First impressions lasting for Henry

Larry Lucchino breezed into John W. Henry's office in Fenway Park yesterday afternoon carrying the newest ornament for the principal owner's desk: The William Harridge American League championship trophy, in which a golden eagle, brandishing the league banner, sits atop a silver baseball.

"People would ask me, `Who are you rooting for in the National League?' " Henry said.

"This is what I would do," he said, spinning the eagle like a weather vane. "St. Louis, or Houston."

But there was a time in Henry's life when he would have been inconsolable if the Cardinals had not advanced to play the Red Sox in this 100th World Series. In the corner of his office is an old radio, not unlike the kind Henry grew up listening to Cardinals games on, during a childhood split between Ford City, Ark., and Quincy, Ill.

"I used to have an old Zenith -- a shortwave, about that size," Henry said, gesturing to the radio in his office. "Growing up on a farm in Arkansas, my nearest neighbor was about a mile away. I really didn't have much in the way of playmates. The Cardinals were really my world. I had a rich inner life."

"I was a complete introvert," he said. "I had a great front yard. People would come to my front yard, friends would come over and play baseball, but I was too shy to ask if I could play." So Henry retreated into the world created on KMOX, with its 50,000-watt signal that carried the voices of Harry Caray and Joe Garagiola and Jack Buck, the great broadcasters who brought the Cardinals into Henry's life. He would keep score while listening to the games, and faithfully kept baseball cards, cards he still has in his Florida home.

No surprise whom his hero was. "Stan the Man," Henry said, recalling his fondness for Hall of Famer Stan Musial. "He was our Ted Williams.

"I loved the character of Stan Musial. When I bought the Marlins I asked if he could come and throw out the first pitch on Opening Day. He and I ended up throwing it out together. He came to my house, he played the harmonica during the game. He was just a sweetheart of a man."

As a boy, Henry said, he tried switch-hitting, just so he could try to bat like the lefthanded Musial. He stood in front of his desk yesterday and imitated Musial's stance, putting his feet together like Musial, leaning over in a crouch just like The Man did.

Henry's baseball education came from the radio. His father had little time for the game. "My dad wasn't a baseball fan," he said. "He was a workaholic farmer -- soybeans, wheat, corn. I remember looking out the window at 10, 11 o'clock at night, seeing him on a tractor. He worked so hard, sometimes we didn't see too much of him. But some of my warmest memories of my father are the times we had after a Little League game."

There are some things you never forget. Like the first time he went to see a game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. It was not a trip his father willingly undertook.

"It wasn't until my father became ill and was in a hospital in St. Louis that I went to a game," Henry said. "Johnny Keane, who was the manager, or maybe a coach at the time, gave me tickets. We were staying at the Chase Hotel. He was there, and I ended up having a heat stroke at a doubleheader and wound up in the same hospital as my dad.

"I was only 8 or 9 years old. I was drinking all these Cokes. I remember lying on the gurney and them asking me, `What did you have to drink?' I remember saying, `Cokes.' It was brutally hot, that doubleheader, but for me, as it is for the kids here, to walk in and see that green grass, it was special."

Keane gave him tickets, he said, because the baseball man knew Henry's father had a brain tumor. "I was spending my days in the hospital," Henry said. "My father was left completely incapacitated. He was unable to speak, unable to walk. One eye was shut, he couldn't blink. It was really bad."

His father, who was around 61 at the time, lived another 15 years.

"It was a terrible thing to witness," he said. "At one point, the hospital caught on fire. I just remember part of the hotel was on fire, and he was strapped down in his bed. It was just a tough thing for a kid, especially because my dad was very powerful. He was a hunter. He hunted in Alaska. He was a powerful, proud man." And yet it was his father's suffering that brought Henry to St. Louis, and a ballgame. "It was like heaven and hell," he said.

Even after Henry moved from the Midwest -- he was in Florida when Keane's Cardinals beat the Yankees in the '64 Series, and watched the Cards beat the Impossible Dream Sox in the home of his girlfriend's parents in California -- he retained his passion for the Cardinals.

"I remember in 1982, when the Cardinals won the World Series, I was on my first business trip for my company, the one that I had started," Henry said. "I was in a hotel room in Houston. When the final out was recorded, that was the first time I ever cried with joy, pure joy. I fell on the hotel room bed, just crying. Just sheer exaltation."

Henry is fabulously wealthy today, but there was a time when his ambitions were very modest.

"My goal was to grow up and be able to get a job in St. Louis that would allow me to afford season tickets," he said.

The day would come when Henry entertained the thought of buying the Cardinals. "When the Cardinals came up for sale in 1995, I never thought Anheuser Busch in a hundred years, a thousand years, would sell the team. It just never seemed a possibility, when it came up. Talk about a childhood dream, owning your boyhood team."

But Henry passed. The shy boy who once didn't dare ask his friends to let him play long since had made his fortune, and had bought into sports teams -- he was a minority partner in the Yankees, and he'd owned a minor league baseball team -- but he couldn't bring himself to give up the life he'd grown to love, with homes in Connecticut and Florida, nor did he want to leave his rock band, Elysian Fields, for which he was the lead singer ("A little different for an introvert, I know," he said.) He also wasn't quite ready, he said, to become the front man for a sports franchise.

He overcame that reluctance, he said, when he bought the Marlins. "One of my greatest thrills was sitting in the dugout being interviewed by Jack Buck," he said. "Just a wonderful man. Another thrill was going into the offices in Busch Stadium and Stan Musial said, `Hey, John, how you doing?' I saw Jack Buck five minutes later and I said, `Jack, do you know what just happened to me? Stan Musial walked up to me and knew who I was. He said, `Hi, John.' "

But for all the memories, and his appreciation for how the Cardinals have captured the affections of a region much the way the Sox have, Henry doesn't want anyone to misunderstand where his allegiances are.

"The ultimate World Series?" he said, repeating a question. "A four-game sweep."