The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson

Introduction

The other day I was walking through the airport in Atlanta, working my way past security and toward the gate, when a TSA agent pulled me aside and asked, pointedly, What’s in your suitcase?

My L.L.Bean roller had just cruised through the X-ray machine, and now Carlton required an explanation as to the large rectangular blemish appearing on the screen before him.

Oh, I said. That.

Yeah, he replied. That.

It’s a brick, I said.

Carlton’s face suggested disbelief.

A what? he snapped.

A brick, I said. Like—you know. A brick.

Carlton didn’t like bricks.

Sir, he said, you can’t travel with a brick in your carry-on.

Really? I replied.

Really, he said. There’s really no good reason for bringing a brick on a plane.

That’s when I stopped him and explained I had the best reason in world history for bringing a brick on a plane.

OK, Carlton said. Tell me.

I cleared my throat.

Do you know who Bo Jackson is? I asked.

He looked at me as one stares down a moron.

Right, I said. Well, I’m writing a biography of Bo Jackson. A definitive biography. I’ve been working on it for well over a year. And yesterday I was at his childhood home in Bessemer, Alabama. Middle of nowhere. And he lived on this abandoned street, on this now-abandoned lot. And his childhood home is totally gone. Not there. But I was standing in the spot where he grew up, and beneath the leaves and the sticks and a whole lot of garbage were a few bricks from the house’s foundation. So I took one, because it’s Bo Jackson’s house, and I’m obsessed with Bo Jackson’s life. So why wouldn’t I take a brick home with me?

Charged by two trenta cold brews, I kept going. And going. And going. About Auburn and Kansas City; about Los Angeles and Chicago and Anaheim. About scaling an outfield wall and breaking a bat atop his head and running over a mohawked, steroid-stuffed Seahawks linebacker. About boar hunting and hip replacements and a long-ago television show called Ben Casey.

A few days earlier I’d attended services at the all-Black, side-of-the-road Mount Zion Baptist Church (which Bo attended as a boy), and the spirit of Pastor Dwight Miller’s sermon had moved me.

Praise Bo!

At long last I stopped, and Carlton called over a supervisor. Hey, Melissa, he said. This gentleman is writing Bo Jackson’s biography. And he’s trying to fly home with a brick from the guy’s childhood house.

Melissa picked up the brick. Smoothed it over with her hands. I smiled and nodded.

A brick? she said.

Yeah, Carlton replied.

Pause.

Hmm, she said. We don’t get many bricks in suitcases. But Bo Jackson—that’s a pretty big deal.

Melissa smiled.

Go on through, she said. Fly with Bo Jackson’s brick.

JEFF PEARLMAN

AUGUST 15, 2021

Prologue

On the night of September 15, 1991, the sixty-five members of the Chicago White Sox traveling party knew they were about to die.

This is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole.

No.

This is an airplane that seemed all but destined to crash.

Earlier that day, the White Sox wrapped a four-game series at the California Angels with a 9–2 victory. The players and coaches immediately retreated to the visitors’ clubhouse at Anaheim Stadium, where they showered, changed and bolted to nearby Ontario International Airport. They then walked toward the jetway and climbed up the steps onto the team’s chartered Boeing 737-300, operated by America West Airlines.

As the pilots prepared for the three-and-a-half-hour flight to the Windy City, the players, coaches, and executives found their familiar spots. Carlton Fisk, the gruff veteran catcher, plopped down in the back row alongside Matt Merullo, his young understudy. Ozzie Guillen, the loquacious shortstop, found a seat a few rows up from Dan Pasqua, the slugger and regular midflight poker afficionado. Lance Johnson and Warren Newson, a couple of young outfielders, sat side by side.

For the first two and a half hours of travel, all was calm. The flight attendants offered drinks and food. Playing cards were dealt among teammates. Frank Thomas, the burly first baseman, listened to music on his Walkman. Robin Ventura, the young third baseman, started to—

BOOM!

Everyone remembers the sound—a loud, unsettling explosive reverberation that caused the aircraft’s 126 seats to shake. Then Craig Grebeck, the utility infielder, pulled up the shade on his window, looked out toward the engine and spotted the flames. A huge flash, he recalled. Gobbling everything up.

Grebeck turned toward Tim Raines, the speedy outfielder. Rock, he said, the fucking engine’s on fire.

What? Raines said, before craning his neck to gaze outside. Oh, shit! Raines screamed. Ohhhhh, shiiiiiiit!

Pasqua dashed toward the window, saw the inferno, rushed back to his seat and buckled it as tight as possible. Donn Pall, a relief pitcher, pressed-pressed-pressed-pressed-pressed the flight attendant call button until someone arrived. Look out the window! Pall screamed.

Holy shit! the flight attendant said, then yanked down the blind.

Thomas—the 6-foot-5, 240-pound mountain of a man—collected every pillow he could find and cocooned himself in a preposterous nest of cotton and fleece. Scott Radinsky, relief pitcher, screamed (Almost Famous–like), We’re going down boys! We’re . . . allllll. . . . gonnnnnna . . . diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie. Barry Foote and Dave LaRoche, coaches and long-ago Yankee teammates, sat in silence and listened as a player two rows back called a friend to tell him the whereabouts of a hidden bank account. Others used the seat-back phones to reach out to family members.

Mom, I love you . . .

Dad, I love you . . .

Honey, I love you . . .

The plane banked hard left, the flames crawling up the metal, lighting up the craft’s innards in a terrifying orange-red glow. Screams. Tears. Religious medallions rubbed between index fingers and thumbs.

And then—it happened.

The cockpit door swung open, and out stepped Bo Jackson.

Three decades later, many of the White Sox players can still see it. The world’s greatest athlete—the two-sport phenom; the Bo Knows embodiment; the man who loved picking the brains of the pilots—marching down the aisle, aware of the danger but shrugging it off, urging his teammates to buckle up. It was John Wayne. It was Clint Eastwood. It was Harrison Ford. It was . . .

Don’t worry, everyone! Jackson commanded in his deep baritone. The crew knows exactly what it’s doing. We’ll be fine.

Jackson strutted from man to man before taking a seat. When the pilots somehow touched down at Des Moines International Airport, placing the jet between dozens of emergency vehicles, the members of the White Sox burst out in applause. Joey Cora, a young second baseman, turned his head to look at Bo Jackson.

That, he thought, is a hero.

There is a second version to this story—one also verified by multiple members of the Chicago White Sox.

