Bo Goes into the Royals Hall of Fame: Jackson's legendary moments live on in Kansas City (2024)

Everyone remembers the bale of hay. It sat on one end of a tunnel just outside the Kansas City Royals clubhouse, not far from a portable batting cage, a short walk from the dugout. On the bale was a target, and if you happened to walk by in the summer of 1989, you might have seen one of the greatest athletes who ever lived aiming a bow from across the tunnel.

Bo Jackson was at the height of his powers then, an All-Star outfielder for the Royals, a supernova running back for the Los Angeles Raiders on the side, and a cultural phenomenon at the center of a Nike advertising campaign. But when it came to his daily pregame routine, he preferred to relax with a bow and arrow. Jackson had come across archery at Auburn University when he stumbled upon a football teammate shooting a bow outside a dorm. He brought his own compound bow to Kansas City, where teammates would gather around to watch him do his “William Tell thing.”

Jackson would set an apple by the target. Once, a teammate held it in his hand. Those in charge could only pray that nothing went wrong.

“I was hesitant to go back there,” recalls John Wathan, the Royals manager at the time. “I just stayed in my office.”

The funny thing about the archery is that didn’t seem that weird. If Jackson’s teammates knew anything about Bo, it was that he really could do it all.

“Guys were almost blowing out their rotator cuffs trying to pull that damn thing back to co*ck the bow,” says Mike Macfarlane, a former Royals catcher. “And he’s doing it with one finger.”

It’s been 35 years since the summer of ’89, which means it’s been 35 years since the apex of Bo mania — the 300-foot throw in Seattle, the blinding, Mickey Mantle dashes to first base, the titanic blast off Rick Reuschel in the All-Star Game with Ronald Reagan in the broadcast boost that caused Bobby Bonilla to tell reporters: “I’ve got to go home this winter and put a Nautilus machine in my backyard.”

On Saturday, the Royals will induct Jackson into their club’s Hall of Fame. The honor comes more than three decades after he last played for the team and required a local veterans committee to elect him. But those are just details. In reality, the night is a recognition of a singular fact: Despite playing just 511 games before a hip injury ruined his career, Jackson is the most famous player in Royals history, an icon from a bygone era in which a baseball player could still command America’s attention.

“He’s one of the greatest athletes of our time,” said George Brett, the only Royals player in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Jackson was a latter-day superhero, so physically dominant and utterly mesmerizing that it can feel easy to fall into the trap of mythos. There’s a reason former teammate David Cone called him “Zeus.” The years pass. Memories fade. The homers become longer, the highlights larger than life. Yet if you talk to those who were there — his teammates, managers, opponents — one thing always remains true: Bo really was that guy.

“You’re looking at Superman,” Macfarlane says.

“A different breed,” former Royals closer Jeff Montgomery says.

Or as Cone put it:

“The hype was real.”

Start with the Buck O’Neil story, which somehow feels more resonant now: It happened on June 21, 1986 — the day Jackson signed with the Royals. Jackson showed up to Royals Stadium for an introductory press conference, then changed clothes and headed out for batting practice.

He hadn’t swung a bat in weeks. He left his equipment at home. He was, in the moment, one of the biggest sporting curiosities in the country, the Heisman Trophy winner who said no to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. On the fourth pitch he saw, he unleashed a compact swing and blasted a booming home run high atop the hill in straightaway center field, near the base of the Royals scoreboard. It went an estimated 450 feet.

O’Neil, the legendary Negro Leagues player, was there that day in his official capacity as a scout for the Chicago Cubs. At 74, he had played and managed for the Kansas City Monarchs and served as a coach for the Cubs. He had witnessed Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. Yet as he listened to the ball explode off Jackon’s bat, he vowed that he had only heard that sound three times. The first was Babe Ruth. The second was Josh Gibson, the transcendent Negro Leagues slugger. The third was standing before him.

“It sounded like an M-80 went off,” Montgomery says.

