ClutchPoints
There was a time in the late 1980s when Bo Jackson was one of the most revered and feared athletes in sports. After playing baseball, football and track and field for the Auburn Tigers from 1982 to 1986, Jackson was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ No. 1 pick in the 1986 NFL Draft. Instead, he opted to play Major League Baseball with the Kansas City Royals after being selected in the fourth round of the ’86 Draft.
His skyrocketing NFL career all ended abruptly when he sustained a hip injury during the Raiders’ Divisional Round win against the Cincinnati Bengals. Jackson summarized the events of his injury while speaking with Marshawn Lynch and Michael Robinson on the Get Got Pod.
“I didn’t feel the need to step out of bounds; I was like, I’ve got 6 to 8 more yards to get. Got it, went down wrong, but it wasn’t the tackle. It was the fact that, I can’t think of his name (Bengals linebacker Kevin Walker), but he grabbed me up top and slid down and locked onto one leg. I pulled the left leg free and took that one step, because I’m running at full tilt. When he locked down onto my right leg, I stopped instantly in my tracks, but my momentum kept going forward, so something had to give. Either my hip or the worst knee blowout in sports. So my hip dislocated and broke my pelvic socket.
“If you watch that play when I hit the ground and rolled over, you see my left hand touch my hip a split second later. I snapped my hip back into the socket because it was out of the socket before I stopped moving, and I popped it back in and I thought it was a hip pointer.
“My hip injury was a speed bump in Bo Jackson’s road to life, that’s all it was. I got over it, went on down the road. It took me about 48 hours to get over the fact that I wasn’t going to play football anymore.”
Although Jackson never played football again. He eventually returned to baseball during the 1993 season with the Chicago White Sox and his final season in 1994 with the California Angels. He retired at the age of 32.
Jackson will continue to live in infamy for his role in the 1989 video game Tecmo Bowl. In the game, his Raiders’ character is the fastest and nearly impossible to tackle.
Auburn retired his No. 34 jersey and in June 2024, Jackson was added to the Royals Hall of Fame.
“What you see here today is a proud pop pop, a proud dad, a proud teammate of all the guys I played with,” Jackson said at his Hall of Fame induction. “Thank you for supporting me. I have a saying. Sometime during your day, be it any day of the week, stop and put some sunshine into somebody’s cloud.”
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