The engine is on fire.

The passengers are terrified.

No one is moving.

Prayers are being said aloud.

The plane banks hard to the left.

And then . . .

"I can tell you exactly what happened," said Merullo, the reserve catcher. He was twenty-six at the time, a struggling-to-stick once-upon-a-heyday prospect out of Winchester, Massachusetts. Merullo was sitting on the Boeing 737 alongside Fisk, bracing for impact and taking notes with his eyes.

Bo had been limping that year, because his hip was hurt, Merullo recalled. "But with the plane on fire, he gets out of his seat near us and he sprints—and I mean sprints—to the cockpit like Mighty Mouse coming to save the day. Bo Jackson literally opens the cockpit door and enters. I know he was a pilot, so I’m guessing he helped land the plane or something. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do."

Fisk, approaching his forty-fourth birthday and in his twenty-second Major League season, was one of the few unfazed. According to Merullo, the veteran surveyed the scene, grabbed a Budweiser from a nearby cooler, cracked it open and gazed slyly toward Jackson.

Go get ’em, Bo, Fisk said. "Gooooo get ’em."

Both stories are true.

I wouldn’t write that about a similar circumstance involving Michael Jordan or Carl Lewis, Mike Tyson or Ja Morant. I wouldn’t write that about Renaldo Nehemiah, Michael Phelps, Randy Moss, Brett Favre or Wayne Gretzky.

But, in this case, both stories are true.

Bo Jackson ran from the cockpit and ran toward the cockpit. He flew the plane, served as his own copilot and delivered Coca-Cola products to every passenger. He climbed out onto the wing and extinguished the fire while simultaneously writing a poem about the perils of Laura Branigan rock operas.

This is what it means to be mythological; to exist in a world that is both factual and fantastical; to do things so unprecedented, so spectacular, that one must wonder if they were ever actually done at all.

It was Joe Posnanski, the journalist and occasional Bo chronicler, who referred to Jackson as the last folk hero—and the more I thought about it, the more I came to embrace Joe’s take. Nowadays, everything that happens in the world can be found seconds later on YouTube and Twitter. Kevin Durant dunks—it’s right there. Ronald Acuña, Jr., blasts a 450-foot home run—also right there. There is no longer such a thing as You won’t believe this, because there’s nothing not to believe. It exists in front of us. And, in many ways, that’s wonderful. Sports have never been more accessible, and in dark times (say, like, during a worldwide pandemic) being able to observe the splendor of a 130-mph Serena Williams serve can balm the soul.

And yet . . .

Sports without mythology is David Blaine without levitation. Did Babe Ruth really point into the distance before homering at Wrigley Field in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series? Did Earl Manigault really grab a quarter off the top of a backboard before dunking a basketball? We don’t know. But the beauty is in the mystery. It’s in the debate; in the descriptive adjectives; in having a cousin whose uncle’s brother’s sister’s nephew’s wife’s maid of honor (from her second wedding, not her third) was at the game, and swears to God it happened.

Bo Jackson is, as Posnanski says, the last folk hero, because he’s the last legendary athlete to do these impossible-to-conceive feats without the benefit (or curse) of a thousand camera angles. Dating back to his boyhood in Bessemer, Alabama, and through his years at Auburn University, then as a Memphis Chick, a Kansas City Royal, a Chicago White Sox, a California Angel, a Los Angeles Raider, there are fables that may well be more than fables. Bo, age seven, side-arming a rock 200 yards. Bo, high school senior, blocking two oncoming linebackers 40 yards down the field. Bo, at Auburn, soaring over a Volkswagen; standing waist-deep in a pool and leaping—flat-footed—onto the cement lip. Bo throwing a football straight into the air and hitting the New Orleans Superdome scoreboard—140 feet above his head. Even one of his all-time-great highlights—the 1989 throw from the left-field corner to gun down Seattle’s Harold Reynolds at home—is an incomplete video experience. Watch the clip, and you never actually see Bo release the baseball.

So did he?

It’s the reason, nearly thirty years since his final moment as a professional athlete, Bo Jackson continues to feel relevant and important. He was far from charismatic or charming. He hated signing autographs, and told plenty of people (friends and foes alike) to back off, to keep their distance, to read the scowl. But Jackson rendered sour personality moot. There have been other two-sport athletes of some note. D. J. Dozier played for the Minnesota Vikings and New York Mets. Brian Jordan was both a fantastic Atlanta Falcons safety and Atlanta Braves outfielder. On and on. They came, they vanished. What Jackson accomplished (and, via campfire stories, still does) was forcing oneself to ask, "Did I just see that? Did that actually happen?" You would rub your eyes, look again. Rub once more, look again. The mythology is a paradox—by not quite believing what you witnessed, you remember what you witnessed. It’s permanence via dumbfoundedness, and it makes a man whose time in the sun was disappointingly brief far more interesting/discussed than statistically superior contemporaries like, say, Andre Dawson or Eric Dickerson.

Those men—Hall of Famers in their respective sports—were beholden to gravity.

When the Boeing 737 pulled up to the gate in Des Moines, it was one o’clock in the morning.

The sixty-five members of the White Sox traveling party entered an empty terminal. There was little chatter. Ballplayers exist off of banter, but this wasn’t the time. Minutes earlier, the aircraft was on fire.

Now they were being told another America West plane would arrive shortly. In the meantime, they were to have a seat and collect themselves. "Like it was that easy," recalled Pasqua.

A stone’s throw from the gate was a kiosk—one that, when opened, peddled pretzels, hot dogs and beer. Positioned toward the side of the business was an industrial-size keg, protected with a large stainless-steel Master Lock. A half dozen or so White Sox found themselves staring longingly at the object, noting aloud that they could really use a drink.

Bo Jackson stepped forward. I got this, he said—then wrapped his right hand around the lock, squeezed tightly and (pop!) cracked it open. He broke the fucking lock, said Radinsky. Just . . . broke it.

With that, Jackson lifted the keg high into the air and poured beers for his gleeful teammates. Like a bartender, said Merullo, when we needed one most.

How, exactly, did the Chicago White Sox drink, when there were no cups?

No one remembers.

It’s the stuff of folk heroes.

Chapter 1

The Little Rock Chucker

The house no longer exists.

Of course, it no longer exists.

For its existence would be proof, and folk heroes don’t leave behind much proof. Because folk heroes aren’t tangible. Their actions, their movements, their existences—it all comes and passes like a wink.

