By Chris Avena
Our feature guest is without question, the greatest athlete of our generation. His Athletic abilities are legendary. He is the only athlete to be an all-star in both the NFL and Major League Baseball. But more importantly, he is a very passionate Hunter and outdoorsman. Will you please welcome Mr. Bo Jackson.
Chris: Bo, Is it safe to say that athletics was your job, and hunting was your passion?
Bo: Absolutely. I worked during the summer with baseball, but the few days that I would have off, I would be out fishing, which is a passion. During the winter, football was my job. But when I had time off, I was in a deer stand. Or somewhere in the ground blind hunting. Now that I'm retired from both Baseball and Football. It is a full-time passion for me. Fishing, hunting, I own three boats. They are not social boats or party boats to go out for the weekend and just hang out. They are fishing boats. I have one boat for the lake and two boats for the river. I spend a lot of time whenever I have time on the water. Besides that, besides my fishing, and my hunting. All of my friends, well, most of my friends. They are not ex ballplayers or anything like that. They are everyday work in Joe's, doctors, businessmen, you name it, they love to hunt, they love to fish, love to bird hunt, and so forth and so on. So that's what I do now. I'm so busy with my work once again because I am supposed to be retired, but they say when you retire, you work three times as hard as you did when you worked when you actually had a job. So all of my time now is spent trying to balance my food companies, my multiple companies that I have. And my hunting and fishing. I got my boat sitting in my driveway right now. It's been sitting there for five days. And I haven't had time to get out on the river because of my food company and traveling and doing this and so forth and so on. But it's fun. It's good to know that it's there. And with me being the boss, I can walk out this office anytime I get ready. Go get that boat and go to the river and don't have to bother with anybody.
Chris: Have a cell phone you can work anywhere.
Bo: I can work anywhere. Right now my buddies and I have planned to go to Southern Texas next week for an archery hunt. And I can't wait.
Chris: What's on the menu?
Bo: We are going to a friend's ranch. That is a high fence. He has some exotics there. And I think the animal that I'm going after with my bow is a Nilgai. That's a big body animal.
Chris: It is, they are very durable. They are tough animals.
Bo: I have never had Nilgai meat before. I have had all the other types of wild game so I am looking forward to trying some of it. I am looking forward to taking it with my bow but they want me to take it with the rifle. But I am hell bent on doing it with my bow.
Chris: It is going to be very difficult to do with a bow, I will tell you that.
Bo: I tell you what, if I can get him within 70 to 80 yards, and with him not knowing that I am there. I think I'm a pretty good shot. I do all my own adjusting and torquing on all my hunting equipment, my golf equipment. I do it all I get in my man cave and I unhook the smoke detector and I go to work. So I do all my own fletching, building my arrows and tune in my bows to where they shoot like a Dart. Now, I just didn't read this in a book. I have a lot of friends that's in the outdoor business. Vicki and Ralph from Archers Choice. Tim Wells out of Peoria, Jackie Bushman, Michael Waddell, all of these guys and ladies are good friends of mine. So I've learned from them over the years and I take it home and I get in my man cave. That's where once I went downstairs in my basement into my man cave where I got a sign saying no trespassers. I'm no longer Bo Jackson. I'm that outdoors person that the country barely knows. That has a passion to be in that area, that has a passion, to want to get out in nature and just be a part of nature.
Chris: When you played for the Royals, you had a very unusual way to zone yourself in for the game.
Bo: I just shot my bow and arrow in the locker room a lot. The players weren't there. I get there early and just to relax. I would do the "William Tell" thing, where I go get an apple and set it on something and put an arrow through the apple and Bret Saberhagen and other team mates would try to pull my bow back, and they couldn't pull it back. The bow was set at 90 pounds. And they couldn't pull it back at the time. But now with me being an old man. And with the artificial shoulder, I'm only pulling about 60 pounds now, which is way more than enough. If you're shooting the proper equipment, if you got it set up proper with a heavy enough arrow that can carry the kinetic energy behind it to get the penetration of a big size animal you have nothing to worry about.
Chris: I heard a story that at one point you would be shooting the apple out of your team mates hand?
Bo: I have only done that once.
Chris: How in God's name, did you talk somebody into holding an apple while you shot it out of their hand?
