The Measurements II
George Brett played with Bo Jackson the last month of the '86 baseball season and all of Jackson's next four seasons in Kansas City. Brett is in the Baseball Hall of Fame and he speaks with considerable authority when he says, "I never missed a Bo Jackson at-bat. Nobody hit them longer or higher or ones that left you saying to yourself, 'Oh... my... God!'"
From 1987-1990, Jackson hit a tape-measure home run every 16 at-bats, and in 1989, when he hit 32 home runs and drove in 105 runs, he was a starter for the American League All-Stars. In his first time up in the showcase game, he hit - what else? - a prodigious home run to center field. He was named the game's Most Valuable Player.
His throws to home and third base also left grown men muttering. Miss his howitzer throw and ask, "Who was the relay man?" To which the reply would be, "There was no relay man."
The Hobbyist
Not knowing what to expect and not wanting to risk injury to their unique specimen, the Raiders began The Bo Jackson Experiment cautiously. In seven games in 1987, they handed him the football 81 times. He averaged 6.8 yards a carry. Some hobby.
And so a Fantasyland star was born in Los Angeles in the autumns... and nurtured on the midwestern prairies in the summers.
In the fall of 1988 (cue the music), Bo Jackson began myth making that seemed from a higher league.
Five weeks after tossing aside his baseball uniform, he shredded the Seattle Seahawks for a record Monday Night Football rushing performance of 221 yards. Included in that total was a 91-yard touchdown run. Another run was the bug-on-the-windshield blast through - almost literally - Seattle linebacker Brian Bosworth. The Boz had been trash-talking Jackson before the game, not having heard, obviously, about this John Gotti grown up.
A couple weeks later, the Raiders were in New Orleans to play the Saints in the Superdome. The building had opened in 1975 and until that time (or since), no one had thrown or kicked a ball off the scoreboard that is suspended from the ceiling. Bo Jackson, a running back, picked up a football and casually threw it off the scoreboard on his first try.
In 1989, Bo Jackson got another leg up on the NFL, one he also maintains to this day. He scored on a 92-yard run against Cincinnati, making him the only man in pro football history to have two career runs of 90 or more yards.
In 1990, he started another exclusive Club of One when he was voted to play for the AFC team in the Pro Bowl. In ’89, he had been voted to baseball’s All-Game. No one ever had made that double play before.
The Adman
Bo Jackson was at the forefront of two of the most memorable - and lasting - ad campaigns of all time. Nike’s "Just Do It" and "Bo Knows," slogans practically embedded in the American consciousness, both debuted in 1988.
The most famous of many spots came in 1990. Bo is presented as The Man. Football’s Jim Everett says, "Bo knows football," Baseball’s Kirk Gibson says, "Bo knows baseball." Basketball’s Michael Jordan says, "Bo knows basketball." Hockey’s Wayne Gretzky comes skating up and simply says, "No!" Jackson then jams very badly with rock legend Bo Diddley, who stops and says, "Bo, you don’t know Diddley!"
The Comeback
Bo Jackson didn’t play in the Pro Bowl after the 1990 season. A routine run, a routine tackle and a seemingly routine fall in a divisional playoff game against Cincinnati had a not-so-routine consequence: Jackson’s left hip was dislocated. He relocated it himself but the pain was unbelievable.
No one knew then, but he never would play football again. In 515 carries over 38 late-season games in four years, he averaged 5.41 yards (among running backs with the requisite number of attempts, Jim Brown has the highest average of all time, 5.22).
No one knew then, too, but the dislocated hip and the complications that followed sapped Jackson's speed. He would play baseball again, in a limited role (71 at-bats) for the Chicago White Sox in 1991 and then again in 1993, remarkably after hip replacement surgery in 1992.
Blood supply had been cut off to the area around Jackson’s left hip socket, causing deterioration of the cartilage and bone, a condition known as avascular necrosis.
Doctors were concerned that he would walk normally. Bo Jackson was determined he would play baseball again, and he came back to the game in goose bumps fashion: He hit a home run in his first swing in 19 months in April 1993.
He carried on through 1993 with the White Sox, then in 1994 with the California Angels, now a study in courage and a pacesetter yet again. No one ever had played major league baseball with an artificial hip. "I actually slid a few times on it," he says. "It didn’t make my doctors happy, but it didn’t hurt me, either."
He hit a total of 29 home runs in 1993-94 - stole one base, too - and then, at 32, took his magic body out of the games.
The Good Life
He has no regrets. None. Some people think he should have picked one sport and stayed with it. He says he's lucky to have done it all. Some people decry the injury he suffered in football. He says it could have happened sliding into third base.
"Life is about ifs," he says. "It would be nice to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame or the Pro Football Hall of Fame [he is in the College Football Hall of Fame], but it would be nice to win the Powerball lotto, too."
A rich man in many ways, he lives in suburban Chicago, in a bucolic setting on rolling hills by the Des Plaines River, with his wife, Linda, and their three teenage children - Garrett, 18, Nicholas, 16, and Morgan, 14.
Bebe Jackson died in 1992, three weeks after Bo’s first hip surgery (he has had two ensuing operations on the hip), and in 1995 Bo completed his promise to his Mama when he finished his degree in human sciences from Auburn.
He own or co-owns successful meat and food processing and distribution companies.
Bo Jackson’s life is no longer an adrenaline rush, no longer the stuff of folk songs.
But he was fortunate once. He got to sing his song.
And lucky us, of course: We got to watch and listen.
