Editor’s Note: About a month ago, I wrote a column about Bo Jackson that, for some reason or another, drew about as much response as anything I’ve written for The Kansas City Star. “Some reason” could be that it was just a brilliant piece of work up there with Plato’s Republic, Huck Finn and the early Far Side cartoons. “Another” is that people just care about Bo Jackson.
“Another” is, at this moment, a 30-1 Vegas favorite.
Anyway, the Bo story for the newspaper was entirely built around his baseball career with the Royals – it did not touch upon his football career, his years at Auburn or his astonishing power in Tecmo Super Bowl. So, just for you, we are now offering the director’s cut of that story – which has all sorts of deleted scenes, previously unseen footage and various other special features.
And you get it all free of charge. As one car dealer in a former hometown liked to say, “If I sold them any cheaper, I’d be giving them away!” Only I am, actually, giving it away. So that’s a bad example. Why don’t you at least buy a book?
* * *
OK, so one day in New York, Bo Jackson complained in the dugout before a game. Reporters surrounded Bo, which never made him happy. Reporters wanted to explain things, and Bo Jackson wasn’t about explaining. Bo was about doing.
“Everything I do, people tend to exaggerate it,” he moaned. “With me, they want to make things bigger than they are.”
Bo told the reporters he was just another guy. He wasn’t some sort of folk hero, like John Henry or Pecos Bill. No, he hurt like other players. He made mistakes like other players. He struck out a lot. He was not forged out of steel, and he could not outrun locomotives, and he could not turn back time by flying around the world and reversing the rotation of the earth.
“I’m just another player, you know?” he said.
Then the game began, Royals vs. Yankees at Yankee Stadium.
FIRST TIME UP Bo hit a 412-foot homer to center field.
SECOND TIME UP Bo smashed a 464-foot opposite-field home run. That ball landed in that far off-place over the right field fence where only the baseball gods like Ruth, Gehrig and Mantle had ever dared to fly.
“Colossal,” teammate George Brett would say. “I had to stop and watch.”
THIRT TIME UP Bo had to wait as Yankees manager Stump Merrill walked out to the mound. Stump wanted to know how pitcher Andy Hawkins intended to deal with Bo this time.
“I’ll pitch it outside,” Hawkins said.
“It better be WAY outside,” Merrill replied.
Hawkins threw the ball way outside. Jackson poked the ball over the right field fence for his third homer. The New York crowd went bananas.
Bo never got a fourth time up that day. He hurt his shoulder while diving for a ball hit by baseball/football soul mate Deion Sanders. Bo almost made one of the great catches in baseball history. Instead it turned into an inside the park home run, and Bo hurt his shoulder.
As he walked gingerly off the field that day, New Yorkers stood and cheered for Bo. It’s possible that no opposing player ever hear those sorts of cheers at Yankee Stadium.
“You know what?” Royals Hall of Famer Frank White would say almost 20 years later. “I really did play baseball with Superman.”
* * *
How can you explain Bo Jackson to a kid today? Times have changed. Superheroes have gotten smaller. It’s just the way of the world. Look: If some athlete does something amazing these days – say LeBron James’ crazy 48 points against Detroit in the playoffs – it gets played and replayed, hashed and rehashed, analyzed and sensationalized, discussed and described and disseminated and displayed until it becomes something close to ordinary. That’s the flip side to technology, to high-def television, to 24-hour sports talk and a million cable channels and bustling chat rooms and celebrity athlete blogs and the stats explosion and sportswriters breaking things down on television and cameras that can slow the game down to a standstill, to the point where we can always see if the umpire was right, when the ball was fumbled, why the golf swing was off. There are no mysteries left. Sports are bigger than ever. Athletes are richer than ever. But it’s hard to be larger than life these days.
If Babe Ruth called his shot in a World Series today, we’d hear the press conference, we’d see it 500 times on SportsCenter, we’d have caught him on the Jim Rome Show, we’d have heard what the PTI guys had to say about it – and we’d be sick of it.
