by David Grann
Henderson earned a reputation for creating tumult off the field as well. He held general managers hostage with his contractual demands. “I’ve got to have my money guaranteed,” he’d say. Or, in one of his more Yogi Berra-like phrases, “All I’m asking for is what I want.” Once, when he couldn’t find his limousine upon leaving a ballpark, he was heard saying, “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.” In 1989, the A’s signed him to a four-year contract worth twelve million dollars, which made him the highest-paid player in the game; but less than two years later, after several players surpassed that sum, he demanded a new contract. The pitcher Goose Gossage, who played with Henderson on the A’s, once said, “Henderson set a new standard for selfishness. He made Jose Canseco look like a social worker.” By the end of his career in the majors, Henderson was recognized as one of the best players of all time, but, in the view of many players and sportswriters, he was also “greedy,” “egomaniacal,” “Tropical Storm Rickey,” “the classic baseball mercenary,” and “the King of I.” In other words, he was the last player anyone thought would join the Golden Baseball League.
“I can’t be late,” Henderson said.
He was at the Los Angeles airport, waiting for a morning flight to Yuma, Arizona, where, for a July game against the Scorpions, the Golden Baseball League was hosting Rickey Henderson Night. (The first thousand fans to arrive at the game would receive Rickey Henderson bobble-head dolls.) The league, realizing that Henderson helped give it legitimacy, had offered him various perks to sign on, and, unlike the rest of the players, he didn’t have to endure long bus rides to away games—he flew by commercial airplane. And so, while the team was spending five hours on a bus to Yuma, Henderson picked up his bags and boarded the plane. He was wearing an elegant tan shirt and matching pants, and a gold Rolex studded with diamonds. During his career, he has earned more than forty million dollars in salary alone. He owns dozens of rental properties, as well as a hundred-and-fifty-acre ranch, near Yosemite National Park, where he spent time in the off-season with his wife and their daughters. He also has a Porsche, a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, a BMW, a Mercedes, a Cadillac, a G.M. truck, a T-bird, and a Ferrari. “I’ve told major-league clubs, ‘Don’t worry about your bank account—I’ll play for free,’” Henderson said. “This ain’t about my portfolio.”
As he waited for the plane to taxi to the runway, he checked his cell phone to see if his agent had called with any word from the majors. “Nothing,” he said. After holding power over general managers for so long, Henderson seemed uncertain what to do now that they held power over him. He had even considered crashing a Colorado Rockies tryout for high-school and college players. He knew that his reputation had probably hurt his chances of being brought onto a team as an elder statesman and bench player. “There’s always that concern: will Rickey be willing to come off the bench?” Henderson said. “I would. If you let me retire in a major-league uniform, you won’t hear a peep out of me.” Henderson regularly scoured the news reports for injuries and roster changes in the majors, to see if there might be an opening.
“Who’s that new guy they got playing center field for the Yankees?” Henderson asked me.
“Tony Womack,” I said.
“Womack, huh?” he said, then added in frustration, “My God, you mean to tell me I ain’t better than him?”
He placed a call on his cell phone, and began talking over the roar of the engine. The stewardess, who seemed unusually tense, asked him sharply to turn the phone off. He said that he would, but requested that she ask him nicely. Within moments, security officers had boarded the plane to remove him.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked.
“Is that Rickey Henderson?” a passenger asked.
“Look how cut he is,” another said. “I hear he never lifts weights—he only does pushups and situps.”
“You’ll have to come with us,” an officer told Henderson.
I stood up to get off with Henderson, and the officer asked who I was.
“That’s my biographer and lawyer,” Henderson said.
The passengers began to shout, “You can’t take Rickey!” But the stewardess wouldn’t relent, although Henderson said that if he had done something to offend her he was happy to apologize. The plane took off without us.
“See, man?” Henderson said to me. “I cause controversy even when I don’t do nothin’. That’s the way it’s always been.”
