“What Jimmy really loved to do? What he really loved to do was steal. I mean, he actually enjoyed it. Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guy in the movies.” — Ray Liotta as Henry Hill

That’s a quote from “Goodfellas,” which premiered in September 1990, when the Oakland A’s were reigning champions and Rickey Henderson was the most electrifying player in baseball. That was his best season, too, and at the start of the next one, he broke Lou Brock’s career record for stolen bases.

Henderson yanked the base from the Coliseum dirt and raised it to the sky. He thanked God, the A’s and the city. He thanked family, fans and managers. Then, with Brock standing beside him, Henderson declared: “Today, I am the greatest of all time.”

That night, 1700 miles away in Texas, Nolan Ryan broke his own record for no-hitters with seven. The irresistible contrast made for a lazy talking point: the humble, stoic Ryan had upstaged the vain, cocky Henderson. Low-hanging fruit at its most sour.

Henderson, who died Friday at age 65, was the bad guy in that movie — and sure, he brought it on himself. He whined about being underpaid. He often referred to himself in the third person. He wore fluorescent green batting gloves. He popped his collar and shimmied on home run trots. He slashed the air after catching fly balls, his glove like Zorro’s blade.

And all of it — the contract stuff notwithstanding — was awesome.

“In my way of playing the game, people have called me a hot dog,” Henderson once said. “But I call it (bringing) some style or entertainment to the people. I enjoy going out there and exciting the fans, because I feel like they come out here to see some excitement.”

Was any player ever more exciting than Rickey Henderson? Was anyone a better entertainer? Certainly, no one outside of the movies loved stealing as much as Henderson or succeeded so grandly at it.

Henderson finished with 1,406 stolen bases. His last came in August 2003, for the Dodgers, off a Colorado pitcher named Cory Vance who was born in June 1979. That was the same month as Henderson’s very first steal, in his major-league debut for the A’s.

In some ways, Henderson was a lot more like Ryan than it seemed. Both played in four decades, into their mid-40s. Henderson led his league in stolen bases 12 times; Ryan led his league in strikeouts 12 times. Henderson is the only player with more than 1,000 steals; Ryan is the only pitcher with more than 5,000 strikeouts. (Henderson, in fact, was strikeout victim No. 5,000.)

But here’s the difference: as freakishly dominant as Ryan was in strikeouts, Henderson was far more prolific in stolen bases. Ryan has 17.2 percent more strikeouts than Randy Johnson, who ranks second. Henderson has 49.8 percent more stolen bases than Brock.

Here’s another way to frame that: Let’s say Henderson’s career had ended in 1993, which would have been a fitting capper. Henderson, then with Toronto, drew a leadoff walk in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 6 of the World Series, causing the Phillies’ Mitch Williams to try a slide-step motion to hold him on. Joe Carter took advantage with a clinching home run.

(In his absorbing biography of Henderson — “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original” — Howard Bryant tells a great story from the following season, after Henderson had re-joined the A’s. On a trip to Toronto, players and staff reminisced about where they were when Carter hit his homer. Henderson shouted from the back of the bus: “I was on second base!”)

Through 1993 Henderson had 1,095 career steals, about 17 percent more than Brock — the same as Ryan’s strikeout edge over Johnson. But Henderson then stuck around for another decade as a speedster for hire.

He bounced back to Oakland, then to San Diego, the Angels, Oakland again, the Mets, Seattle, the Padres again, Boston and Los Angeles. He kept running even when the big leagues stopped calling, swiping 53 more bases for independent teams in Newark and San Diego.

All that speed naturally found its way to the plate. Henderson scored 2,295 runs, another record, just above Ty Cobb, Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. When he set the mark in 2001, with a homer for the Padres, Henderson trotted around the bases – and then slid into home.

“It was feet-first and he was always a head-first guy; that caught us more off-guard than anything,” said Ben Davis, a catcher on that team. “But you never put anything past Rickey. I mean, that year, think about it: he got his 3,000th hit, he got the all-time walks record and he got the all-time runs scored record. The walks record was broken by Barry, but that’s unbelievable, to do all that in one year.”

Henderson was 42 then but still managed 25 stolen bases, the most ever for that age. His single-season record of 130, set in 1982, has never been seriously challenged. Even with new rules to encourage base stealing, last year’s leader, Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz, had just 67.

Besides Henderson, only one other modern player, Vince Coleman, has three seasons with 100 steals. After Henderson passed Brock, Coleman, then with the Mets, mused about his own chances. He thought he could do it.

