4.24.2007
AN ODE TO BO
I consider him no less than the finest athlete in the last century, the most remarkable physical talent of recorded gaming, and perhaps our biggest, boldest, most tragic man of sport. I cloak him in his myth, the short four years of awe on a national stage where, every September, when pennant’s magical numbers came true and the hero of my childhood hopped a plane to the west coast, forever-sunny Los Angeles, and joined his other team, his hobby, he called it, of suiting up in Marcus Allen’s backfield for The Silver and Black. Should I calm myself? Can I?
I was a boy when Bo Jackson came into the American cultural consciousness. When Bo assumed dominance in the video gaming world, where the programming geeks at Tecmo, Inc. decided to gift the Raider’s number 34 half back with divine speed on the HB Toss. I easily ran for six- or seven-hundred yards in a game. To show his brilliance, I scampered him up and down the field in etch-o-sketch patterns, circles and cuts and weaves, until the play clock for the quarter ran to zero with Bo in the end zone. One play, Ninety-nine yards. Four minutes ticked away.
I was a boy when there was the Saturday morning cartoon, ProStars, where Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Bo saved little kids with their given athletic superpowers. The cartoon, though revealing of Bo’s superstar status, was dreadful. Gretzky was a chump. He killed robots with a slap shot. And they made Bo seem the trio’s thick-headed Gaston.
I was ten when my father came into the den and said, “Why don’t we drive down to the Royals Spring Training in Florida this year? See Bo up close. Get some autographs.”
For my house Bo became a phenomenon years before the memorable Bo Knows campaign or the professional accolades. In 1982, as the freshman tailback from Bessemer lined up in the three-back set and took Randy Campbell’s quick handoff, Bo leapt over a crimson swell into the Legion Field end zone to beat The Bear in his final Iron Bowl. “Bo Over the Top,” we called it.
But I don’t remember the Auburn Tiger Bo Jackson very well. Not from real time witness. No recollection of his evening blast at Plainsmen Park to christen the new light tower in left field. No confirmed memory of the 162-yards-a-game senior Heisman campaign, his front-page-news 4.18 forty yard dash time at the NFL combine, his spurning of Tampa Bay’s first overall selection in the May NFL draft, or his short stint with the Memphis Chicks farm team.
My first retrievable memory of him begins on paper: my first baseball card Bo. I would go on to collect over 75. In this card, one of the originals, Bo is frozen, his torso tightened and twisted in a throwing motion, the gray polyester Memphis jersey, number 28, hugging his trunk. He looks sort of too big, strangely big, certainly more thick and muscular than the rest. He looks, I guess, like a pro footballer in a baseball uniform, and he would continue this awkwardness throughout his five-year Major League career with the Royals: his baseball pants appeared painted onto his bulging thighs; his bright blue batting helmet looked like a high school kid’s; even the bats, the 50-year-old Pennsylvania white ash, seemed like over-baked pretzels in his angry, strikeout hands. Bo never blended into a game. He once ran up the outfield wall for Christ’s sake.
Bo didn’t fit in. He had an otherness, a glow, unlike any other person in the League.
I watched him play football. The Boz, some cocky Oklahoma rookie linebacker for the Seahawks, mouthed off about Bo trying to play two sports, and watched Bo, playing in his third game in the NFL, two years removed from competitive football, rush for 221 yards. Howie Long, so taken by Bo’s football talent, dreamed up a scenario that if Bo had Eric Dickerson’s L.A. Rams offensive line in a running-focused offensive scheme, one like John Robinson’s, he’d have rushed for 3,000 yards in a season.
Tommy LaSorda used Mickey Mantle as the comparison. The Memphis manager used Ted Williams. Others made comments about the heavens and godliness. Hyperbole and hype, it seems. Looking back, it reads as if no one knew how else to describe Bo, other than a language far beyond reasonable. It is the language of folk-heroism.