The airline, seemingly embarrassed by his removal, tried to find us another flight, but the next one to Yuma didn’t leave until the evening. “I gotta make my game,” Henderson said. “It’s Rickey Henderson Night.”
Eventually, the airline found us a flight to Imperial, California, which was about an hour’s drive from Yuma; from there, the airline said, it would provide a car to take us to the stadium. When we arrived at the Imperial airport, a middle-aged man standing in the baggage-claim area said, “Rickey, what brings you to Imperial?”
“Got a game tonight in Yuma.”
“In Yuma?”
“Playing in a new independent league over there.”
“You trying to make it back to the show?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Well, I sure wish they’d give you a shot. They never treat us old guys well.”
We drove in a van across the desert to Yuma, which is known primarily for a prison that once housed outlaws from the Wild West. When we reached Desert Sun Stadium, Henderson seemed taken aback—it was little more than a field with bleachers and a water tank looming over it. “It ain’t Yankee Stadium, is it?” he said.
The temperature was a hundred and nine degrees, and it was hard to breathe. Henderson signed autographs and posed for photographs with fans—“I’m, like, the Babe Ruth of the independent leagues,” he said—and then went into the clubhouse to suit up. The bus for the rest of the team had already arrived, and the players were lounging in their underwear; a few were chewing sunflower seeds and discussing a rumor that a scout from a major-league organization had appeared at a recent game.
By now, Henderson knew most of his teammates’ stories. There was Nick Guerra, a former college star who worked a construction job in the mornings to support his family. There was Scott Goodman, a slightly pear-shaped power hitter, who once hit eighteen home runs for a minor-league team affiliated with the Florida Marlins but was released anyway. And there was Adam Johnson, perhaps the most promising player on the team, a twenty-six-year-old starting pitcher who had lost only one game all season. The manager, Terry Kennedy, who had played fourteen years in the major leagues as a catcher, and whose father had played in the majors as well, told me, “I sometimes call this the Discovery League. Everybody here is trying to discover something about themselves—whether they should continue pursuing their dream or whether it’s time to finally let it go.”
Henderson and Goodman went out to the batting cage together. Goodman, who was among the league leaders in home runs and R.B.I.s, had been struggling with his swing in recent games.
“How you feeling?” Henderson asked him.
“Last night, I wasn’t getting my bat out right.”
“I don’t mean last night. I’m not worried about last night. How do you feel now?”
“I don’t know,” Goodman said. “It’s like I’m not getting my weight behind anything.” He went into the cage and swung at several pitches.
“See your foot?” Henderson said. “You’re stepping too far in, instead of toward the pitcher.”
Goodman inspected the divot in the dirt where his front foot had landed. “You’re right,” he said. “I never noticed.”
Kennedy told me that he had initially worried how Henderson would fit in with the team, especially considering his perks. “I was never into guys who chirp,” he said. But, to his surprise, Henderson had gone out of his way to mentor other players. “I don’t want to go too deep into his head,” Kennedy said. “But something’s clearly going on in there. I think
maybe he’s trying to show clubs that he’s willing to be a different player.”
After a while, Goodman and Henderson returned to the clubhouse.
They put on their road uniforms, which were gray and navy blue, and walked onto the field, their cleats leaving marks in the sticky grass. Despite the heat, more than four thousand people had come out for Rickey Henderson Night—the biggest crowd in Yuma since the opening night of the season. As Henderson took his position in center field, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, with a pair of rodent-like ears attached to its roof and a curly tail sticking out of its trunk, circled the grass. “It’s time to exterminate the competition,” the stadium announcer said. “Truly Nolen Pest Control—We get the bugs out for you.” After the first inning, Henderson sat on the bench, his uniform already soaked with sweat, while cheerleaders danced on the dugout roof over his head. The announcer said, “See if you can answer tonight’s trivia question! The question is: What year was Rickey Henderson originally drafted by the Oakland A’s?”