It’s not right to say that sports are less interesting because of all the changes … there has never been a better time to be a sports fan in so many ways. But we did lose something along the way. That’s the price of progress. The clouds smell of gasoline, and all that. There’s no room now for tall tales in our games. Old-time baseball fans and scouts always telling grand stories about old-time ballplayers – they will say “Oh, you should have seen Mickey Mantle before he hurt his knees; he ran so fast he could bunt for doubles.” They will say: “Before Pete Reiser started running into walls, he could play leftfield and centerfield at the same time.” They will say, “There was nobody quite like Monte Irvin before he went to war; he used to hit for the cycle three times a week.” Negro Leagues catcher Biz Mackey used to say he kept a raw steak inside his catcher’s mitt to soften the beating his hand would take. He said Satchel Paige threw so hard, by the end of the game that steak had become hamburger.
Bo Jackson was the last folk hero. He only hit .250 in the big leagues, and he didn’t walk much. He only played parts of four seasons in the NFL, and he never gained 1,000 yards rushing. But none of that has anything to do with who Bo Jackson was. Bo broke a bat over his head after striking out. Bo threw a ball from left field to first base on the fly to double-up Hall of Fame catcher Carlton Fisk. Bo really did just show up for football games in October and transform into the most sensational running back the game has ever seen. He really did … well he really did a lot of stuff.
* * *
The Georgia crowd hooted and taunted Bo Jackson as he stood in the batter’s box, looking all out of place. You have to understand that there is plenty of bad blood between the kids at Georgia and the kids at Auburn. They are not rivals, exactly – Auburn already has Alabama and/or Tennessee, Georgia already has Florida and/or Georgia Tech. But one good thing about Southern football schools – the fans have plenty of animosity to spread around, and there’s more passion in Georgia-Auburn than there is in most rivalries across America.
“Wrong field, Bo!” a few Georgia fans taunted … this was the perfect time and place to get in a few shots at Bo. Nobody messed with Bo on the football field. He was a phenomenon there – he was bigger, stronger, faster than anyone. He averaged 7.7 yards per carry as a sophomore, and later, in his Heisman Trophy senior season, he once gained 100-plus yards in a game when he had two broken ribs. Georgia fans may not like Auburn any more than Auburn fans like Georgia – but both sides respect football greatness when they see it.
But this was Bo on the baseball field, and that was a different thing. The fans hooted and mocked – a couple had brought footballs they waved. Bo never looked particularly at ease in the batter’s box; his batting stance was always a jangle of nerves. The first pitch, Bo swung and missed by three feet, and that taunting went up another level, laughter mixed in, poor Bo, poor misplaced Bo, what was he doing out there?
Bo Jackson hit the next pitch 550 feet.
Actually, nobody knows exactly how far Bo hit it – they only know it was the longest ball ever hit at the University of Georgia. It might have been 500 feet, it might have been 4000 feet, but the distance didn’t matter. Bo Jackson hit the longest home run any of those kids had ever seen.
And there was silence. Eerie, stunned, pitch silence. Bo ran around the bases in that silence. By the time he reached third base, the college had snapped out of their state of shock and they finally reacted. They started cheering and bowing to Bo Jackson.
* * *
First time I ever saw Bo Jackson was in 1985 in a makeshift ballpark in Charlotte, N.C. He had just started his pro baseball career, and even then it seemed a bit surreal. Bo had won the Heisman Trophy at Auburn, of course. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers picked him No. 1 overall, sent a limo to pick him up and drive him to Canton, where sculptors were already working on his Pro Football Hall of Fame bust.
Instead, he signed to play baseball with the Royals.
The signing of Bo had been a long process, and one of the great scouting jobs in baseball history. Kenny Gonzales of the Royals would stay at the Ramada Inn in Bessemer, Ala., where Bo’s mother, Florence, worked. And they would have coffee every time he was in town. They became close friends. He told her that his dream would be for Bo Jackson to someday play baseball with the Royals. She told him that her dream would be for Bo to be the first in the family to get a college degree. They understood each other.