And yet . . .

If you look hard enough, and place your eyes close to the ground, there are traces. Beneath the brown leaves, beneath the twigs, to the right of the rusted mop handle, a few inches away from the shards of shattered beer bottles—you will find a reddish-orange brick. Then, to its left, another reddish-orange brick. Two more over there. Another three or four over there.

Some of the bricks are whole. Most are worn and crumbled, time’s white flag to the relentlessness of hot Alabama summers.

But the bricks are, in fact, here and they are verification that once upon a time a house stood on the vacant lot that is 612 Butler Avenue in the Raimund neighborhood of Bessemer, Alabama.

The place where Bo Jackson was born.

It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine. The Butler Avenue before you is not the Butler Avenue of long ago. It is a dead-end dirt road, with a string of abandoned homes pocked by shattered windows, peeled-off paint, caved-in roofs. The lawns are overtaken by weeds and wildflowers. Garbage is everywhere. A yellowed mattress. A smattering of playing cards. A thirtyish man named Symphoney Adams lives in a gray home near the dead end, and he points toward a patch of scorched earth beside his driveway. I burn my trash, he said nonchalantly. Cheaper than having it collected.

The cliché biography trope would offer, Squint and you can still see Bo Jackson. But try as one might, you can’t. What one beholds are the bloody remains of a once-thriving iron ore, coal and limestone mining industry that began to abandon Birmingham and its nearby suburbs (like Bessemer, which is fifteen miles to the city’s south) in the early 1970s. Pretty much everyone who lived here worked in the mines, said Carolyn Williams, one of the few remaining Butler Avenue residents from back in the day. She is seventy-five, African American, with short hair, embedded dimples and three stray cats on a front porch. Her home is the one she was born in, and as others bolted she stuck. Now she wonders why. With a crime rate of 118 per 1,000 residents, Bessemer—long known as The Marvel City—is one of the most dangerous places in America. It’s a far cry from what it was, she said. Then, a pause. A sigh. "But I’m telling you, this was once a place to be. Believe it or not, it really was . . ."

And the words are uttered with such conviction that, perhaps, some vague vision of Butler Avenue is recoverable. It’s the early 1960s. The mines are still mostly open. The houses on Butler Avenue are well-maintained and fully occupied. The Scotts live over there—they’re bootleggers. The Johnsons are down thataway—they sell ice cream out of the freezer. The Evans family. The Leonard family. The Williamses. And here, at 612 Butler Avenue, resides Florence Mae Jackson. She is a single Black woman who was reared by her parents, George and Margaret Jackson, in a little blue home on an adjacent street. Those who know her well call her Bebe. But those who don’t know her well keep a measured distance. Florence is a not a Bebe. She is hardened. Takes no shit and doesn’t suffer phonies. There is a stereotype of the Southern Black woman who refers to you as Sugar and insists you sit on down and try a slice of her out-of-the-oven rhubarb pie. That’s not Florence Jackson.

Back in 1949, when she was eighteen, Florence married a local World War II veteran named Johnnie Jackson, Sr. He jumped ship after a handful of years, leaving her with multiple kids and a house (the green one at 612 Butler) the size of a sneaker.

The home was built in the mid-1930s, constructed primarily of plywood and reddish-orange brick on a plot that measures roughly three quarters of an acre. Inside, there were three rooms: a miniature kitchen (which doubled as a bedroom), a miniature living room (which doubled as a bedroom) and a miniature bedroom. There was no running water. If one needed to defecate he had to open the rickety front door and walk ten feet to a green rectangular outhouse with a tar paper roof and concrete floor.

Florence worked jobs one wouldn’t choose to work—cleaning houses, cleaning rooms at the local Holiday Inn and Ramada Inn. She never held a driver’s license, so the older children took her where she needed to go.

By the early 1960s, Florence was mother to seven—several with Johnnie Jackson, Sr., another bunch with A. D. Adams, a steel mill worker from Leflore, Mississippi, who moved to Bessemer in the late 1950s. Adams was a burly man with short-chopped hair, a pronounced mustache and forearms that doubled as anvils. His nickname was Big Track. A. D. had a warm laugh; the kind that began in the belly and shot up. He worked hard, spending four decades employed by the Woodward Iron/Coppers Coke Plant. He wasn’t one to bemoan his lot in life. Everyone liked A. D., recalled Stephanie Wilson, his niece. He would give you the shirt off his back without a second’s pause.

There was one small issue: A. D. Adams lived in a house four miles away on 26th Street North—with his wife, Louise.

The two married on October 26, 1961, in a small church ceremony in Montgomery. So, when thirteen months later (on November 30, 1962, to be exact) Florence was taken to the nearby Black hospital, Bessemer General, to give birth to A. D.’s child, the father was nowhere to be found.

He wasn’t there to hold Florence Jackson’s hand.

He wasn’t there to embrace a new life.

He wasn’t there to swaddle his baby boy.

His absence was expected.

It would come to sculpt the life of the child.

After the requisite one-day recovery, Florence Mae Jackson and her newborn returned to the house at Butler Avenue. This was familiar turf—along with her seven other children (Jennifer, twins Jerry and Sherry, Louella, Janet, Anthony and Ronald), Florence had miscarried two sets of twins, as well as two individual babies. She had been through the drill. So when it came to naming the latest baby, Florence didn’t seek out deep meaning via biblical influences or family history.

Nope, she simply turned to the twelve-inch black-and-white Zenith positioned in the living room where the television show Ben Casey aired on Channel 6 every Monday night at nine o’clock.

The star of Florence’s favorite program was an actor named Vince Edwards, who portrayed a rugged neurosurgeon with, in the words of Newhouse News Service’s Richard Freedman, virile intensity.

Florence looked at the television.

Florence looked at her nearby baby.

Vincent Edward Jackson it would be.

Florence recalled her eighth child as being something of a nightmare. He cried a lot. He ate a lot. When he didn’t get his way, he threw objects. He stomped until Florence picked him up.

Before long, there were three more children—a year-younger sister, Millicent (whose father was also A. D.), then two boys, Clarence and Anthony, with a different man. And while Butler Avenue was a long way from the skippy-dippy-doo Mayberry portrayed on The Andy Griffith Show, it was a fairly safe environment for Florence and her offspring. Neighbors watched out for other neighbors. Your friend’s mother was your (unofficial) auntie. The homes all used the same skeleton key—so if someone required a cup of sugar, she was welcome to go a house over, unlock the door and take it.

