Bo Jackson

The boy everyone called Bo was not simply restless. Growing up near Bessemer, Alabama, he took lunch money, shoplifted, fought, and terrorized other children. He wanted to look hard and became known as a bully. In 1976, he joined a group of boys who killed a minister’s pigs. His mother, Florence Bond, considered sending him to reform school.

Bond was raising ten children. She was, biographer Jeff Pearlman found, a strict disciplinarian who remained fiercely proud of Bo. She warned him that if he kept going, he would be wearing prison stripes before he turned twenty-one. After the pig incident, Jackson repented and worked to repay the minister. The damage did not disappear into a lecture; repair took work.

A high-school baseball coach supplied another kind of structure. Pearlman’s reporting found that the coach drove Jackson home after practice every day, looked after him, and took him under his wing. Sports did more than display the teenager’s exceptional ability. Practice placed rules, repetition, and a dependable adult inside hours that had often gone badly.

Jackson later said that at sixteen he decided he had to stop being a bully and straighten out. He did not turn that change into a story of willpower alone. Looking back on his choice to play two professional sports, he said the original purpose was to keep him out of trouble: “Idle time with me is the devil’s workshop, and if my mother was still alive, she would tell you.”

He went on to win the Heisman Trophy and play both Major League Baseball and in the NFL. Rare athletic gifts mattered enormously; firm parenting did not manufacture them. What Bond and the coach changed was the use of his time. One made the consequences unmistakable and left room for repair. The other kept returning, practice after practice, with a ride home and work worth coming back to.