Tampa Bay drafted Bo and flew him to town on a private jet, that made him ineligible to play baseball his senior season at Auburn. Jackson never forgave the Buccaneers for that blunder. He told his mother that he was seriously thinking about playing Major League Baseball if he was drafted by the right team. Florence mentioned that to Kenny Gonzales. When the Royals drafted Bo Jackson in the fourth round, nobody around baseball really took it all that seriously. Bo seemed untouchable.
But he signed with the Royals. And on the day he signed, Florence was so happy she hugged Kenny Gonzalez and lifted him off the ground.
“That day we signed Bo was one of my greatest days in professional baseball,” says Art Stewart, now the Royals’ Senior Advisor to the General Manager. “There was just nobody like this guy.”
In the moments after Bo signed, he asked if he could take batting practice. Bo had not swung a bat in months. He hit the first pitch he saw off the base of the crown scoreboard in centerfield. It had to fly 450 feet. Avron Fogelman, who co-owned the Royals, shouted: “Get me that baseball.” Bo promptly hit the second ball he saw to almost the exact same spot, off the base of the scoreboard.
“Get me that ball too,” Fogelman said.
It was surreal. George Brett and Frank White stood by the batting cage with their mouths open, like children watching fireworks. That was the day that Buck O’Neil heard the sound – a crack of the bat he only heard three times in his life. The first time he heard it was as a boy, when he watched Babe Ruth take batting practice. The second time was as a player in the Negro Leagues, and the player was Josh Gibson. The third time was Bo that first day in Kansas City.
“You had to rub your eyes,” Art Stewart said. “Because you couldn’t believe what you were seeing.”
A short while later Bo was playing for the Memphis Chicks in that makeshift little park called Crockett Park in Charlotte. The original Crockett Park had burned to the ground, so this was a park of metal bleachers. The clubhouses were trailers. Bo muscled a long fly ball over the Krispy Kreme sign in left-field. “That was Bo Jackson’s first professional home run,” the public address announcer said. Everybody cheered. And then someone pointed and shouted, “He broke his bat.”
Yes, kids. Bo Jackson broke his bat on his first professional home run.
That’s the kind of guy we’re talking about here.
* * *
Bo Jackson was always grouchily unimpressed with himself. Michael Jordan was asked about Bo, and he offered up one of the best quotes ever spoken about sports and the elusive qualities of genius. “Neither of us is very easily amazed,” Jordan told Newsweek. “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
This is the quality, I think, that is vastly underrated – it’s rare for someone to have that sort of titanic faith in themselves. I’ve always been amazed by the story of Kurt Warner, who went from stocker at Hy-Vee to Super Bowl MVP – not so much because of what he did on the field, but because when he was stacking cans of Del Monte corn and lining up bags of Funyons, he somehow still saw himself as an NFL quarterback. That absolutely amazes me. I’ve worked a lot of bad jobs in my life – I moved boxes in a factory, I worked as a telemarketer trying to sell family portraits, I bussed tables, I mowed lawns, I sold newspapers door to door, I worked 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. as a newspaper agate clerk, I sold furniture on the side of the road, I worked for a mortgage company where my job was to call delinquent customers – but my least favorite job by far was the summer I worked at a Kroger. I can’t tell you exactly why – it wasn’t necessarily harder than those other jobs, certainly it was easier than the factory work – but in that store I could barely breathe, the clock would not budge, and every dream I ever had about myself faded into oblivion. I could have had Elway’s arm, Marino’s release, Tarkenton’s legs, Unitas’ brain and Montana’s touch and I feel quite sure that three months working in a Supermarket would have broken me.