On the day of Vincent Edward Jackson’s birth, George Wallace, the state’s governor-elect, found himself addressing the Alabama Farm Equipment Association’s convention in nearby Montgomery. The headline atop the next day’s Birmingham News piece was WALLACE ONCE MORE SAYS HE WILL DISOBEY INTEGRATION STATUTES.

Save one story on the newspaper’s second page (headline: NEGROES LACK BOND, STAY BEHIND BARS), the entire Birmingham News reads as a celebration of the region’s whiteness. Despite the city’s 39.6 percent Black population, there were no images of nonwhite faces. There were no odes to Black accomplishments. The day’s weddings were white weddings. The day’s deaths were white deaths.

So while, yes, Raimund felt safe, much of that was because it was a small, cocooned region of Bessemer—Black residents, Black businesses, Black schools, little day-to-day interactions with white hostilities. Until 1963, when the state of Alabama finally complied with the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, there were two Raimund Elementary Schools in Bessemer—one deliberately painted white (for the white students), one deliberately painted brown (for the Black students). I lived in the white area. Bo lived in the Black area, recalled Lynn Payne, a white Bessemer native who graduated from high school in 1967. We weren’t raised to hate Blacks. You just knew to keep a certain divide.

Not that little Vincent Edward Jackson thought much about such matters. When you’re young, and you’re one of eight . . . nine . . . ten children in a three-room house, and your father doesn’t exist in your sphere, and your stomach is hollow, the last thing on your mind is the civil rights movement. Years later, Jackson had vivid memories of resentfully watching The Brady Bunch, wondering why Mike and Carol’s kids always seemed so happy. Nobody [in my house] had a bed all for himself, he recalled of his childhood. We had two beds in the bedroom, and usually we’d sleep two to a bed, one at the top and one at the bottom. The rest of us would sleep on the floor. Get a blanket and sleep on the floor. In the winter we had a coal stove for the bedroom and a gas heater for the living room, and most of the time I tried to sleep right in front of the heater. Sometimes I’d wake up with burn marks on my butt where I bumped against the heater during the night.

Florence worked long hours, so her children spent much time with neighboring relatives. Her sister Beatrice was employed as a janitor at a nearby school, often bringing her nieces and nephews leftover scraps from the cafeteria. And Florence’s parents, George and Margaret, lived within walking distance and helped raise the grandchildren. With A. D. Adams not around, Vincent’s idea of manhood was molded by George.

He was sixty-three when Vincent was born, a former semipro catcher who barnstormed the region with an array of Black teams. Most people called him Snag—an ode to the unusually large hands that allowed him to snag baseballs minus a glove. Some of Vincent’s earliest memories involve sitting on the porch of his grandparents’ house and observing his grandfather. He would wake up early in the morning, get his old coon dog and they’d go up in the mountain, come back around nine or ten o’clock, he’d have one or two possum, Jackson recalled. When he came home and he’d empty out the croker sack and have two, three rabbits, two, three coons. I’d sit there and watch him skin ’em, wash ’em out, hang ’em in the smokehouse.

A treat for little Vincent was an oatmeal cookie made with cheese. Or a foil-wrapped sweet potato. Most meals involved wild game—rabbit, squirrels, he recalled. You name it, we’ve eaten it. If a Jackson found a turtle in the road, he brought it home, scooped out the innards, dumped the goop into boiling water and drank turtle soup. There were times we didn’t have anything but grits, he said. It always puzzled me. ‘How in the hell can we live in this house and not have food to eat?’ Every item of clothing was handed down. The local bootlegger, Pap Scott, was always in need of plastic bags, so the Jackson kids scavenged Bessemer and passed them to Scott for three cents apiece.

On December 21, 1968, less than a month after his grandson’s sixth birthday, George died. It was Vincent’s first experience with death—the idea that someone can exist, then cease to exist. We buried him either the day before or the day after Christmas, Jackson recalled. For about five or six Christmases after that, it rained. Christmas was always sad.

This is a moment in time when something changes. Young Vincent was supposed to imitate George—a steadfast and decent man who believed in family, hard work and Sunday mornings at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. He trudged forward—left boot on, right boot on. In an ideal world, Vincent Edward would wind up just like him.

Now George Jackson was gone.

Florence did not dream on behalf of her children. She did not stress over their futures. Certainly never thought of college, or careers in business or law. Her lone goal was to have them survive in one piece, to navigate childhood and emerge unscathed and available to work in one of the nearby mines. This was no easy task.

The Jackson kids were rough, wild and physical. Were one to walk past 612 Butler Avenue on certain nights, he’d see the children on the porch, decked out in soiled clothing, armed with shotguns and bricks. Waiting, Vincent recalled, for mom to come home. They trusted few outside of family. A person’s word meant little. Promises were viewed skeptically. That type of outlook generally exists for a reason, and with the Jacksons it wasn’t hard to interpret. The children were fatherless and broke.

For Vincent, there was an added component: He stuttered.

When he wanted a slice of bread, it was C-c-c-c-c-c-an I-I-I-I-I-I ha-ha-have s-s-s-s-s-some buh-buh-buh-buh-buhread. If he wanted to go outside, it was I-I-I-I-I-I’m g-g-g-g-going out-out-out-outside. The stutter was almost certainly genetic. His father, A. D. Adams, gave Vincent nothing but a speech impediment that would damn his son until his adulthood.

In poor, rural, Black Bessemer, there was no such thing as a speech therapist. Certainly, the Raimund School District didn’t provide one. So when Vincent enrolled at now-integrated Raimund Elementary for first grade in 1969, his stutter presented a problem. I was probably one of the smartest kids, he recalled, but my stuttering was so bad I couldn’t keep up with the normal kids. I was the first in my class to actually write my name instead of print, and I could read better than any of the kids in class. I was slowed down because of my stuttering.

