Baseball great Rickey Henderson recently gave the Hall of Fame induction speech to end all induction speeches. He was a larger-than-life figure in my childhood, and he had a personality to match, often referring to himself in the third person. For example, “There are pieces of this puzzle that Rickey is still working out,” in a discussion of age and baseball in an excellent New Yorker profile. There was no third-person in the speech, but there was plenty of Rickey being Rickey:
As a kid growing up in Oakland, my heroes were Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson. What about that Reggie Jackson? I stand outside the ballpark in the parking lot, waiting for Reggie Jackson to give me an autograph ... I said, ‘Reggie, can I have an autograph.’ He would pass me a pen, with his name on it.
The best part is that Jackson is sitting behind him, cracking up, along with Robin Yount and various other living legends. You can watch the whole thing, in three parts, on YouTube: Part 1 has some awesome commentary by Tony Gwynn and Torii Hunter; Part 2 is the beginning of Rickey’s speech; Part 3 is the conclusion.