Bo Jackson simply believed he could do anything. He was an athletic marvel, of course, a two-time high school decathlon champ, a world class sprinter who weighed 225 pounds, a power-hitter with an astonishingly strong arm. But it was his almost childlike insistence that he could do anything that struck you. When Bo Jackson was called up to the big leagues that September after only 53 minor-league games, he shrugged. When he had his first four-hit game in only his fifth game, he announced, “It’s just another night.” Two days after that, he faced Seattle’s Mike Moore, a power pitcher who would win 161 games in the big leagues. Before the game, Bo went over to Willie Wilson’s bats, liked the feel of one, and announced, “This is mine.”
With Willie’s bat, Bo Jackson hit a 475-foot blast to left-center. It was the longest home run ever hit at Royals Stadium.
Yes, kids. Bo Jackson’s first Major League home run flew 475 feet.
“It felt good,” Bo said, “But it can only last a couple of minutes. Everybody was oohing and ahhing and giving the high fives. You know the usual stuff that goes on.”
You know. The usual stuff. Bo Jackson could have taken off and started flying, and it would not have surprised him.
‘There’s something about Bo,” Royals general manager John Schuerholz said then. “Call it mystical or magical.”
* * *
The run everyone seems to remember from the Monday Night Football Game in 1987 against Seattle was the time when he ran through Brian Bosworth. And sure, that was impressive and, more to the point, really enjoyable to watch. Bosworth had been such an uncontrollable force in college, a caged tiger, and then Bo plowed him over and the next time anyone saw him the Boz he was out of football, playing bit roles in movies and he weighed like 123 pounds.
“This guy is somebody you don’t have an answer for,” the Boz would say.
But it’s the other run that I remember better, the 91-yard run, and the reason that one stands out so much is that it began as just another play, a plain old run left, the kind of play you will see 10 times in every single game. After a lifetime of watching football, you grow accustomed to the game, and you anticipate what’s going to happen before it happens. How many times have you seen a running back go left? And what happens – the running back gains a few yards and gets pushed out of bounds. Or a defensive end runs him down. Or the running back cuts back toward the middle to gain a few extra yards. Maybe you will even see some sort of spectacular move and a long run.
But I never before saw what Bo Jackson did that night, and I never saw it again. He got the ball started outside and then he simply exploded into another gear – he just ran by everybody. It was utterly impossible. Four or five defensive players had angles on him, and none of them even came close to touching him. It was something you see in high school every so often, something you might see in college when a once-in-a-lifetime talent comes along. But you NEVER see that in the NFL.
“I was standing on the sideline, and he was going in there was a WHOOSH of wind,” Seahawks receiver Steve Largent would say.
Bo averaged 5.4 yards per carry in his short NFL career. That’s a record. He had two rushed of 90-plus yards – only one other played did that. He had that amazing 35-yard run against Denver when he caught a pitch-right, reversed field, ran left, absolutely obliterated a defensive back, ran by several others and dove into the end zone. There was the time against Washington when he plowed over two defensive players at the same time. And so on.
“We would watch hours and hours of video on him,” former Chiefs coach Marty Schottenheimer said. “And then we would just stop. There was no way to defend him.”
* * *
Nobody had any idea what to make of Bo Jackson the baseball player. On the one hand, he really didn’t know how to play baseball. He was striking out practically every other at-bat. Fly balls were an adventure. He needed time to learn … but there was no time. He was playing football. He was a Nike icon – Bo Knows commercials were the hottest thing in sports. He was too big a star to ride minor league busses.
“I think if Bo had been able to stay healthy and been given time to learn the game, he would have been a Hall of Famer,” says Allard Baird, who was working as a scout for the Royals at the time. “I have no doubt in my mind about that. He had everything you could want in a player. Everything. But that just wasn’t Bo’s destiny.”
No, instead, Bo’s destiny was to become a comic book hero.
September 2, 1986: Bo’s first game. His first at-bat was against Hall of Famer Steve Carlton. He hit a ground ball to second base, and Tim Hulett picked it up and threw to first – only Bo was already past the bag.
“Oh man, nothing that big should move that fast,” said Royals Hall of Famer and former hitting coach John Mayberry.
