One of the greatest! His quote to Trine softball “Be Greedy”!
In early 1986, Bo Jackson was the best athlete in America, and everyone knew it.
He'd just won the Heisman Trophy. He was hitting over .400 for Auburn's baseball team. NFL scouts were already calling him a generational talent. So when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, holding the No. 1 pick in that year's draft, wanted to bring him in for a visit, owner Hugh Culverhouse sent his private jet and promised Jackson the trip wouldn't cost him anything.
It cost him everything.
The NCAA ruled the flight an improper benefit. Jackson's college baseball career was over before he ever agreed to play a single down for Tampa Bay. He believed it wasn't a mistake he believed it was a setup, a way to force him onto the football field by taking baseball away from him.
So when the Buccaneers drafted him first overall anyway, he told them plainly: don't bother. They offered him $7.6 million over five years the richest rookie contract in NFL history at the time. He turned it down and signed a minor league baseball contract worth a fraction of that, choosing bus rides and small crowds over a team that had lied to him.
People called it irrational. Jackson didn't see it that way. Some things, he believed, mattered more than money.
A year and a half later, on his 25th birthday, he stepped onto the field for the Los Angeles Raiders a team that let him play both sports against a Seattle linebacker who'd publicly promised to shut him down. Jackson took a handoff, stiff-armed a defender to the turf, and outran the entire Seattle defense for a 91-yard touchdown that carried him straight into the stadium tunnel. He finished the night with 221 rushing yards, a record that still stands today.
Then baseball season came, and he did it all over again playing outfield and hitting a 448-foot home run in the same All-Star Game, on his way to being named MVP.
To this day, Bo Jackson remains the only athlete in American professional sports history named an All-Star in two major leagues.
His career ended earlier than anyone wanted, cut short by injury in 1991. But the story people still tell isn't really about the speed or the records. It's about the year he refused to let anyone buy back his integrity and turned out to be right.
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