Late in Rickey Henderson’s career, his Seattle Mariners teammate Mike Cameron would reach for the bus microphone as the team lumbered from airports to hotels, and he read aloud some of the recent achievements of his fellow players from the media relations notes.

Maybe someone was about to hit a round number — 400 career RBIs, 500 strikeouts. In comparison, though, Henderson’s numbers were otherworldly, Cameron recalled. It was as if Henderson were an alien designed to play the earthly game called baseball, and to look great doing it.

During Henderson’s 25-year career, he played 3,141 games with 671 teammates, for 15 managers, against 3,099 opponents. Henderson’s prolific production is indelible: The goal of the sport is to score the most runs, and Henderson did that 2,295 times — more than anyone, ever.

And yet as incredible as Henderson was for his accomplishments as a player — for stealing a record 1,406 bases, for hitting with power, for his physicality — he was almost as renowned for his personality, his style, his irrepressible confidence and devotion to each game.

Henderson died on Dec. 20, five days shy of his 66th birthday, and this Saturday, he will be honored in a celebration of life at the Oakland Arena.

Those who knew him are saturated with stories about the Hall of Famer, about his devotion to excellence, his acumen, his persona and those moments when he transcended the sport. “The legend of Rickey Henderson still lives on through the numbers of the game,” Cameron said, “and the legendary stories.”

Here are just a few.

The art of the steal

In 1988 — although similar conversations undoubtedly took place throughout the 1980s, a decade in which Henderson wrecked conventional managerial strategy — then-Baltimore Orioles manager Frank Robinson said before a game in Oakland that he told pitchers and catchers to not even bother attempting to keep Henderson from running if he got on base.

“Why should we even try to throw him out? We’re never going to get him, and we might throw it away trying to get him,” Robinson said. “Don’t even try to get him. He’s too good.”

Of course, Henderson walked to start the first inning that day, and stole second … without a throw.

Former Texas Rangers manager Bobby Valentine landed similarly. “We used to talk about two outs, nobody on, ninth-place hitter at the plate,” Valentine said of a hypothetical game situation. “Walk him, hit him, let him get on first base [in front of Henderson] because it just wasn’t fair when Rickey got on first and no one was on in front of him. It wasn’t fair to the catcher.”

“He was unbelievable in the ’80s. Oh God. Rickey stopped the game with everything he did. He stopped it walking to the plate. He stopped it when he’d take a pitch. He stopped it when he hit a pitch. He stopped it when he got on base. He was wonderful to watch, except when you knew he was beating your ass.”

Manager Tony La Russa had Henderson in his dugout across seven seasons — but also saw from across the diamond.

“I managed my first 10 years against Rickey, and managing against Rickey was terrorizing. You care about winning the game, as we all do, you were so nervous in a close game, a one-run game, up one, down one, tie game, and in my lifetime, the most dangerous player of our time was Rickey Henderson. He had this miniscule strike zone. If you threw it in there, he’d hit it. If you didn’t throw it in there, he’d walk, and it was a triple. He would walk, steal second and third and score on a weak ground ball. We called them Rickey Runs.”

Cameron had always been a base stealer in his rise to the majors and felt he understood the art, but Henderson gave him a more enhanced view. With a right-hander on the mound, Cameron had been taught to look for the collapsing right leg as the first move. Henderson narrowed that focus: the back heel. With left-handers, watch the left shoulders.

Raúl Ibañez recalled how Henderson seemed to have the tell on every pitcher’s pickoff — some bit of body language that betrayed whether the pitcher was going to throw the ball to the plate, or to first base. And if a pitcher appeared whom Henderson had never seen before, he would go to the end of the first base dugout and watch until he found the tell.

If Henderson played in this era, former manager Buck Showalter said, “with the rules we have now, he would steal 200 bases. … There was a science to what he was doing, he knew exactly how many steps it took to reach second base. And you never knew when he was going. Runners always have a slight bend to the knee right before they were going. Rickey’s knee never buckled. He’s the only one I’ve ever seen who was like that.”

La Russa noted, “They did everything they could to not let him beat them. He was a marked man. All the different strategies to beat him — waiting him out, slowing him down on the bases — he defeated all of them. People tried to intimidate him. My favorite phrase is the one I used years ago: ‘You can’t scare him. You can’t stop him.'”

