-than-life orbit and endured the difficulties and humiliations that were the price of being the one behind the marquee attraction, like when he broke Lou Brock's record in 1991 and forgot to mention his own wife (who was six months pregnant at the time) as essential to the journey, and in 2017, when the A's renamed the field at the Coliseum Rickey Henderson Field -- and Rickey stepped to the podium with a speech that Pamela had written and did it again. If there was anything in which Rickey came in second, it was in protecting and elevating his standing and reputation, in making Rickey look better than he often actually was. It was Pamela all along.

Over the course of his career, Rickey's good nature was also on display with his teammates. One instance occurred May 30, 1994, with the A's making their first trip of the season to Toronto. The team bus left the Toronto Sheraton, rolled down Spadina Avenue, and as it rumbled to the SkyDome, it past a billboard on Blue Jays Way containing just three elements: a photo of an elated Joe Carter, the date of his epic home run, and the time it landed in the seats to give Toronto the championship in 1993. No other words.

The billboard sparked a question that bounced around the A's bus as it pulled into the ballpark: "Where were you when Joe Carter hit the home run?" From the front to the back, players, coaches, and staff recalled their whereabouts during Canada's most famous baseball moment. Dave Feldman, the statistician for KRON-TV, the A's television affiliate, said he was sitting on the couch, watching the game in his San Francisco apartment, totally stunned. More voices followed, with more recollections.

Then, a lone voice boomed from the very back of the bus.

"I was on second base!"

It was Rickey.

The only thing that did more for Rickey's reputation than his hilarity was his sheer dominance. "Rickey was great, sure, but when Rickey put his nose in it -- those days when he really wanted to play -- there was nobody better," Eckersley said.

Like the time in 1998, when Rickey was close to done. He was 39, and his manager, Art Howe, lamented that Rickey couldn't get around on a fastball anymore. As proof, he would strike out 118 times that year, the most ever in a single season for him. That meant he was vulnerable, and the youngsters thought they could take him out.

"One time we were in Cleveland, and Kenny Lofton was leading the league in stolen bases," recalled Ron Washington, the A's third base coach at the time. "And here's Lofton across the diamond chirping at Rickey: 'See that old man on the other side of the field? There's a new sheriff in town. That dude is done.' And don't you know, Rickey just went on a tear. Second -- gone. Third -- gone. He'd come back into the dugout and say, 'If Rickey sleep, let Rickey sleep.' He just took whatever he wanted. When you talked s--- to him the way Kenny Lofton did, he reminded you that he was still Rickey Henderson."

When it all coalesced into a titanic career, even La Russa had to reassess.

"Rickey knew his body better than anybody else," La Russa later told me. "I have to admit I was wrong about him. As a manager, I would ask him how he felt and he would tell me, '70 percent.' Seventy percent wasn't good enough for him to play, but I'd tell him 70 percent of Rickey Henderson was better than 100 percent of anybody else I had on the bench. There were times he did not play even when that 70 percent, I thought, could have benefited the team, but when you look at the end results of what he did, the totality of his career achievements cannot be argued."

His detractors were not completely wrong. Rickey was difficult. Rickey was a force of his own making, for better and, for a manager, often for worse -- especially when he saw himself as underpaid. But if the games are about numbers, as we are told they are, Rickey Henderson stood vindicated, and in the end, that is why he was loved.

"Tell me something," he once said to me during a discussion over malingering. "How in the hell you gonna steal 1,400 bases jaking it? How could you do what I did, for as long as I did it, and say I didn't want to be out there?"

Portions of this story excerpted from Howard Bryant's biography of Rickey Henderson, "Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original," published in 2022 by HarperCollins.