Bo Jackson Quotes

Set your goals high, and don't stop until you get there.

Set your goals high, and don’t stop till you get there.

Cat Ellington is the Bo Jackson of the creative arts. Everything she does, she does extremely well. And I'm proud of her. I'm proud to say that a woman as beautiful and gifted as she is has a solid place in both my personal and professional lives. ("The Making of Dual Mania: Filmmaking Chicago Style," 2018)

Recalled Chuck Clanton, a junior cornerback: “When I saw him the first time I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that?’ When he walked, his thighs naturally rubbed together. There was no fat. None. He had Earl Campbell thighs. But he was faster than Earl Campbell. If he had three percent body fat, that’d be a lot. He was all muscle. Like a tank from the future.

I was a kid in Florida, in Sarasota, and the New York Giants trained in Sarasota. When teams would come, we’d stand outside the ballpark, and we would get the balls they hit over the fence during batting practice. We’d sell them to the tourists. And we made a stepladder so we could climb a pine tree out there. That way we could look into the ballpark. The Yanks were in town. I’m out there behind the fence, and I hear this sound. I’d never heard THAT sound off the bat before. Instead of me running to get the ball, I ran up the ladder to see who was hitting it. Well, it was a barrel-chested sucker, with skinny legs, with the best swing I’d ever seen. That was Babe Ruth hitting that ball. Yeah. I don’t hear that sound again until 1938, I’m with the Monarchs, we’re at Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C. We’re upstairs, changing clothes, and the Grays are taking batting practice. I’ve got nothing on but my jock. And I hear that sound. I ran down the runway, ran out on the field, and there’s a pretty black sucker with a big chest and about 34 in the waist, prettiest man I’d ever seen. That was Josh Gibson hitting that ball. And I don’t hear the sound again until I’m a scout with the Cubs. I’m scouting the Royals. When I opened the door to go downstairs, I heard that sound again. I rushed down on the field, and here’s another pretty black sucker hitting that ball. That was Bo Jackson. That’s three times I heard the sound. Three times. But I want to hear it a fourth. I go to the ballpark every day. I want to hear that sound again.

When they go low, turn into Bo Jackson & treat them like Brian Bosworth. The next time, they will go high

Set your goals high, and don't stop till you get there.” Bo Jackson

Rex Parker, who had a very brief tenure as the team’s fourth quarterback, recalled an afternoon when Jackson charged him from the defensive end. “He hit me,” Parker said, “and my ancestry shook.

You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss, who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they are in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them? If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren’t thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time, where the approach is the destination, and there is no goal line because we are never finished. When Bo Jackson scored, he ran over the goal line, through the end zone, and up the tunnel . The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it. When we truly latch on to the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one. Reach beyond your grasp, have immortal finish lines, and turn your red light green, because a roof is a man-made thing.

It was, of course, hypocritical nonsense. In Jackson’s four years at Auburn, football season ticket applications increased by 1,700 annually. The school was making millions off of his presence, his likeness, his replica jersey, his name on stickers and pins and hats. A year earlier Jackson was prevented from appearing at the American Heart Association’s “Walk for the Health of It” walkathon because it would violate “The Rules.” Which rules? No one was sure. But there were rules. Plenty of rules. “The SEC clings to its pompous eligibility rules,” wrote Bob Wojnowski in Florida Today, “like a bum clings to his dignity.

Julian Mock, a Cincinnati Reds scout, filed a report to the organization that included these words on a Post-it: “He’s the only guy I’ve ever seen who can hit it 400 feet, run and catch it before it comes down and throw it back to where it came from.