In the baseball world, a team’s leadoff hitter has a specific role: get on base and, ultimately, get into a position to score a run. If you ask a baseball fan who is the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, he or she will almost certainly say, “Rickey Henderson.” Henderson, the career leader in both runs scored and stolen bases, was well known for wreaking havoc on pitchers while he was on the base paths.
He also managed to wreak havoc on the Oakland Athletics’ finance department.
Henderson made his Major League debut as a member of the A’s (as the Athletics have become known) midway through the 1979 season. For the next ten years, he’d play for both the A’s and Yankees and was easily the league’s biggest base-stealing threat—he led the league in the category in nine of the ten seasons.
Before the 1990 season, Henderson became a free agent for the first time. While the “Man of Steal” had already earned more than $10 million over his career to that point, Rickey (as he’d refer to himself) was about to get a much larger payday from the A’s—a four-year contract guaranteeing roughly $12 million in salary. Of that $12 million, $1 million was due up front in the form of a signing bonus. The A’s paid him by check.
The novelty of a million-dollar check was not lost on Henderson.
After the 1990 season, the A’s finance department tried to balance the books, only to find a $1 million overage—they had too much money in the bank, given what they thought they had paid out. An inquest showed the likely culprit: for some reason, the million-dollar check made out to Henderson had never cleared. The A’s called up Rickey and asked if he knew what had happened, and luckily for the finance people, he did.
Henderson never cashed the check. Instead, he had it framed and hung it on one of his walls. The check, as Henderson would later explain, was a constant reminder that he had made it—that he was a millionaire—and he wanted it to be in a place where he’d see it every day.
The A’s asked him to make a copy of the check, frame that copy, and deposit the actual one. Henderson, fortunately, agreed.
There are a lot of really great Henderson stories on the Internet, with varying degrees of truth. For example, despite what some websites say, he never asked a teammate how long it takes to drive to the island nation of the Dominican Republic. But Rickey did once fall asleep on an ice pack, getting frostbite in the process—a malady that made him miss some playing time due to injury.
The term “checkmate” comes from the Persian shah mat, which means “the king is helpless.”