Bo Jackson: 'Would have never played football' if he'd known of risks

Bo Jackson, the two-sport phenom who might just be the greatest pure athlete in American sports history, has made a surprising confession: had he known of the possibilities of long-term head injuries, he would have never stepped onto a football field.

“If I knew now what I had known back then, I would have never played football. Never,” Jackson said in a wide-ranging interview with USA Today. “I wish I had known about all of those head injuries, but no one knew that. And the people that did know that, they wouldn’t tell anybody.”

For those of you who know Bo only as one of the old dudes driving on a video-game football field in that Kia commercial, listen up: Jackson was an absolutely unstoppable force of nature, a freak that could accomplish any athletic feat he set his mind to. He was drafted by the Raiders after spurning Tampa Bay, believing the Bucs had cost him his college eligibility to play baseball by sending him a private plane, and then reporting him to the NCAA. He also played baseball for the Kansas City Royals, and his feats there – snapping a bat over his knee, running sideways up a fence, homering in his first All-Star game at-bat – seem more myth than reality.

Football was the hobby, but football managed to derail Jackson’s regular career. While with the then-Los Angeles Raiders (not to be confused with the current Los Angeles Rams or Los Angeles Chargers), Jackson averaged 5.4 yards a carry as a part-time running back. His career came to a sudden, searing end in the playoffs after the 1990 season, when a tackle during a game against Cincinnati sheared blood vessels in his hip. Jackson would never play football again, and faced a long, slow road back to baseball’s major leagues. He played a few unremarkable seasons before retiring during baseball’s 1994 strike.

So when a guy like Jackson says football’s tougher now, you listen. “The game has gotten so violent, so rough. We’re so much more educated on this CTE stuff [chronic traumatic encephalopathy],” he said. “There’s no way I would ever allow my kids to play football today. Even though I love the sport, I’d smack them in the mouth if they said they wanted to play football. I’d tell them, ‘Play baseball, basketball, soccer, golf, just anything but football.'”

Jackson also indicated that he was ready to retire from the NFL even before he’d gotten injured. “That week, three or four days before the playoff game,’’ Jackson said, “I sat down with [wife] Linda and told her that I was going to announce my retirement. When the season was over, we had made my mind up that I was going to do that. That was the plan. Well, the man upstairs changed that plan.”

Still, Jackson insists he has no regrets, even though football may have cost him a Hall of Fame baseball career. “There’s no reason for anyone to feel sorry for what happened to me, or what might have been,” he said. “I didn’t play sports to make it to the Hall of Fame. I just played for the love of sport.”