How he saw the game — on and off the field

Henderson’s stance at the plate was unique, a low crouch that turned his theoretical strike zone into the size of a QR code. “I just remember how difficult it was to make a tough pitch to him with his small strike zone,” All-Star pitcher Roger Clemens said.

Cameron once asked him how he could hit so well from that stance. “That’s how Rickey see the game,” Henderson replied. “I see the game small.”

Everything Henderson did on the field came with his own trademark style. When he thought he hit a home run, he’d pull the top of his jersey — pop it. He ran low to the ground, moving with peak efficiency, and slid headfirst, like a jet landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. He’d catch routine fly balls swiping his glove like a windshield wiper.

And the panache carried off the diamond, too. Cameron recalled how Henderson always walked into the clubhouse beautifully attired. Dress slacks, silk dress shirt tucked in. When Cameron and teammates went to Henderson’s room to play cards or dominoes, he would greet them at the door wearing the hotel robe and slippers.

“He had his flair,” La Russa said, talking about the time he managed against him. “It didn’t bother me as long as it was normal and natural. What bothered me is when he would get on first, steal second and third, and score on a ground ball. That’s what bothered me.

“His schooling was limited,” La Russa continued. “He did not have a classic education. He talked in the third person. People did not understand. Rickey’s IQ is not just a baseball IQ. Rickey is a very intelligent guy. If you’re around him, you realize how smart he is.”

Henderson didn’t talk a lot during games. “He might’ve talked to the umpires more than [to] anyone else,” Mariners teammate Alex Rodriguez noted. And his interaction with the umpires was more of a monologue, as longtime umpire Dale Scott remembered. If Henderson disagreed with a strike call, he was apt to say: “Rickey don’t like that pitch.” Then he would move on and concentrate on the next pitch.

Henderson was ejected 11 times over his long career, and nine of those were about disagreements over the strike zone, but he was not a serial whiner, Scott said he thought. “He never went goofy on me,” Scott said. Whether he was at the plate or on the bases, he talked to himself — maybe to push himself, maybe to heighten his focus. A pitch could be thrown outside and Henderson might say out loud, ‘Rickey’s not swinging at that.'”

He was a challenging player to umpire, Scott recalled, because of his speed, his acute understanding of the strike zone and the way he crouched in his stance. Bill Miller, who was in his early days as an umpire as Henderson’s career neared its end, guesstimated that Henderson probably had more high strikes called on him than anyone because of his setup at the plate. When Scott worked the bases, he knew every infield ground ball hit off Henderson’s bat carried the potential of a bang-bang play at first, and every time he reached base, there were bound to be pickoffs or close safe/out calls on attempted steals, with Henderson crashing into bases to beat throws.

‘Fueling the machine’

Those around Henderson were awed by his incredible physical condition and the methods he used to stay in shape.

Tim Kurkjian once asked him how he got so strong. “You must lift weights all the time,” Kurkjian said.

“Never lifted a weight in my life,” Henderson said. “Pushups and sit-ups. That’s all.”

Cameron backed this up: “I never saw him lifting weights. The prison workout: Pushups and sit-ups. And a hand grip.”

Showalter said, “I was driving home from a spring training game and I saw Rickey leaving a vegetable stand with three bags of vegetables in his arms,” Showalter said. “He took immaculate care of his body, I don’t think he ever drank. He didn’t eat at McDonald’s; he went to a vegetable stand. He was fueling the machine.”

“He was a very physical runner and slider,” Showalter said. “He had different gears. He was like an airplane coming for a landing, leaning forward while accelerating. The end of the runway was the bag. I never saw him slide off the bag. He took a beating with all the sliding he did. Guys tried to pound him on tags. They’d block the base. He’d just smile at them as if to say, ‘You can’t hurt me.'”

In A.J. Hinch’s rookie season, 1998, he wore No. 23 and Henderson wore 24, so they lockered next to each other. At the All-Star break, they happened to be on the same flight to Phoenix. “I hear him call out with his raspy voice and his cackle for a laugh,” he recalled. “I sit in the aisle seat in the exit row and Rickey is in the window seat. We land in Phoenix, and as we get off, Rickey asked me where I was going. I told him my girlfriend is at baggage claim, to pick me up. He said, ‘No, why are you walking? Rickey doesn’t walk. Rickey needs to save his legs.’

