KANSAS CITY, Mo. — If Bo Jackson had been born a generation later, when he might well have forsaken the game of football that rendered him a supernova, chances are he’d be in Cooperstown alongside former teammate George Brett — the only National Baseball Hall of Fame member who spent his entire career playing for the Royals.
If born a couple generations earlier, when moving pictures of Jackson’s feats would have been scarce and grainy, he’d be seen today as part myth, part legend because, well, how could you credibly document such a phenomenon?
“Call it mystical or magical,” then-Royals general manager John Schuerholz told The Kansas City Star in 1987.
Without the proper receipts, you could only have wondered if he was more akin to Bernard Malamud’s fictitious Roy Hobbs, “The Natural,” stupefying the opposition by literally hitting the cover off the ball, or more like Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson.
Decades after he’d last heard that distinct clout in a swing, Buck O’Neil thought, “Here is that sound again!” on the 1986 day Jackson signed with the Royals and took batting practice after not swinging a bat for months … and scorched the first two pitches he faced off the Crown scoreboard in center field of what was then known as Royals Stadium.
That was a mere hint of the impending tales to astonish that remain hard to fathom even with video evidence: the prodigious home runs and absurd speed and scaling of fences and impossible throws and snapping bats across his knee or head and a zillion other scenes that defied logic.
All the more so because he would never have played for the Royals if not for some indulgences of fate and the astute eye and ear of longtime super scout Art Stewart and the beginning of a beautiful friendship that we’ll come back to.
But it was fleetingly but spectacularly real until the wretched hip injury Jackson suffered moonlighting with the NFL’s Raiders — another ample reason for Kansas Citians to dislike the Chiefs’ rival — led to the Royals releasing him in 1991.
The miserable turn left teammates crestfallen: “He could have been the best player to ever put on a Royals uniform, or any uniform,” pitcher Bret Saberhagen told reporters then.
The sentimentality at the time wasn’t so much about his endangered careers but about parting with the sorts of friendships he’d found difficult to make while skyrocketing to fame through his remarkable talents — and the ubiquitous “Bo Knows” Nike ad campaign.
What Bo didn’t know then was the way he’d be forever reunited with the Royals and so many of those enduring friends on Wednesday, when it was announced he’d been voted into the Royals Hall of Fame.
“I was floored when I heard about it,” Jackson, now 61, said during a Zoom call with local media on Wednesday.
And when Jackson is enshrined in an on-field ceremony before the Royals’ June 29 game against Cleveland at Kauffman Stadium, perhaps some tears will flow then, too, from a man who more typically has avoided embracing such feelings.
“I’ve become an emotional person now,” he said. “You know how they say ‘With age comes wisdom?’ ”
In this case, it comes in the form of gratitude instead of any of those mind-blowing achievements.
