Bo Is Worth a Little More Than Diddly : Raiders: Jackson is big on the baseball and football fields, but even bigger in the world of sports endorsements.

The entourage winds through the back halls of the Astrodome. The high-pitched screaming of young girls bounces off the concrete walls.

What manner of teen heart-throb comes this way? Michael Jordan? Michael Jackson?

Here he comes now. He has a policeman for an escort. You know these crazed teeny-boppers! He wears a Raider uniform, huge shoulder pads that make him look like a midget tackle, a diamond in his left ear. He smiles at the hubbub but looks neither left nor right--the one, the only . . .

Bo.

Banners bedeck the stadium, 75% with his name on them . . . in another team’s town: “Bo Don’t Know Pain. . . . Bo’s Not Going to Do Diddly.”

In Philadelphia, there was, “Bo Doesn’t Know Whitney,” a reference to the fact that Eagle quarterback Randall Cunningham has been seen with Whitney Houston. They’re digging deep to one-up Bo Jackson these days.

How big is Bo?

How big is there?

His importance to Nike, the sportswear company that signed him when he was a standard jocko and waited two years to put him in a TV commercial, is rated second only to Jordan’s.

“Whether a (John) McEnroe or an (Andre) Agassi is in the same league is questionable,” says Fred Schreyer, Nike director of promotions, from his office in Beaverton, Ore.

“Right at this particular point in time, Bo’s as big as anyone in the world of sports endorsements.”

This week, Jackson ranked No. 10 in the American League’s most valuable player balloting, and ranked No. 6 in the American Football Conference in rushing . . . with 60 fewer rushes than anyone in the top five.

He is the only NFL player ever with two touchdown runs over 90 yards. Jim Brown had one in nine years. Jackson got two in 21 games.

Jackson has an average of 6.6 yards a carry and is on a 1,144-yard seasonal pace.

If he maintains this, it will be the highest average for a 1,000-yard rusher since Beattie Feathers’ 9.9 in 1934, when they may have been playing two-handed touch below the waist.

“I don’t think there’s any question that Bo is probably the athlete of our time,” Raider teammate Howie Long said.

“He’s one of those guys--he’s the Jim Brown of the ‘80s. Jim Brown, I think, was so far ahead of himself physically. Here was a guy--big, strong, fast, athletic.

“This guy has a lot more speed than anybody. He’s the guy of our generation. I feel fortunate to have the experience of playing with him.

“The great thing about him? Bo doesn’t care about any of it. That’s refreshing. He just does what he wants to do. It has nothing to do with the accolades.”

It takes a big accolade, anyway, to get his attention.

Jackson talked for a GQ magazine cover story recently but rarely talks to the local press corps during the week. For three Raider seasons, he has held an arrival press conference, talked after games and, aside from that, has been as a ghost.

Wednesday, he sat still for the Raider-sponsored TV crew, but it was, “No comment, no comment,” to everyone else.

He recently told a friend that neither the Raiders nor the Kansas City Royals have his home telephone number in Alabama. If they want him, they petition his agent, who relays the message.

There has been nothing in modern times like him. Jim Thorpe dominated football and baseball in their infancies, but Thorpe didn’t have a corporation hyping his name. We’re into something shiny and new now.

CROSSROADS

One of these seems to come along every year in this career.

Jackson felt a twinge in his left quadriceps last week at Houston and didn’t play in the fourth quarter. There was also talk about sore ribs and a knee that took a shot from a helmet. He didn’t practice Wednesday although he has insisted all along that he’ll play Sunday.

What now? Jackson is always showing you the sky above . . . and the mud below.

In his first Raider season, he missed the last two games with a sprained ankle.

A year ago, he left the game at New Orleans with a hamstring pull after running around right end for 23 yards on the first play and around left end for 22 yards on the second. He was never the same afterward.

While no one but Jackson can be a judge of his pain, football is a game of getting hit and getting up. It is often noted that Brown never missed a game, and Walter Payton missed one.

On the other hand, there has been little to compare to Bo’s third Raider season.

Bo I wasn’t comparable. He had that 221-yard game at Seattle but no others over 100. He had a 6.8-yard rushing average but missed those final games while Raider officials muttered darkly.

Bo II wasn’t comparable. He averaged only 4.3 yards. There were reports of a rivalry with Marcus Allen over who would play in the goal-line offense. Bo looked slow.

“The first two years, he had to learn two entirely different (coaching) systems (under Tom Flores and Mike Shanahan),” says Joe Scannella, running backs coach.

“Now he comes in here and at least he knows the system. He’s not on top of everything now but at least he knows basically what we’re doing. He can make his adjustments so he can free-wheel a little better.

