This is an excerpt from The Ballplayers: Baseball’s Greatest Players Remembered, Ranked, and Revealed, by Dan Holmes. The book is available from Amazon in eBook format.
Reggie [Jackson] was recruited to play defensive back by Arizona State in the mid-1960s. The story goes that one day the football team and baseball team were holding practice on adjacent fields. Jackson started boasting that he would hit a home run if he could get a bat in his hand. A teammate bet Reggie $5 that he couldn’t, and Jackson took him up on it. Jackson, still wearing his pads and football uniform, coaxed ASU baseball coach Bobby Winkles to give him a chance at the plate. Legend goes that the pitcher threw his best fastballs and Reggie hit three of them over the right field wall. He collected $5 from his teammate, and Winkles talked him into switching to baseball after his freshman year.
Oh, if there had been social media when Reggie played, what things would he have said? Reggie was bold, brash, and a badass. He broke most of the Pac-10 batting records when he was at Arizona State, and he was still scouted by NFL teams even though he only played one season of football. The Orioles offered him a $50,000 signing bonus and a guaranteed spot on a major league roster if he would turn professional. While he was doing all those things, Reggie always spoke his mind. He was in the mold of Cassius Clay and Bill Russell: a smart, ambitious black athlete who refused to hold his tongue.
Had there not been an amateur draft (instituted one year before he left college), Jackson could have commanded piles of money in an auction for his services. Instead, he was selected as the second overall pick* of the 1966 MLB Draft by the Athletics, who were still in Kansas City. The previous year, Jackson’s college teammate, Rick Monday, was the first pick, also by the A’s. Jackson took Monday’s center field job when they were at ASU, but in five years together on the A’s, Monday was in center and Reggie in right.
When he arrived for spring training for Oakland in 1972, Reggie had a mustache under his lip. Owner Charlie Finley liked it and offered his players $300 to grow one. After the season started the club held a “Mustache Day” and invited Frenchy Bordagaray, the last big leaguer to have sported a mustache.
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