from the New York Times

Mariano Rivera happily remembers opening his back door as a boy in Puerto Caimito, Panama, and being 100 feet from the beach. When the tide was low, Rivera said, it looked as if the soft sand stretched forever. The beach was Rivera's favorite baseball field, an endless playground.

Rivera guessed that he played baseball 340 days a year. On the beach, on the dusty streets of the fishing village, on fields he and his friends cleared by uprooting shrubs with machetes, anywhere. Although he used cardboard for a glove, Rivera said it had been a wonderful experience and added, "I wouldn't change one moment."

Still, a few years ago, something was nudging Rivera away from his beloved Panama. It was fear.

Rivera, who makes $10 million a year to close games for the Yankees, worried that having his salary publicized could make his wife and children targets for a kidnapping.

Rivera quietly moved his immediate family to the United States full time after the 2000 season because he felt it would be safer. Rivera, who had two children at the time and has three now, consulted with the Yankees, who helped coordinate the relocation. Now the Riveras spend more than 11 months a year here or in Westchester County.

"I love Panama," Rivera said. "Everybody is there. We are family people. We like to be around our families. But for safety, I had to look out for my kids and my family."

Rivera stopped fiddling with a weighted baseball in front of his locker on Monday morning, tilted his head back and discussed the unthinkable.

"All it takes is one crazy, maniac guy who wakes up that morning with my name in their mind," Rivera continued. "And I can't tolerate that."

General Manager Brian Cashman declined to discuss Rivera's move or the Yankees' involvement in it. Even after Cashman was told that Rivera had mentioned the Yankees' involvement in his little-known decision, he refused to discuss it. In addition, Rivera was coy about what, if anything, had caused him to complete the move when he did.

The 35-year-old Rivera, who has been married to his wife, Clara, for 13 years, has three sons.

"If I was here and was away from them for one week, I would worry," said Rivera, referring to his wife and sons, Mariano Jr., 11, Jafet, 8, and Jaziel, 2. "I couldn't do it."

Kidnapping is not epidemic in Panama. But Tom Clayton, whose company, Clayton Consultants, specializes in helping people involved in kidnap-for-ransom incidents, said the Panamanian police told him five years ago about an increasing problem involving a neighboring country.

Colombia, which borders Panama, has more kidnapping cases than any country in the world, Clayton said. The Panamanian police reported that some of its richer citizens had been targets of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a leftist guerrilla group known by its Spanish acronym of FARC.

"The FARC has crossed the border into southern Panama and has been kidnapping wealthy Panamanians for the past few years," Clayton said. "In general, I'd estimate kidnaps in Panama aren't a big problem. But if I had $10 million a year income, I don't think I'd be there, either."

Maura Villarreal, the mother of Detroit Tigers reliever Ugueth Urbina, was abducted from her home in Venezuela last September and held hostage for six months. The police learned that Venezuelans had abducted Villarreal and sold her to Colombians.

During the ordeal, Urbina received several calls on his cellphone from the Colombians, who demanded $6 million in ransom. The police rescued Villarreal last month from a drug-traffickers den in the Venezuelan jungle.

"It's not like the movies," Urbina said after she returned home. "This is real life."

Life was simpler when Rivera was a skinny boy who loved baseball yet had no dreams of playing professionally. If he had not developed into one of the premier closers in the game, he said, he would have avoided becoming a fisherman like his father. A fishing boat Rivera was in capsized when he was 18.

Rivera speculated that he would have become a mechanic or a minister, and he would have been just as content as he is now.

Panama is not Rivera's residence anymore, but he gushed about it throughout a 45-minute conversation. "I can't stay away from Panama," he said. "It's always with me."

But Rivera has been there only once in the past year, to attend the funeral for his wife's cousins Victor Darío Avila and his son, Victor Leonel Avila, who died in a pool accident at Rivera's home in Puerto Caimito.

Rivera attended the funeral on the morning of Oct. 12, traveled 2,255 miles in the afternoon and saved the opener of the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox at Yankee Stadium that night.

"That was all God there," Rivera said Monday. "I don't know how else I did it."

Rivera remembered the day, calling the funeral joyous because it celebrated the lives of his wife's cousins. As devastating as the deaths were, he said, the family believed that the father and son were together with the Lord, so that lessened the pain.

Alexander Cubilla, who investigated the deaths, said Avila and his son died because the water in the pool had been electrified to prevent dogs from entering it. Maity Alvarez de Correa, a lawyer for the Rivera family, said that the wires surrounded the pool, but that the pool itself was not electrified.

"The investigation is officially closed," Correa said in Spanish during a telephone interview. "It was ruled an accident. It was obvious that it was an accident since the beginning. There was no doubt."

Rivera lamented how some people tried to blame him for the accident. The two-story colonial villa surrounded by a six-foot wall is for sale. The Riveras do not plan to live there again.

"We can't go back there," Rivera said. "Not with those memories."

For the first time last December, Rivera was not in Panama for Christmas. Instead, he flew 40 of his and Clara's relatives to New York for the holidays. Rivera said everyone stayed at his house, so some slept on couches and on the floor.

The crowded scene reminded Rivera of "how we used to live" in Panama, and he embraced every second of the visit. Rivera said he, Clara and their children cry for hours when they have to say goodbye to their family, and those tears flowed again when they parted two months ago.

Rivera, a boy who grew up playing baseball on the beach in Panama and a man who still becomes wistful talking about it, said he would not retire there.

Rivera smiled when he was asked to imagine being 65 and fishing where his father had fished, but he was uncertain about the potentially picturesque scene. As much as things pull Rivera back to Panama, some things keep him away. He will never leave there. He just might not stay.

"I will always have a place there," Rivera said. "But live there? I don't know. Maybe I'll be in both places. Maybe I'll do that."