The sound traveled with Jackson to Memphis, Tenn., where he began his career that summer with the Double-A Chicks. Teammates marveled at how raw he was. He could go days without making contact. He ran through stop signs at third base. He would misread a ball in the outfield, then turn on the jets and chase it down in the gap. He was only 23 but felt even younger as a baseball player. And then, out of nowhere, he’d step to the plate and hit a broken-bat home run over the scoreboard, and there it was again: That sound.

“The word ‘enigma’ comes to mind,” Macfarlane says now.

That Jackson was even there often felt surreal. On long bus rides, he would plop an air mattress down in the aisle, sleeping all the way to Florida. During one rain delay in Columbus, Ga., he pulled out football film from his Auburn days and projected it on a bathroom wall in the clubhouse, breaking down plays for his minor-league teammates. Jackson, a child of Bessemer, Ala., was a man of few words; Macfarlane appreciated how he tried to fit in. The crowds grew so big that the team bus often waited over an hour after games while Jackson signed autographs. To fix the problem, the Royals sent a team employee to chauffeur Jackson after games.

To most teammates, one thing was clear: Jackson had an insatiable drive to improve. It didn’t matter if he was exhausted. Didn’t matter if he was hitless in his last 10 at-bats. If he was on the field, he was going full tilt.

“He just genuinely loved the game of baseball,” Macfarlane says. “Just being around that: ‘All right, if he’s going, I’m going.’ It was a pick-me-up.”

The play that would become known as The Throw happened on June 5, 1989. We’ll get to it shortly. That it involved a nondescript catcher named Scott Bradley is both a footnote and a reminder of the kismet that seemed to follow Jackson. Bradley was a journeyman who lasted parts of nine seasons before a long career as the head baseball coach at Princeton. He also moonlighted as a professional extra in Jackson highlights.

When Jackson collected four hits in his fifth major-league game on Sept. 11, 1986 — beating out three infield choppers to the left side — Bradley happened to be catching for the Seattle Mariners. The tremendous display of speed left him in awe. Wathan, the Royals manager, said it sounded like “a whole herd of buffalo running to first base.” Willie Wilson, Jackson’s teammate, shrugged at the infielders’ impossible task. “If they play back,” he said, “he’s going to hit a dribbler and beat it out.”

When Jackson hit his first career homer three days later — a 475-foot bomb off Mike Moore that seemed to burrow into the grass berm in left-center — it was Bradley who had called the pitch.

“When it was hit,” Bradley says, “it looked like a two-iron.”

Jackson would bat .235 with 22 homers in 1987, his first full year in baseball. After debuting with the Raiders that fall and rushing for 554 yards in seven games, he returned to the Royals in 1988 and hit .246 with another 25 homers. Jackson was smoothing out the rough edges. His baseball instincts were improving. He found comfort in the clubhouse. Brett, the club’s superstar, came to call him “Bobo.” It wasn’t until 1989, however, that he really started to take off.

On June 5, right on cue, Bradley returned to the frame, stepping into the batter’s box in Seattle with one out in the bottom of the 10th. Steve Farr was on the mound. Harold Reynolds at first. The score was 3-3. When Bradley laced a 3-2 fastball into the left-field corner, Reynolds was running on the pitch. Jackson took off to retrieve the ball, and if you have worn out the highlight on YouTube, you know that the camera cuts away from Jackson just as he grabs the ball. The man with the best view of the play happened to be Bradley, who was rounding first just as Jackson turned and threw. He could see that Jackson did not take a crow hop or set his feet; he just turned and let it fly. “With one lever of his right arm,” Montgomery says.

The ball sailed more than 300 feet, beating Reynolds to the plate. In one fell swoop, catcher Bob Boone snatched it from the air and applied the tag. In the moments after the Royals won 5-3 in 13 innings, as Reynolds sat inside the clubhouse and watched the footage on repeat, Wathan declared it “the greatest throw I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“If I’m in the game another 30 years, I don’t think I’ll ever see another like it,” he said. “The thing that got me was that it was a strike.”

The funny thing about that: Wathan was in the game for another 30 years. He retired in 2022 after a long career in the Royals front office. He never did see another one like it.

“I guess I was right,” he says.

