Auburn’s Jackson to Wait To Make Career Decision

“I just want to be a member of the team,” Bo Jackson said. The question is, which team?

Jackson, selected No. 1 in last Tuesday’s NFL draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, stuck by his decision to wait until the Major League draft in June before deciding whether to pursue football or baseball.

“Hopefully, by midsummer, I will have a job,” the 1985 Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn said. “Right now, I’m unemployed.

“I don’t know much about the Bucs,” he said. “I would just do my part as a running back, not as a franchise.” He would be a member of an elite backfield, joining James Wilder, the tailback who has carried the Tampa Bay offense for four seasons.

“I think James Wilder is a great back,” Jackson, a 6-foot-1, 225-pound tailback, said. “Alone, he has done a helluva a lot for Tampa and I hope he continues to do so.

“I’ve played baseball all my life and football for 8-9 years. I’m sticking to my guns and I won’t decide until after the baseball draft. If the baseball draft was today, the NFL people probably would want me to wait for their draft.”

Jackson would not indicate whether he was leaning toward football or baseball, but he did say that he might have something to prove to those people who doubt his skills in the batter’s box.

“I like challenges,” the outfielder said. “I love making liars out of people. There are people who say if Bo goes baseball, he will have trouble with the curveball. Some people will continue to have doubts about Bo. I’ll use all of that to fuel my fires.”

Jackson has not hit a curveball or any other pitch in months. Earlier this year the Bucs flew him to Tampa for a physical examination. Because the Bucs paid for the trip, the Southeast Conference declared him ineligible to play baseball for the rest of the season.

In Tampa, Bucs owner Hugh Culverhouse said he is prepared to make Jackson the highest paid rookie in NFL history, giving him “more than dollars and cents. . . . I can offer him career and investment opportunities. . . . We have a goal to sign him. . . . If it’s a question of money, we’ll win.”

But Jackson said money will not be the decisive factor. “I don’t want people to say in the long run that Bo was bought, that he did something because somebody said they could do this or that for Bo. . . . It will be because it’s what I want to do,” Jackson said.