A few years ago, a sportswriter I like and admire named Craig Calcaterra became Twitter’s punching bag for the day when, on the occasion of Bo Jackson’s birthday, he wrote that while Jackson was a tremendous athlete, his legacy was vastly overblown by guys in their 40s and 50s who just remembered a few highlight clips and his video game avatar’s dominance in Tecmo Super Bowl.
Jeff Pearlman’s The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson is a disquisition on the subject of Jackson’s legacy, and a continuation on the debate over whether the hype outpaces the reality.
For the unaware, Bo Jackson was an athletic phenomenon in the 1980s and early-90s. Born in a poor, rural Alabama community to a single mother with many other children to raise, he starred as a high school running back and went to Auburn University on a football scholarship. In 1985, he won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s best college football player, while also starring in baseball and track and field. He was picked first in the NFL Draft, but initially spurned football to play baseball for the Kansas City Royals, only to decide a year later that he wanted to play in both leagues, something many considered impossible and which most considered foolish and reckless due to the risk of injury. Jackson’s pro careers in both the NFL and MLB were full of incredible feats of athleticism and memorable moments, but after a freak injury in a playoff game against the Cincinnati Bengals, his football career was over and his baseball career was never the same.
Laid out in plain fact, Jackson’s accomplishments don’t seem worthy of all the mythos and hushed conversation, but Jackson’s hold on the imagination of sports comes from those little moments that can’t be captured in numbers alone. There’s the way he broke his bat over his head after a strikeout, the way he ran up the outfield wall in Baltimore, the way he broke Brian Bosworth’s spirit on a touchdown run on Monday Night Football, and the throw he unleashed to nail speedy Harold Reynolds at the Kingdome in Seattle.
The throw might be the perfect encapsulation of why Jackson lingers in the minds of sports fans. If you look up the video on YouTube, it’s a frustrating experience. Right as Jackson is about to unfurl a desperate, no-chance heave towards home plate, the camera cuts away. The camera operator wanted to capture Reynolds scoring the game-winning run. There was no reason in the world to think even Bo Jackson could make a throw that far, that accurate, in time to catch one of the fastest men in baseball. So all you see on tape is Jackson about to throw, and then Reynolds, incredulous, being tagged out at home. Today there would be a dozen angles of the throw, with accompany facts and figures about the velocity and arc of the throw. But with Bo Jackson, you just have to use your imagination.
Pearlman’s book is full of such stories, otherworldly feats of strength and speed with only eyewitness reports to attest to their veracity. Like throwing a football that hit the scoreboard at the New Orleans Superdome, 140 feet above the field. Or launching 550 foot home runs for the Auburn baseball team. Or winning high school decathlon championships despite his high school not even owning a pole-vaulting pole.
Bo Jackson was so gifted that professional sports were boring for him. He hated practicing and never watched film or studied the game the way other athletes, who have to fight to keep their spot in the pros, do. Pearlman tackles head-on the question that dominated Jackson’s entire career and the aftermath of his devastating injury: was it a good idea for Jackson to play two sports professionally? The answer, of course, depends on your perspective. It’s unquestionable that Jackson would have had a better, longer baseball career if he hadn’t played football. And his football career would have been more impressive if he hadn’t spent the off-season playing baseball. Some fans will say he blew a chance at either sport’s Hall of Fame by refusing to focus on one. Others will say damn the numbers, Bo Jackson is a legend, and isn’t that cooler than anything he could’ve accomplished in just one sport?
For Bo, though, it was never a question. Once people told him he couldn’t possibly do it, doing it was the only option. And that’s what legends are made of.