One of the last times I met Tucker in prison, he looked alarmingly frail. His facial muscles seemed slack, and his hands trembled. Since his incarceration, he had had several strokes, and a cardiologist concluded that blood clots were gradually cutting off oxygen to his brain. His daughter told me bluntly, “He’ll die in prison.”
“Everyone says I’m smart,” Tucker said to me. “But I’m not smart in the ways of life or I wouldn’t have done the things I did.” After a brief flurry of attention following his arrest, he had been all but forgotten. “When I die, no one will remember me,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. “I wish I had a real profession, something like the music business. I regret not being able to work steady and support my family. I have other regrets, too, but that’s as much as one man can stand. Late at night, you lie in your bunk in prison and you think about what you lost, what you were, what you could’ve been, and you regret.”
He said that his wife was thinking of selling their house and moving into a community where she could see more people. Although he and his wife still spoke regularly, Tucker said, she was too frail to visit.
“What hurts most… is that I know how much I disappointed my wife,” he went on. “That hurts more than anything.”
As he rose to go, he took a piece of paper from his back pocket. “I made this up for you last night,” he said.
On it was a list of all his escapes, neatly printed. At the bottom, there was a No. 19-one more than he had actually made-left blank. As the guard fetched his wheelchair, he waved him away. “I don’t need my chariot,” he said. Then slowly, with his back hunched, he steadied himself against the wall and, with the guard standing behind him, inched down the corridor.
– January, 2003
Stealing Time
WHY RICKEY HENDERSON WON’T GO HOME
One summer night not long ago, Rickey Henderson, the greatest base stealer and lead-off hitter in baseball history, stood in a dugout, pinching the front of his jersey and plucking it several inches from his chest-“peacocking,” as some players call it. He went through the same pregame rituals that he has performed since he was a rookie outfielder with the Oakland A’s, in 1979. He sorted through a bunch of bats, asking, “Which one of you bad motherfuckers has got a hit in you?” Picking one up with resin on the handle, he cocked it back, waiting for an imaginary pitch, and talked to himself in the third person, the words running together so fast that they were nearly unintelligible: “Let’s-burn-Rickey-come-on-let’s-burn.”
Henderson is accustomed not only to beating his opponents but also to lording his abilities over them. As a ten-time All Star for the A’s, the New York Yankees, and seven other teams, he stole more than fourteen hundred bases-a record that is considered untouchable, like Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. He scored more runs than Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, or Hank Aaron. Bill James, the oracle of baseball statistics, wrote, “Without exaggerating one inch, you could find fifty Hall of Famers who, all taken together, don’t own as many records.” Or, as Henderson puts it, “I’m a walking record.”
As Henderson stepped onto the field, he stopped abruptly. A foul odor was seeping from under the dugout. “Where’s it coming from?” one of his teammates asked. Several players bent down, trying to find the source of the smell; previously, the manager had found a dead rat in the stadium.
“I think it’s coming from over here,” one player said. “See that hole?”
Henderson tried to ignore the commotion and resume his routine. He walked toward the batter’s box, moving casually, as if he were out for an evening stroll. An opposing player once noted that it took him longer to get to the batter’s box than to drive to the stadium. Henderson has said that his slow approach is a way to get into a pitcher’s head; opponents have said that it is simply another means for Henderson to let the world take stock of him. As he reached the batter’s box, informing the world what Rickey was going to do to the ball, he again seemed disconcerted, and looked up at the crowd: there were only six hundred or so fans in the stadium, and many of the women had dressed up, as part of a promotional Eighties Night, in sequins and lace stockings, like Madonna in her “Like a Virgin” phase.
Earlier, Henderson had confessed to me, “Last night, I dropped down on my knees and I asked God, ‘Why are you doing this to Rickey? Why did you put me here?’”
An announcer called his name on the scratchy P.A. system: “Now batting lead-off for the San Diego Surf Dawgs… RICKEY HENDERSON.”
The man who once proclaimed “I am the greatest of all time!” was, at the age of forty-six, playing in the Golden Baseball League. It wasn’t the majors. It wasn’t even part of the minor-league farm system. It was an independent league, which consisted largely of players who had never made it to the minors, or had washed out of them. Created by two Stanford business-school graduates, the league-which began operating in 2005, with eight teams in Arizona and California-is widely considered to be the bottom of the bottom. Yet it is here that Henderson suited up for three thousand dollars a month, less than he could bring in selling a piece of memorabilia from his days in the majors.
“Come on, hot dawwwg, let’s see what you can do!” a fan yelled.
Henderson tapped the dirt out of his cleats and got into his crouch, staring at the pitcher, a twenty-four-year-old right-hander for the Mesa Miners. Several nights earlier, Henderson had singled and stolen second base, sliding head first in a cloud of dust, to the delight of fans, but, this time, he hit a weak liner to the second baseman for an easy out. As he made his way to the dugout, one of the hecklers in the crowd yelled, “Hey, Rickey, where’s your fucking wheelchair?”
Other baseball greats have insisted on playing past their prime: at forty, Babe Ruth, in his last major-league season, batted.181 for the Boston Braves. But Henderson’s decision to go so far as to join the Surf Dawgs-which, the team’s former publicist admitted, was frequently assumed to be a girls’ softball team-has been a source of astonishment. His last stint in the majors was in 2003, when he played part of the season for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He hit a mere.208, with three stolen bases. (His last productive season was in 1999.) The Dodgers management, concluding that time had finally defeated “the man of steal,” as he was often called, unceremoniously released him. He had played three thousand and eighty-one games, putting him fourth on the all-time list. He was forty-four years old, and most fans reasonably assumed that he would retire and wait for his induction into the Hall of Fame. Instead, he played the 2004 season with the Newark Bears, in the independent Atlantic League, before switching to the Golden Baseball League. Manny Ramirez, the Boston Red Sox slugger, who played alongside Henderson in 2002, has said that Henderson must be “crazy,” and a sportswriter declared that it would take “a team of psychiatrists” to figure him out. Even one of his three daughters, Alexis, asked, “Dad, why are you doing this?”
A few hours before the game against the Miners, I found Henderson sitting on a metal chair in the Surf Dawgs’ locker room, with his shirt off. He insisted that he was no different from anyone else in the league: he simply wanted to make it to the majors. But he also seemed shocked by his own predicament, by the riddle of age. As he put it, “There are pieces of this puzzle that Rickey is still working out.”
He stood to put on his uniform. He is five feet ten, and, like a Rockette, most of his height seems to come from his legs, which he calls “the essence of my game;” they dwarf his torso, which always appears to be pressing forward, as if he were bursting out of a starting gate. His eyes betray frequent shifts in mood-they squint with displeasure, then widen with delight-and, during games, he often hides them behind wraparound sunglasses. He put on his jersey, which was white, with powder-blue sleeves, and pulled his pants above his hips; when he slipped on his cap, only the creases on his forehead and around his mouth confirmed that he was as old as many of his teammates’ fathers. Extending his arms, he said, “Look at me. I ain’t got no injuries. I got no problem with my eyes. My knees are good. The only problem I have is a little pain in my hip, and it ain’t nothin’ a little ice can’t cure.”