Five decades ago, stutterer was often seen as a crass synonym for stupid. So Vincent, at the urging of Florence, was forced to re-enroll in first grade and take Mrs. McDonnell’s class again. It was humiliating—having a November birthday, he was already nearly a year older than many of his classmates. The school was minuscule. A single coal heater. Thin walls. There were four rooms and a cafeteria for the roughly seventy-five kindergarten through grade 5 students. A husband and wife janitor (Robert Harris) and cafeteria worker (Annie Harris) kept things running. Every Friday a man pulling a cart filled with sugarcane stopped outside the main entrance and sold nickel stalks. One teacher, Mr. Hopson, kept a stick wrapped in duct tape by his desk, and used it to whip misbehaving students. Another, Mrs. Smith, preferred an old-school wood paddle. I was caught eating peanuts in class, recalled Michael Cox, Jackson’s classmate. Mrs. Smith gave me one hundred licks—ten per day for ten days. Your parents didn’t care. It was fair game. Inside Raimund, everyone knew everyone, so everyone knew the grumpy first grader who st-st-st-stuttered all his words. As a result, the Vincent Jackson walking the halls of Raimund Elementary as a second-time first grader was a quiet terror. When I started to read and I got stuck on a word, he said, the kids started laughing and it made me mad.

How mad?

If you laughed at me when I stuttered in class, he added, I was going to beat the shit out of you when we got out of school. I did that religiously from the first through the sixth grades.

Vincent looked for reasons to start fights. One day, he wore his sister’s hand-me-down sneakers to school, and someone laughed. Vincent beat him up. A couple of times, lacking shoes, he arrived in dirty, torn socks. People laughed. He beat them up. One day, Vincent stuttered over the word h-h-h-home while reading aloud to the class, and someone laughed. Vincent beat him up.

It was while languishing at Raimund that Vincent first discovered a wholesome way to generate income: steal the lunches of classmates, then force them to buy back the food. If they refused, he punched them. Sometimes even if they did buy the food back, he punched them. He’d line us up and say, ‘I want this from your plate, this from your plate,’ said Bobby Clayton, Jr., a classmate. He challenged you one time, and after that you learned to give him what he wanted. The class photo from that year tells the story—a scowling Vincent Edward Jackson in a ratty, hand-me-down pink shirt, doing his all to conceal a missing front tooth.

Away from school, Vincent’s life could sound—beneath a certain lens—somewhat idyllic. Butler Avenue was backed by acres of wooded terrain, and he and his friends and cousins (Bessemer was home to dozens of Jackson kin) spent hours climbing, sprinting, leaping, riding. We would get up in a tree and jump into the honeysuckle bushes to break our fall, Jackson recalled warmly. There was a nearby fishing hole with water the color of blood from the reddish clay bottom, and on hot days the children sought out frogs and tadpoles and, on occasion, snakes. They held lengthy crab apple battles. Mr. Simon, a few streets over, paid the boys a dime for every robin they could kill with a BB gun (He ate them birds, said Greg Johnson, a child of Bessemer). Vincent’s closest running buddies were three cousins—Michael, Lodge and Jason Jackson—who lived around the corner.

On Friday nights his aunt Bea (referred to as Sister by most everyone) threw parties for the neighborhood—fish sandwiches, greens, cobblers. People wouldn’t even go home to change, he recalled. They’d stop by on the way home from work. They wanted to get drunk. Vincent served as caddie, shuffling back and forth to the refrigerator, bringing the men their Falstaffs, making sandwiches, occasionally slipping his hand into a drunkard’s pocket and picking out a ten-spot. That’s when you could buy two-for-a-penny cookies, he said. Twelve-ounce sodas for twelve cents. A bag of potato chips cost a dime. There can be a Rockwellian feel to it all; a simpler time with simpler needs.

But that’s largely illusion. A. D. Adams lived across town with his own family (he and his wife, Louise, wound up having their own fleet of children, and in his 2010 obituary he was unironically remembered as someone who was loved and adored by many who called him Daddy), and Vincent lashed out. Once, because a friend issued a dare, he stood along the side of a road and launched a rock at the front window of a passing car. The glass splintered into hundreds of pieces and the vehicle swerved off the street. Vincent bolted into the woods. I was best known in the community for throwing rocks, he said. I hit somebody every day with a rock.

Another time, he and his brother Jerry engaged in a heated backyard rock-throwing contest. Jerry ducked behind a doghouse, and when he raised his head Vincent hurled a rock that nailed him flush above the eyes. We didn’t have rock fights anymore, Jackson said. He was anointed with a new nickname: The Little Rock Chucker.

Before discovering sports, his true gift was stealing bicycles, then stripping them down. I’d throw it in a fire, he said, burn the paint off, spray-paint it another color, ride it down the street past the house I stole it from. Nobody would know.

In the Jackson household, violence begat violence. Because food was hard to come by, Florence made clear the few items in the refrigerator were to be cherished. When she bought, say, three or four bananas, they were not to be gratuitously touched. Her line was Don’t bother [fill in the blank]—as in, Don’t bother these bananas, because I’ll be making a pie on Saturday. And if a child did bother the bananas, brutality ensued. If Florence punished her children, it wasn’t with a stern lecture. No, she hit them with a switch, or a pipe, or a shower rod. Or multiples of the above.

When Vincent was six or seven, he took to crawling into the kitchen, rummaging through his mother’s purse and grabbing the loose change. Sometimes it’d only be a quarter. Different days, fifty cents. On a memorable Saturday morning, Vincent was caught in the act.

Don’t you move! Florence barked. You keep your hands right there!

She went back to sleep for another hour and a half, then woke, tied her son to the bedpost, grabbed the nearest extension cord and—his words—wore my ass out. Jackson walked away from the beating with a back resembling a bloodied tic-tac-toe board. Which was nearly as bad as the time she whipped him with an extension cord in one hand, a .38 pistol in the other. You run or you try to take the extension cord from me, she said, and I’m gonna bust you in the ass with this pistol.

Vincent did not run.

Most Sunday mornings, Florence dragged her children to the neighboring Mount Zion Baptist Church, where she sang in the choir as her offspring sat on the wood benches and squirmed as the deacon spoke of God and Satan, heaven and hell. He was a bombastic orator, and his warnings—In Revelation 12:9 we learn that Satan is a dangerous enemy. He is a serpent who can bite us when we least expect it. He is a destroyer . . .—were meant to terrify the two dozen or so children in attendance.

It didn’t work.

When Vincent Jackson was seven, he and the other neighborhood children enjoyed playing house.

Now, that might read a bit strange. Vincent was the kid stealing bikes and punching noses and throwing rocks at passing cars. House seems genteel.

Here’s how he explains it: We would use the outhouse to play house in. There was a shelf and a toilet. We would get old cans out of the garbage and put them high on the shelf and pretend they were groceries and we would put the toilet seat down and it was a table. If somebody in the neighborhood got a new refrigerator or a new stove, we would get the box and it would be our bedroom and we’d make holes in it for windows . . .

