Baseball Keeps Jackson From Football Destiny

We have studied Bo Jackson as a two-sport man the last four years and are now ready with our conclusion:

Bo is a dramatic, but not great, baseball player.

Bo is a great football player, but can’t prove it.

We are not suggesting here that the two-sport venture is a bust and that Bo is a failure in life. All we are trying to say is that because he chooses the professional duality he does, he never will rise to that elevation in football reserved for the very special.

He will be recalled as the greatest running back ever to undertake two-thirds of a season. Bo hasn’t cheated the Raiders, currently lodged at training camp. Two-thirds of a season is all he promised them. They bagged him on the seventh round only because other teams demanded more than two-thirds of a season.

On Oct. 3, this year’s regular baseball season ends. On Oct. 14, Bo will appear in his first Raider game--their sixth--working in selected spots.

He probably will do the same in the seventh game and he will start the last nine. Proceeding on this schedule in 1989, missing all the exhibitions as he customarily does, he still gained 950 yards, sixth-best in the AFC.

Just as important, he created among defenses such fear that in order to contain him, they yielded elsewhere. Seattle’s Chuck Knox admits candidly: “The guy terrorizes you. One slip and he is gone.”

In the lexicon of the sport, gone means the case for the defense is terminal.

Bo is an excellent receiver and, certainly, dangerous when he receives, but since he skips training camp, where the art of running routes is refined, he gives up a lot in this area of attack.

Two-sport people in the pros never have ascended to greatness in both. Bill Sharman, Gene Conley, Dave DeBusschere, Danny Ainge all dabbled in baseball and basketball, eventually settling into one or the other.

John Elway dipped a toe into minor league baseball, chucking it fast for football. Deion Sanders has tried both, hardly a smash in either.

One day, we discussed Bo with Kirk Gibson, a standout football and baseball guy at Michigan State, joking whether Kirk would like a fall job as wide receiver for the Raiders.

“Bo is tougher than I am,” he confessed. “When seven months of baseball ends, there is no way I could handle three months of football.”

But while Bo is handling both, he has yet to reach that level of perfection making him a great player in baseball, at which he works full time.

He is a spectacular player, dazzling you with spectacular acts. He is a thrill-show artist. His first three times at bat the other night, he smashes home runs.

He doesn’t get a fourth time. Pursuing a line drive, he leaves the ground in a low climb like the Concorde, madly determined to catch a fly ball.

What he ends up with is a shoulder separation and a stay on the disabled list.

The week before, we see him chasing a ball, under full acceleration, into deep left-center. He catches it and, literally, runs up the fence and down.

He runs the bases with more speed than one that size should conjure. He makes prodigious throws. And he takes animated tumbles, like a stunt man.

But he still strikes out more than a great player should. He doesn’t hit for the average a great player should. And he isn’t as comfortable on defense as a great player should be.

Ted Williams was worse on defense, a failing overlooked when Ted hit .406. Bo posted his best average last year, .256.

He is a unique performer. But a feeling grows at this time that no matter how long he remains in baseball, he will not rise from unique entertainer to extraordinary ballplayer.

And since his football season is short-circuited by baseball, he will run out his time in football remembered mainly for the glorious things he might have done had this been his full-time game.

Baseball or football, it is fun to watch Bo. And maybe expectation is a sickness in this land.

But while he has his legs, his body and his youth, we would like to see him, the next five years, open the football season in July and finish it in December.

Falling short of our cultural plain, Raider owner Al Davis has announced he is happy with the current arrangement, which is like opting for two works by a sidewalk painter instead of one Renoir.