18 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
RICKEY’S
A NEW BIOGRAPHY
DELVES INTO
WHAT MADE ONE
OF BASEBALL’S
BRASHEST STARS
SO DEFIANTRICKEY By Howard Bryant
The first thing one notices upon picking
up Howard Bryant’s new book on
Rickey Henderson is that the author nailed
the title: Rickey. What else could you call a book about
the most notorious third-person-referencer in history,
one whose outsized personality and place at the heart
of countless wacky anecdotes make him the perfect
subject for a biography?
But Bryant does much more than clear that
admittedly low title bar, and he goes well beyond
regurgitating all the Rickey stories out there. One
of the foremost writers on the intersection of race
and sports, Bryant spends large chunks of the book
crafting what is almost a cultural history of baseball
and the Black experience in Oakland. In 1940 the city
had 8,462 Black residents. By 1980, when 21-year-old
Henderson was entrenched as the A’s leadoff hitter,
that number had increased by 1,783%, to nearly160,000. Many—like Henderson, who lived for five
years in Arkansas—came from the South to find a
city that had a long way to go when it came to race
relations. (That applied to the A’s as well. The Black
scout who signed Henderson recounts how scouts
were told to target players with single mothers,
since they were easier to lowball on signing
bonuses.) Around the time Henderson’s family
moved West, two other native Southerners in the
Bay Area, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, formed
the Black Panthers. Curt Flood, who also went to the
Bay Area as part of the Great Migration, challenged
baseball’s reserve clause a few years later.
The atmosphere of defiance that he grew up in goes
a long way in explaining Henderson’s own brashness,
which Bryant shows both helped and hindered him in his
playing days. Seldom does a sports biography—especially
a page-turner—so comprehensively explain the forces
that made an icon the way they are. —M.B.SCORECARDREADGAMEPLAN: THE SMART FAN’S GUIDE TO RIGHT NOW
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