“So we were there for five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Almost half an hour, and then a courtesy cart came to get us at the gate. He wouldn’t let me leave so he could save his legs. That was his way of teaching me to be a big leaguer.”

La Russa said, “It is remarkable how often he stayed off the disabled list with the pounding he took. What I learned is that when Rickey said he couldn’t go, he couldn’t go. When he could feel that his legs were getting tight, they were vulnerable, he would take a day off. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to play, he knew his legs and body well enough that it was smarter to give them a day for sure. I learned to appreciate that.”

Cameron once asked him how he could slide headfirst throughout his career without getting overwhelmed by the pounding, and Henderson held up his hands. His fingers pointed in different directions “and looked like spiderwebs,” Cameron said. “I don’t know how he hit so well, with his hands beaten up like that.”

There was a game in that 2000 season when Henderson’s back was sore, Rodriguez recalled, and the Mariners played into the bottom of the 13^th, with Henderson due to hit leadoff. “He would go an entire game and not say a word to anybody,” Rodriguez remembered. “The top of the 13^th ends, and I’m hustling to the dugout to get ready to hit, and Rickey waves me down.”

As Rodriguez related the memory, he moved into an imitation of Henderson’s distinctive voice, as so many of his teammates and friends do. “Hey, hey, Rod,” Henderson said to Rodriguez, mixing in his trademark third-person usage of his own name. “Listen — Rickey’s back hurts. I’m going to walk, and I already talked to [David Bell] — he’s going to move me over. Make sure you get me in. Rickey don’t get paid for overtime.”

Facing a young Roy Halladay, Henderson singled. When Bell dropped a bunt, Henderson beat the throw to second. Rodriguez singled to load the bases, and then Edgar Martinez ended the game with another single. “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Henderson said happily, as the Mariners celebrated. “Now let’s go get in the hot tub.”

Henderson, the teammate

When Henderson was traded from the New York Yankees back to the Oakland A’s in 1989, Henderson “was very conscious of the perception that he was not a great teammate — an ‘I/Me’ guy,” La Russa recalled. “He was very sensitive to the perception that he was egotistical. He was expressive to the point that he was all about the team. That perception was totally shot. When he came to our team, he made a great team the greatest team ever. We divided the pressure around here.

“Talk to anyone he played with, and he played with a lot of teams, there wasn’t a superstar part of his attitude in the clubhouse, the dugout, the planes, on the buses, He was beloved. When you hear noise in the clubhouse, it was Rickey laughing, he was always in the middle of everything. That truth is not always recognized by fans. Before he played for us, I had no idea he was that way. You see all the flair. But he never played the superstar card with his teammates.”

Henderson was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in 1993, joining, among others, Paul Molitor. “There are guys, when you play against them, that you don’t care for them, their act or their gait,” said Molitor. “When Rickey came to Toronto, I changed 180 [degrees] with him. We had a pretty good team when he got there, but I found that he loved to be a part of a team, he loved to win. He made no waves whatsoever.”

Ibanez idolized Henderson while he grew up, mimicking the way Henderson caught and threw as one of the very few major-leaguers who batted right-handed but threw left-handed, and during the 2000 season, Ibanez played with him. “One of my favorite teammates I’ve ever had,” Ibanez said. “Hilarious. Thoughtful.”

Ibanez often watched Henderson in batting practice, working through his swing among teammates like Edgar Martinez, making adjustments, sometimes talking to himself. “Rickey is trying to hit like Edgar,” Henderson once said. “Rickey can’t hit like that.”

Henderson’s pronunciation of Ibanez’s first name always included an emphasis on the ‘h’ sound in the middle — Rah-houl — and Ibanez remembers him being open with advice, and instilling confidence from his own bottomless well of it. “Once you get the opportunity,” Henderson rasped to Ibanez, “you’re going to hit, Rah-houl.”

Young players loved Henderson, recalled Bruce Bochy, who once managed Henderson when he played with the San Diego Padres: “Rickey would play cards and dominoes with them before games, and on the plane.” When the Padres acquired All-Star slugger Greg Vaughn before the 1997 season, and in those days before the National League adopted the DH, Bochy was concerned about how Henderson would handle the situation — two very accomplished left fielders. “I bring Rickey into my office to tell him about the box I’m in,” Bochy remembered. “He looked at me with understanding and said, ‘That’s OK. All Rickey ask is that you let him know when he’s playing the night before.”

