In a year of gut punches, none has hit harder for Oakland A’s fans than the sudden loss of the greatest player to don the green and gold, Hall of Fame outfielder and native son Rickey Henderson. Since the rumors of Henderson’s passing began to surface late Friday night, A’s fans were left to cope with the seemingly incomprehensible notion that their Superman was gone.
“When you’re a little kid, you think your sports heroes are immortal, you think they’re actually, legitimately superheroes,” said Paul Freedman, lifelong A’s fan and co-founder of the independent league Oakland Ballers baseball club. “It’s hard to remember they’re actually human beings. I don’t think anybody thought Rickey was gonna be gone, certainly not so soon.”
The shock of Henderson’s seemingly sudden passing was shared among many A’s fans mourning his loss on Saturday.
“We thought he could steal 50 bags at age 50, right?” said Nick Lozito, like Henderson an alum of Oakland Technical High School who is now a journalist, author and newspaper designer. “He was just this kind of superhuman guy.”
It wasn’t only that Henderson helped guide the A’s to their last World Series title in 1989, or that he set numerous records while in an A’s uniform, two of which (1,406 career stolen bases and 130 stolen bases in a single season) are not likely to be broken. It wasn’t the 14 years he spent in an A’s uniform as a player or his role as a team ambassador and minor-league instructor over the past two decades that endeared him to Oakland A’s fans. It was that he was all of those things, but, most importantly, he was one of them.
“He embodied that whole Oakland mentality, that ‘I don’t care about you, I’m gonna do what I gotta do.’ And he showed it on the field. The popped collar, the swagger, the steals,” said Jorge Leon, president of the Oakland sports fan group, the Oakland 68s.
Henderson was the brightest star in a collection of great Black baseball players from Oakland, a group that includes Joe Morgan, Curt Flood, Dave Stewart and Dontrelle Willis.
“Oakland has such a great deep history in baseball, especially Black baseball,” said West Oakland native and community activist David Peters — better known to Bay Area sports radio listeners as “Bleacher Dave.”
“Rickey was a Bushrod (Park) legend,” Peters said, referencing the recreation area where Henderson played as a child growing up in North Oakland.
“There are some players that just personify the cities that they play in and Rickey brought the essence of Oakland onto the field,” Freedman said. “He was dynamic, he was tough, and he wasn’t afraid to stand out. He is synonymous with Oakland.”
Oakland was engrained in Henderson’s persona, regardless of where he was playing at the time. Peters said the people of Oakland took pride in how Henderson remained true to himself at all times, including when he was playing for the New York Yankees in the mid-1980s.
“He just did it his own freakin’ way,” Peters said. “Particularly when at the time as a Yankee, he was rejected for not being bland and following a Yankee mold and having this audacity to be outrageous, to be arrogant, and to love himself and be completely comfortable telling everybody and expressing that ‘I’m better than you, yeah, that I’m great.’
“We loved him for that.”
Steve Stevenson, owner of the independent music label and Oakland-based record shop 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, grew up in Oregon but became an A’s fan because of Henderson. He loved Henderson’s brash style of play and the way he carried himself.
“He was the coolest guy amongst a team of extremely cool guys,” Stevenson said.
“He symbolized something for me that was not only very inspirational as a kid, but when I moved to Oakland now 21 years ago, part of the attraction of the Bay Area was people like Rickey Henderson. Even though he had stopped playing for Oakland years prior, Oakland always had a spot in my heart, and he was a big reason for it,” Stevenson added.
Though Henderson was brash and never afraid to celebrate his own greatness, he was also never too big to connect with others. He remained part of the Oakland community throughout his life.
“With all these major-league players that come out of Oakland, they don’t forget where they come from,” Leon said. “And it shows. They can walk around town like nothing, and they know it, because that’s what Oakland’s about.
“Oaklanders are just humble people that have that swag when it’s called upon. And when you’d see him around the community, that’s what it was.”
Leon got to meet Henderson on several occasions over the years, including at the Reggie Jackson Celebrity Softball Classic held at the Coliseum in late October. However, it was his interaction with the “Man of Steal” when he was six years old that he will always remember the most.
“I ran into him at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland and he bought movie tickets for everyone who was in the lobby at the time,” Leon said. “I was just coming out of a movie, so I said, ‘No thank you,’ but can I have your autograph?’ I still have that autograph to this day.”
“To me, he was better than Babe Ruth,” Leon continued. “So to see him there, at that place, my eyes were just big. He was like a superhuman.”
As news of his passing spread across social media on Friday night and Saturday, fans were quick to share their stories of meeting Henderson and how kind he was during those interactions.
Carrie Olejnik was an A’s season ticket holder from 1993-2022. She says she felt fortunate to have had several interactions with Henderson over the years, including a memorable moment in 1992 when she attended Tony LaRussa’s ARF fundraiser. The tickets to get an autograph with Henderson were sold out, but when she was leaving, he stopped to take a picture with her. She’s treasured that photo ever since.
“He always seemed so sincere in loving his fans,” she said via text message. “He’d go out of his way for a photo or a quick chat and he was always smiling at his fans.”
Olejnik was part of a group that traveled to Cooperstown for Henderson’s Hall of Fame induction.