It sounds lovely. In the darkness of poverty and a fatherless world, young Vincent and his pals sought out domestic bliss and tranquility and . . .

Or, not.

. . . We’d go inside [the house] and get a blanket and we’d do the nasty. We’d do the grown folks.

In 1979, a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the average age of first sexual intercourse among teenagers was 16.2 years.

Vincent Jackson insists he was seven.

I never told anybody, Jackson recalled. Back there in the country, kids did that because we would see the grown-ups do it. It began, innocently, with a game called Hump—the boys counted to one hundred as the girls hid in the woods. When a boy found you, he could hump against you—clothes against clothes, Jackson said. There’s somebody always looking to see where the pretty girls are gonna hide. I always peeked.

For the most part, Florence had no idea what her eighth child was up to. Yes, she was aware he could be stubborn and obstinate. But the era was one of distanced relationships between a child’s behaviors and a parent’s involvement. There weren’t a thousand after-school clubs to join. Your kid came home, had a snack, hopped on his bike and vanished until dusk. He would be fine.

One Sunday morning, when Vincent was eight or nine, he and some friends walked through the woods to a local dairy farm. The property belonged to a white man. The kids ran down to a lake on the property, dove into the cool water and were confronted by the owner. If I ever catch you swimming in that lake, he said, I’m gonna whip your ass!

A few weeks later, the boys returned. First, they picked bushels of blackberries off the man’s bushes. Then they removed all their clothing and dove back into the forbidden waters. A man who worked the land was riding horseback when he spotted the trespassers. He galloped forward, fired his rifle into the air, hopped off the horse and threw all the clothing down a drain.

The nude boys dashed from the lake, through a barbed-wire fence (Which wasn’t easy without anything on, Jackson said) and roughly five hundred yards into the woods. The walk home, Jackson recalled, was anything but normal. We had to pass one house where the old lady sat on the porch, he said.

One of Jackson’s cousins hushed his comrades. Don’t say nothing, he whispered, and they’ll think we’re from Florida.

Later in his life, as he came into contact with people from different parts of America, Jackson was often asked what it was like to grow up Black in the Deep South. The presumption was that there would surely be stories of KKK marches and burning crosses.

The presumption was wrong.

Jackson never actually heard racial epithets directed toward him until he was midway through elementary school. One day, while walking home after the final bell, he was headed toward the woods when a blue Mustang approached. Filled with white kids, it sped in his direction.

Jackson bolted into the woods, and the whites followed. Come here, n-----! one screamed. We’re gonna kick your ass! As the boys moved in, Jackson stopped atop a hill and slung rocks. The taunts continued—We’re gonna getcha! We’re gonna getcha!

That, Jackson later said, was the first time that I really experienced prejudice.

This, of course, was not really true. Vincent Jackson was born at Bessemer General because Birmingham’s better hospitals didn’t take Black patients. He lived in the Raimund section because that’s where Blacks were relegated. The house he called home had little resale value. His mom worked as a housekeeper because those were the jobs available to uneducated Black women. His mom was an uneducated Black woman because society did not grant her the luxury of dreams or expectations. The church he attended—Mount Zion Baptist—was all Black, and had the Jacksons tried entering the nearby Second Baptist Church, an army of aspiring Moseses would have risen to stop them. I went there as a girl, recalled Gigi Smart, who is white. "Our deacon said he would never go to church with Blacks. The teachers Vincent learned from at Raimund Elementary were almost all white. The white classmates he had at Raimund were, for the most part, not allowed to have Black children over and certainly not allowed to go to a Black friend’s house. Rex Parker, a white student one year ahead of Jackson at Raimund Elementary, considered his best childhood pal to be Langston Leonard, a Black classmate from the Butler Avenue neck of Bessemer. When the two were in third grade, Langston was diagnosed with leukemia. Rex’s parents would not allow him to pay a visit. After Langston died, a crestfallen Rex was forbidden to attend the funeral. My dad was a racist, and he wouldn’t let me go, said Parker. Someone told me Langston asked about me during his last days. That still eats at me. I let him down. Any why? Because he was Black and I was white? What a waste . . ."

Prejudice was all around Vincent Jackson.

He just didn’t realize it yet.

So when—and how—did Vincent Edward Jackson become Bo?

Well, to certain residents of Bessemer, never. As a young boy, he was handed the various young boy type of nicknames many of us are assigned. He was Boo, Nap, Nappy Head. Some referred to him as Vinson, an absentminded shortening of Vincent. A good number of people who attended school with him still (in 2022) think of him as Vincent, and spit out Bo as one would a mouthful of sour milk.

Back in the late 1980s, Jackson told a Sporting News reporter: My older brother and cousin said I was tough like a wild boar. After a while they just cut it short and called me ‘Bo.’ He has mainly stuck by the story—and perhaps it’s true.

But maybe there’s a different reason.

On May 31, 1972, when Vincent was nine, going on ten, Florence wed Joseph Bond, a miner who was twenty-five years her senior. The union was as much of convenience as affection—Bond lived on a parallel street, had saved his money and was financially well off for the area, which was something Florence had never known. He was an old man, one family friend said. "What do you think the gossip was?"

Shortly after the marriage the couple—along with Florence’s children—relocated to a new house a half mile away at the top of Merritt Street in the Erie Heights neighborhood. It was, in the eyes of nine-year-old Vincent, a literal mansion. Three levels! Back and front yards! Twelve rooms! Two bathrooms—both indoors! This was huge. Plus, when Bond died less than a year after the wedding, the house was all Florence’s.

The relocation also placed Vincent significantly closer to 408 Republic Avenue, where a man named Willie Norville Harris resided. Harris was one of the guys everyone in Black Bessemer knew. He was (simultaneously) the owner of Harris Sanitation, an employee at Dickie Clay (maker of fine bricks) and the assistant pastor at the Good Samaritan True Holiness Church.

The Harris property was home to cows, goats, horses, chickens, pigs. Norville (no one called him Willie) and his wife, Elizabeth, were parents to eight children, all of whom woke early every morning to feed the beasts. We worked like dogs, recalled Tony Harris, the sixth of the eight offspring. "My dad was very strict. Very strict. He definitely would break out the switch if we didn’t listen. Those animals were our dinner, but they were also sold to other people for their dinners. I hated every moment of the work. But we had no choice."