Problem solved.

Henderson’s communication with Piniella was a little different. Among his players, Piniella was known as a hard-ass, to the degree that Cameron’s instinct to run on the bases was curtailed to preempt a possible chewing out from his manager. When Henderson arrived, Cameron recalled, it was his presence that loosened Piniella, the two of them jabbing verbally at each other while those around them laughed. At one point during the season, Piniella gave Henderson a couple of days off, and Henderson lobbied for a return to the lineup. “Hey, Sweet,” he called out to Piniella in the dugout, using Piniella’s nickname. “Rickey don’t know about two days off. Rickey’s legs are good.”

“They should be good,” Piniella retorted with some friendly sarcasm. “You couldn’t move before.” Henderson “was the only one,” said Cameron, “who could talk s— to Lou.”

It wasn’t always clear to some of Henderson’s teammates if he actually knew their names. Hinch played with Henderson in Oakland, and later in Hinch’s career, when he was with the Kansas City Royals and Henderson was with the Boston Red Sox, some of Hinch’s teammates doubted Henderson would remember him. “So here we are at Fenway Park about to go out for pregame stretching telling Rickey stories,” Hinch wrote in a text response, “when Roberto Hernandez” — the Royals’ closer — said there’s no way Rickey knows my name.”

“I tried to convince him and the others that my locker was next to his. I had scored a lot for him as the nine-hole hitter and him leading off. I had flown with him. I had worked out in the offseason with him at the complex. Yet they were not convinced. Roberto put his money where his mouth was and told me he had $1,000 if Rickey referred to me by name when we went out there. I asked if it counted if he used any initial — JP, DJ, PJ, AJ, any of them. Roberto said, ‘Nope, has to be A.J.'”

“We head out and I go directly to left field and give Rickey the bro hug in front of Roberto and he says, ‘A.J., my man, how are you?’ HE NAILED IT. When I got back to my locker, I had 10 $100 bills in my chair.”

He might not have talked much with teammates during games, but he was talking constantly — in the direction of fans, to himself. Playing center field, Cameron could hear Henderson at his position, just talking out loud: Hey, hey, hey! Baby!

Henderson was a leadoff hitter through his career, but Cameron would see him in the clubhouse only minutes before a game, finishing a game of spades, or pluck. “Never in a hurry,” Cameron remembered. And then he would start to stretch. Cameron, batting second, once called out to his friend from the on-deck circle as the home plate umpire began to look for the first batter: “Hey, Rick, they are ready for you!”

Henderson responded smoothly, “The game don’t start until Rickey goes to the plate.”

Henderson’s place in history

During Henderson’s chase for Lou Brock’s record for career stolen bases, the two became friends. “Close friends,” Brock said. “I really liked Rickey. I loved how much he cared about the game, about winning.”

When Henderson broke Brock’s record, he famously pulled third base out of the ground, held it toward the sky and proclaimed, while being interviewed on the public address system at the Oakland Coliseum, “Today, I am the greatest of all time!”

That was not the plan.

“Together, Rickey and I wrote a speech that Rickey was supposed to read after breaking the record,” Brock told Tim Kurkjian 20 years ago. “He said he would carry it in his uniform pocket, and have it ready for when he broke the record. When he broke the record, he got caught up in the emotion, and just said what he said.”

Brock, who was not angry or upset, called Henderson after the game.

“Rickey, the speech?” Brock asked. “What happened to the speech we wrote?”

Henderson said, “Sorry, Lou, I forgot.”

This was on May 6, 1991. Henderson’s career continued for another dozen seasons.

According to stats guru Craig Wright, Henderson drew 2,129 unintentional walks, the most in history. An amazing 796 times, he drew a walk to lead off an inning, almost 200 more than any other player. There are 152 players in the Hall of Fame elected as position players who played in at least 1,500 major league games. Sixty-eight of them (45%) drew fewer intentional walks in their careers than Henderson did just leading off an inning. “And one of them,” said Molitor, “was in the bottom of the ninth in Game 6 in ’93.”

In that Game 6 of the World Series, Henderson and the Blue Jays trailed the Philadelphia Phillies 6-5. Henderson walked. Paul Molitor singled. Joe Carter hit a walk-off three-run homer.