“When we met up with him the evening before (the ceremony), Rickey gave me the biggest hug like we were old friends,” Olejnik said.
Henderson loved interacting with the fans behind home plate at the Coliseum, often stopping in the tunnel leading to the dugout to sign autographs. And he always had a good sense of humor. Olejnik recalls Henderson rooting for his big head racer in the A’s in-game Hall of Fame mascot race (akin to the Milwaukee sausage race).
“We all thought Rickey should have won every race!” Olejnik said.
Peters ran into Henderson in September at a wine bar at the Oakland airport when both were traveling to Seattle for the A’s final series of the regular season. He says he tried to play it cool but couldn’t help sitting next to Henderson and telling the “Man of Steal” how much he’d meant to him.
“He was looking very uncomfortable with this grown-ass man fawning over him,” Peters said with a laugh. But Henderson still spoke with him anyway. “Just to be able to have the opportunity to chat with him for a couple of minutes, it meant so much.”
“He was always charming and spoke in the third person. He was always Rickey,” Freedman said. “He always had the same smile on his face, at least when I saw him, that he had on the field.”
In addition to the records and the flair on the field, what stuck with Leon about Henderson was his love of the game of baseball. Henderson extended his career well into his 40s, refusing to hang up the spikes even when big-league teams stopped offering him contracts. And when he retired, he embarked on a long career behind the scenes with the A’s as a roving minor-league coach, spending time at each of the A’s affiliates to teach the finer aspects of the game.
It was in that role that Lozito had the opportunity to meet Henderson, when Lozito was on the media relations staff for the Sacramento River Cats, then the A’s Triple-A affiliate.
“Being an Oakland Tech graduate, just to be able to talk to him for a few minutes, it was pretty cool,” Lozito said.
The legacy that Henderson left at Oakland Tech helped pave the way for future generations of great athletes from the school, including NFL legend Marshawn Lynch and Cal basketball star and NBA player Leon Powe. Henderson represented what was possible for kids growing up in Oakland. It is a story that Peters wants to ensure continues to be told to future generations of Oakland children.
Stevenson lives not far from Oakland Tech now and passes by there on a near-daily basis.
“I think about him and all the different people who came and went out of that school, who transcended all expectations into superstardom, and from very modest means, and I appreciate that,” he said. “He may have traveled a lot in his career, but he still continued to live here in Oakland. He was very much an Oakland guy through and through. For that alone, he’s a really big inspiration.”
When Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda passed away earlier this year, fans across the Bay in San Francisco gathered at the statues of their heroes to pay their respects. Broken-hearted A’s fans have no such spots to share their collective grief. The field named in Henderson’s honor is currently being changed over into a soccer pitch, while the markings on the outside of the Coliseum have been stripped of any sign the A’s played there. Next season, any in-game remembrances of Henderson will take place 95 miles away in West Sacramento. For Stevenson, Henderson’s death the same year the A’s left Oakland just feels like piling on.
The loss of Oakland’s MLB team and then the city’s greatest MLB son in the same year is an almost incomprehensible loss for fans like Peters, who feel abandoned by the league.
“We’ve lost our team; we’ve lost all our teams, and now we’ve lost Rickey, who was one of the few handful of players who epitomized the A’s — him and Stew (Dave Stewart),” Peters said. “These guys were from Oakland and we rooted for them extra hard. They carried so much of our hopes and our dreams and our representations.”
It’s too soon to know what kind of memorial will be built in Oakland to honor Henderson. Peters hopes that one memorial can be at Bushrod Park. He also envisions a museum where fans can learn about Henderson and the other great players from Oakland who left an indelible legacy on the game.
“I think there should be something that memorializes the history of baseball in Oakland … somewhere in Oakland, because we matter,” Peters said. “We’ve always punched above our weight, and this is such an important part of not just the sports fan culture here in Oakland, but just of Oakland’s culture and history that we should be proud of and that no one can ever take away from us.”
It will be more challenging to tell that story without the franchise Henderson made his mark with playing games in the city. The Oakland Ballers will do everything they can not to let it be forgotten. The legend of Rickey Henderson was a big part of the team’s rollout when Freedman and co-founder Bryan Carmel launched the Ballers. When they first released the team jerseys, all of them bore Henderson’s No. 24 and they played Henderson’s Hall of Fame speech at the team’s first meeting with fans.
“He deserves to have his name on everything that’s Oakland baseball history, and we want to continue to honor it,” Freedman said.
For now, fans are sharing their memories of Henderson through social media posts and other avenues. Olejnik was one of several people who changed their profile photo to one of themselves and Henderson. Leon raised his Rickey Henderson flag outside his Oakland home. Cody Gordon, a lifelong A’s fan who spent many of his adult years in Oakland before moving to southern Oregon, where he raises animals and crops, has a goat named Rickey. He said Rickey would be getting extra treats on Saturday.
As he said so boldly when he broke Lou Brock’s all-time stolen base record, Rickey Henderson was the greatest. He will be missed by baseball as a whole but his void will be especially felt in Oakland, where his greatness shined the brightest.
(Top photo of Rickey Henderson signing autographs on Sept. 25: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