Bo: Look, the thing that you have to realize, baseball players are a bunch of kids. It doesn't matter how old you are. Everybody in the locker room. The only part that you all get to see is us out on the field where we are being serious and playing. But in the locker room. It's like a daycare center. Everybody's doing things. Everybody's playing pranks on each other. Everybody's pulling jokes on each other. Everybody's pissing each other off. And we're having fun. So yeah, we do crazy things. We play jokes on each other. And every now and then you can talk one of your teammates into doing something dangerous, like hold an apple while the other teammates shoot an arrow through the apple out of his hand. So that's just an everyday occurrence in a major league locker room.
Chris: That's wild. Now taking a step back, at what age were you introduced to hunting, and what was your impression of the sport before you actually went out of the hunt?
Bo: Well, I was introduced to hunting when I was five or six years old. The first time I ever went hunting was with my grandfather. I had to be three or four years old. My grandfather had a smokehouse. This was before anybody had a freezer or could afford a deep freezer. Everybody had a smokehouse, you would smoke your meat to keep it, and he had a smokehouse outback. He had his farm animals, but he would go hunting and he would hunt raccoon, possum, deer if he could. We went up to coon hunt one night and he got his hound dog, his coon dog. We left his house because over the weekends I just spent the night at his house, which was only a block up the street. And we woke up one morning and it's just as plain as night he woke me up. I got up. Got me dressed. He got his shotgun, got his hound dog. My grandfather was an iron ore miner. So he got his hat and it had the light on it with the battery pack on it.
Got his shotgun and he had a rope and the rope clipped on his belt and he tied it around my waist so we wouldn't have to hold my hand and he said follow me. So he had the rope on me and I'm just following my granddad as we go up on the mountain. We sat on a log and he unleashes his hound dog and lets him go. So we sat there and I'm wondering why he let his dog go in the dark because it's 3:30 in the morning, and we sat down and we wait till we hear that dog start baying and yelping. So, we go down and look and he turned his light on his mining cap and up in a tree I see these two little lights looking back at us. It's a raccoon. He took a shotgun and boom! Leaves and bark and the raccoon hits the ground, and it bounces. Before it hits the ground again, that hound dog got him and shook it. That was my first experience with hunting. Like I said, he hunted for the food.
Archery, as far as I'm concerned, my cousin Jason and I, we built our own bow and arrows. We built our own slingshots. We build our own bow and arrows out of just sticks. We go get a limb from a tree that we could bend, get some nylon cord around one end and bend it around the other end. We go out in the field and find twigs that are straight about the size of a pencil. Then we get the bottle caps off of a Coca Cola or something and bend it around the tip with a hammer, to put a point. Then we would get a chicken feather, split down the back of the arrow, stick it down, get some thread, and tie it around. That feather would stabilize our arrow and we would hunt my uncle's chickens. Well, not hunt but shoot at them because we could'nt hurt them. We would bruise them or wound them. Once my uncle found out, he beat the crap out of both of us. Period. He whooped the crap out of both of us out in the yard in front of the neighbors. But that was life. As a kid, we had to make our own fun.
So I got to college and got older. A punter named Louis Colbert, one day after practice, we had a day practice during the summer. And I was up in my room and I walked out on the balcony, I saw the punter out in the yard of the football dorm. He was shooting this bow. And I never shot a compound bow before. I watched him shooting a styrofoam cup about 20 yards away. I couldn't see the arrow but I saw that cup move. I was like "Damn", he hit that cup. He got another arrow and he hit that cup again. So I'm intrigued. I walk down and go down to see him. I said how are you hitting that cup every time like that? He said, Well, I got a peep sight here and I got a pin, a 20-yard pin and I looked through the site. Once I pulled the bow back, I looked through this site and put that pin on whatever I wanted to hit at 20 yards. So I said can I do it? He let me take a few shots and I was hooked.
Chris: You were a natural
Bo: I was hooked. My first bow I ever bought was a Fred Bear bow that cost me 63 bucks. That came with six arrows, aluminum arrows, until this day, that bows hanging in my man cave. With the same string on it that came on it 30 something years ago
Chris: You never restrung it?
Bo: And I can still pull it back and it still shoots.
Chris: Wow, that's amazing.
Bo: I still have that bow. It's heavy. Because back then everybody just made their bow to make the bow. The first thing I ever killed with that bow was a wild pig. So that's how I got introduced and reintroduced to the outdoors and hunting. Now it's just my way of relaxing and getting away from being Bo Jackson.
Chris: You know, football and baseball are tremendous team sports that are constantly testing you physically. How does hunting test you?