“He knows I’ll be chasing his record, just like I’m chasing all the other records,” Coleman told the (Bridgewater, NJ) Courier-News. “If I stay healthy, I’m gonna average 80, 90, 100 steals a season.”

Coleman never topped 50 steals again. He finished hundreds shy of Henderson, and yet still had a standout career: his total, 752, is sixth all-time. Ultimately, Coleman lacked the on-base component that eludes so many base stealers. Of the 20 players with 500 steals since 1930, more than half had a career OBP under .350.

Henderson’s was .401. Only one modern player with 500 stolen bases, Bonds, reached base more at a higher rate. And while Bonds is easily the game’s greatest living player, Henderson was probably the greatest living Hall of Famer at the time of his death. The only others even in the conversation would have been Mike Schmidt or a pitcher like Johnson, Greg Maddux or Steve Carlton.

It’s jarring now to look at the career leaderboard in wins above replacement. The only living players above Schmidt, who is tied for 24th with Nap Lajoie, are Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, whose careers were tarnished by ties to steroids. The extraordinary volume of high-impact performance is just so hard to achieve.

Henderson did it. He hit from a crouch with a refined approach that would play in any era: a seven-time league leader in walks, he also slammed a half-season’s worth of leadoff homers with a record 81, plus another in the postseason.

That came in Game 4 of the World Series in 1989, the year the A’s brought Henderson back from the Yankees in a midseason trade. That October was his showcase: a .441/.568/.941 slash line with 11 steals in 12 tries. The A’s lost just once on their way to a championship.

Henderson led off the clincher against San Francisco’s Don Robinson. He took two balls. With a thunderous lineup behind him, he could have worked the count. Instead he swung hard at a fastball down the middle, lashing it over the left field fence. The A’s never trailed in that World Series as they romped to a sweep.

It was their last title representing Oakland, Henderson’s hometown. Eventually the team named the Coliseum’s field in his honor, though he never got his own statue — too much permanence, perhaps, for a franchise with a wandering eye.

Now the A’s are gone, off to Las Vegas by way of Sacramento, and Henderson is gone, too. Wednesday will mark 66 years since his birth, on Christmas night 1958 in the backseat of an Oldsmobile on the way to a hospital in Chicago. He was a man on the move from the very start.

Dash away, dash away, dash away all.

(Top photo of Henderson after he broke MLB’s single-season stolen-base record in 1982: Getty Images)

HARTFORD, Conn. — As USC’s bench emptied onto the XL Center floor, with the No. 7 Trojans having defeated the No. 4 UConn Huskies 72-70, JuJu Watkins’ hands shot to the sky. Basking in her 25-point performance that lifted USC past UConn for the first time in school history, Watkins turned to the small section of supporters decked out in red and yellow inside the sold-out arena and acknowledged their support.

“It hit a little different knowing the history from last year and how they sent us home,” Watkins said.

The stakes were different this time. In April, in the Elite Eight, the Huskies knocked the top-seeded Trojans out of the NCAA Tournament. But Saturday night’s 2-point victory was meaningful nevertheless. Not only for Watkins and USC senior transfer Kiki Iriafen, but for their coach, Lindsay Gottlieb, who has long admired the program UConn coach Geno Auriemma has built.

“This is a really significant win, and it’s a really significant win because of the stature of UConn’s program and what Geno Auriemma has done for our sport,” Gottlieb said. “For my entire high school (career) on, this is what basketball excellence was. This is what we saw, and it’s challenged all of us to want to be better, to find players who want to be better and be that elite. And I don’t think that’s gone away.”

Gottlieb is in her fourth season with the Trojans, and she aspires to build a sustained program similar to the Huskies. A season ago, USC won its second Pac-12 tournament title in program history and made consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances for the first time in nearly two decades. Over her brief tenure, she has reminded onlookers not only of USC’s history of success — two national titles and three Final Four appearances in the 1980s, Hall of Fame players such as Lisa Leslie, Cynthia Cooper, Cheryl Miller and Tina Thompson — but of what it can be in the present. Watkins, last year’s national freshman of the year and a first-team All-American, is at the center of the latest chapter. Victories like Saturday’s help make lofty aspirations feel more attainable.

Gottlieb grew up just outside New York City, but she wasn’t recruited by Auriemma in high school. Nevertheless, when she was 15 or 16, she accompanied one of her friends to one of his camps. UConn was always the local draw, and following Saturday’s win, she recalled a trip she made during her senior year at Brown University, in nearby Providence, Rhode Island, when she and her father drove to Storrs to see UConn take on Tennessee.