“Nineteen seventy-six,” one of Henderson’s teammates said.
“I wasn’t even born then,” another said.
At one point, with Henderson playing center field, a shot was hit over his head and he began to run, unleashing at least a memory of his speed. He looked back over his shoulder, trying to bring the ball into focus, and made a nice catch. “Thataway, Rickey!” his teammates yelled when he came back to the dugout.
Even though Henderson played well, with two singles and a walk, the Surf Dawgs lost, 5–0. His wife, who had come to see him play that weekend with two of their daughters, told the team’s general manager, “Why won’t he just quit and come home?” As he left the field, fireworks began to explode in the sky above him, the finale of Rickey Henderson Night.
One afternoon before a home game, Kennedy approached Henderson at the ballpark and asked if he would teach the other players the art of stealing. Kennedy knew that, in recent years, base stealing had been all but forgotten in the major leagues. Team owners, convinced that home runs brought people to the stadium, had built smaller and smaller ballparks; at the same time, players made their muscles bigger and bigger with steroids. Since 1982, when Henderson broke the single-season record for steals, home-run totals had risen by sixty-one per cent, while the number of stolen bases had fallen nearly twenty per cent. But Kennedy knew how devastating stealing could be: he had been with the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series, when Henderson and the A’s swept the Giants in four games and Henderson set a post-season record, with eleven stolen bases.
Henderson agreed to give a demonstration, and there was a buzz as Goodman, Johnson, and the other players gathered around first base. Henderson stepped off the bag, spread his legs, and bent forward, wiggling his fingers. “The most important thing to being a good base stealer is you got to be fearless,” he said. “You know they’re all coming for you; everyone in the stadium knows they’re coming for you. And you got to say to yourself, ‘I don’t give a dang. I’m gone.’” He said that every pitcher has the equivalent of a poker player’s “tell,” something that tips the runner off when he’s going to throw home. Before a runner gets on base, he needs to identify that tell, so he can take advantage of it. “Sometimes a pitcher lifts a heel, or wiggles a shoulder, or cocks an elbow, or lifts his cap,” Henderson said, indicating each giveaway with a crisp gesture.
Once you were on base, Henderson said, the next step was taking a lead. Most players, he explained, mistakenly assume that you need a big lead. “That’s one of Rickey’s theories: Rickey takes only three steps from the bag,” he said. “If you’re taking a big lead, you’re going to be all tense out there. Then everyone knows you’re going. Just like you read the pitcher, the pitcher and catcher have read you.”
He spread his legs again and pretended to stare at the pitcher. “O.K., you’ve taken your lead; now you’re ready to find that one part of the pitcher’s body that you already know tells you he’s throwing home. The second you see the sign, then, boom, you’re gone.” He lifted his knees and dashed toward second base. After he stopped, he said, “I’ll tell you another of Rickey’s theories.” Nearly all base stealers, he explained, begin their run by crossing their left foot in front of their right, as they turn their bodies toward second. That was also a mistake. “If you cross over, it forces you to stand straight up to get into your stride,” he said. “That’s the worst thing you can do as a runner. You want to start out low and explode.”
As Henderson was conducting his demonstration, members of the opposing team arrived and began to look on. He said that the final touch was the slide. Before Henderson, the great base stealers typically went feet first. Henderson decided that it would be faster—not to mention more daring and stylish—to go in head first, the way Pete Rose, who was never a major base stealer, occasionally did. Yet each time Henderson tried the head-first slide he would bounce violently, brutally pounding his body. Then, one day, while he was flying to a game, he noticed that the pilot landed the plane in turbulence without a single bump. Henderson recalled, “I asked the pilot, I said, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ He said the key is coming in low to the ground, rather than dropping suddenly. I was, like, ‘Dang. That’s it!’” After that, Henderson said, he lowered his body gradually to the ground, like an airplane.
