The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (33 page)

After Bellew read about Tucker’s last arrest, he wrote him a letter for the first time. “I needed to know why he did it,” he said. “Why he sacrificed everything.”

Although Tucker could never give him a satisfactory answer, they struck up a correspondence, and in one of his letters Tucker told him something he had never expected: Bellew had an older half sister named Gaile Tucker, a nurse who lived in Florida. “I called her up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘This is your long-lost brother.’ She said, ‘Oh, my God.’” Later, the two met, studying each other’s features for similarities, trying to piece together a portrait of a man they barely knew.

“I don’t have any ill feelings,” his daughter told me. “I just don’t have any feelings.”

At one point, Bellew read me part of a letter that Tucker had recently sent him: “I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. . . . I never got to take you fishing, or to baseball games or to see you grow up. . . . I don’t ask you to forgive me as there is too much lost but just so you know I wish you the best. Always. Your dad, Forrest.”

Bellew said he didn’t know if he would continue the correspondence, not because of what Tucker had done to him but because of what he had done to his mother. “He blew my mother’s world apart,” Bellew told me. “She never remarried. There was a song she used to sing to me called ‘Me and My Shadow,’ all about being alone and blue. And when she had cancer, and wasn’t going to live much longer, I broke down and she sang that song, and I realized how bittersweet it was. It was her life.”

In the spring of 2002, when I visited Tucker’s third wife in Pompano Beach, she seemed to be still trying to cope. A small, delicate woman, now in her seventies, she had had several operations and lived alone in their house. “With Forrest gone, there’s no one to fix things up,” she said. She paused, scanning the den where he used to keep his musical instruments. “The silence is unbearable.” She showed me a picture of the two of them, taken shortly after they met. They are standing side by side, their arms touching. He has on a red shirt and tie, and his wavy hair is neatly combed to one side. “God, he used to be so handsome,” she said. “When I met him, he was a doll.”

She turned the picture of him over several times in her hand. “I waited all those years,” she said as she walked me outside, wiping her eyes. “I thought we had the rest of our lives together. What am I supposed to do now?”

  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.”

Henderson knew that he had only a few months to prove to a scout that he was able to play at the highest level—the major-league season ended in October. He told me that not long after he began playing for the Newark Bears he called Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Most of Henderson’s greatest achievements in baseball, including his first World Series ring, in 1989, stemmed from his time on the A’s, and he told Beane that he wanted to return to the team more than to any other. “Then I could go out the way I came in,” he said. Beane responded that the A’s, which were currently vying for a spot in the playoffs, had no room for him. Nevertheless, Henderson said, “I ain’t giving up hope. I know if people would just come out to see me play they would realize that Rickey is still Rickey.”

He arrived hours before a game, and would slash at balls as they shot out of a pitching machine at eighty-five miles an hour, while the Surf Dawgs’ adopted theme song blared over the loudspeakers: “Who let the dogs out? Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!” On some mornings, he could be seen running up and down the bleachers. Jose Canseco, who played with Henderson on the A’s, and who helped to fuel the explosion of performance-enhancing drugs in the major leagues, has said of Henderson, “That’s one of the guys who’s not on steroids!”

“They kept that shit a secret from me,” Henderson said. “I wish they had told me. My God, could you imagine Rickey on ’roids? Oh, baby, look out!” He laughed in an easygoing way. “Maybe if they weren’t juicing there’d still be a spot on a ball club for me. People always ask me why I still want to play, but I want to know why no one will give me an opportunity.

It’s like they put a stamp on me: ‘Hall of Fame. You’re done. That’s it.’ It’s a goddam shame.”

As Henderson was talking to me, one of his teammates, who had tousled hair and looked to be about eighteen, walked over. He was holding a baseball and a pen in his hand. He said to Henderson, “I feel funny asking, but could you sign this?”

Henderson smiled and signed the ball.

“Thank you, Rickey,” the young man said, holding the ball along the seams, so as not to smudge the ink.

Henderson turned back to me, and said, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’d give everything up—every record, the Hall of Fame, all of it—for just one more chance.”

  Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, sometimes even a touch mad. Ron LeFlore, who stole ninety-seven bases with the Montreal Expos, was a convicted armed robber; Ty Cobb, who was called “psychotic” by his authorized biographer, used to slide with his spikes in the air, in an effort to take out the second baseman; even Lou Brock, who was more gentlemanly, believed that one of his greatest assets was unbridled arrogance. Henderson, by all accounts, was a natural-born thief. Lloyd Moseby, a childhood friend of his who played for the Toronto Blue Jays, told Sports Illustrated, “Rickey hasn’t changed since he was a little kid. He could strut before he could walk, and he always lived for the lights.”

Henderson grew up with little outside the game: when he was two, his father disappeared, abandoning the family, and, after his mother moved to California to find work, he and his four brothers remained in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for several years, in the care of a grandmother. In 1976, when Henderson was seventeen, the Oakland A’s drafted him in the fourth round and assigned him to one of their minor-league teams, in Boise, Idaho. From the beginning, he was intense, moody, and flamboyant. If he hit what looked like an easy ground out, he sometimes refused to run it out, to the consternation of the manager. But, when he thought the opportunity was ripe, his speed was unparalleled. One night in Fresno, California, in 1977, he stole seven bases, tying the record for a single game. Two years later, in the middle of the season, the Oakland A’s called him up to the majors.

With his new money, Henderson hired a group of detectives to find his father. “I didn’t care if he was a bad guy or a good guy,” Henderson told me. “I just wanted to know him.” The private eyes reported back to his mother, who informed him, “Your father is dead. He died a few years ago in a car accident.” In 1980, however, Henderson found an unlikely father figure in Billy Martin, the A’s new manager. Martin was a pugnacious drinker who, on at least one occasion, slugged one of his own players. But he and Henderson shared an in-your-face approach to the game—Martin hung on his office wall a poster that said, “There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm”—and together they developed a manic style of play, known as Billy Ball, that was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. As Henderson has put it, “Billy was the publisher of Billy Ball, and I was the author.”

Because the A’s didn’t have a lot of power, they couldn’t rely on three-run homers and big innings; they had to manufacture runs, to create them out of the slightest opportunities. As the lead-off hitter, Henderson was the catalyst, or, as he likes to say, “the creator of chaos.” He had remarkable strength (twice, he finished the season with a higher slugging percentage than Mark McGwire), but his principal role was to be a nuisance, a pest—to “get on base, any damn way I can,” and begin wreaking havoc on the defense.

As part of his strategy, he had developed one of the most distinctive and infuriating batting stances ever seen. Each hitter has a strike zone that extends roughly from his chest to his knees. Henderson, by collapsing his shoulders to his knees—by practically doubling over—made his strike zone seem uncommonly small; one sportswriter quipped that it was “the size of Hitler’s heart.” With so little room for the pitcher to throw a strike, Henderson would frequently eke out a walk. (In 2001, he broke Babe Ruth’s record for total walks, and is now second, behind Barry Bonds.) Or he would crush the ball—he is one of only twenty-five players in history with more than three thousand hits. Once he was on base, the chaos began: he would often steal second, then steal third; he stole home four times. In his first full year, he broke Ty Cobb’s American League record of ninety-six stolen bases in a season, which had stood since 1915; two seasons later, he blew past Lou Brock’s major-league mark of a hundred and eighteen. Thomas Boswell, of the Washington Post, wrote, “Not since Babe Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920—thirty more than anyone else had hit in a season—has one of baseball’s fundamental areas of offensive production been in such danger of major redefinition. . . . Now, perhaps for the first time, a player’s skill is challenging the basic dimensions of the diamond.”