Late in the 2001 season, Henderson closed in on Ty Cobb’s record for runs scored, and Padres teammate Phil Nevin wanted to be the guy who drove him in. Nevin missed opportunities, and in the first inning of the Padres’ game on Oct. 4, 2001, Henderson flied out. Nevin — the Padres’ cleanup hitter — told Henderson he should get himself on base the next time and he would drive him in.

“You missed your chance yesterday,” Henderson responded. “Rickey is going to drive Rickey in, and I’m going to slide across home plate.”

In the bottom of the third inning, Henderson pulled a ball that hit off the top of the left-field fence and caromed over the wall, a home run — the 290^th of the 297 Henderson hit in his career. With teammates gathered at home plate to greet him, Henderson slid into home plate, feet first.

“He was so misunderstood because of the speech he made after breaking Brock’s record, when he said, ‘I am the greatest,'” Nevin said. “People thought he was a selfish guy, who couldn’t remember anybody’s name. But he was a great teammate.”

Said La Russa: “With Rickey … there’s no doubt you can get to that greatest list of all time, with Willie [Mays] and Hank [Aaron], and Rickey is right in the middle of it. He is right on that club. That’s his greatness. He compares to all of them, Babe Ruth, all of them.”

Said Valentine: “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen. Up close and personal, in the late ’80s, my goodness, how could anyone be better? I don’t know how anyone could be better.”

Henderson played his last major league game on Sept. 19, 2003, and was voted into the Hall of Fame in 2009. Twenty-eight writers did not vote for Henderson.

Myth and legend

The stories about Henderson were voluminous, with some of them seeming improbable, incredible. Henderson made an appearance on ESPN’s morning radio show “Mike and Mike” and was asked about the veracity of a handful of the legendary anecdotes — a game of true or false.

Was it true, Henderson was asked, that he once called Padres GM Kevin Towers and said, “This is Rickey calling on behalf of Rickey, and Rickey wants to play baseball”?

Henderson’s grinned and replied, “False. I like that.”

When Henderson checked into a hotel, was it true that he sometimes checked in under the pseudonym of Richard Pryor? “Yes,” he confirmed. “[Also] James Brown, Luther Vandross.”

In the early 1980s, the A’s accounting department was freaking out because their books were off by $1 million — and as the famous story goes, Henderson had taken a $1 million bonus check and framed it without cashing it, and hung it on the wall in his house. Was this accurate? “That’s true,” Henderson said, laughing.

There was a story that Henderson fell asleep on an ice pack in the middle of August, got frostbite, and missed three games. “Yes, that was with Toronto,” Henderson said. “I was icing my ankle.”

His final days

Last year, in La Russa’s last serious conversation with Henderson, the player asked his former manager: “What record did I obtain that you never thought was possible?” La Russa replied, “‘3,000 hits.’ I didn’t think, with all his walks, that he would get to 3,000 hits. You don’t want to walk him. But if you throw a strike, he hits it on the barrel for a single, double, triple or home runs.”

Last year, Cameron and Nevin attended games in those last days of the Oakland Coliseum. When Nevin bumped into him, Henderson greeted him warmly — “Hiya, Phil!” — and talked about how much he enjoyed getting to know Nevin’s son, Tyler, who played 87 games with the A’s last season. Henderson, Nevin recalled, “still looked like he could put a uniform on.”

Late in the season, Brent Rooker, Oakland’s All-Star slugger, approached Henderson in the clubhouse, where he was playing cards, and told him he had heard an interview with a longtime writer who opined about the best player he had ever covered. “Who was it?” Henderson asked.

“It was you,” Rooker said.

Henderson replied, “Well, who else would it have been?” And for Rooker, it was an affirmation that Henderson’s swagger, his confidence, was indomitable. “He carried that same aura about him all the time,” Rooker recalled, “and he was a blast to be around.”

In early December, longtime Padres hitting coach Merv Rettenmund died, and some of Rettenmund’s friends and former players scheduled a gathering in San Diego. The expectation was that Henderson would attend. But just before the event, Henderson spoke to a former teammate and mentioned that he had been fighting a cold and hadn’t been feeling well. “I haven’t had a cold in 15 years,” Henderson said.