April 14, 1987: Bo Jackson faced Detroit’s Nate Snell with the bases loaded. In spring training that year, Snell had forced Bo to pop out with the bases loaded, and Bo threw his bat and glared at Snell. “Bo was the kind of guy who wanted to prove you wrong,” Frank White says. “If you told him he couldn’t do something, he would do it.”
Snell threw a fastball, and Bo crushed it. Grand slam. It was his fourth hit of the day, his second homer, seventh RBI. He also stole a base. When the bat boy picked up the bat, he realized something. Bo had broken his bat on the homer again.
July 29, 1988: Bo Jackson was facing Baltimore’s Jeff Ballard. He called timeout and stepped out of the box. He adjusted his batting glove when he realized that the umpire did not actually grant his timeout, and Ballard was throwing the ball. Jackson jumped back into the box, swung that bat and … yeah. He hit a home run.
“Most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Bob Schaeffer, Kansas City’s first-base coach at the time.
May 15, 1989: Legendary baseball writer Peter Gammons was in Minnesota to write a Sports Illustrated cover story about Jackson, so he watched Bo take batting practice. It was a typical Bo hitting session – he cracked rockets all over the field. Then it was time for his last swing. Bo jumped into the cage and hit left-handed.
He hit a titanic 450-foot shot off the Hardware Hank sign in right field.
Left-handed.
“I got work to do,” Bo said to the other players, whose jaws had dropped. He ran out to the outfield to shag some fly balls.
May 23, 1989: Bo locked into a fastball battle with Nolan Ryan. Up to that point, Nolan and Bo had met six times, and Bo had struck out six times. This time, Nolan kept pumping 100 mph fastballs and Bo kept fouling them off. Ryan was not going to try a curveball – this was bigger than a simple baseball game. This was man-to-man, power vs. power, clash of the titans. The previous time they met, Ryan had blown a final fastball by Bo – but Bo’s swing was so violent and so powerful that afterward. He was about to find out. Ryan threw one last fastball. Bo connected. Bo hit the ball 461 feet, the longest ever homer at Arlington Stadium.
“They better get a new tape measure,” Bo said.
July 11, 1989: All-Star Game in Anaheim. Bo Jackson led off with a monstrous 448-foot home run to straightaway center field – it cleared two fences out there.
“Unbelievable,” Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn would say.
“I got a piece of it,” Bo would say.
The next inning, he beat out a double play grounder by running to first in 3.81 seconds – one of the fastest times ever clocked for a right-handed hitter. He stole second base (becoming only the second player to hit a homer and steal a base in an All-Star Game, with Willie Mays). He scored the game-winning run. He was named MVP.
July 11, 1990: Bo ran up the outfield wall. Literally. He chased down a fly ball and caught it about four steps in front of the fence. He put his right foot on the wall, then his left, then his right – until he was seven feet off the ground and sideways. For a guy who didn’t want to be seen as a superhero, he sure kept doing superhero things.
“What do you think of Bo Jackson?” a reporter asked, well, Bo Jackson.
“I’ve known this guy for years,” Bo said of Bo. “And nothing he does fazes me.”
* * *
No story on Bo would be complete without a mention of Tecmo Super Bo. Jackson says people, even now, come up to him to talk about how good his namesake was in that classic game Tecmo Super Bowl. He isn’t especially thrilled to talk about it.
He was that good. I once played a season with those Raiders despite my lifelong hatred of the Raiders. That was a tough team to play with. Jay Schroeder was the quarterback, and he stunk. The defense was so bad that your only hope was to control Howie Long and drop him back into coverage.
But Tecmo Bo was unstoppable. Those of you who played the game (and it seems now that every single person over 35 played Tecmo) will recall that before each game you could see what condition players were in. If a player was in BAD condition, he would be entirely useless. Except Bo – even in BAD condition Bo was still good for 150 to 200 yards rushing (hey, he did gain 100 yards in college with two broken ribs). But Bo in GOOD condition was like a joke – he was like an error in the program. He was good for an 80-yard run every single time he touched the ball.