I can’t downplay the feelings I associate with Bo Jackson. The awe of hearing Jim Fife announce on video highlights Bo sprinting through the Georgia Tech defense. The wonder at his broken bat homers. The giddiness before Raider games with rivals like the Broncos or Chiefs, seeing Bo, again somehow unnatural-looking in his pads and uniform, line up behind Jay Schroeder, bolt to the outside, and find a stride beyond normal.
And the sadness, the brokenheartedness and stomach ache of my ten-year-old self, sitting on the red rug in our family den, January 13, 1991. Bo’s only career playoff game, his sideline cut to gain an extra eight yards in a swarm of Bengals and the stuttered tackle that stole something.
It was perhaps, that sunlit dusk television moment, the first time I remember fear. The only comparison that comes to mind, seeing Bo’s leg snag, swiftly locking up, and subluxate out of socket, is horse racing and watching the champion Barbaro misstep and pull up lame.
I remember the dread of knowing it was over. I recall the loss of breath, the quickening heartbeat, and my white knuckles. Though no one knew on the Sunday that blood would never flow right to Bo’s hip again, that it would weaken and deteriorate and die, that Bo’s unexplainable combination of Olympic sprinter speed and weightlifter’s power had vanished, for good. Somewhere in me, I knew. We’d still venture south to see Gubicza and Saberhagen and Brett in Baseball City that March, collecting the team’s signatures, and, once, for a brief flash, seeing who I thought was Bo trot out of the dugout, broad and brown-faced, but feeling the pang of disappointment at young slugger Danny Tartabull. I knew though. The Bo I viewed with a child’s wonder, rare and perfect, would never be again.
I still feel heavy thinking about it. I regret and lament. I do not create fantasy careers, or roleplay specific, mathematical what-if’s, or align Bo with the Sammy Sosa’s and Emmitt Smith’s of his era. So should I downplay that? No. I simply let this thing like homesickness rise, wane, and go back down again. And I miss whatever it was that, for four two-sport seasons, brought me close to something great and marvelous and fine. TB
I consider him no less than the finest athlete in the last century, the most remarkable physical talent of recorded gaming, and perhaps our biggest, boldest, most tragic man of sport. I cloak him in his myth, the short four years of awe on a national stage where, every September, when pennant’s magical numbers came true and the hero of my childhood hopped a plane to the west coast, forever-sunny Los Angeles, and joined his other team, his hobby, he called it, of suiting up in Marcus Allen’s backfield for The Silver and Black. Should I calm myself? Can I?
I was a boy when Bo Jackson came into the American cultural consciousness. When Bo assumed dominance in the video gaming world, where the programming geeks at Tecmo, Inc. decided to gift the Raider’s number 34 half back with divine speed on the HB Toss. I easily ran for six- or seven-hundred yards in a game. To show his brilliance, I scampered him up and down the field in etch-o-sketch patterns, circles and cuts and weaves, until the play clock for the quarter ran to zero with Bo in the end zone. One play, Ninety-nine yards. Four minutes ticked away.
I was a boy when there was the Saturday morning cartoon, ProStars, where Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Bo saved little kids with their given athletic superpowers. The cartoon, though revealing of Bo’s superstar status, was dreadful. Gretzky was a chump. He killed robots with a slap shot. And they made Bo seem the trio’s thick-headed Gaston.
I was ten when my father came into the den and said, “Why don’t we drive down to the Royals Spring Training in Florida this year? See Bo up close. Get some autographs.”
For my house Bo became a phenomenon years before the memorable Bo Knows campaign or the professional accolades. In 1982, as the freshman tailback from Bessemer lined up in the three-back set and took Randy Campbell’s quick handoff, Bo leapt over a crimson swell into the Legion Field end zone to beat The Bear in his final Iron Bowl. “Bo Over the Top,” we called it.
