Bo’s Hip to Idea of Being an Angel

From one-handed pitchers to one-hipped outfielders, everyone is welcome with the California Angels. Becoming something of a foster home for unwanted baseball orphans, the Angels are now the temporary guardians of Vincent (Bo) Jackson, a man made of flesh, blood and plastic, who evidently had nowhere else to go after the heartless Chicago White Sox transformed him into Soxless Bo.

Like chicken soup, what we have here is a can’t-hurt proposition for the Angels, who needed a little something to heat up their fans. Already a restaurant across the street from their stadium, along State College, had an employee clambering to the top of their roadside marquee Monday to arrange letters reading: “BO KNOWS SEAFOOD.” And the knowledgeable Mr. Jackson himself already understands enough about life in California to know how he intends to live here.

“I’m going to rent,” he jokes, “so if it tumbles down, I won’t have to worry about it.”

Been following the quake, Bo?

“Yeah,” he says. “I hear the earthquake insurance people are trying to find somebody who’ll cover them .”

Waiting for a better offer, Jackson was telling friends just a few days ago that he planned to spend the months to come motoring around on one of his four Harley-Davidson motorcycles, seeing America. Some of them now think he was putting them on, that Bo already had this arrangement with the Angels all lined up, and even he smiles mischievously now and says: “When they asked what I was going to do, I had to tell them something.”

Straight answers can be so boring. Take the way Jackson responded during Monday’s visit to his new place of employment when someone asked what effect his synthetic hip had had on his illustrious athletic career and his general well-being. Bo considered this question with a comprehending nod of his head and a sincere tone to his reply, but what he said was: “Well, I spent a lot of time setting off the metal detector at the airport.”

This is a good thing, the Angels inviting the mighty Bo to camp, even if they are the only ones willing to invest a few bucks in him now. Nobody is kidding anybody that Jackson will guide this ballclub out of the American League wilderness, but the price is reasonably cheap, the risk is minimal and the player is a genuine American icon who is all of 31 and not yet ready to be a biker. He thinks there’s still some life in the sculptured old body. And so does young Bill Bavasi, the new Angel general manager.

“I’d love to be able to tell you that Jim Thorpe was back,” Bavasi says. “But we’re just looking forward to a ’94 version of Bo Jackson.”

As with other multifaceted athletes of past or present, Jackson is never sure from one season to the next where he can ply his trade. What greater lunacy could there be than, for example, this long-long-longshot possibility of Bo Jackson’s job being taken over by Michael Jordan . . . on a baseball field. Professional sport has become a jigsaw puzzle, one in which Deion Sanders never knows when he will be wearing flannel or nylon or in which Herschel Walker might be seen one morning stiff-arming a tackler and another morning pushing a sled.

Football was the fall pastime of Bo Jackson once, but now he wants no part of it. None.

“How much do I miss it?” he asks. “I don’t miss it, because I never think about it. When I’m finished with something, I’m finished with it.

“I have a rule in my house. No one’s allowed to watch any baseball, any football, any basketball. No ball, period. Now we can watch some NASCAR or maybe a little golf, but that’s all.”

Yeah? How come?

“Well, let me ask you something,” Jackson replies to an interviewer. “Would you want to go home and watch someone do interviews?”

The interviewer laughs.

“I’m not trying to be funny,” Bo says.

What he means is, he needs to be doing something, not observing something. Bo Jackson is a doer. He has been keeping active in Arizona, working out, dropping 10 pounds from his tummy and two inches from his waistline. Although he has always been a marvel of a physical specimen, real hip or fake, Jackson can go soft the same way anyone can without exercising at his usual pace. When asked what his training schedule consists of, he says: “It consists of working your buns off. Exercise, repetition and lots of sweatin’.”

Even though he might not be one of the usual Angels in the outfield, being prepared to play is Jackson’s way.

“I’m not here to take someone’s job,” he says. “I’m a fourth outfielder. I will be in the outfield when one of the other outfielders aren’t able or capable. I haven’t come to the California Angels to try to be a quote-unquote savior. If there’s a void, I’ll try to fill it. But if the job belongs to somebody else, then I’ll politely step aside and let them handle it.”

Maybe he can help. Maybe he can’t.

Bavasi is curious himself. That’s why he signed Jackson. That’s why he says: “I’ll tell you the only thing I know about Bo. If he sets his mind to do something, and if anybody bets against him, I would cover those bets.”