“It was sold out,” Gottlieb said, “and I was in that building and saw this atmosphere.”

Saturday was raucous, too. And Watkins, USC’s star guard, said it might have been the largest crowd she has played in front of. Nearly 16,000 people packed inside XL Center, almost all of whom wore navy and white.

Still, Watkins added, “just to see my family here, all the SC fans, it meant the world.”

If anyone needed reminding, the Trojans’ victory reinforced their status as one of this season’s national title contenders. At 11-1, their lone defeat came at home to Notre Dame by 13 points. It would have been easy, Gottlieb said, for those inside the program to blame each other after that November loss — for the Trojans to fracture.

“As long as we stick together, this can make us better,” she said she told them afterward. “And (the loss) has in every way.”

Entering Saturday’s victory, the Trojans sported the country’s third-best defense and No. 15 offense. They convert in transition (nearly 20 percent of their points come in transition) and off turnovers (averaging 28.7 points per game), important measurables that could serve them well in the future. Their victory over the Huskies reinforced that they could come on the road, in one of the most-anticipated games of the season, and punch first. It proved they could surrender a 13-point halftime lead, trail by a point with just under five minutes to play and still recover.

“No one got off the treadmill,” Gottlieb said.

Of course, having a transcendent star like Watkins helps calm any nerves. Not only did she lead the game in scoring, she added six rebounds, five assists and three blocks, including one just before halftime on UConn star Paige Bueckers. Bueckers was prolific in the second half and finished with 22 points, but she also guarded Watkins as the USC star got off to a fast start in the first quarter.

“Every scouting report that you put together or every film that you watch, it’s very evident that one player can’t guard (Watkins),” Auriemma said. “When she gets into a little bit of a rhythm, you have to hope she misses.”

With the score within one possession with only 4:30 to play, Watkins recorded 6 of USC’s 8 points and assisted forward Rayah Marshall on the lone basket she didn’t score.

“A lot of the things she does is super hard, but she makes it look so easy,” Iriafen said. “We all know she is a superstar, so playing with her definitely relieves pressure on everybody else.”

Any remnants of pressure dissipated even further in the postgame locker room. Players doused Gottlieb with water as she entered. They leaped together in celebration.

“For me now to bring a team here, to know we could do it, and then to actually do it is incredibly meaningful,” Gottlieb said. “Really proud of the big win.”

(Top photo of JuJu Watkins driving between Paige Bueckers, left, and Kaitlyn Chen: Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images)

LOUISVILLE, Ky.  — What’s remarkable is not that two women are coaching for the national championship and one will win a title for the first time in the 44 years of NCAA women’s volleyball. It’s remarkable that these women, Katie Schumacher-Cawley and Dani Busboom Kelly, are the two doing it.

Because they are the ideal representatives.

In this historic moment, as Schumacher-Cawley at Penn State and Louisville’s Busboom Kelly match wits before a sold-out KFC Yum! Center and a national ABC audience on Sunday at 3 p.m., they are the embodiment of what it takes to get to the top in an industry dominated by men.

Eighteen of the 20 winningest coaches in Division I women’s volleyball history are men.

“It’s going to be awesome for the sport to get this monkey off its back and move on from this, where it’s not historic that a woman wins,” said Busboom Kelly, 39, in her eighth season and making a second trip to the national championship match with the Cardinals. “It’s just a regular thing.”

Penn State (34-2) and Louisville (30-5) reflect their coaches’ drive and resilience. They won national semifinal matches on Thursday against Nebraska and Pittsburgh, respectively, in dramatic fashion.

Schumacher-Cawley and Busboom Kelly both coached with a steady hand. They fostered confidence from the sideline as their squads’ manufactured comebacks against opponents considered to rank first and second nationally in talent, depth and championship-level experience.

The Nittany Lions pulled a five-set reverse sweep, fighting off two match points for Nebraska in the fourth set.

At the start of the decisive fifth set, junior libero Gillian Grimes heard a voice of reassurance in the Penn State huddle: “We’re made for this.” The phrase didn’t come from Schumacher-Cawley. But she is why it was spoken.

Louisville players faced pressure all season to earn a spot in the Final Four at home. As stress rose when Pitt won the opening set and took the lead in the second, Busboom Kelly implored the Cardinals to keep their composure.

“This is going to start to work,” she said.

Without star attacker Anna DeBeer, the senior was injured two points into the fourth set, they swarmed Pitt after turning back three set points for the Panthers in the third.

