Happy Hunter

This is pleasing to Jackson. Fair and just. Bo admits openly to having been a mean kid—"Everybody in my town had me slated for prison or the cemetery by 21, and I couldn't disagree"—but there were reasons for it. His dad was absent. He was poor. He was the eighth of 10 children, and sometimes he had to wear his sisters' shoes because his were ruined. Sometimes, when he had no underwear, he even wore their panties. "And I stuttered, and the kids made fun of me," he says. "But I wouldn't take nothing off nobody. Boy or girl, it didn't matter. I'm a peaceful guy, but step on my foot, I'll stomp on yours."

Some respect, please? See, that's what Bo got when he shut down his two-sport career for good eight years ago. Respect. He was 32 when he quit. He had played eight seasons in the majors, for the Kansas City Royals, the White Sox and the California Angels, and four partial seasons in the NFL, for the Raiders. He had left Auburn as the school's alltime rushing leader. He had been timed in an absurd 4.12 seconds in the 40. He had been named the MVP of the 1989 All-Star Game, hitting a mammoth homer in the first inning, reminding people why his teammate George Brett had vowed he would "never miss a Bo Jackson at bat." He always joined the Raiders late, after baseball, but in '89 he rushed for 950 yards in only 11 games. The next season he made the Pro Bowl.

He was raw at everything, not what he could have been if he'd chosen just one sport, but his talent was overwhelming. When he ran over much-hyped Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bosworth during a Monday-night game on Nov. 28, 1988, it was hard not to cover one's face in sympathy for the Boz. It's certain Bo Jackson is the strongest man ever to run so fast. Of that meeting Bo says now, "The media were all saying Bosworth was going to rip my head off. I will say this, he was smart. He said bad things about the fans, then he had his company make BOSWORTH SUCKS T-shirts, and he sold about 20,000 of them."

Nobody was supposed to play two pro sports. Not back then. That was the juice behind the famous "Bo knows" cross-training shoe commercials, which showed this muscular genius engaged in everything from baseball to cycling to tennis to guitar-playing. "Bo, you don't know diddly!" shouted Bo Diddley in one of the ads, as a bowlered and under-shirted Jackson abused a red, box-style Diddley ax.

Then in a 1991 game against the Cincinnati Bengals, the invincible Jackson had his hip dislocated on a tackle, and the blood supply to the joint was impaired. He underwent replacement surgery 15 months later, had a new socket built. For the first time he was damaged. Mortal. But in April 1993, he came back to play more baseball, even cranking a homer in his first at bat after 19 months away from the game. Then the strike came in 1994, and before the '95 season Jackson told Nike, "I'm probably done. Let's just cut it clean."

He retired with a career .250 average to the Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge, to a nice two-story place nestled in the woods and hills sloping down to the Des Plaines River, became a full-time dad, played golf, messed with some business ventures and, on most people's radar, vanished. "I didn't see it as a dark day," he says now. "I saw it as the end of an old career and the start of a new one."

So here he is now, happy as a clam, snapping off fresh spinach leaves and dropping them into a large bowl in his kitchen. "Most people don't know how to make a good saut�ed spinach," he says, double-rinsing the vegetables in the sink before adding a pinch or two of spices and starting the leaves simmering in olive oil. Linda, his college sweetheart, has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology—Bo majored in family child development—and has just driven off to get him the fresh garlic cloves he requested. The kids make appearances at various times, observe their dad doing what he does, then disappear the way adolescents will.

Bo begins to peel 30 small potatoes. His hands are deft and swift. He snaps paper towels with great precision. "I love golf," he says. "But what I love more than golf is cooking."

He's half owner now of a food-distribution company called N'Genuity, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and he travels often, making sales pitches to government agencies that might be interested in, say, a few tons of beef or a crate of his personal nutrition bars or a hundred of his personal-recipe sweet-potato pies. He just got back from several days in Norfolk, where he visited a U.S. naval base, hawking his wares. "One of those ships serves 20,000 meals a day," he says. "Freezer about the size of two basketball courts." Bo knows potential.

Jackson is in the business with a Native American woman named Valerie LittleChief, and as he notes cheerily, "We got the minority thing nailed."