The Jackson family knew the Harris family, but only casually. What Vincent Jackson did know was that Norville Harris owned a bunch of really enormous hogs.

Not that this was unusual. Some of the best days of Vincent’s childhood involved his uncle Jesse (Florence’s brother), who lived close by and raised his own slew of hogs. Come fall Saturday mornings, Vincent and some of his brothers would walk through the woods and over to their uncle’s house, then watch as he’d place feed in the trough. The hogs would come out, Jackson recalled, and he’d pick one that he was gonna slaughter and he’d take his little .22 rifle and hit him right between the eyes and drop him right there.

Jesse would order the boys to drag the carcass toward a cast-iron pot overflowing with boiling water, dump it on the animal and scrape off the hair. Then, Jackson recalled, we’d hang him up and you’d just gut him—and when you’d do that, you get the saws out and just cut him up. [Then] they would take the head up to the house, wash it, clean it out, cook it, and make ‘country souse.’

Last, Vincent and his brothers scooped up the pig intestines and (splat) threw them (splat) at one another (splat).

It’s hard to measure the impact of exposure to such violence at the age of ten . . . eleven . . . twelve. But the experiences hardened Vincent to animal cruelty. Which is probably why, at age thirteen in the summer of 1976, he and twenty or so friends and cousins walked over to the Harris property, checked to make certain no one was looking, found a bunch of sticks—and beat the living shit out of Norville’s hogs.

For.

Three.

Straight.

Days.

Twenty-two years after William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, the Jackson-led posse surrounded one boar hog after another and unleashed a merciless bevy of blows to the head and body. We wouldn’t beat on people, recalled Wayne Leonard, who was part of Bo’s crew. But animals? One summer some neighborhood kids caught a stray dog, poured gasoline on it, lit a match and watched it run. Animals were fair game. Hence, there was no empathy toward the hogs. When one died, the kids moved on to the next one.

Except that the biggest of the boar hogs refused to give in. He was approximately five hundred pounds, and absorbed his daily pounding, crumbled to the ground, then rose to live for yet another attack. On the third day, Jackson recalled, We finally got him down. We were all gathered around him, beating him with the sticks. Then, a sound from behind—Hey! Get out of here! A shotgun blast, and the boys dropped their sticks and ran.

Jackson scaled the fence and sprinted toward a ditch that he remembered being about twenty yards wide. I hit that ditch full speed and leaped over and as I looked down there were all those dead pigs, he recalled. Jackson headed for the woods where he ran left, right, right, left, right before returning home and locking himself inside his room. He changed his clothes, wiped the mud from his shoes.

Knock, knock, knock.

It was William Lumpkin, the local barbershop owner who for years cut Vincent Jackson’s hair. If Lumpkin wasn’t trimming fades, he was assisting Harris with his farm.

When Florence answered the door, Lumpkin explained to her what had transpired. I do your boy’s hair every month, he said, and he was one of the boys who killed the hogs.

Florence was livid. Her son was trouble. Always trouble. Beating kids up. Throwing rocks through windows. Stealing lunch money. Look, she said, if Mr. Harris wants to send his ass to reform school, then send him. Because I’m tired of him.

Reform school?

Lumpkin demanded that Vincent name the other boys who helped kill the animals. This was a youngster who feared no pain, feared no suspension, feared no labor. But . . . reform school? One of his brothers had attended reform school for several years, and returned with stories of other boys trying to rape him.

Reform school?

I ratted on everybody, Vincent said. They all got grounded for the summer. They couldn’t be pissed at me, because nobody could beat me up.

The story quickly turned to local lore, and from local lore to local legend.

Vincent Edward Jackson had killed a bunch of hogs—boar hogs.

Boar hog, when enunciated, sounds just as it reads. But when uttered quickly, with a hardy Alabama twang, it’s more like bo hog.

Bo, for short.

Chapter 2

A Black Bruce Jenner

There are three moments that could have changed everything.

Three moments, where instead of Bo Jackson becoming a mythological sports icon, Vincent Edward Jackson becomes another fatherless poor Black inmate in a state (Alabama) not lacking the model.

The first moment: He is twelve, and it is summer. There’s a recreation center not far from the family home where local kids are provided free meals and inexpensive snacks. In the center of it all is a battered ping-pong table.

Two kids are playing, and Jackson has next. He reaches for a paddle, only his cousin reaches for the paddle, too. She tugs hard, digging her fingernails beneath his skin. The paddle is now in her hand. Bo shoves her, then fires off a weak hook. She punches him in the face.

Vincent storms off to the adjacent baseball field and returns moments later with an aluminum bat. His first swing is wild and off the mark. He falls, and a bunch of kids laugh aloud. He swings again, misses again. More laughter—the kind he hears while stuttering in class.

There is a third swing. It is the hardest so far, and it lands just below her rib cage, in the kidney. She falls to the concrete floor and lets out a guttural moan. Bo is unmoved. He is standing over her, preparing to take another shot. He raises the bat, begins to chop downward, and . . . out of nowhere, his sister Sherry (who works at the rec center) grabs Bo and pulls him away.

Vincent, she screams, you could kill her!

He drops the bat and walks away, leaving his victim writhing in pain.

The second moment: He is still twelve, back at the rec center waiting to shoot pool. An older kid arrives and shoves Bo. Get lost, he says. It’s my turn.

Bo is overmatched in size and strength. So he says, You be here when I get back, then leaves, walks home and returns with his mother’s shotgun.

The culprit is gone. But Bo knows where he lives, and tracks him through the woods. I saw him, he said, and I threw the gun up, fixin’ to shoot. If he hadn’t stepped behind the tree, I would have blew him away.

When he arrives home, one of his sisters locks the front door. For three hours, Bo sits in the backyard, watching birds fly toward a pecan tree on the neighbor’s property. He fires at one—BOOM!—and nothing fell down but feathers and a beak, he recalled.

Florence hears the sound, drags Bo in by his ear, and beats him with an extension cord.

The third moment: He is a seventh grader at McAdory Junior High. There is a kid he doesn’t like—some chubby boy named Danny Terrell. One afternoon, while standing in the hallway, Bo pounces, leaping toward Danny with the intent to hurt.

It does not work out.

Terrell is bigger and stronger than his assailant. A pair of punches to the nose throw Bo back against a locker and knocks him out. Both students are suspended, and that should be that.

