This profile of Rickey Henderson from a few years ago is delightful and poignant. The poignant part comes toward the end, so I’ll leave that for you to reach on your own. Here’s one of the delightful moments:
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 story, here.
