This week, an article about Bo Jackson by Joe Posnanski from the Kansas City Star has been making the rounds on the sports blogs. He notes that it’s been 20 years (20 years!) since Bo was a rookie, which makes me feel both incredibly old and gives me a nostalgic lump in my throat. Like every other 10-year-old baseball fan of that era, I worshipped Bo, putting him on a pedestal right next to my other favorites, Don Mattingly and Ozzie Smith. My love for Donnie Baseball and Ozzie was based on logic. Mattingly was from my hometown, a left-handed first baseman who was the one baseball player I always tried to emulate. Ozzie was the most popular player on my favorite team, the Cardinals, and I doubt that any kid who grew up listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon call Cards games on the radio would have picked anyone else. But for Bo Jackson, it was different. I didn’t give a whit for the Royals; in fact, they provided my first taste of true sports agony when the beat the Cardinals in the 1985 World Series. I had never followed Bo’s Heisman-winning football exploits at Auburn. I had probably never heard of him until I saw his first baseball card in the 1986 Topps Traded/Rookies set. But once I started to see and hear about the things he could do on the baseball field, I didn’t have any choice but to want to see more.

Posnanski documents most of Bo’s greatest baseball exploits, and he points out something that made him different. So many of the stories about other mythical baseball players like Babe Ruth, say, like him calling his shot in the 1932 World Series, or hitting an infield fly so high that he ran around the bases and scored before it landed, seem to be apocryphal because there’s no real proof that they happened, no video, nothing other than anachronistic newspaper accounts and word of mouth legends. But as Posnanski writes:

So what makes Bo different? Well, for one thing, it’s all on video. Bo really did break a baseball bat over his thigh after striking out. Bo really did throw a ball from left field all the way to first base on a fly to double-up Hall of Fame catcher Carlton Fisk. Bo really did, in his spare time, transform into the most sensational running back the NFL has ever seen. He really did … well, he really did a lot of stuff.

I got to see Bo Jackson play baseball once when I was 13. In 1990, my dad and I took a road trip to Kansas City on the Fourth of July to see the Royals play the Yankees at what was then called Royals Stadium, a double pilgrimage to watch Bo play head-to-head against Don Mattingly. But unfortunately Mattingly was sidelined with the type of back problems that would eventually cut his career short, and instead I was treated to the platoon of Kevin Maas and Steve Balboni. Bo held up his end of the bargain though. In the first game, he went 3-4 with 2 RBI, with a double and a solo home run off Lee Guetterman in the 7th inning deep into the Yankees bullpen. The next night, he abused Guetterman again in the 7th, this time blasting a 3-run shot 420-feet to the grassy incline beyond the centerfield fence. To this day, I swear that the ball landed on the hill about halfway up, and instead of bouncing back down like you would expect it to, it continued rolling up the hill until it hit the base of the crown scoreboard. After the game we watched a spectacular fireworks display over the stadium as charred pieces of the exploded casings rained down on us in the grandstand.

That was Bo’s last full season with the Royals before he hurt his hip in a playoff game with the Raiders. He was never the same after that, but I prefer not to think about his comeback attempts with the White Sox and Angels, just like I pretend that Michael Jordan never came out of retirement to play for the Wizards. Instead, I remember Bo Jackson the way I was lucky enough to see him, in his prime, when it seemed like he could do anything.