Henderson concluded by saying that if the base runner studied the pitcher, made a good jump, and slid well, he should beat the throw nearly every time. And, if for some reason he was caught, the moment he got back on base he should try to steal again. As Henderson put it to me, “To steal a base, you need to think you’re invincible.”
“Look at your head,” the Surf Dawgs’ hitting instructor said to Henderson one July afternoon. “You’re dropping it down.”
“I know it,” Henderson said, stepping back in the batting cage. He took several more swings, but nothing seemed to be going right. “Come on, Rickey, you’re better than this!” he yelled.
That month, his batting average had plunged from .311 to .247—one of the lowest on the team. In May, he hit only one home run; he had none in June. “He still sees the ball well,” Kennedy, who was leaning against the cage, said of Henderson. “But he doesn’t have the bat speed to get around.”
After a dismal series against the Samurai Bears, an all-Japanese squad that had the worst record in the league, Henderson began staring at the ground in the outfield. Kennedy turned to his coaches and said, “I think we’ve lost him.”
Kennedy, believing that Henderson was ready to quit, later called him into his office. “I understand if you’re through,” Kennedy said.
“No, man, it’s not that. It’s just my damn hitting. I can’t get it straight.”
As the weeks wore on, it became clearer that the defiant mind-set that had made him a great base stealer had, in many ways, trapped him in the Golden Baseball League. He was forever convinced that he could do the impossible. “When I went to play with the Newark Bears, I was sure I would be there for only a few weeks—that a major-league team would call me,” he said. “But one week became two weeks, and now it’s two years and I’m still waiting for that call.”
Trying to improve his average, he started to experiment with his trademark crouch; he stood straighter at the plate, until he was an almost unrecognizable figure. “I remember at the end of my career I began to doubt my ability,” Kennedy said. “I knew what I wanted to do, but my body wouldn’t let me do it. And I called my father and said, ‘Dad, did you ever start to think you weren’t good enough to play this game?’ And he said, ‘I did, and once you do you can never get it back.’”
During the game against the Scorpions in late July, after Henderson had singled and was on first, he got into his three-step lead. I had been travelling with the team periodically throughout the season, waiting to see him steal. The crowd implored him to run, and several times the pitcher threw to first to keep him close. “Here he goes!” a fan yelled. “Watch out!” But, when the pitcher went into his
motion, Henderson didn’t move. He stood there, frozen. “What’s wrong, Rickey?” another fan yelled. “Can’t you steal anymore?” On the next pitch, Henderson took his lead again and wiggled his fingers. The pitcher seemed to dip his shoulder when he was about to throw home—his tell—but Henderson didn’t break. After several more pitches, the batter hit a ground ball to short and Henderson was easily thrown out at second. As Henderson returned to the dugout, he shouted, “Goddam cocksucking sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t see a goddam motherfucking bullshit thing.” He sat in the dugout with his head bowed, and for the first time since I had seen him play he didn’t say a word.
Two weeks later, in the middle of August, as the Surf Dawgs’ season was nearing its end, word spread in the clubhouse that the Oakland A’s had just phoned about a player. Kennedy came out and told the team the good news: a Surf Dawg was being called up to Oakland’s AAA farm team. It was Adam Johnson, the pitcher. Afterward, Henderson told me, “I’m happy to see one of the guys get out of the league, to get a chance to move on.” He seemed genuinely glad for him and refused to mention his own circumstances. On another night on the field, however, he pointed to the Surf Dawg logo on his jersey and said, “I never thought I might end my career in this uniform.” I asked if he would retire at the end of the season. “I don’t know if I can keep going,” he said. “I’m tired, you know.” As he picked up his glove, he stared at the field for a moment. Then he said, “I just don’t know if Rickey can stop.”
—September, 2005
After the 2005 season, Henderson quit the Golden Baseball League, though he continued to hope that he would get a call to play again in the majors. In 2009, at the age of fifty, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He still insisted, “I can come back and play.”