📜📜📜📜 pic.twitter.com/i37SadzgLd
— Rickey Jackson ⚜️ (@Rickey57Jackson) May 8, 2023
Now this is cool. Rickey Jackson achieved a Hall of Fame-worthy career with the New Orleans Saints as the best player on the vaunted “Dome Patrol” defense, but he recently completed another lifelong accomplishment: earning his college degree, not long after celebrating his 65th birthday in March.
Short by a couple of history courses when he declared for the NFL draft back in 1981, Jackson chose to return to school late in life because it’s something his parents would have wanted him to do.
“I was so close to it that it made no sense to not get it,” Jackson said, per the university’s website via Nick France. “My mother would’ve loved it, my father wanted me to get it. I know they’d be proud of me.”
He walked the stage to receive his degree in social sciences from the school’s College of General Studies on April 30, removed nearly 42 years to the day when he turned pro as a Saint.
Jackson spent a year taking online classes to complete his studies, and it’s an accomplishment he’s very proud of. He’s done it all — he owns a Super Bowl ring, a gold jacket from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the adoration of a fanbase that still puts him up there with the greatest defenders of all time.
But because this was an individual accomplishment, Jackson values it a bit more than those other achievements. He added to France, “I’d put it up with the Super Bowl and all. This is something I achieved personally on my own, so I’d put it right up with that.”
Now he’s urging his old football friends like Lawrence Taylor to go back and finish their studies, too, when they’re golfing together in South Florida. Jackson told the Palm Beach Post’s Tom D’Angelo, “Anybody can do this. I did it. It just takes commitment.”