In short, Penn State and Louisville refused to go away. They kept taking huge swings. They played to win.

“We’re not talking about losing ever,” Penn State outside hitter Jess Mruzik. “We’re never counting ourselves out, no matter how big of a deficit we’re facing.”

In matches played in front of an NCAA-postseason record crowd of 21,726, Penn State and Louisville were the tougher teams.

Is it any surprise, considering the coaches?

“Women are tough,” said Nebraska coach John Cook, who’s won four national championships. “And those two are really tough. Look at them as players. They both won national championships, so this isn’t a fluke. These guys are winners. They’re great competitors. And their teams play like it.”

Schumacher-Cawley, 44, is a Chicago brand of tough. She grew up in the city and starred in multiple sports at Mother McAuley High. She played at Penn State, earned two All-America honors and won a national championship, the school’s first in women’s volleyball, in 1999 for coach Russ Rose.

Rose won six more titles. He’s the all-time leader in championships and wins among Division I coaches. In 2008, Schumacher-Cawley was inducted into the Chicagoland Hall of Fame in a class alongside Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Andre Dawson.

She ran the program at Illinois-Chicago for eight seasons and returned to Penn State to work for Rose in 2018 — four years after the Nittany Lions’ most recent Final Four appearance until last week.

Schumacher Cawley took over when Rose retired in 2022.

“Following Russ Rose, to take the team back to the Final Four in just three years,” Busboom Kelly said, “take being a man or woman out of it, that’s an amazing accomplishment.”

Early in her third season this fall, Schumacher-Cawley revealed a Stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis and she began chemotherapy. She lost her hair but did not miss a practice with her team.

“We’re obviously wanting to do this for her because she’s been so amazing throughout this season,” said Mruzik, who hammered a match-best 26 kills against Nebraska. “So that gritty five-set win helped put another brick into the piece that we’re trying to build this season.”

Schumacher-Cawley deflects questions about her health and the gender issue in coaching.

“I’m just really excited to represent Penn State,” she said.

Maybe it’ll sink in, she said, the magnitude of two women on the bench, both in charge with a trophy on the court, when they step out under the lights Sunday.

“I’m proud of this team,” Schumacher-Cauley said. “I think I’ve said that every day. I’m proud of their fight.”

The fight transcends volleyball.

Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly was the 2021 AVCA national coach of the year. (Sam Upshaw Jr. / Courier Journal / USA Today via Imagn Images)

When Busboom Kelly took over at Louisville in 2017, she doubled the Cardinals’ win total, from 12 to 24, in one season.

In 2019, Louisville advanced to the round of eight for the first time. In 2021, Busboom Kelly was named the national coach of the year as the Cardinals went undefeated until the Final Four, losing in five sets against Wisconsin. A year later, Texas beat Louisville for the national championship.

“She’s led one of the great turnarounds in any college volleyball program,” Cook said.

Busboom Kelly played for Cook at Nebraska from 2003 to 2006. He recruited her off a farm near Cortland Neb. She was a multi-sport star at tiny Adams Freeman High School.

In college, she moved from setter to libero and helped spark the Huskers, alongside future Olympians Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan, to a national championship in 2006. She won another title with Cook and the Huskers as an assistant coach in 2015.

A year later, she took over at Louisville.

“I hope people appreciate what she’s done here,” Cook said.

Louisville fans appreciate Busboom Kelly, based on the reception Thursday that she and the Cardinals received.

“I think the last time I was on the mic talking about Dani, I called her a badass,” Louisville middle blocker Phekran Kong said Friday at the news conference to preview the championship. “So I’m going to double down on that one. Because she’s legit.”

In the fourth set on Thursday, after DeBeer left with the injury that could keep the senior All-American out of the championship match, middle blocker Cara Cresse promised Busboom Kelly that she would deliver two blocks.

Cresse produced. Momentum flipped. The Panthers fell apart late in the match. Even sophomore opposite hitter Olivia Babcock, crowned Friday as the national player of the year, felt the pressure. The Cardinals embraced it.

“This is for all the people who doubted us,” Louisville outside hitter Charitie Luper said.

Her coach looked on and smiled.

More than to shatter a glass ceiling on Sunday, Busbom Kelly said, she’s excited that a woman will coach her team to the national championship so that athletic directors and future players who might go into coaching understand that it can be done.

“It’s more just being really proud that we can be role models,” she said, “and hopefully blazing new trails.”

(Top photo of Schumacher-Cawley: Dan Rainville / USA Today via Imagn Images