The moment stayed with Bradley, too. In 2017, Boone’s grandson Jake joined his baseball program at Princeton. Whenever Boone would come to a game, he always stopped Bradley to talk about one thing: Bo Jackson. It wasn’t just that Boone thought the game was over; he had started wandering toward the dugout. Then he saw Jackson turn and throw.

“I played for the Yankees,” Bradley says. “I caught Randy Johnson. But I probably tell more Bo Jackson stories. He’s so far above and beyond anybody I have ever played against.”

On the day before Jackson led off the 1989 All-Star Game with a home run, Dick Kaegel packed his bag in the press box at Angel Stadium and started heading downstairs. Kaegel, a beat reporter at The Kansas City Star, had just filed a story and was headed for dinner when he bumped into Jackson and Royals pitcher Mark Gubicza.

“Hey, Dick,” they asked. “Could we get a ride?”

Kaegel obliged and the three started walking out toward the parking lot when Jackson saw a few hundred fans waiting beyond the concourse gates.

Jackson asked Kaegel where his car was parked. Kaegel pointed.

“OK, let’s go,” Jackson said, before taking off into a sprint.

Jackson was already one of the biggest sports stars in America. But two things would happen the next night that would send him to another stratosphere: Jackson led off the first inning with a 448-foot blast off San Francisco Giants pitcher Rick Reuschel. Then Nike premiered its “Bo Knows” advertising campaign, featuring the ad with guitarist Bo Diddley. Jackson would finish the season with 32 home runs and 105 RBIs, his best to date.

He was even better in 1990. He ran up the wall in Baltimore. He hit three homers at Yankee Stadium against Deion Sanders and the Yankees, separating his shoulder in the same game. He returned six weeks later and homered off Randy Johnson in his first at-bat. (Bradley was there for that one, too.)

“We would be pulling into the hotel in a city, and there would be people waiting outside to see Bo,” Montgomery says. “They would have signs up. ‘The Bo Show.’ ‘Bo Knows.’ We had one of the best players in the world on our team in George Brett, but people were there to see Bo.”

When the baseball season ended in 1990, Jackson returned to the Raiders. He averaged 5.6 yards per carry and led the team in rushing. On Jan. 13, 1991, the Raiders faced the Cincinnati Bengals in an AFC divisional playoff game at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Macfarlane, who lived in the area, was at the game. Wathan, the Royals manager, was tuned in from home. Both were watching when Jackson was pulled down from behind by the Bengals’ Kevin Walker. Jackson’s hip was dislocated on the play.

Wathan remembers having one thought: “Oh s—.”

Two months later, Jackson was on crutches inside the Royals’ spring training clubhouse in Florida. Wathan was tasked with delivering the news that Jackson already knew: he was being released.

The clubhouse was quiet. Jackson made the rounds. Brett said the news knocked him to the floor. Most of the players had never heard of avascular necrosis, in which bone cells die because of a lack of blood supply.

“Superman doesn’t get hurt,” Macfarlane says. “Especially something as weird as that.”

Jackson promised to return to baseball, and he did, playing parts of two seasons for the Chicago White Sox and one for the California Angels. But his football career was over. He would never be the same.

For years, Jackson’s teammates have wondered how good he could have been. Some believe he could have been a Hall of Famer, or at least, an MVP candidate. But that reduces the discussion down to numbers. The loss was deeper than that.

“There was just something about Bo,” said John Schuerholz, the general manager of the Royals’ World Series championship team in 1985, who is also going into the club’s Hall of Fame this weekend. “Call it mystical or magical.”

The quality remains elusive. But perhaps it was most evident in the explosive sound of ball hitting bat. Jackson was an iconoclast. But he was also a throwback.

“There was a time when, if you wanted to play professional sports, baseball was the thing,” says Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. “So our greatest athletes played baseball. You see that through the ’70s and ’80s. Deion Sanders. Dave Winfield. Bo was of that lineage.”

There’s a reason, Kendrick says, that Buck O’Neil was drawn to Jackson. He just loved watching him play.

(Top photo of Bo Jackson in 1987: Ronald C. Modra / Getty Images)