''But yeah, everything I got, including those lines, I earned.''

Rickey Henderson was in the big leagues before cable TV was in most living rooms. The former high school star running back in Oakland, Calif., started his pro baseball career in 1976, three years after Nomar Garciaparra was born. He has played through the administrations of six US presidents, including the Bushes, father and son. He counts both Yaz and Ichiro as playing contemporaries, and has crouched in a batter's box against both El Tiante and Kerry Wood.

The Red Sox are his eighth major league team. He has played for 13 managers, including Billy Martin on three occasions with two different teams, as well as for Lou Piniella on both coasts, and that doesn't even include Cubby and Joe K. this spring. The A's were so taken with him, they acquired him four times.

Last season in San Diego, while much of the sporting public was distracted by the home run bashing of Barry Bonds and the sentimental farewells of baseball icons Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn (Henderson's teammate on the San Diego Padres), Rickey was racking up numbers he is unlikely ever to lose.

Already possessor of the most stolen bases in a career (1,395 and counting) and in a single season (130), Henderson passed Babe Ruth's record for most walks in a career, then erased the name of another all-timer, Ty Cobb, setting the record for career runs scored last Oct. 4 in San Diego. He broke the runs record in typical watch-Rickey fashion, hitting a home run off Luke Prokopec of the Dodgers, and then, as his teammates gathered at home to pummel him, arrived with a theatrical slide into the plate.

''The runs record is a team record,'' Henderson said that night, departing from the script he'd used the night he broke the stolen base record 10 years earlier, when he ripped third base from its moorings and proclaimed himself as the greatest base-stealer ever in the embarrassed presence of Lou Brock, the Hall of Famer whose record he'd just broken.

''I couldn't have done it myself,'' Henderson said last October in San Diego, tapping into a seldom-used vein of humility, before adding, with more laughing charm than grating gall, ''Well, today I did it by myself.''

Hitting milestone

On the last day of the 2001 season, Henderson crunched one more number, doubling off Colorado's John Thomson for his 3,000th hit, becoming the 23d player in the post-1900 era to accomplish that feat. That was one number, Henderson said on a back field here the other day, he never thought he'd reach, and not just because he was out of a job from the time the Mariners released him following the 2000 season until just days before Opening Day last year, when Padres general manager Kevin Towers signed him for what was essentially Michael Coleman money.

`I never, never, never thought about 3,000 hits,'' he said. ''I walk too much for 3,000 hits. That was the furthest thing from my mind.

''I always thought about runs scored. That was my game. Paul Molitor, he'd call me, `Run Rickey.'''

But the hits, they just kept comin', until there was really nothing left for Run Rickey to do after No. 3,000 but ride off into that golden California sunset, his legacy of being the greatest leadoff hitter ever tucked safely into Gucci saddlebags.

But just when everybody else was prepared to cue the closing credits, Henderson had other ideas. With the urging of

new Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, who had signed off on Henderson's two tours in San Diego, outgoing GM Dan Duquette signed Henderson to a minor league, make-good deal, giving him a chance to add a 24th season to the game's longest-running dance card.

''I could have rode off into the sunset,'' Henderson said, ''but I wasn't ready.

''I don't get tired of it. I still enjoy it. When you first start out, you barely imagine that you'll stay three or four years - when I first started, you needed four years for your pension, and that's what I was trying to do, to make that.

''I didn't have the slightest idea that I'd be hanging around this long, and I didn't have the slightest idea that I'd accomplish the things I've accomplished. It's been a blessing from the Lord to stay healthy.

''The longevity, that's probably what I'm proudest of. I know I can still play. I come out here, play hard, get up in morning, and I don't feel no pain. I like to talk to the young guys, see what the young generation is doing so I can keep up with them.''

Spicy living

Henderson, his body a miracle of adolescent leanness, still does at least 150 sit-ups a day; he'll get up in the morning, turn on the TV, crunch a quick 75, and do the same at night. He generally shuns the weight room, running miles in the winter and preferring to follow a regimen of stretching and flexibility exercises that have allowed him to absorb the pounding

that comes from stealing 20 or more bases in each of his 23 seasons, 40 or more bases from 1980-1993.

Diet? He says he eats what he wants, but watches how much he eats. ''I like to cook,'' he said, promising to grace the Sox clubhouse with the seafood gumbo his father taught him to make.

''My mom says sometimes I make it too hot,'' added Henderson, admitting to

a fondness for spices. ''She says I like it when it makes me sweat.''

