April 9, 1993: Bo Knows

CHICAGO - The story of Bo Jackson's career sounds like the work of an overzealous screenwriter. You can almost imagine a script meeting...


Make him the best college running back in the country? No, that's not good enough. How about we make him a great baseball player too? Yah! And then we can make him unable to decide between his two loves, so he chooses to play both.

Hmmm. Still not enough. We have to give him flair. How about this: he's such an athletic freak that he can run up outfield walls, and when he strikes out, he breaks the bat in half over his knee. And of course, he has to have blinding speed on the football field and be able to run over 'roided up linebackers like they were high schoolers.

Now he's got to become popular. Let's give him commercials, television appearances. How about this: he appears in a football video game, and his avatar is so dominant that gamers revere him, talking about him in hushed tones years later.

You know, he's got it too good now. People need a good story, some adversity for this guy to overcome. Let's give him a freakish injury. Oooh - how about a dislocated hip! And better yet, let's say that as he's lying on the turf waiting for the trainer to get to him, he's still so strong that he'll pop his own hip back into place. Yah, that will be a good scene. Then we can end the movie with his dramatic comeback from injury...


Bo Jackson's career is still recent enough that sports fans almost take it for granted how good he was. After all, Deion Sanders also played football and baseball simultaneously, and he was just as good as Bo. Plus, he never got hurt, so we had a longer time to enjoy him.

But Bo was the original, the man who made Deion possible. Incredibly, all the things mentioned above about Bo are true, happening between 1985 and 1991. It's that dominant Bo Jackson that most people will remember.

But it's the Bo Jackson from April 9, 1993, that's perhaps the most impressive. A lot of athletes have excelled at two sports to the point where they could have played both professionally if they so desired. But how many had ever played a major league game with an artificial hip?

Two years after getting injured in an NFL playoff game, Bo was back on the baseball diamond, pinch hitting in the sixth inning of the White Sox home opener. And anybody who had followed Bo's career had to know what was coming next...


So when he comes back, his first baseball game back, let's have him take a pitch, then swing on the next one, his first swing with a fake hip, and hit a home run. Then he'll run around the bases and think of the promise he made to his mother that he'd make it back. And he'll cry, because his mom didn't live to see this home run. It'll be a perfect ending to his career. What? Too unrealistic? It'll work, I swear...