Baseball’s stolen base king was born at high speed, on Christmas Day 1958, in the back of an Oldsmobile hurtling through a blizzard toward a Chicago-area hospital.
The man who would go on to swipe a record 1,406 bags would often joke about his wonderfully apropos origin story.
“I was already fast,” Rickey Henderson said about his birth in a 2009 MLB Network documentary. “I couldn’t wait.”
Henderson, unequivocally the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, died Saturday at the age of 65. His wife and three daughters offered a statement, confirming his passing.