Baseball: Bo knows it's hip to be back: Bo Jackson is back with a bang as well as a new joint. Richard Weekes reports

AT Comiskey Park in Chicago, you can buy a 20-game season-ticket package called The Hip Plan. The Plan is that you will go to watch the White Sox in the hope of seeing the Hip, which is made of polyethylene and cobalt chrome steel and bolts the pelvis of Vince Edward Jackson - known to the world simply as Bo - to his left femur. Roll up, roll up and see the amazing baseball comeback of Bo, star of Nike commercials and former two-sport superstar athlete. Watch bionic Bo smite mighty home runs, see him perform awesome feats in the outfield, witness him run the bases with his artificial hip. . .

So far this season the 30-year-old Jackson has measured up to his billing. In the White Sox's home opener against the Yankees last month, one year and four days after he underwent hip replacement, Jackson was sent on in the sixth inning as a pinch-hitter. He smashed the second pitch 400 feet into the right-field seats for a solo homer. As Jackson ambled round the bases and fireworks filled the sky, his business manager, Susann McKee, turned to his stockbroker in the stand and said: 'Ker-ching] Ker-ching]' The scoreboard moved round a notch, but more importantly, Jackson had just rung up big bucks. The sponsors would be crawling to McKee's door in the morning.

Jackson has made a habit of confounding those who have written him off ever since the day in January 1991 when he fractured his hip in a routine tackle during an NFL play-off game, tearing cartilage and cutting off the blood supply to the top of the thighbone. The injury seemed to have ended his days as a Los Angeles Raiders running back and a Kansas City Royals outfielder; certainly the Royals saw no reason to doubt their doctors' grim tidings, and they released Jackson in March that year.

The White Sox decided to gamble on the former All Star MVP recovering his hitting power, and after rehabilitating in the minor leagues, Jackson indeed returned to play for Chicago for the final month of the season. But during spring training in 1992 he broke down in pain and the obituarists were at the ready once more. In despair Jackson consulted Dr James Andrews in Alabama, who had treated him at Auburn University, and Dr Andrews told him his only hope was to replace the hip.

What Jackson did after the operation turned medical opinion on its head. 'Normally we tell people with total joint surgery to take it real slow,' said Dr James Boscardin, the White Sox doctor, who assisted Andrews in the theatre. 'We say, now you can get in and out of your car, walk up the stairs, maybe play a little golf. No one has imagined being able to return to professional sports.'

Within a week of the operation, Jackson went to Phoenix to team up with Mack Newton, a physical trainer who also has an artificial hip, to begin an aggressive exercise programme to develop his flexibility and muscle strength. Stage two came in Chicago last winter, when he incorporated baseball drills into his workouts under the supervision of the White Sox trainer, Herm Schneider.

During these lonely months, it was not only the doubting orthopaedic experts that drove Jackson on. There is a story of a death-bed scene three weeks after surgery, when he promised his ailing mother Florence that he would play baseball again and he would complete his degree, which had got left on the sidelines when football got serious and he was rushing towards the Heisman Trophy.

The problem with this Boy's Own script is that not everyone is happy about the circus atmosphere around Jackson's comeback. You need only spend a short time in the White Sox clubhouse to realise there are some big egos on his team. It does little for the self-esteem of players like the shortstop Ozzie Guillen, who is himself coming back from a career-threatening knee injury, to find a semi-circle of reporters constantly formed around Bo's locker and nobody at his own. The experiment of trying out Jackson at first base during spring training - a failure - alienated the regular first baseman Frank Thomas, while George Bell, whose position as designated hitter was also deemed to be under threat from the less than fully mobile Jackson, responded to invitations to express awe at the bionic one's recovery with a sarcastic 'Bo is Bo. Bo can do everything.'

Then there is the moody man himself, nicknamed after his native Alabamans' word for boar hog, the grouchiest pig of all. Unlike Michael Jordan, who is happy to act as an accomplice to the hype manufacturers, Jackson makes no secret of the fact that he finds the media's attention a pain. Your reporter's attempt during spring training to discuss his comeback with him met with a curt 'I don't do one-on-ones', followed later by the suggestion, 'Why don't you go back to England and write about Chuck and Di?' It seemed an unpropitious moment to debate the Independent's policy on royal coverage.

Yet Jackson must know there is no way back to being just a regular Joe. Every time he goes out to play baseball, he cannot help but feed the myth. An injury to Tim Raines, the club's first-choice left fielder, has given Jackson more playing time this season than expected. Close observers of the team report that at the plate Jackson is more effective than before the injury: he no longer tries to slug home runs at every at-bat, preferring to hit for singles, to which his current batting average of .294 is testimony. He has helped take the White Sox to second place in the American League West. Yet he has inevitably lost much of the natural speed that once made him a 10.13sec 100 metres man, crucial for an outfielder chasing fly balls. When Raines returns, and he is used more sparingly than now, frustration at the diminution of his powers may set in.

And in the background is the ever- present risk of catastrophe. It is the unspoken sub-text in The Hip Plan advertising. Everyone going to Comiskey Park knows that Bo may be one crunching collision away from his last game. In Dr Boscardin's words: 'A macro trauma, someone crashing into him, twisting the hip out, a horrible collision at the plate, catching a spike. . .'

'It's Bo's call,' Ron Schueler, the White Sox general manager, had said in March, in response to a suggestion that the club were putting Jackson at risk of crippling injury. Schueler it was who decided to pick up Jackson's dollars 910,000 ( pounds 590,000) option for 1993. 'If he walked in here and said, 'I've had enough, I want to go home', he has my blessing. It's not my decision to force him to play but I have to give him every opportunity to succeed.'

Perhaps more worrying is the long- term wear and tear on the hip. 'It is a man-made object with a finite life,' Dr Andrews said. 'How long it will last, we don't know,' Schneider added. 'It may last one month, six months, five years, 10 years.'

All we do know is that Jackson is swinging the bat in uncharted territory, the turnstiles are clicking and the Bo hype machine is printing dollar bills. Roll up, roll up. 'Ker-ching] Ker-ching]'

(Photograph omitted)