But, no. The Terrells and the Jacksons live in the same neighborhood, and a school bus leaves Danny off on Merritt Avenue, right in front of Bo’s home. In the aftermath of the fight, nursing a black-and-blue nose, Bo rushes inside and grabs the .22 rifle belonging to one of his brothers.

He loads the clip, finds a good spot, sets his sight on Danny Terrell, prepares to fire.

Against all odds, a thought enters his mind: If I shoot Danny Terrell, I’m either going to jail or I’m going to reform school. And if I go to reform school, I’ll be up all night trying to keep people from raping me.

So, instead of shooting Danny Terrell, Jackson fires at a tree. He turned and looked, dropped his books and hauled his ass home, Jackson recalled. I could have filled him so full of lead they would have had to pick him up with a magnet. But something tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, this isn’t a good thing. So I shot the tree."

The Terrell family left town shortly thereafter.

So, yes, the Bo Jackson you know could have been the Vincent Edward Jackson you never knew. The line is thin. But something saved him.

Jackson found sports.

He was, from the start, uniquely athletic. Carolyn Williams, a next-door neighbor, recalled little Vincent, no older than seven or eight and just a big-headed ol’ boy, picking up a rock and launching it down Butler Avenue. In her mind’s eye, the rock soars through the air, from one end of the street to the other—which would be well over two hundred yards. I don’t know exactly how far, she said. "But it went."

Back in Bessemer, there weren’t a ton of sports opportunities for young children. But the town’s landscape provided its own training grounds. Vincent Jackson wasn’t running 40s in singlets, but he was sprinting up, over, under and through the woods in tattered jeans and hand-me-down Keds. He wasn’t lifting weights or tossing javelins, but the 12,471 rocks that left his hand traveled at high velocities. His boxing workouts involved beating up kids. His endurance training was Florence’s extension-cord whippings. His shiftiness came in avoiding crab apples.

In the summer of 1973, ten-year-old Vincent took his first major leap into organized athletics, signing up to play Bessemer Little League. He was assigned to a team coached by Florence’s cousin-in-law, and lasted a month. It wasn’t fair—squads were delegated by grades, and Vincent (November birthday, held back a year) was dominant. I was too physical for the boys I was playing with, he said.

Promoted to Pony League, he joined the Raimund Pirates and found himself surrounded by older kids with more developed skills. Any records documenting the league have long vanished. But fleeting memories abound. Vincent Jackson blocking the plate like a brick wall. Vincent Jackson gunning down a runner at second, then pointing an imaginary gun his way. Curtis Wilson, a future high school classmate, was an outfielder for the rival Jonesboro Astros. In a game at Bessemer’s diamond, Wilson stole home plate and ran over Jackson for the winning run. He didn’t budge, Wilson remembered. But he dropped the ball.

After the field was cleared and high fives were exchanged, a dirt-covered Jackson ran up behind Wilson.

Curt, he said, we’ll meet again.

There was one forbidden sport: football.

Which, if you think about it, is sort of strange. Florence Bond would beat her kids, whip her kids, threaten her kids with a gun, lock her kids out of the house, strap her kids to a bedpost.

But football was too violent.

She did not want me to play—period, Jackson recalled. I guess she . . . um . . . seen it on TV. She saw the pros play on TV. How hard they’re hit.

Raimund Elementary ran through sixth grade, and after that, in the fall of 1976, Jackson began attending the seventh-through-ninth McAdory Junior High, which was located alongside the high school four miles from his home in neighboring McCalla.

Steered away from football (recalled Bobby Clayton, a classmate: Most of Bo’s friends would stay after school for junior high football practice, but Bo just took the bus home; it was sorta sad) and not yet ready for high school track, Vincent followed the path of his older brother Anthony, who spent two years playing baseball at nearby Lawson State Community College. The sport was Vincent’s first athletic passion, and he devoted many a day to starring for the Raimund Pirates and, later, the Ben All-Stars of the local industrial league. The games were played on tattered fields, in front of sparse crowds. He loved it. As a younger child, he had enjoyed stickball in his yard—my aunt would bring old mops and brooms for us, Jackson recalled. Now, with the Ben All-Stars, he was holding a real aluminum bat, wrapping his left hand in a genuine leather glove, squaring off against bigger, stronger, better players. Usually kids weren’t playing in those games, said Curtis Wilson. But Bo was just too talented not to have in uniform. One of his teammates, a pitcher named Reggie Patterson, wound up spending four Big League seasons with the White Sox and Cubs. He was four years Bo’s senior.

When he began the ninth grade, Jackson defied his mother and tried out for a football team. He made the junior varsity roster. My mother was the motivator, said Earl Jackson, Vincent’s brother. Because of her doubting him so much.

At the time, McAdory’s do-it-all superstar athlete was junior halfback Larry Mason. He was one year older but two grades ahead of Jackson. Mason stood 5-foot-11 and was built like a chimney. He ran over people and around people, and the scouts flocked to McCalla to watch the kid play (Mason later spent several years in the NFL and USFL). Jackson, by comparison, languished in the shadows. At the beginning Vincent was just sort of average, said Lester Haney, a JV teammate. You have to remember, he’d never played football before. So it wasn’t like, ‘Look, everyone, it’s Bo Jackson!’ Not at all. We were all raw kids.

He was a good JV running back, recalled Michael Weeks, another teammate. But was there a reason to think, ‘Holy cow! This guy is special’? Nah.

Jackson’s first taste of scholastic athletic glory came in the spring of his ninth-grade year, when he joined the McAdory High track team. He had always enjoyed running, but this was about more than competition. At age sixteen, he was starting (albeit slowly) to look around and see his life was heading in a bad direction. Far too many of the kids from his neighborhood were turning toward drugs and violence. Gradually, familiar faces disappeared, victims to temptation. Plus he was tired of getting in trouble, of staring down a mother with an extension cord and reason to believe her son was worthy of a beatdown.

I finally realized that all the crap I had been doing when I was younger could get me sent to jail, he said. Something just clicked where I wasn’t that bad a person.

One day, during the early spring of 1979, Vincent was walking off the McAdory baseball diamond when he happened upon Dickey Atchison, the varsity track coach, mentoring a high jumper. The boy was working his way up toward clearing six feet, but it was going slowly. He would clear five feet four inches. Then five feet five. Then stumble. Then stumble again. Then . . .

Jackson, wearing pants, took three elongated steps and cleared five feet six with room to spare.

Whoa.

Hey kid, Atchison asked,