Soon thereafter, Henderson was gone.

“I never saw him have a bad day on a baseball field,” Cameron said. “To get a chance to play with someone of that nature.

“The joy. It was crazy. It was special.”

Tim Brown, 53, is finally getting the opportunity to be a NASCAR Cup Series driver.

Bowman Gray Stadium is the reason why. For the first time since 1971, the track will host a NASCAR Cup Series race with the Cook Out Clash taking place Sunday. It’s an annual exhibition event to kick off the season, but not every driver makes it into the field. The format for this year’s edition will have 23 drivers in the main event.

Brown might not be a household name among Cup Series followers and probably will be unfamiliar to some who tune into the Clash. At the regional level, though, he will go down as one of the greatest to get behind the wheel — certainly at Bowman Gray Stadium. He is the winningest driver in the venue’s history in the modified division with 101 victories, 12 track championships and 146 poles.

Fittingly, Bowman Gray is where the North Carolina native makes his debut, even if it comes 35 years after first chasing the dream.

“I’ll be honest with you, once I turned about 30 years old, I gave up on my lifelong dream of being a Cup driver,” Brown said. “Just because I had seen that transition to where you either had to be 12 or 13 years old and get signed or you had to have big money to pay an owner to let you drive, so I had already given up on that dream.”

Rick Ware Racing is fielding the car for Brown. The two are familiar because Brown is a Ware employee, one who will be among those building the car he’ll drive. When the rumors began about NASCAR bringing the Clash to Bowman Gray, Ware and team president Robby Benton immediately told Brown the goal was to put him in the car.

Brown won’t be alone in fulfilling a dream at Bowman Gray. Burt Myers, another 12-time track champion and rival of Brown’s, will also make his Cup Series debut, doing so with Team AmeriVet.

The two local stars are among a number of reasons why all eyes will be on Bowman Gray Stadium on Sunday. It’s already considered a special weekend without a car having yet hit the track.

Bowman Gray Stadium is a quarter-mile racetrack, one that circles the Winston-Salem State University football field, with deep roots in NASCAR. It is advertised as the series’ first and longest-running weekly track, dating to 1949 when two of NASCAR’s founding fathers, Bill France Sr. and Alvin Hawkins, brought racing to the facility.

Ben Kennedy, the great-grandson of France, won a NASCAR regional series race at the track in 2013. Last year, Kennedy was the one who went to Bowman Gray Stadium to announce in person that the Clash was coming to the track.

Though Brown and Myers might not be known to fans of NASCAR’s highest level, those followers will be familiar with many other names with Bowman Gray connections.

A young Richard Childress, now a NASCAR Hall of Fame car owner with his Richard Childress Racing operation, worked concussions at the track. Richard Petty recorded his 100th race win at Bowman Gray in 1969. Junior Johnson, David Pearson, along with the Allisons and Earnhardts, all once raced at Bowman Gray.

For the longest time, NASCAR was hardly a sport that returned to things it had once moved away from. The quest has been to find ways to evolve, whether through competing in new markets, schedule changes, championship format changes or different versions of the race car itself. It’s a monumental moment to bring the Cup Series back to Bowman Gray Stadium.

“I do like that we’re at home at Bowman Gray,” Team Penske’s Austin Cindric said. “When I think of downtown Los Angeles, I don’t think of short-track racing. When I think of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it’s a lot closer to short-track racing. I do think the fan base is very passionate at that place and will definitely appreciate having Cup cars there, maybe more than anywhere else. I can’t wait to see that. I can’t wait to see the turnout.”

The turnout will also be noticeable on the racetrack. During the three years NASCAR spent in Los Angeles at the Coliseum, the entry list consisted of the 36 charter teams required to make the cross-country trip and compete. Bowman Gray has an entry list of 39.

North Carolina is considered the home of NASCAR and where many of its teams and drivers are based. Starting the season at home and at a track beloved by many has resonated within the industry.

In the three years the Clash was held in L.A., the racing was decent but secondary as entertainment took center stage with musical acts, celebrities and athletes appearing. The feel is set to be different this weekend, and it should be because this could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for some.

