Bo's Going to Follow His Dream

By Tom Callahan

Every September, as the baseball and football seasons converge, newcomers arrive to begin inheriting a game, minor-league baseball players in buses, major college football players in limousines. If they have always been connected, this year they seem entwined.

The most prominent National Football League rookies -- Dallas Runner Herschel Walker and Buffalo Quarterback Jim Kelly -- have come from a kind of minor league, the dormant U.S.F.L. The preeminent college football player of 1985 -- Auburn's "Bo" Jackson -- has gone to baseball. If the football scouts are right about Jackson's being a "bigger and stronger O.J. Simpson," and the baseball scouts are right about his "Mantle-like speed and power" and "Clemente-like throwing arm," then both sports have been significantly affected by the small events of an Alabama childhood that led to this unlikely choice.

In his heart, the Heisman Trophy winner, the No. 1 pick of the N.F.L., was never a football player at all. "Really, I got into football from peer pressure. My mom never wanted me to play," says Jackson, who declined millions in Tampa Bay to accept hundreds of thousands in Kansas City. " 'I'm not having you all broke up and limping and sore,' she'd say. When I'd come home that way, she'd lock me out. I'd stay the night with friends."

The first organized sport Jackson attempted was baseball, an upset itself in Bessemer (near Birmingham), where he was sired by a steel man and grew up among ten children inspired by a hotel maid. "I played Little League for about two weeks before they decided I was too rough and moved me up to the Pony League. When I was supposed to be in the Pony League, I was playing in a men's semipro league. I never played with friends my own age." In the ninth grade, he took up football just to be a ninth-grader. "Baseball was more of a game," he thought from the first, "football more of a device, a challenge too, but mostly a responsibility."

Dichotomies abound in Vincent Edward Jackson, 23, nicknamed Bo for the resemblance he once bore to a boar. As a boy, Jackson was a bully with a gentle streak. At Auburn, he seemed as apt to persevere with a separated shoulder as to demur with a tender hamstring. "You wouldn't call him a gung- ho practice player," Coach Pat Dye recalls fondly. "I'm sure it was like work to him, but it never looked that way. Baseball thinks Rickey Henderson is fast. They're going to find out what speed is. Speed, size, grace, courage. He had everything you'd ever want in a football player."

In speech, Jackson is full of Bo, given to admiring himself in the third person. Yet he stammers slightly. "But you can be a millionaire," college teammates urged him, "and live the dream." He told them, "Bo's going to follow his heart." Its first stop was Memphis, home of the Chicks, where hitters right out of the egg can begin striking a gingerly acquaintance with curve balls. After 45 at bats, the most famous rightfielder in all of Double A had four hits (.089). "I've always got off slow in baseball," he says. "That's the only sport I've ever got off slow in." Thereafter, Jackson batted .338, including one home run that measured at 554 ft.

Summoned by the Royals this month to debut against the last dangling shards of Steve Carlton, Jackson golfed a stupendous foul ball and then beat out a spare single to start his big-league career one for one. He says, "I'm blessed and thankful to be so quick." He struck out three times the next night, but neither sensation moved him. "I'm not the kind to say, 'Hey look, Steve Carlton, a Hall of Famer.' The only time I ever get that excited is the night before I'm going to go fishing or hunting." Within a few days, he was blithely enjoying two- and four-hit games, and by last week he was crashing home runs, including a 475-footer judged the longest (by 3 ft.) ever hit in Royals Stadium.

Second thoughts seem to have been written into his contract: Jackson is entitled to buy his way out of baseball and into football next July. "But I'm having too much fun for second thoughts," he says. "George Brett, Willie Wilson and Hal McRae rag me all day long." Since the football games have begun, he has been following the fortunes of contemporaries like the Los Angeles Raiders' naval attache Napoleon McCallum. But he feels no pangs. "I'm glad it's over and sad it's finished," Jackson says with a soft laugh. "I'll sit up in the stands later this year and watch them play. And I'll smile and say, 'That's the life you didn't choose.' "

The joy of any sport, he believes, is "just competing," reveling in "the sweet gifts of body and mind that thousands wish they had." He has decided that "the Lord is watching every move I make and making extra sure that I'm not misusing my talents." But he could use some help with the curve balls.