by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Dexter knows Bo.
Actually, it all goes a lot deeper than that. Jacksonville attorney Dexter Van Davis and Vincent “Bo” Jackson were classmates from the seventh through the 12th grade in McAlla, Ala., “a suburb of Bessemer,” Jackson said. “Which is a suburb of Birmingham.”
Jackson, the first athlete chosen to play in the All-Star game of two major sports, has been out of sports since 1995. He and Valerie LittleChief are now co-owners of N’Genuity Enterprises, which offers “a variety of food products as well as world-class business, technology and staffing solutions.”
The company headquarters is in Scottsdale, Ariz. When he isn’t traveling, Jackson works out of his home in Oak Brook, Ill., about 30 miles from Chicago.
“I do a lot of business with the military,” said Jackson, who was visiting his high school football teammate in the offices of Luster & Davis last week followed by a visit the next day to see the sailors on board the U.S.S. Kennedy. “I sell food to the military through government contracting. I sell to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
“When the troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan sit down and eat chicken, burgers, wings, breakfast sausage, they’re eating Bo Jackson signature foods.”
Were it not for the hip replacement caused by his last run as an Oakland Raider, Jackson appears to still be in good enough shape to take the field.
His firm grip could make a visitor feel as though a bus had parked on top of his hand.
His memory, however, is not quite what it could be.
“We just annihilated the Gators when I was at Auburn,” he said, with an amused grin at Davis, who received his law degree from the University of Florida. “Seminoles, too. Whipped up on all y’all boys.”
According to the Auburn Sports Information Department, Jackson’s teams beat FSU the three times they met during his four years. The University of Florida, however, beat Auburn three out of four games.
There is no confusion, however, about the impact Jackson had on collegiate and professional sports.
He was MVP in the Sugar Bowl (1983) and the Liberty Bowl (1984), was an All-American (1983, 1985), received the Heisman Trophy (1985), was MVP of the Major League Baseball All-Star game (1989) and was an NFL Pro Bowl selection (1990).
His high school teammates could see it coming.
Although Jackson “was just an average player” as a junior, “We had helicopters come to our school to interview this guy that senior year,” said Van Davis. “They were recruiting him like crazy. All the schools in Alabama were.”
Van Davis went into the Air Force in September 1982; Jackson spent the summer at Auburn.
“I went to summer school because I wanted to get a jump on everything,” Jackson said.
Van Davis stayed on active duty for eight years before getting an undergraduate degree at the University of North Florida and then going to law school. He is still in the Air National Guard, for a total of 22 years in the military.
Jackson received hip replacement surgery after the 1991 hit against the Cincinnati Bengals that ended his professional football career. He still played professional baseball till 1995 — for the Kansas City Royals, Chicago White Sox and, finally, for the California Angels.
“Most people say I was robbed as far as my professional sports career goes,” Jackson said. “I said I never got into professional sports to make it to the Hall of Fame or to do this or that. I lucked up. And professional sports fell in my lap.
“It was all because I could outrun anybody on the field, and I could throw the ball like somebody shooting it out of a rifle. And, lo and behold, somebody wanted to pay me a lot of money to do that.”
Jackson did, indeed, throw a baseball a bit faster than most, Van Davis said:
“What a lot of folks don’t know is he was a pitcher in high school. We used to listen to the intercom every morning in home room, and they’d give the announcements.
“They’d say, ‘Bo pitched another no-hitter.’ No one could hit him.”
Jackson apparently had but one pitch. A fastball. But it traveled 93 mph to the plate.
“I set goals early,” Jackson said. “Leaving high school, I knew I didn’t want to end up back in my hometown doing nothing because the jobs back then were starting to go downhill. The steel mills were starting to close up. And that was the bulk of the income for all the families, the middle- and low-income families there.
“So I set goals. And I have them now.
“I have a goal to be one of the most successful black businessmen in the country one day. I have a goal of taking my company to the cover of Fortune magazine.
“I don’t sit up and rest on my laurels. Once I get complacent with what I’m doing, it becomes boring. I’m always trying to make what I do very interesting.”
Though he excelled in football, baseball and track, Jackson never had a preference for one over the others.
“If every athlete would look at professional sports like I did, it would be so easy to walk away,” he said. “Sports wasn’t the center of my universe. I know the owners and the marketing people used me to fill the stands on Sunday. I used professional sport to network my way into every corporate door that I could.”
Looking back, neither Jackson nor Van Davis is surprised that the other has become successful. Others may be, but they’re not.
“If you went back 22, 23 years and said Dexter will have his own law firm one day, and Vincent will have his own food distribution company, everybody would have said, ‘Yeah ... those knuckleheads,’ ” Jackson laughed.
“That’s right,” Van Davis continued. “ ‘They’re going to be working in the steel mill.’ ”
“But I’m not surprised to see that Dexter has his own law firm,” Jackson continued. “That’s saying a lot, seeing where both of us grew up and our family background.
“We were both from a large family, very low-income families. It was a very low-income area. My mother cleaned people’s homes during the day and cleaned hotels at night.”
“My Dad worked in a steel mill and drove a bus part time,” Van Davis said. “And my Mama drove a bus for high school students.”
“That just shows you what the man upstairs has in plan for you,” said Jackson.
“And what hard work and dedication and perseverance can do,” Van Davis added. “You can accomplish anything. This is America. You can accomplish anything in this country.
“That’s why people are dying to get here. Because you can move up that ladder.”