If you want to see something entertaining, check out this YouTube video which shows Bo Jackson running out an entire quarter with one run. There's also a YouTube which shows Bo scoring 10 touchdowns. It was like that.
* * *
There are so many more Bo baseball moments. One coach says he saw Bo Jackson swing a bat so hard, he actually broke it even though he missed the ball. Once, he ran over catcher Rick Dempsey. Dempsey broke his thumb but said: “I held him to fewer yards than Brian Bosworth,” Dempsey said.
There was the time when Bo faced Roger Clemens, who had struck him out four straight times. “I’m going to get him this time,” Bo said. He smashed a home run over the left field fence.
And there was “The Throw.” That deserves its own section. On June 5, 1989, the Royals were playing at Seattle. It was the 10th inning, score was tied 3-3, Harold Reynolds was on first base when Scott Bradley rifled a double to left field. Reynolds was running on the pitch, so it was obvious he would score the winning run. He rounded third, headed for home and prepared to have his teammates mob him when he saw his teammate Darnell Coles pumping his arms, the baseball signal for “SLIDE!”
Reynolds thought: “Slide? Are you kidding me?”
So, he was about to launch into what he called “a courtesy slide” when he saw that Kansas City catcher Bob Boone had the ball. Boone tagged him. In the clubhouse afterward, Reynolds would watch the play again and again and again, and never figure out exactly what happened.
What happened was this … Bo Jackson had gotten the ball and made a flatfooted throw of 300-feet in the air. It was a perfect strike. It was so impossible, so ridiculous, so absurd that no umpire was on the spot to make the call. Home plate umpire Larry Young finally came to his senses and made a fist – Reynolds was out.
“Now I’ve seen it all,” Scott Bradley would say.
“This is not a normal guy,” George Brett would say.
“That was just a supernatural, unbelievable play,” Seattle manager Jim Lefebve would say. His son, Ryan, had been in the clubhouse and when he saw the hit he ran out to the dugout to enjoy the celebration with the guys. When he got out there, he saw a whole team with the most stunned looks on their faces.
“What happened?” Ryan kept asking everybody. “What happened?”
“I just caught the ball, turned and threw,” Bo grumbled. “End of story. … It’s nothing to brag about. Don’t try to make a big issue out of it.”
* * *
Bo Jackson’s baseball career really ended on a football field in Los Angeles – he hurt his hip in an amazing run against the Cincinnati Bengals. Sometimes, he has wondered what his life and career would have been like had he stepped out of bounds there. Bo did come back and play some more baseball, and he did a few remarkable things after that. But it was different. He wasn’t superhuman anymore.
In four-plus seasons with the Kansas City Royals, Bo Jackson hit only .250. He hit 109 homers and stole 81 bases. He banged 32 homers one season, and stole 27 bases another. He struck out more than 600 times. That was his great flaw. When Bo connected with the ball, he hit .385. He made some great plays in the outfield, but one year he had 12 errors in only 97 games. He played in that one All-Star Game.
The thing is, anyone who ever saw him play will never forget him. Every game he played whether it was football or baseball was like a Harry Houdini performance – you expected to see something you had never seen before. This story began with that July day in 1990 at Yankee Stadium when Bo Jackson hit three home runs. He got hurt, though, and missed more than a month.
He returned on August 11 to face Seattle, but was so unsure about his health that he did not even take batting practice. Then he said, “I can play.” He came up in the second inning. The pitcher was Randy Johnson. First pitch, Bo crushed a long fly ball to center field. The ball splashed in the waterfall to the left of the scoreboard. The Royals estimated the homer flew 450 feet.
“I’m not trying to brag,” Jackson said. “But I actually saw the threads on the ball right before I hit it.”
For once, Bo Jackson had impressed himself. And that might have been his greatest feat of all.
