BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - Bo Jackson knows snow.

Did you know that?

Not snow skiing.

Snow blowing.

You live in the Chicagoland area, as Jackson does, it comes with the territory, even if ESPN just crowned you the greatest athlete of all time, ahead of Jim Brown, Jackie Robinson and all the other giants of the games people play.

"To be picked over those guys, it's a wonderful thing," Jackson told us Thursday on Smashmouth Radio on ESPN 973 The Zone

If you know Bo, you understand that no superstar in this lifetime has combined a more diverse and spectacular highlight reel with a less visible ego. You realize that no one is less impressed with his unparalleled athletic career than Jackson himself.

Unless it’s his wife. So you know this story has a “but” coming.

“But you know, the other day, we had 9 inches of snow in Chicago,” he said. “My wife looked at me and said, ‘That snow’s not gonna move itself.’ I had to get out there and shovel snow, man.

“You can call me the greatest of all time or G.O.A.T. or whatever, but I still gotta go crank up that damn snow blower and get to work.”

He doesn’t have to come back to his home state to help make it a better place, but he does. He came back Thursday to serve as the keynote speaker for the American Values Luncheon of the Greater Alabama Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

He’ll return April 27 for Bo Bikes Bama II to help the state continue to rebuild from the killer tornadoes of 2011. The inaugural bike ride last year raised $600,000 for the Governor’s Emergency Relief Fund.

There will be two rides this year in and around Cordova, one a 20-miler and the other covering 60 miles. Jackson said he wants to make Bo Bikes Bama an annual event to put roofs back over people’s heads and to build community tornado shelters.

It’s a worthy cause with a worthy leader, who seems more fulfilled doing this kind of work than he ever did running the football for the Los Angeles Raiders or hitting homers for the Kansas City Royals or doing both - and setting track records - at McAdory High and Auburn.

Jackson turned 50 on Nov. 30, not that you’d know. ESPN didn’t turn that milestone into a week of programming the way it did when Michael Jordan recently hit the half-century mark. Jackson probably wouldn’t have allowed it, which is another way he stands alone from his peers.

“Sports was never the center of my universe,” he said Thursday.

Think about that for a moment. The greatest athlete of all time said that, and if you know Bo or anyone who knows him, you know he meant it.

He always was a private person in a public profession, so it was no surprise that he could keep a secret for two decades. He spilled it during our conversation Thursday.

The devastating hip injury he suffered carrying the ball Jan. 13, 1991, in a playoff game for the Raiders against the Bengals ended his football career. That’s common knowledge, but here’s the revelation “the public don't know.”

A few days before that game, he said, he and his wife decided that was going to be his final football season. It was the fourth season of his five-year contract with the Raiders, but the couple’s first child was starting school the next fall.

He was going to retire “just so I could be in one place and my kid could have a stable life.”

To that point, his life was leaving Auburn for spring training, leaving spring training for the summer and early fall in Kansas City with the Royals, leaving Kansas City for the rest of the fall and winter in Los Angeles with the Raiders, then returning to Auburn.

“It’s rough having a kid being yanked out of one school and put in another one every four or five months,” Jackson said. “So I was gonna retire from football. Things worked out where I still retired.”

From football and, after a brief comeback, baseball, too, but not from life. It’s tempting to go all “Bo knows woe,” even all these years later, but he anticipates your pity and shoots an arrow right through it.

“Don’t feel sorry for Bo Jackson because he coulda been this or he coulda been that,” he said. “I never got into a sport to be the greatest.”

He just was because God made him that way, giving him the ability, in his own words, “to run like a spooked deer” and throw a ball “like somebody shot it out of a rifle,” but that’s in the past. He’s got work to do now.

He served on the Auburn search committee that chose Gus Malzahn to succeed Gene Chizik as head football coach. That seems odd considering Jackson's very public support of Chizik throughout his tenure, but Jackson said his feelings about the former coach haven't changed.

"Gene Chizik is a dear friend of mine," he said. "I will always support him wherever he lands, and he will land on his feet. I already told him, if you need me to come speak to your kids, pick up the phone and call me.

"Gene Chizik is a nice person. He is a good coach, but the university thought it should go in a different direction. That wasn't my decision. ... It was an amicable decision for both parties, and things work out for the best."

Jackson's changing direction himself tonight, flying back home to Chicago because, you know, that snow's not gonna move itself.

"I'm just letting you know," he said. "I'll probably wake up tomorrow morning and go salt the driveway."

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Email: scarbinsky@gmail.com

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Listen: Weekdays from 6-10 a.m., on ESPN 97.3 The Zone on the Smashmouth Radio Network.