There Are Games Even Bo Can’t Control

It is time, as a matter of routine, to run a check on Bo Jackson, multi-entrepreneur, to find out how he is proceeding in April in the game of rounders.

The Kansas City people, by whom Bo is employed, inform you, at the time this prose is constructed, that Bo has come to bat 51 times, without interruption. As a general rule, Bo is interrupted.

He is credited with 17 hits, including three doubles which, we are told, start out to be singles, but expand to two bases when Bo catches the outfielders thinking about moonlight on Lake Como.

“When Bo starts to run,” the Kansas City spokesman says, “fielders had better not think about anything but Bo.”

Bo also is striking out at just about the rate he did in 1989 when, in 515 at-bats, he fanned 172 times.

That amounts to roughly one fan per three at-bats, proving that if outfielders lose track of Bo, pitchers don’t.

You may not have caught this in your research but, as a junior in high school, Bo pitched. He finished with a record of 9-1.

Because he also hit .450, his career as a pitcher ended, the coach shifting him to the outfield the next season.

People always seem to be shifting Bo. At Auburn, he is playing baseball when the track coach figures he should be sprinting, too. He takes Bo to the Florida Relays, where he wins the 100 meters in 10.13.

This season, as in seasons before, Bo converses rarely with the sporting press.

The press shrugs, as Charlie Dressen shrugged when Joe DiMaggio rejected his advice on when to look for the curveball.

Charlie wasn’t offended. And he had the last laugh when DiMaggio’s streak ends at only 56.

Actually, Bo doesn’t converse excessively with anyone, maybe a blessing when you listen to, and read about, the young guys recently drafted in the NFL.

Some have a lot to say, if not too much. Sizing up his emotional structure, one announces he is going to a team that fits his personality.

Another describes, with dramatic gusto, the joys of hitting. And a pronunciamento we never before had heard comes from another. He says he wants to win.

Everyone is making a statement. But Bo, he shuts up. And he advises guys coming into pro sports to shut up, pointing out that rhetoric is useful only in debates.

As you know, Bo departs Kansas City each October to join the football Raiders in progress. First, he joins them in Los Angeles. Then he is ready to join them in Irwindale when it next develops he will join them in Sacramento.

Informed to make plans to join them in Oakland, he is back to joining them in Los Angeles, with the possibility existing he could yet join them in Oakland.

That’s even before St. Louis, Baltimore, Jacksonville and Charlotte are heard from.

Wherever Bo joins the Raiders, he figures to be joining them a minimum of two more seasons, completing a five-year contract.

If Bo does this, a fat treasure, in the form of a balloon payment, comes his way, and Bo isn’t a prospect to walk away from it. Bo has big muscles, but they aren’t in his head.

But would he play in the Los Angeles Coliseum if the historic architecture, a tower of ancient beauty, were to be defaced by renovation?

“My contract specifies,” he is apt to say, “that I am bound only to a stadium bearing all the glory that was Rome and the grandeur that was Greece. If the architecture changes, the Raiders face forfeiture of their money to me, and I report them to the Audubon Society, or whatever society stands at the forefront on this issue.”

Bo would be informed: “The Audubon Society is not involved. But it offers to help. It will provide Coliseum-servationists with bird nests for hats.”

At Kansas City, Bo has just finished a video with Billy Crystal for charity. Billy always aspired to be a second baseman. Instead, he makes a picture called “When Harry Met Sally,” in which Sally fakes an orgasm in a coffee shop.

Feeling she needs help, Billy forgets about baseball, showing how big careers in sports can be expunged by little events.