Bo: Hunting humbles you like golf. Every time you think of you got to handle this, or I've mastered this. It throws your curve ball. It throws your curve ball so it humbles you. Hunting doesn't mean going out every time harvesting an animal. Hunting doesn't mean being successful. I consider a successful hunt, going out and not even seeing an animal but learning something that animal is doing in their everyday life. The path that animal is traveling. It's like a chess game in the woods, you're trying to get to where you're downwind of that animal. And that animal is always circling to find out who is in his living room. Because if you go to your house, and you walk in the door and see something out of place that wasn't out of place before, you know, somebody is in your house. And that animal knows when you're there, they may not see you, but he's gonna work his way to 360 degrees until he can get whatever is in his living room, and he's going to get the hell out of there. So it's always good for me to try to outwit that animal because I know that animal is way smarter than me. And it's just a chess game with this.
Chris: What was your most memorable hunt?
Bo: Wow, my most memorable hunt was the first time I went elk hunting. No, that was my first ever whitetail hunt. I went to a buddy's place by the name of George Mann. He's like a pioneer of archery hunting in the state of Illinois. He held probably most of the archery records for biggest deer, in the state of Illinois. He passed about 10 years ago. He taught me a lot about archery. The first time I ever went hunting on his place, it was with the rifle. I didn't know anything about deer except if you want to take a deer, take one with horns. He put me in a tree stand out in the woods. He said, they're gonna come around in this wheat field. He said, if you harvest an animal, don't get out of your stand, just wait till I come back and get you. So I'm thinking, Well, all right. About an hour and a half later, I harvest a deer. A basket rack eight points at the time dropped him right there. So I just sat there and I started to get the shakes. I'm like, What the hell's wrong with me? I just got a case of buck fever, as they call it. So,I sat there and he didn't show up. Hours later he didn't show up and is getting dark, still didn't show up. Now it's really dark, and it still didnt show up. I shot the deer around 4:00. By 6:30 you can't see your hand in front of you. I'm waiting for him to come. Nobody comes. So I said, Well, I'm going to get down. I start climbing down the ladder. And I get my foot touches the ground. And Wooo! I shoot back up the ladder. Now I got a rifle. I go back up there, sit in the stand I'm like, what the hell is that? Not knowing that deer snort at you, blow at you. So I sit there for 20 minutes. I start to go back down, get halfway down. It blows at me again. So I'm thinking is that a Bigfoot? What the hell is that? I chamber around because I don't know. Can't see anything. And about 20 minutes later, I see the lights coming through the woods, his truck. He comes down to pull to the edge of the field. "Well, did you get one"? Where the heck have you been? I almost got attacked by something. I don't know what it is. He said, Why do you say you almost got attacked?'' I told him the story. He laughed his butt off. He said that was just a deer blowing at you. So that had to be my most memorable hunt and from that day on. I've just been an outdoorsman. So whenever I get the opportunity, I'm outdoors. I'm out in the woods, out on the lake, out on the river doing something.
Chris: The number of hunters have been declining over the years. The fastest-growing demographic as far as people buying hunting licenses are women. The fastest demographic, the slowest is both Hispanic and African American. How would we entice more people of Hispanic and African American background to get out into the field?
Bo: Well. That's a hard one because I know with my friends, my African American friends. They are all suburbanites. I invite them out to go to my hunt lodge to hunt pheasant duck. And that is when the excuses start. I said look, just come. We will get you hunting, we will get you a day license. We will get you a three-day license at the hunting lodge or you can get your hunting license right there at the lodge. You can borrow one of my shotguns, and I'll show you how to shoot a shotgun. We go out and we pheasant hunt. Now, these are wild pheasants, but they had to be imported from Wisconsin or whatever. But the way we got it structured to set up a pheasant is gonna continue to run from you. In our property at one of our lodges is surrounded by Girl Scout property, not right next door. But these pheasants keep running. So we have little two feet fences at the end of the field. So we'll get 25 to 30 yards from the edge of the field and we know that there are some pheasant there, we'll send the dogs in and let them flush the birds. We have a day of hunting. After that, my friends were like, Hey, where can I go buy me a shotgun. It only takes one time and they are hooked. I try to do my part to educate people of color, people in my own race and any race if they want to try it once. Because I know that if I hadn't gotten interested and if someone didn't teach me how to do it, I probably wouldn't be that person either. Now, the thing about it is that they think well, I'm gonna go hunt that wild game and it probably tastes awful. Wild game is some of the hell is probably the healthiest food that you can eat. Because, number one, it's all-natural. I've had my friends come over and I cook everything from peasant to wild boar to venison tenderloins. Rabbits’ stew you name it, pheasant Potpie, and they're like, man, where did you get this? I said out of my freezer. Man, how did it get in your freezer? I put it there after I harvested it. They say, is this a wild game? Yes. They say Wow! I can't believe it. And it's just the fact that if you have friends that are willing to allow you to educate them on the art of harvesting wild animals if you have the capacity to have the patience to teach those who have never experienced that, then God bless you. Because number one, I can eat wild game every day.
