Yet who couldn’t see the speed of a runner on the baseball field? Many commented that Henderson didn’t need a step or two to burst into a full-out run he went from still to flying. Like so many elite athletes, he excelled at other sports and initially wanted to play for the Oakland Raiders.Īt Oakland Tech High School, Henderson also ran track for a bit, played football, basketball and baseball. Henderson came of age during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s and found his way in sports. He has let one of the great sports journalists in America into his life to tell his story - 'Rickey: The Life And Legend Of An American Original,' a book by Howard Bryant, who talks sports. And they understood why, Hutton was just 18 – the same age Rickey and his group were now – when he was killed by police two days after Martin Luther King, Jr. The kids saw the (Black) Panthers, dressed like superhero-revolutionaries, who were armed to protect them, and saw what the FBI did to them, from little Bobby Hutton to Fred Hampton. “That attitude seemed to permeate the city. “Almost as a collective, residents of Black Oakland had arrived in town seeking better and by disposition were ready to demand their rights without asking for permission,” Bryant writes. At the 1984 All-Star Game with Eddie Murray (left) and Chili Davis (right), Henderson was now a perennial All-Star - but fumed about not being paid as much as the game’s home-run hitters.
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