Bo Is True to His Own Word

On the day Bo Jackson agreed to be the special guest on “Sesame Street,” a little girl with a head full of curls came up to him, carrying a crooked stick, accompanied by a couple of sheep. She stuck out her hand to introduce herself.

“Bo,” she said, “you don’t know Peep.”

From that moment on, Bo was no more than just another new kid on the block, an overgrown child on a children’s TV show, eager for somebody to come out and play with him. First, he introduced himself to Peep’s sheep, saying: “Bo.” The sheep, in unison, replied: “Baaa.” Back and forth they went. “Bo.” “Baaa.” “Bo.” “Baaa.”

Later on, Bo climbed into a sandbox and explained to some of the other children the difference between the words full and empty by scooping sand in and out of his football helmet. Before the show was over, Bo even found himself lip-syncing the lyrics to one of the show’s favorite songs.

“Wubba wubba wubba wubba

“Woo woo woo.

“Wubba wubba wubba

“And a doodly-doo.”

Bo Jackson has a way with children and a special affinity for them, partly because he still considers himself one, a 27-year-old, 230-pound one who can never get enough of playing games, but mostly because the one thing missing in his life was a happy childhood. The way Tom Hanks wanted to become “Big” in the movie of that name, Vincent Jackson would love once more to be small.

Since he can’t, Bo dotes on the children around him. He takes his oldest son, Spud, who is 3, on the air with him when he does Arsenio Hall’s TV show for grown-ups, or takes him over to meet Michael Jackson, for whom Spud fearlessly plays the piano. He baby-sits newborn Morgan whenever he finds the time, and scolds the two boys, Garrett (Spud) and Nicholas, with parental guidance that definitely gets their attention.

“I’m going to lock you outside and freeze you into ice cubes and put you in my drink and drink you!” Bo tells them when they misbehave.

“No, you’re not !” the boys cry.

Then he hugs them, and everything is all right.

If this seems an unusually intimate look into the private life of Bo Jackson, be advised that it is not without Bo’s permission. On the contrary, when Dick Schaap first huddled with his collaborator to discuss doing the Bo-ography, “Bo Knows Bo” (Doubleday, $18.95), he discovered that the story America’s Player was dying to tell was, in fact, his dear-diary side, his vivid recollection of an angry, rebellious, life-without-father childhood.

“It was almost a compulsion on Bo’s part to get it out of his system,” says Schaap, a respected author and television interviewer. “I hardly had to ask any questions. It just came spilling out.

“It took much more prompting on my part to get him to talk about, say, batting against Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens. Bo’s original idea was not to discuss baseball or football at all. I’d say: ‘Bo, some of the public still wants to hear about touchdowns and home runs.’ And he’d say OK, reluctantly, because what he really wanted to talk about was growing up in Bessemer, Ala., and about what a real bad kid he was.

“I think he just wanted to purge himself of that, once and for all, and in his own words.”

Knowing Bo, although nobody knows Bo like Bo knows Bo, we hardly find it surprising that Bo would do something so surprising. If anybody seemed the type to keep his innermost thoughts to himself, it was Bo. But, Bo being Bo, nobody knows what Bo will do except Bo, and those of us who make a living writing about Bo now know that Bo even writes better than we do.

Schaap borrowed time whenever and wherever Bo could spare some, benefiting partly from the fact that Bo is often confined to his hotel room, the proverbial prisoner of his own fame, unable to step out in public without being mobbed.

Recalls Schaap: “We went into a Mexican restaurant near Anaheim Stadium one night, Bo and George Brett and myself, and we’re not in there one minute when the other patrons start chanting: ‘Bo! Bo! Bo!’ We’re there with George Brett, a three-time batting champion, 10-time All-Star, and it’s like he isn’t even there.”

Brett himself, in the book’s introduction, writes that when he is 60 or 70 years old and children ask what he did for a living, he will reply: “I played with Bo Jackson.”

Unlike so many jock-books, “Bo Knows Bo” tells us more about somebody we want to know more about. Bo is one of those guys who always complains that nobody knows him while refusing to let those people get to know him.

He treats strangers condescendingly, then tells you how hard life can be. When women in a restaurant send over their autographs because they heard Bo doesn’t give out his, he wonders where they ever heard such a thing. This from the same man who has a brass plate on his front door that reads: “Absolutely No Autographs.”

Bo Jackson is a big kid who likes big toys. He owns a Ferrari Testa Rossa that never leaves his garage. He flies in F-16s, wants to own his own Spitfire and considers Chuck Yeager his greatest idol. He goes boar hunting with a bow-and-arrow in the Dixie swamps and keeps many handguns in his and his mother’s homes.

These are hardly toys for boys, and Bo, of course, is all man. Childhoods take their toll on people. Bo’s wife, Linda, pursued her Ph.D. in counseling psychology with a thesis on women who were sexually abused as children. Bo regrets to this day not having a father around to give him hugs or kick him in the tail or threaten to turn him into an ice cube.

And his mother he adores.

“When I was growing up,” Bo writes, “she cleaned people’s houses during the day and cleaned a motel at night. She also raised 10 children.

“And people try to tell me that playing two sports is hard.”

The details in this book are the details that made Bo Jackson what he is today, a man for all seasons. The only thing wrong with this book is that it probably ought to be two books.

Says Schaap, who has written 26 books: “I’ve interviewed people from all walks of life. The B’s alone include everybody from Bardot to Bush to Berra. But I have never in my life seen anyone who has been held in such awe by his peers as Bo.”

He is a man among men. But Bo Jackson is also still the big kid who, when the Sunday newspaper comes to his house, keeps the funnies and throws away the rest.