Chris: Yeah me too.
Bo: I can eat wild game every day.
Chris: What's your favorite wild game recipe?
Bo: Oh! That depends on the season. During the winter, I like to make a rabbit stew. With my signature buttermilk cornbread, but I can take all the red meat and neck meat off of any deer and make stews with, make pot roast, grilling. It is very simple for me. It really doesn't matter. I like to take that pheasant and make it with an orange sauce with some scalloped potatoes.
Chris: So you are a good cook?
Bo: I love to cook.
Chris: Is there something you can't do?
Bo: I can't play basketball. That's an indoor sport. I'm not an indoor person. I've never had the interest in playing basketball. That's about it. But as far as wild game, cooking, in this little office here, last week, I brought some of my Bluefin tuna, to the office and just seared it on both sides. The way that it's rare in the middle, just slice it up, put it on a plate with some wasabi, and some soy sauce. And just had Bluefin tuna for lunch which is just outstanding. So that's what I do. That's me in a nutshell. If I harvest it, because I don't like to use the word kill, if I harvest what I hunt, I put it to good use, and if I don't have room in my freezer, like I don't right now. I always get it processed by a professional processor, and give it to needy families. Which actually makes me feel 10 times better. Than consuming that myself.
Chris: And it's helping people.
Bo: It's helping people 100%.
Chris: So now you have Bo Jackson Signature Foods.
Bo: Bo Jackson Signature Foods are part of Jackson and partners, which is just one of my many companies that I'm involved in that I'm trying to help run to keep afloat. To make it simple yes. I'm in the food business. I'm not doing anything different than anybody else. Except trying to give the consumer a quality "Grade A" product. At a very good cost. Period.
Chris: Is it mostly Steak and Fish?
Bo: Let's just say proteins, which can be all meats, from steaks to crab, to shrimp, to burgers, you name it. I'm just trying to make my footprint in the sand of the food industry. I have another company called Jackson packaging, which is a corrugated box company that has been doing some business with a lot of companies. So I keep myself busy. I'm national. I've been on the national speaking tour for almost 30 years and I stutter. I love to talk. It doesn't bother me. It's just a fact that if you can overcome your fears, anything is possible.
Chris: That’s a fact.
Bo: Anything is possible.
Chris: So who taught you to cook?
Bo: I learned how to cook from watching my mother when I was three to five years old. First thing I ever cooked was that buttermilk cornbread that I brag about every chance I get. When I was young in order for my mother to cook dinner for my other siblings, which at that time was my other seven siblings. She had to keep an eye on me and cook at the same time. So she would make me sit in my little red rocking chair that I got for Christmas. She set me in the middle of the kitchen, right by the kitchen table. And she said, don't you move. I either have to sit there because she would have her soap operas on TV in the kitchen also while she's cooking. She told me don't you move because she knew that if she couldn't hear me or see me, I was doing something to either burn down the house or electrocute myself. So don't move and I sat there and I had to either watched her cook buttermilk cornbread every day and that cast iron skillet that weighed about 14 pounds. I had to watch her cooking that cast iron skillet or watch the general hospital when Luke and Laura were in high school. So that's what I did. Watch her cook or Luke and Laura with Dr. Hardy and Jesse. I still know all the characters.
Chris: I used to watch it.
Bo: So you know what I'm talking about? Yep, so that's what I did. Watch General Hospital, One Life to Live. All those people. And either watch soap operas or watch my mom cook. I watch her cook buttermilk cornbread. Watch her cook the fried chicken. She would make the cornbread in the cast iron skillet and she flipping out on a pan. Use that same skillet. Puts them all in it, fried chicken or fried pork chops.
Chris: So you literally went from the gridiron to the cast iron?
Bo: I actually, to be honest with you. I was more familiar with the cast iron before the gridiron. So I went from the cast iron to the gridiron. Now I'm back to the cast iron. So yes.
Chris: All right. Well, I appreciate your time.
Bo: Thank you, brother. I appreciate your time. Thank you for coming.
Chris: Good luck this season and hunt safe.
Bo Jackson Signature Foods: https://bojacksonsignaturefoods.com/