“As much as it is an exhibition race, anybody that says they don’t want to win at Bowman Gray is lying,” Ryan Preece of RFK Racing said. “Winning in general, you want to do, but Bowman Gray, the history that’s behind it, you look back at some of the names and adding your name to that list of the Cup Series going and winning at Bowman Gray. That’s where NASCAR was pretty much born, so it would be pretty special to go and do that, and what better way than to kick it off here in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”

Federal prosecutors disputed claims by Shohei Ohtani‘s former interpreter that he stole from the slugger to pay back massive gambling debts, saying there was no evidence he suffered from a gambling addiction before he started draining the Los Angeles Dodgers star’s bank account, according to court documents filed Thursday.

Ippei Mizuhara is due to be sentenced Feb. 6 after his June guilty plea. Last week, he asked U.S. District Judge John W. Holcomb for an 18-month sentence, instead of the nearly five years prosecutors seek. Mizuhara said he was remorseful and blamed the crime on what he called a “long-standing” addiction to gambling in which he “frequented casinos four to five times a week.”

But in their new response, prosecutors doubled down on their sentencing recommendation and said their research showed there was no evidence of a long-standing addiction other than Mizuhara’s “self-serving and uncorroborated statements to the psychologist he hired for the purposes of sentencing.”

“All defendants claim to be remorseful at the time of sentencing,” prosecutors wrote. “The question courts must answer is whether the defendant is truly remorseful or whether they are just sorry they were caught.”

Mizuhara’s attorney, Michael Freedman, declined to comment Thursday.

Prosecutors said the government’s investigation found “only minimal evidence” of Mizuhara’s past legal gambling, stating that investigators had looked at more than 30 casinos across the country and that “the only evidence found was defendant spending $200 at the Mirage casino during a weekend in 2008.”

Prosecutors attached a document containing a color photocopy of Mizuhara’s California driver’s license, along with spreadsheet images showing bets he placed at the Mirage.

Mizuhara registered for an account on FanDuel in 2018 but never placed a bet on the website, according to prosecutors. He began betting with DraftKings in 2023 after he “had already stolen millions of dollars from Mr. Ohtani,” the filing states.

Other exhibits showed Mizuhara placing bets ranging from $5 to $1,400 on NBA, NHL, soccer and college baseball games.

Prosecutors contend Mizuhara did not accumulate a “tremendous debt” that forced him to steal from Ohtani, as Mizuhara has claimed. At the time of the first fraudulent wire transfer from Ohtani’s bank account, for “a modest $40,000” in September 2021, Mizuhara had more than $34,000 in his checking account, prosecutors said.

“[Mizuhara] could have used his own money to pay the bookie but instead chose to steal from Mr. Ohtani,” prosecutors wrote.

They allege Mizuhara deposited money he received from his winnings from the bookie and DraftKings into his personal account and “had no intention of repaying Mr. Ohtani.”

In his filing to Holcomb, Mizuhara claimed that he “had to rent a place” near Ohtani and “paid hefty rent” where he ultimately settled in Newport Beach, California, while simultaneously paying rent for an apartment in Japan. He also stated in his filing that he was “living paycheck to paycheck.”

“But this is also not true,” prosecutors wrote in their filing, submitting bank statements as evidence showing “he was using Mr. Ohtani’s debit card to pay his rent” without Ohtani’s “knowledge or authorization.”

“He had no expenses,” the prosecutors continued. “He had no loans, car payments, or rent expenses,” noting Ohtani gave Mizuhara a Porsche to drive.

Mizuhara always had a “significant balance” in his checking account, prosecutors state, noting it was more than $30,000 in March 2023 and more than $195,000 in March 2024, when inquiries from ESPN led to his firing from the Dodgers and to Ohtani’s attorneys calling the wire transfers a “massive theft.”

Prosecutors also said Mizuhara turned down book and commercial deals in spite of Ohtani encouraging him “to accept the deals.” Mizuhara “did in fact write at least one book” — an illustrated children’s book about Ohtani, according to an exhibit.

Prosecutors concluded their filing by stating “a significant period of incarceration is necessary,” and reiterated their request for a sentence of 57 months in prison, three years supervised release, more than $16 million in restitution to Ohtani and $1.1 million to the IRS.

“There is no doubt” Mizuhara “feels ashamed from the international attention he received from his fraud schemes and web of lies,” the prosecutors wrote. “But instead of showing true remorse,” they allege, Mizuhara is trying to “justify stealing millions from Mr. Ohtani.”