But I don’t remember the Auburn Tiger Bo Jackson very well. Not from real time witness. No recollection of his evening blast at Plainsmen Park to christen the new light tower in left field. No confirmed memory of the 162-yards-a-game senior Heisman campaign, his front-page-news 4.18 forty yard dash time at the NFL combine, his spurning of Tampa Bay’s first overall selection in the May NFL draft, or his short stint with the Memphis Chicks farm team.
My first retrievable memory of him begins on paper: my first baseball card Bo. I would go on to collect over 75. In this card, one of the originals, Bo is frozen, his torso tightened and twisted in a throwing motion, the gray polyester Memphis jersey, number 28, hugging his trunk. He looks sort of too big, strangely big, certainly more thick and muscular than the rest. He looks, I guess, like a pro footballer in a baseball uniform, and he would continue this awkwardness throughout his five-year Major League career with the Royals: his baseball pants appeared painted onto his bulging thighs; his bright blue batting helmet looked like a high school kid’s; even the bats, the 50-year-old Pennsylvania white ash, seemed like over-baked pretzels in his angry, strikeout hands. Bo never blended into a game. He once ran up the outfield wall for Christ’s sake.
Bo didn’t fit in. He had an otherness, a glow, unlike any other person in the League.
I watched him play football. The Boz, some cocky Oklahoma rookie linebacker for the Seahawks, mouthed off about Bo trying to play two sports, and watched Bo, playing in his third game in the NFL, two years removed from competitive football, rush for 221 yards. Howie Long, so taken by Bo’s football talent, dreamed up a scenario that if Bo had Eric Dickerson’s L.A. Rams offensive line in a running-focused offensive scheme, one like John Robinson’s, he’d have rushed for 3,000 yards in a season.
Tommy LaSorda used Mickey Mantle as the comparison. The Memphis manager used Ted Williams. Others made comments about the heavens and godliness. Hyperbole and hype, it seems. Looking back, it reads as if no one knew how else to describe Bo, other than a language far beyond reasonable. It is the language of folk-heroism.
I can’t downplay the feelings I associate with Bo Jackson. The awe of hearing Jim Fife announce on video highlights Bo sprinting through the Georgia Tech defense. The wonder at his broken bat homers. The giddiness before Raider games with rivals like the Broncos or Chiefs, seeing Bo, again somehow unnatural-looking in his pads and uniform, line up behind Jay Schroeder, bolt to the outside, and find a stride beyond normal.
And the sadness, the brokenheartedness and stomach ache of my ten-year-old self, sitting on the red rug in our family den, January 13, 1991. Bo’s only career playoff game, his sideline cut to gain an extra eight yards in a swarm of Bengals and the stuttered tackle that stole something.
It was perhaps, that sunlit dusk television moment, the first time I remember fear. The only comparison that comes to mind, seeing Bo’s leg snag, swiftly locking up, and subluxate out of socket, is horse racing and watching the champion Barbaro misstep and pull up lame.
I remember the dread of knowing it was over. I recall the loss of breath, the quickening heartbeat, and my white knuckles. Though no one knew on the Sunday that blood would never flow right to Bo’s hip again, that it would weaken and deteriorate and die, that Bo’s unexplainable combination of Olympic sprinter speed and weightlifter’s power had vanished, for good. Somewhere in me, I knew. We’d still venture south to see Gubicza and Saberhagen and Brett in Baseball City that March, collecting the team’s signatures, and, once, for a brief flash, seeing who I thought was Bo trot out of the dugout, broad and brown-faced, but feeling the pang of disappointment at young slugger Danny Tartabull. I knew though. The Bo I viewed with a child’s wonder, rare and perfect, would never be again.
I still feel heavy thinking about it. I regret and lament. I do not create fantasy careers, or roleplay specific, mathematical what-if’s, or align Bo with the Sammy Sosa’s and Emmitt Smith’s of his era. So should I downplay that? No. I simply let this thing like homesickness rise, wane, and go back down again. And I miss whatever it was that, for four two-sport seasons, brought me close to something great and marvelous and fine. TB
posted by TB at 17:49