“I think it’s a lot more difficult when you’re thinking about what you’re doing. It’s apt to slow you down. I have an expression: The injured player, the out-of-shape player, the dump player, the poor player . . . all look alike.”

It’s impossible to know, but the suspicion occurs that Jackson also likes playing for Art Shell, the first black coach in football’s modern era.

From his first moment back, Jackson was upbeat. He said the atmosphere in El Segundo “is like a comparison of night and day,” adding: “I think some big things are going to happen now.”

Says teammate Mike Haynes: “I think that kicks in for all the black players around the country. I think everybody would like to play in this situation.

“As a black, it makes me want to do better for Art, to play a little bit extra for him, so that there’ll be a chance for someone to follow him. Even when we leave the practice field, when I talk to my relatives or a lot of my friends, it’s something everybody wants to talk about.”

Whatever, Jackson went wild.

Haynes, noting that Jackson already has been MVP of baseball’s All-Star game, wants him to be MVP of the Pro Bowl, too, “and become the answer to a trivia question.”

Adds Hayes: “He just seems to be possessed this year.”

Who has ever seen anything like him?

Personnel director Dick Steinberg of the New England Patriots says Jackson is the fastest player he has ever timed.

He is 6-feet-2, 230 pounds and immensely powerful. The list of defenders he has run down grows weekly: Denver cornerback Mike Harden, whom he butted straight over backward; Seattle linebacker Brian Bosworth, whom he dragged into the end zone in the days when that was still considered an achievement; Cincinnati safety Ricky Dixon, who hopped aboard a couple of weeks ago for a ride into the end zone, and Houston safety Jeff Donaldson, a reputed hitter who disappeared beneath Jackson’s wheels several times last week.

“I just said, ‘Geez,’ ” Donaldson said later. “Man, he’s a load. He’s a freight train. He’s scary.”

Says Oiler end Sean Jones: “They say he’s not tough. The only people who talk that . . . don’t play.”

Baseball reporters have compared his running speed and throwing arm favorably to anyone who has played the game. His fellow players come out to watch him take batting practice as they once did for Reggie Jackson.

They don’t ask if Bo can play baseball and football any more.

They remember him for more than talking about himself in the third person.

Surely, this “Bo knows” stuff from the Nike ad that has inspired 10,000 banners and 1,000,000 reporters’ lines, will die soon.

Bo will be remembered for what he was: more than a natural, a double natural; an original.

THE PLANET BO

What is he like?

Start with, hard to get to know.

He’s a small-town person who goes back to Auburn for his (brief) off-seasons.

An Alabama reporter says Jackson was always wary of people he didn’t know hopping into his face, wondering if they were trying to exploit him.

He’s stubborn. This baseball-football thing goes back a long way, to the first story ever written about him by a big newspaper, the Birmingham Post-Herald, which reported before his junior year in high school that his brothers were trying to get him to choose one or the other.

“If Vincent Jackson wasn’t so pig-headed,” the Post-Herald said in the spring of 1980, “none of this would have happened.”

He keeps the press at a distance but is rarely unpleasant.

He is extroverted, compared to the way he was growing up.

“Bo was quiet,” his high school football coach, Dick Atchison, says. “He had a real bad speech problem. He stuttered.

“Really, he didn’t hang around with kids. He was a very private kid. He went to school, he practiced whatever sport was in that particular season and he went home.

“Bo’s senior year, if you walked in the gym, he’d be sitting in the corner by himself, studying. Maybe other kids would be sitting somewhere else, talking, jiving. Bo had some very close friends but he wasn’t as outgoing as he is now.

“When he was at Auburn his freshman and sophomore years, he used to sit in his room and listen to gospel music.

“He used to call me on Saturday nights. Now, they would play a ball game Saturday afternoon. Bo would call collect. The operator would say, ‘I have a collect call from Bo; will you accept the charges?’ I’d say, yeah.

“And he would really be down. I mean, to the point of wanting to come home. He’d say, ‘I played ball this afternoon, I came back and sat in my room.’

“I’d say, ‘Bo, what do the other players do?’

“He’d say, ‘Well, they go to parties.’

“I’d say, ‘Why don’t you?’

“He’d say, ‘I don’t want to. I just don’t like that.’

“And he’d sit in his room. I think things got better his junior and senior years. He started dating and doing some things. But boy, his first two years there, he was almost a recluse.”

Jackson has since married his college sweetheart, Linda, who is a doctoral candidate in psychology. They have two sons.

They commute between Kansas City in the spring and summer, Los Angeles in the fall and Auburn in the off-season, from January to February.

Daddy has an appointment with a destiny all his own.