Bo Knows

Today at SB Nation both Jon Bois and Bomani Jones celebrated the fascinating heart-stomping career's of Bo Jackson. I suggest to everyone to go read this piece and celebrate the greatness that was Bo Jackson.

I found it interesting that both Bois and Jones remembered Bo more as a baseball player than a football player. I'll always recognize Bo for his football days, but that's probably because he played football for the Raiders which is basically like Bo was in my backyard.

The most interesting piece and as Bomani Jones stated, Bo's greatest legacy was that he just simply walked away from sports and never looked back.

"Post-career Bo is just as impressive to me as the athletic superhero. The reason? He seems perfectly fine with not being the athletic superhero. We just got an all-too-real reminder of how difficult it can be for former football players to transition into being regular people. For athletes, in general, this is very hard to do. I would imagine it would be brutal for someone who was as big a star as Bo Jackson. After being, essentially, a journeyman with an artificial hip for years in baseball, he moved into being a regular dude in Alabama

But every time you'd see an interview with him after his career, he sounded like he couldn't be more comfortable. Imagine being so confident in yourself, as a man, that you could have so much ripped from you in a single moment, yet grow and become someone who seems just as happy without it. That is Bo's most underrated feat: he moved on."

That is Bo's greatest legacy. He simply moved on. He didn't stick around baseball looking for another paycheck like Miguel Tejada or Vlad Guerrero. He didn't stick around for that one last awkward year to break a record no one was ever going to accept like Barry Bonds. (I loved Barry as much as anyone, but his last year in San Francisco in retrospect was about as awkward as it gets.) That's something to be admired about Bo and respected.

Today Bo is riding his bike for tornado victims in Alabama and occasionally showing up on the talk show circuit. He'll always be remembered though as one of the greatest athletes ever.