How Oakland Style Empowered A's Great Rickey Henderson and Other Athletes

The A’s began their final series of games at the Oakland Coliseum on Tuesday.

While the A’s haven’t had much success in recent years, the team has a long history of producing some of baseball’s greatest players. Among them is legendary batter and base-stealer Rickey Henderson. In 2017, the team named its diamond Rickey Henderson Field.

Henderson played for the A’s in the 1980s through the 1990s and was a product of the Oakland sports hotbed going back generations.

“I think the thing that made Rickey the greatest leadoff man of all time … was just that combination of speed, power, and obviously, the thing that people pay most attention to in baseball now, his eye,” said Howard Bryant, a sports historian and author of “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.”

Henderson’s family was from Arkansas but followed the path of many African American families who moved West during the Second Great Migration between 1940 and 1970 — ending up in West Oakland.

In telling the story of Henderson, Bryant points to Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers and lived on the same Oakland Street as iconic basketball player Bill Russell. Russell and Newton’s families lived in the same neighborhood in Monroe, Louisiana, before settling in West Oakland. The migration stories of Henderson, as well as of other famous athletes — Paul Silas, Dave Stewart, Gary Pettis, Lloyd Moseby and more — all mirror that movement.

Bryant spoke with KQED’s Brian Watt about what made Henderson a special player and how growing up in Oakland helped shape him as an athlete.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

On how Rickey Henderson’s feats on the field made him a legend

What it is with him is the style, the confidence, the fearlessness in which he played baseball. When I look at the type of player that Rickey would be today and other eras, he wouldn’t be a leadoff hitter. He would be in the middle of the order with all the other power hitters.

But he was just such a unique player who could do anything he wanted on a baseball field. You couldn’t keep your eyes off him.

On how Rickey Henderson and the way he got to Oakland became part of the city’s history

We always talk about Oakland as one of the great sports cities in terms of the development of the players. Where are they from? And that’s what I wanted to do with the first couple of chapters of this book.

The players all come from Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. That pipeline coming out of World War II all the way to West Oakland. And it wasn’t a migration to Oakland; it was a migration specifically to West Oakland. When you think about the concentration of African Americans in that one neighborhood, what also came with that was a massive concentration of athletic talent. It’s an unbelievable story in terms of talent for a town that is not very big.

On the concentration of athletes in Oakland

And all of these players are coming from a great distance. They are playing on the same Little League teams as kids. And then they end up playing in the major leagues together, and they’re on All-Star teams together.

So it was amazing to me talking to these players and asking, Rickey, When did you realize you had world class talent? And he was like, I don’t know, fifth or sixth grade? It’s incredible. But part of the reason that he had that much confidence was the legacy of Oakland sports — there were so many great players there.

It wasn’t rare for those guys to see players be that good and to feel like, well, if Joe Morgan could make the big leagues, I could make the big leagues. If Bill Russell’s in the big leagues or if Curt Flood is in the big leagues, I can do it because they actually had those examples in their own neighborhoods.

In Oakland, there’s a history there. There’s a legacy there that all of those kids feel like they’re next.

On the ‘spirit of Oakland’ and how it empowered athletes like Rickey Henderson

There’s an Oakland style, and you can feel it when you watch Rickey, and you talk to Rickey. You can see it with a Marshawn Lynch and with Gary Payton and Damian Lillard. All of them have that same Oakland-style confidence — they don’t back down from anything or anybody.

When you grew up down the street from the Black Panthers headquarters, and you’ve seen your neighbors challenge institutions at the highest level, challenging police, challenging government, asserting your independence — that spirit permeates everything. And I thought it was fascinating that you could connect those dots all the way back to the ‘40s.

It is something that you see in the style of play. Rickey’s rookie year was 1979. His first 10 years in the league were unbelievable labor struggles in baseball — strikes and lockouts. Baseball players and the owners hated each other during those years. You had a 1980 lockout. You had a 1981 strike; you had another in 1985. Then, you had collusion going on during that same time, where the owners were purposely not signing players to keep salaries down.

And yet Rickey was one of those guys who was completely unafraid to tell you exactly what he’s worth. Most of those players during that time period were very shy and sheepish and almost embarrassed about making that much money and saying so publicly. Rickey was one of the first guys who was like, “Hey, pay me what I’m worth.”

On the Oakland A’s leaving the city and its long sports history

Well, it’s devastating. And it’s even more devastating when you think about it from a different standpoint. Over the past five years, they’re all gone. The A’s are gone. The Warriors are back in San Francisco. The Raiders are in Las Vegas. And so this is the first city in modern North American sports that lost all of their teams.

There’s not a city in this country that produced as many homegrown players at that level as Oakland — Jason Kidd, Gary Payton, Damian Lillard, Rickey Henderson, Bill Russell — the list goes on and on. And also had the same amount of great team success. The A’s win three straight World Series in the ’70s, the Warriors win in 75, the Raiders win three Super Bowls, the A’s win again in the ’80s, the Warriors then have their dynasty in the 2010s. And now it’s all gone. It’s incredibly painful for that fan base.

At the end of the day, the biggest loser is the fans. The fans lose, and they always lose. And they lose because we have created a society in our sports and our sports political culture that, as much as we call these institutions “local treasures,” they still belong to private industry, even though public money is what houses them. And so I still feel, at some point, something has to change.