This Kansas City Royals legend ‘took a chance’ on Bo Jackson: ‘Thank you, Art Stewart’

If Bo Jackson had been born a generation later, when he might well have forsaken the game of football that rendered him a supernova, chances are he’d be in Cooperstown alongside former teammate George Brett — the only National Baseball Hall of Fame member who spent his entire career playing for the Royals.

If born a couple generations earlier, when moving pictures of Jackson’s feats would have been scarce and grainy, he’d be seen today as part myth, part legend because, well, how could you credibly document such a phenomenon?

“Call it mystical or magical,” then-Royals general manager John Schuerholz told The Star in 1987.

Without the proper receipts, you could only have wondered if he was more akin to Bernard Malamud’s fictitious Roy Hobbs, “The Natural,” stupefying the opposition by literally hitting the cover off the ball, or more like Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson.

Decades after he’d last heard that distinct clout in a swing, Buck O’Neil thought, “Here is that sound again!” on the 1986 day Jackson signed with the Royals and took batting practice after not swinging a bat for months … and scorched the first two pitches he faced off the Crown scoreboard in center field of what was then known as Royals Stadium.

That was a mere hint of the impending tales to astonish that remain hard to fathom even with video evidence: the prodigious home runs and absurd speed and scaling of fences and impossible throws and snapping bats across his knee or head and a zillion other scenes that defied logic.

All the more so because he would never have played for the Royals if not for some indulgences of fate and the astute eye and ear of longtime super scout Art Stewart and the beginning of a beautiful friendship that we’ll come back to.

But it was fleetingly but spectacularly real until the wretched hip injury Jackson suffered moonlighting with the NFL’s Raiders — another ample reason for Kansas Citians to dislike the Chiefs’ rival — led to the Royals releasing him in 1991.

The miserable turn left teammates crestfallen: “He could have been the best player to ever put on a Royals uniform, or any uniform,” pitcher Bret Saberhagen told reporters then. And it relegated Jackson to somewhat uncharacteristically talked through tears.

The sentimentality at the time wasn’t so much about his endangered careers but about parting with the sorts of friendships he’d found difficult to make while skyrocketing to fame through his remarkable talents — and the ubiquitous “Bo Knows” Nike ad campaign.

What Bo didn’t know then was the way he’d be forever reunited with the Royals and so many of those enduring friends on Wednesday, when it was announced he’d been voted into the Royals Hall of Fame.

“I was floored when I heard about it,” Jackson, now 61, said during a Zoom call with local media on Wednesday.

And when Jackson is enshrined in an on-field ceremony before the Royals’ June 29 game against Cleveland at Kauffman Stadium, perhaps some tears will flow then, too, from a man who more typically has avoided embracing such feelings.

“I’ve become an emotional person now,” he said. “You know how they say ‘With age comes wisdom?’”

In this case, it comes in the form of gratitude instead of any of those mind-blowing achievements.

In fact, Jackson funneled questions about his memories here away from on-field accomplishments.

Maybe that was in part because he always had made the incredible seem so routine that he seldom even appeared to impress himself. But it was mostly because he was focused on the camaraderie and “privilege it was to play with all these famous people” of whom he was in awe himself.

He thought about Brett’s gorgeous swing and Willie Wilson’s pretty stride as he’d round second and third and Frank White being a magician with his glove.

He talked about Saberhagen’s trash talking — and making good on it — and Dan Quisenberry’s “underarm” delivery that looked “painful as all-get-out.”

And about how John Mayberry, then a coach, sometimes would make him laugh so hard he’d have to step out of the batter’s box to catch himself.

Then there was his fondness for manager Dick Howser and Paul Splittorff and Dennis Leonard and Mark Gubicza and too many others to mention from his six years in the organization.

But his most striking reverence was for the delightful Stewart, whom Jackson surprised with a visit in Wisconsin just months before Stewart died in 2021 at the age of 94.

Whenever his mind does wander to his favorite moments as a player, Jackson said it often starts with being in the on-deck circle for home games and looking in the stands and winking at Stewart’s wife, Donna.

“Because she and Art were like my mom and dad when I was in Kansas City,” said Jackson, who today is immersed in numerous business endeavors. “And I would always speak to her or wave to her or wink at her every time I went up to the plate.

“It’s things like that. The baseball part was easy. It’s just the fact that I was able to come into a great organization and do the things I did, and the Royals allowed me to blossom.”

Stewart was instrumental in that after Royals scout Ken Gonzales started tracking Jackson in Alabama early on and cultivated a relationship with Jackson’s mother by often staying at the Ramada Inn where she worked.

Jackson’s abundant talents were evident even before he was a teenager, but football was a wedge issue: Jackson chose to go to Auburn instead of signing with the Yankees when they drafted him in 1982 and stayed in college when the Angels drafted him in 1985.

He went on to win the Heisman Trophy that year, months after Gonzales wrote a scouting report on Jackson that called him “the best pure athlete in America today.”

But getting him to commit to baseball after Tampa Bay had made him the No. 1 overall selection in the 1986 NFL Draft was a delicate and complicated dance predicated on really knowing Jackson as the Royals had come to.

It helped that they had a relationship with Hal Baird, the former Royals scout who fortuitously was the baseball coach at Auburn and convinced the Royals Jackson was serious about baseball.

They also understood that he was conscious of the perils of football, particularly in the context of the Bucs.

Per The Kansas City Times in a conversation repeated by then-owner Ewing Kauffman in 1986, Jackson said, “Mr. K, if you poured water on this napkin, that’s what Tampa Bay’s line is like.”

The Royals were cognizant of the love for the game in Jackson’s family and knew he relished the challenge of becoming the first Heisman winner to make a splash in another sport.

And they recognized that he wanted to mentor Black youths. So he’d be given the opportunity to be a volunteer counselor for a Marion Labs program that provided tuition for minority students at junior colleges — a factor that Kauffman said at the time he believed was key to Jackson’s decision to choose Kansas City over Tampa.

Today, Jackson might not even have considered the NFL, where he began playing in 1987.. Knowing what he knows now about head injuries in the game, he told USA Today in 2017, he said he would “never have played football.”

He was less vehement on Wednesday, initially saying it would be a “tossup” and that he doubts his two grandsons will play before adding, “I’m friends with too many ex-ballplayers who show symptoms of just getting your head banged every day.”

As for himself, Jackson said his health is fine other than, alas, the mysterious hiccup issue he’s been contending with for some two years now and that surfaced throughout the call.

Back then, though, compelling him to play baseball took a discerning eye and tender touch that were among Stewart’s hallmarks in his nearly 70 years as a scout that included 16 years as the Royals’ director of scouting.

Jackson wasn’t sure how or why, he said, but Stewart saw something different in him than others did.

“Actually, Art was the first person that I thought about (when notified of the Hall of Fame honor),” Jackson said. “Because he took a chance on me. When everybody else was saying, ‘No, he’s not going to do this,’ Art knew. Art took a chance on me, and to this day I honor that man.”

Now they’ll be enshrined in the same Hall of Fame.

And even if it’s great to have the sheer wonder of Bo Jackson and his affiliation with Kansas City all the more emblazoned in Royals’ lore, it’s better yet to know it means plenty to him.

Because of those he was with then … and now again.

And, most of all, because of the man who brought the myth and the legend and the magical and the mystical right here — each to be celebrated anew in a Hall of Fame that fits just right.

“Without Art Stewart, there wouldn’t be a relationship between myself and the Kansas City Royals,” Jackson said. “So, thank you, Art Stewart.”