Remembering Rickey Henderson, who was even better than he said he was

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Before he was a somebody, Rickey Henderson was already a constituency of one.

Professional athletes are a different species, world-class talents whose sense of self and possibility do not often fit within the confines of the doubts and fears natural to the rest of us. But Rickey, the physical specimen who thought he could play baseball forever before he died at 65 on Friday night in Oakland, California, from complications with pneumonia and asthma, stood even beyond his most gilded peers on the confidence scale.

I once asked him when he knew he had the talent to play Major League Baseball, to be on the same field with Reggie Jackson and Nolan Ryan, to play the…