Go ahead and run through people who have the most World Series rings. They're mostly Hall of Famers.

Yogi Berra has 10, Joe DiMaggio won nine. Phil Rizzuto, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle earned seven. Eddie Collins has six. Derek Jeter, Reggie Jackson, Herb Pennock and Russell Nua each have five. Sandy Koufax has four. David Ortiz has thre--

Wait, Russell who?

"Ohh no, I don't talk about what I've done," Nua, MLB massage therapist, told me in a recent phone call. "Because when people talk about it, they probably can't do it."

Nua's career as a massage therapist for baseball players began in the early '90s.

The Hawaii native had a private practice near Spring Training in Palm Springs, Ariz., when a customer -- who was a friend of Willie Wilson's -- thought the two-time All-Star might benefit from some of Nua's treatments. Wilson had just signed with the A's after spending 15 seasons with Kansas City, and Royals Stadium's turf surface had done a number on his knees.

"I worked on him and he liked it, and he wanted me to come up to Oakland for the season," Nua said. "He wanted to be flexible and get all this tightness out of his body from playing in Kansas City."

Nua ended up working with Wilson for five years and then, through Wilson, latched on as pitcher Mike Morgan's personal massage therapist. He worked with the right-hander for 11 years. This was all during a time when teams didn't really have official people in that position. Nua was one of the first of his kind and, as a baseball fan, it was kind of a dream job.

"They both took me all over baseball," Nua said. "When I'd go to these stadiums, I'd be in a storeroom or in a hall. That's where I worked on them. I also worked on their family and their kids."

Nua's title run began when Morgan signed with the D-backs in January 2000. The then-40-year-old reliever told his massager of a premonition he had in the early days of 2001 -- one that Nua could be a big part of.

"[Morgan] says, 'Hey bro, look over there, what do you see?'" Nua recalled. "I go, 'Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson.' He goes, 'No, no, no, that's Schill-Man and the Unit. I'm gonna have you take care of them and we're gonna go to the World Series. How do you like that?'"

So Nua used his magical, hands-only techniques on the two All-Star pitchers that season, visiting their houses for pre- and postgame sessions. His style hasn't changed over his decades-long career, addressing the mental toll of the game of baseball maybe even more than the physical.

"There's a lot of pressure in your head," Nua said. "You have to be able to relax them and reset them. Their thoughts come easily and are pressured. You try to release all this tension that's built up. In baseball, there's all this information and this and that. That's how I looked at it. If I could release the tension in their head, it'd be a lot easier for them to pitch."

Johnson had one of his best years in '01, winning the NL Cy Young Award with a 21-6 record, a 2.49 ERA and 372 strikeouts.

Schilling led the Majors with 22 wins and posted a 2.98 ERA.

And the D-backs became, just as Morgan had predicted, champions. The two star pitchers shared World Series MVP honors.

Everyone on the team got championship rings, and Morgan -- because he felt Nua contributed to the preparation and recovery of some key D-backs -- got one for him, too.

Nua left the D-backs after the '03 season, following Schilling to the Red Sox. Here, the now well-known massage therapist worked with everyone: Jason Varitek, Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz, Tim Wakefield, Keith Foulke, Manny Ramirez (well, when Manny would let him).

"Manny is a different kind of stress because he's very compulsive," Nua told me. "You could be giving him a massage and all of a sudden he'll just, like, jump up and say, 'I gotta go hit, see you later.'"

Varitek, according to Nua, was maybe the most important Red Sox player to take care of.

"He was the captain," Nua said. "When the captain's right, everything's right."

And although he doesn't take full credit for it, Nua did suggest he might have helped a tiny bit with one of the biggest, franchise-altering moments in Boston sports history.

"Yeah, Dave Roberts came to me. He goes, 'Hey, my hamstrings are kinda tight.' I go, 'OK, let's loosen them up,'" Nua recalled. "He goes, 'Can we?' I go, 'Yeah, let's loosen them up. If you need to run fast, at a certain time, it's gonna happen.'''

Eventually, that time did come along. And Roberts was ready.

After Boston's '04 title, players raved of Nua's abilities. His gentle listening skills, his healing oils from China and even the pain he sometimes caused during treatments all seemed to help the Sox push through the stress and grind of their historic run.

"He could massage a dinosaur and probably make them hurt," Foulke told the Milford Daily News in 2005. "He can bring you to your knees."

Nua's approach is simple: "I listen to what they tell me, and that gives me the idea of how to help them."

The championship-level masseur got a ring in '04 and continued piling up the jewelry with wins in '07, '13 and '18 with the Sox. And as Nua gathered up his World Series bling and helped teams achieve success, the baseball/massaging world expanded. Nearly every organization has hired an official team massage therapist. They are crucial figures to getting players through the rigorous 162-game season. They're no longer giving care to pitchers in storage closets or side rooms; they're right where guys can find them.

"We're in the training room; we're more centralized," Nua said. "It's easy access."

The 73-year-old Nua's five rings definitely stand out on his resume: He's become known in some circles as "The Lord of the Rings." Still, Nua -- who has no thoughts of slowing down and loves the travel and the day-to-day routine of his in-stadium duties -- stays incredibly humble about his accomplishments.

He doesn't tell many people about his hardware. He keeps his rings at home in a safe deposit box. He might take one on the road with him just to remind himself that this is always "the goal."

"It never entered my mind that [I'd have five World Series rings]," Nua said. "But if you want to win in anything, you have to be dedicated, and then that's the end result."