"Good Luck, Kid" — The Two Minutes I Spent on the Phone With Bo Jackson

A scout named Jon Kazanas told me that if I was serious about making it, there was one man I should train with: Mack Newton, in Phoenix.

Jon was more than a scout to me — he'd tried to draft me out of junior college, stayed in touch through every year nobody would clear me, and eventually told me about the tryout that started my career. He was a mentor. When he said go see this guy, I went.

And he told me why. Mack Newton was the man who rehabbed Bo Jackson back to Major League Baseball after Bo's hip replacement.

So I knew walking in. That's the part people assume I found out later.

The winter of 2007

I'd just finished my first professional season — a championship with the Windy City ThunderBolts, MVP of the series. I was twenty-two, two and a half years past my own total hip replacement, and I went to Phoenix to train with the only coach on earth who had done this before.

I've written about Mack elsewhere. Two replaced hips of his own. A studio with House of Discipline on the sign. A room where an Olympic decathlete, a big league second baseman and a thirteen-year-old all took notes before they earned the workout.

One day I was sitting in his office and the phone rang.

The call

Mack picked it up, put it on speaker, and said — to Bo —

"Say hello to this 22-year-old young man with a total hip replacement trying to come back and play pro baseball."

I said: "Hi Mr. Jackson. Nice to meet you."

And Bo Jackson said: "Good luck, kid."

That's it. That's the entire conversation, and I have carried it for eighteen years.

I've replayed it a lot and never once come up with what I should have said instead. But think about who was on that line. The only man who had taken an artificial hip back to professional sport. The man who rebuilt him. And a kid who was about to try it in a harder job — because Bo came back as a designated hitter, and I was a pitcher.

What Mack told me when Bo wasn't on the phone

This is the part I'd never written down, and it's better than the call.

Mack told me that Bo had been genuinely close to not coming back at all. That the comeback happened for two reasons.

One was Nike. Bo was the centre of the Bo Knows campaign, one of the most famous advertising runs in sports history, and there was a commercial dimension to whether Bo Jackson played baseball again.

The other was his mother. She was dying, and she wanted him to play. He came back for her.

I didn't check any of that for eighteen years. I checked it while writing this.

Bo Jackson's mother was dying of cancer, and he made a vow to her that he would play again. He returned on 9 April 1993, Opening Day at Comiskey against the Yankees, and in his first at-bat back after the hip replacement — a seventh-inning pinch-hit appearance off Neal Heaton — he hit a home run. He was named American League Comeback Player of the Year that season.

Mack told a twenty-two-year-old the true version, in an office in Phoenix, fifteen years after it happened.

The other thing he said about Bo was simpler, and I think it was the actual lesson he wanted me to take: Bo just did whatever Mack told him, and he was the hardest worker in the room. The most physically gifted athlete of his generation, and the thing his rehab coach remembered was that he did what he was told and outworked everybody.

The part I only see now

My mother died on 22 May 2005. My hip was replaced on 25 July 2005, two months later. She had sat in a meeting with me that spring to learn what my life would look like afterwards, and then she was gone before it happened.

Bo Jackson came back on a replaced hip carrying a promise to his dying mother.

I did not know that when I was standing in that office. Mack told me the story as a piece of baseball history and I heard it as a piece of baseball history.

I'm forty-one now and it reads completely differently.

Was he a hero?

Honestly, no — not in the way people assume when I tell this story.

My brother had the poster on his bedroom wall, the famous one, shoulder pads and a bat across his shoulders. Bo was an icon to anybody who followed any sport, because what he could do wasn't quite believable. But he wasn't my guy.

He became enormously significant to me later, once I understood I was associated with him — that there were, functionally, two of us who had taken a total hip replacement into professional baseball, and he was the other one.

Who I called afterwards

I've tried to remember and I can't.

I probably called my brother. It's equally possible I called nobody and just went on with my day.

What I do remember is the feeling, and it wasn't excitement. It was a kind of settling. A deeper groundedness — that I was doing the right thing, that I had to stay on the path, that God was behind me and my mom was right beside me, and that it was going to be fine.

I was going to do what I set out to do.

Seven professional seasons. Four championships. Still throwing a hundred pitches a game at forty-one, on the same hip.

Good luck, kid.

I took it.