The only things that have a chance to outlast Rickey, it seems, are his records and his reputation for controversy, which goes back to the '80s, when Yankees boss George Steinbrenner let spill that manager Piniella said Henderson was ''jaking'' it. There were contract ''wars,'' as Henderson called them, both in New York and Oakland, in which Henderson may have prevailed but not without being bloodied as a me-first guy.

As recently as his two-season appearance with the Mets in 1999 and 2000, Henderson was a storm center. Teammate Turk Wendell ripped him for dressing and leaving the clubhouse during a game because manager Bobby Valentine had replaced him in left field as an inning was just about to begin. And a chorus of voices blasted him for playing cards with teammate Bobby Bonilla in the clubhouse during a Game 6 loss of the 1999 National League Championship Series, which was viewed as an act of supreme indifference.

Against that backdrop, it was startling to hear former manager Tony La Russa, a one-time critic, say here last week that the biggest misconception about Henderson is that he was a bad teammate; on the contrary, La Russa said, he was one of the best, a player untouched by any real off-the-field trouble for more than two decades and a superstar who went out of his way to help younger players.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Padres closer Trevor Hoffman the night Henderson set the runs record.

''It's Rickey's moment after the game, and he's in the clubhouse praising [manager Bruce] Bochy and telling the rest of us how lucky we are and thanking us for helping him get there,'' said Hoffman. ''This is the Rickey Henderson I've come to know.''

Henderson, in speaking about the Wendell incident, said he had left quickly because he didn't want to say anything harmful in the heat of the moment, and that the pitcher spoke out because he felt compelled to defend Valentine, who later apologized to Henderson for pulling him when he did.

''Turk Wendell's father told [Wendell], in the hallway outside of the clubhouse, that he was wrong, and I should come over there and knock him on his butt,'' Henderson said.

The card playing? He acknowledged he rubbed Valentine the wrong way because he had objected to the way Valentine used Bonilla (''Sometimes he'd send him up to pinch hit just to give the fans a chance to boo''), that he and Bonilla had played cards all summer, and that the players were upset by moves Valentine had made in that game.

''But it was like we blew the game,'' Henderson said. ''It was like it was nobody's fault but me and Bobby. I didn't comment on it [to the media] because I knew they weren't going to ask [Valentine] about what he did in the game.

''I threw this jack down, we're going to lose? C'mon.''

Those times when it appeared Henderson was playing at less than full speed? Often, La Russa said, he was playing hurt.

''As a ballplayer, I felt I always gave you whatever I had,'' said Henderson, who claimed he often kept injuries to himself because he didn't want the other team to know. ''If I had 75 percent that day because I was hurt, I gave you that. You wanted me out there. I thought I played hard. I always thought I was a good teammate. I was a helping guy. I always wanted to help.

''I don't think you can win being a bad teammate. I never was a bad guy who disrupted a clubhouse. No madness. Guys who feel they're above other guys can't win. You need other guys.''

Henderson said he joked with Bonds last summer about how two of the game's most controversial players had mounted parallel challenges to the record book.

''But Barry is different from me,'' Henderson said. ''To a lot of players, Barry kept everything to himself. I was good with it, I shared it. We had the same determination for success, but I was more open. We are both dominant players, but I won.

''I always felt I can't win it by myself. Barry wasn't willing to hear that. He was always a macho guy.''

Opportune chance

The Red Sox have made Henderson no promises about how much he will play this season, but the plan coming out of camp was for him to bat leadoff in front of another newcomer, Johnny Damon, at least against lefthanded pitchers. It should be a familiar sight in Fenway Park this summer: Rickey in his deep crouch, taking a pitcher deep into the count, waiting, waiting, waiting before he somehow wangles his way on base, then aggravating that pitcher further with his line-in-the-sand leads off the bag, a threat to take off for second at any time.

Even at 42 last season, when he hit a career-low .227 but walked 81 times, Henderson stole 25 bases in 32 attempts. Carl Everett led the Sox in steals last season with nine.

''What's a man's age?'' the poet, Robert Browning, once wrote. ''He must hurry more, that's all; cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.''

For all his sprinter's speed, Rickey Henderson never looked like a man in a hurry. But even for him, the days are getting short in which he'll be able to pick at his jersey after leading off yet another game with a home run, something he has done a record 79 times, or dressing up a routine fly ball with a snap catch in left field.

If this is, indeed, his last lap, the Sox are hoping Henderson has one great finishing kick left. Don't bet against it. There are three World Series rings in the Sox clubhouse, and they all belong to Rickey.

''I think,'' he said, ''I've proven here that I know how to play this game.''

This story ran on page D6 of the Boston Globe on 3/29/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.