The Last Folk Hero by Jeff Pearlman

Author:Jeff Pearlman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Mixed Royalties

During his September callup with the Kansas City Royals, one of the teammates Bo Jackson enjoyed chatting with was Greg Pryor, a thirty-six-year-old infielder in the final season of a decade-long Major League career.

The two shared little in common—Pryor was thirteen years Jackson’s senior, as well as a married father of two daughters. But he was also comfortable in his status as a wizened guru. He knew his time was short, and wanted to enjoy it.

One day late in the month, Jackson plopped down alongside Pryor’s locker and pointed to the photograph of an oil well hanging within the cubby.

“What are you doing playing baseball?” he asked. “Don’t you wanna be in oil?”

Pryor laughed.

“Bo,” he said, “you turned down $7 million in football money to take $500,000 for baseball. Who are you to talk?”

The numbers were off. But fair point.

“Greg,” Jackson replied, “I’m just sitting here waiting for the right time.”

He rose, patted the veteran on the shoulder and walked off. Pryor never forgot the words. “Bo knew what he was doing the whole time,” he recalled. “There was no doubt to that man.”

Within earshot, Jackson reassured everyone that he was a baseball player, and only a baseball player. He didn’t miss football, didn’t long for football, didn’t even watch as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers endured a predictably miserable 2-14 season. Why, affixed to his lockers—first in Memphis, then Kansas City—were 8½ × 11 pieces of paper with a handwritten warning: DON’T BE STUPID AND ASK ME FOOTBALL QUESTIONS OKAY!

Yet behind the scenes, mechanisms were at play. Back May 1986, Jackson and his two attorneys—Richard Woods and Tommy Zieman—flew to Portland, Oregon, to meet with Karin Morlan, the head of Nike’s “cleated promotions.” Thanks to the recent blossoming of Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan line of shoes, Nike was the place when it came to athletic apparel. Although Jackson was largely void of charisma, and still struggled with stuttering, he possessed something Nike craved: multifaceted sports talent. So while Morlan and Co. knew not whether Jackson would play football or baseball or (pretty please with a cherry on top) both, Nike longed for him to be the face of its upcoming shoe release—“a bulky contraption sealed with a strap [that] looked like a castoff from the production of Ben-Hur,” wrote Michael Weinreb.

It was called The Trainer. Short for the cross-trainer.

Over the course of negotiations, Zieman and Woods insisted Jackson would not become a Nike pitchman unless the company forked over $100,000 per year for three years. This was astronomical dough. Jordan had received a five-year, $500,000-per-year deal that included royalties on Air Jordans and all Nike Air basketball shoes. But he was Michael friggin’ Jordan. Most of Nike’s other athletes were lucky to snag $5,000 annually.*

Something about Jackson, though, was deliciously appetizing to the company. Sure, it all may well go wrong. He could stick to one sport, stink, vanish. But he could also wind up the second coming of Jim Thorpe. “Bo was obviously a great athlete,” said Phil Knight, Nike’s founder and CEO.

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