Rickey henderson biography book

Sports writer Howard Bryant's new biography, "Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original" (Mariner), tells the captivating story of Rickey Henderson, the Hall of Famer who holds the MLB records for runs and stolen bases, and how he helped change the game forever.

Read an excerpt below:

You could say that Rickey Henderson was destined to be a gift. The surviving details of Christmas , all tangled and swirled in legend, conspired to make the simple fact that Rickey, of all people, being born on Christmas Day felt preordained. One story said it snowed so hard on the South Side that Thursday night in Chicago that just reaching the hospital was an ordeal. Another said Rickey was so unexpected, so calm and quiet in Bobbie Earl's belly and not yet ready to join the world, that neither she nor his father, John Henley, had any reason to expect a Christmas birth. Even if the details were not exactly fact, the stories were true in their own way; Rickey was on his own schedule, and, as would be a defining characteristic of over a quarter-century of professional baseball, he was born with the element of surprise, capable of transforming the calm into the chaotic, always a step ahead of an unsuspecting world.

It was true that Bobbie never made it to a hospital bed i

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