Bo left a legacy — and a void
In the clubhouse at Anaheim Stadium that July night, Dave Stewart needed to ice his arm. But he made sure to situate himself in front of a TV.
It was 1989. Stewart was the American League starter in the All-Star Game. It would be another two decades before another Black pitcher would start the game, but for the moment, baseball was a game loaded with Black stars: Kirby Puckett, Harold Baines, Jeffrey Leonard, Ozzie Smith, Tony Gwynn, Andre Dawson, Vince Coleman, Eric Davis and others still.
It was the end of an era — the last All-Star Game of a decade that featured the highest percentage of African American major leaguers. Black players accounted for 7.8% of MLB rosters on Opening Day in 2020, down from a 1981 peak of 18.7%, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.
It was also a time when some of the nation’s best athletes grew up playing multiple sports but chose baseball as the best path to create their legacies. And none was more protean than the man Stewart, ice on his arm, settled in to watch: Bo Jackson.
That night, on TVs around the country, the twang of Bo Diddley’s rectangular electric guitar introduced clips featuring Jackson running, dunking, swinging, lifting and biking in Nike cross-training shoes, part of the company’s now-iconic “Bo Knows” campaign. The commercial played up the burgeoning mythology around Jackson as a multisport star.
At Auburn, Jackson was a 6-foot-1, 225-pound bulldozer who moved like a Bugatti. As a football player, when defenders could touch him, he ran through them like twigs. He averaged 7.7 yards per carry as a sophomore — then, during indoor track season, he ran one of the fastest 55-meter times in school history.
As a junior in the spring of 1985, he batted .401 with 17 home runs on the diamond; that fall, he won the Heisman Trophy while setting an Auburn career rushing mark that still stands (4,303 yards). The Tampa Bay Buccaneers drafted Jackson first overall in 1986, but he did something today’s two-sport stars rarely do: He chose baseball.
The Kansas City Royals drafted him in the fourth round that year. He played with the minor league Memphis Chicks and was called up to the majors that same season, and he continued to progress as a mighty, strikeout-prone hitter with a knack for the spectacular on defense. Jackson scaled walls, sniped base runners and soared through the outfield to rob base hits. He punished pitchers — and bats — and even went yard after unsuccessfully trying to call for time. His 21 home runs were tied for the AL lead at the 1989 allstar break.
“I was a huge fan of his as an athlete — period,” Stewart says of Jackson. “But when he started to play baseball ... you had to be a fan of his because he could do things that other baseball athletes couldn’t do.
“I remember having a conversation with him in the outfield in K.C., and I was telling him, ‘Man, shoot, you need to give that football stuff up and just play this, bro.’ He said, ‘Man, as long as I can do ‘em both, I’m going to do ’em both.’ ”
That evening in Anaheim, Jackson ended the top of the first by securing Pedro Guerrero’s flyball. Stewart retired to the clubhouse and found a TV. On it, Vin Scully and guest commentator Ronald Reagan conversed about the former president’s connection to football as Jackson stepped to the plate against Rick Reuschel, whose first-pitch sinker dipped below Jackson’s knees for ball one.
“That Bo down there, that’s a pretty interesting hobby he has for his vacation when baseball ends,” Reagan said before the crack of Jackson’s bat interrupted his next sentence. Jackson’s moonshot sent Davis jogging toward the center field wall — and sent several spectators scrambling across tarp-covered seats, where the ball landed some 448 feet later.
Many of history’s greatest Black baseball stars thrived in other sports and could have taken different routes. But in baseball, they could make money sooner and have healthier and longer careers.
Fearsome right-hander Bob Gibson averaged more than 20 points at Creighton and delayed his Hall of Fame baseball career to play for the Harlem Globetrotters in 1957. Dave Winfield was drafted in four leagues: the NFL, MLB, NBA and American Basketball Association. Rickey Henderson and Ken Griffey Jr. said they received more interest to play college football than baseball.
On those 1989 all-star rosters alone, Gwynn was an all-conference point guard at San Diego State. Coleman ditched the NFL after Washington’s pro football team tried to convert the former Florida A&M punter into a wide receiver. Leonard received more than 60 scholarship offers to play college football and basketball. He got none for baseball but chose to play it anyway.
Davis was a Los Angeles high school basketball star, but he opted for the majors over the NBA in 1980 because he didn’t want to “wait for four years before I could make the pros.” Three years after his major league debut with the Cincinnati Reds, Davis said he declined interest from the Los Angeles Clippers because of scheduling conflicts.
Today, multisport athletes see baseball as a secondary option. Jameis Winston, Colin Kaepernick, Patrick Mahomes and Russell Wilson are among several current or former NFL quarterbacks who were drafted by major league teams before pursuing professional football careers instead. Wide receiver Golden Tate chose football despite calling baseball his “first love.”
Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray reversed course after signing with the Oakland Athletics, who selected him with the ninth pick in 2018. He forfeited most of a $4.66 million signing bonus with Oakland to play football, becoming the top pick in the 2019 NFL draft — and earning a bonus five times greater in the process. He became an immediate starter with the Cardinals, but it took three seasons for the earliest of his fellow top-10 MLB draft picks to make their big league debuts.