TEMPE, Ariz. — Herm Edwards’ phone rang Friday, Nov. 23. It was Reggie Jackson. Mr. October. The baseball Hall of Famer who got his start right here at Arizona State.

“Hey, I’m coming to the game,” Jackson said, according to Edwards.

“What game?” Edwards said.

“The Oregon game.”

Losers of four in a row, Edwards and the Sun Devils were set to host No. 6 Oregon the following evening at Sun Devil Stadium.

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“So, what — you telling me you want to stand on the sideline?”

“Of course, I want on the sideline.”

“OK, Reggie, that’s no problem.”

There are several things you need to know about Edwards and Jackson. First, they’re neighbors. Or practically neighbors. When not in Arizona, Edwards has a house at Tehama Golf Club outside Carmel, Calif. Jackson’s house overlooks the Pacific just down the road. Edwards says it’s about an eight-minute drive away. Jackson says he could walk it in 45.

During his playing days with the Philadelphia Eagles, Edwards always had known about Jackson, of course. Everyone did. But he remembers first meeting him in Hawaii while shooting “Superstars,” the old ABC Sports competition that featured the top athletes in sports. Edwards had just competed in Super Bowl XV. Jackson, an All-Star slugger with the Yankees, worked as an ABC broadcaster.

Jackson and Edwards also share Pennsylvania roots. Before heading to Tempe for college, Jackson grew up in Wyncote, a small town outside Philadelphia. Did this make him an Eagles fan? Not exactly. “They didn’t have enough brothers on the Eagles,” said Jackson, who preferred the Steelers. But he was aware of Edwards, and once they met, he started following the cornerback’s football career.

In the 1990s, Edwards and Jackson ran into each other in Tampa. Edwards worked as assistant head coach on Tony Dungy’s staff with the Buccaneers; Jackson worked with the Yankees during spring training. They occasionally had dinner and the relationship grew.

Edwards laughs.

“He’ll just call me out of the blue,” he said.

Hey, Herm. What are you doing? You got to come down and look at my cars.

Hey, Herm. I’m down here having lunch. Come join me.

One time, probably during the spring, Edwards missed Jackson’s call but he called back a few days later. During the conversation, Edwards heard a lot of background noise.

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“Jack, where you at?” Edwards said.

“I’m in the dugout,” Jackson said.

“You’re where?”

“In the dugout. … Man, Herm, we can’t hit worth a damn right now.”

Retelling the story, Edwards can’t stop laughing. Reggie Jackson, talking to him from the Yankees dugout.

“We have so much fun just talking,” Edwards said. “It’s just one of those crazy relationships.”

With Jackson coming to the Oregon game, Edwards informed the necessary people. This was a big deal. Jackson had not visited ASU in years. But not much later, Jackson called with bad news. The trip was off.

“My airplane wouldn’t start,” Jackson said. “It was raining in Monterey. They were trying to figure out a way to get it started and I said, ‘No, no. That’s a message. We just won’t go.’ I didn’t want to take a chance.”

Edwards understood.

“I told him, ‘Don’t worry about it, brother.’ But hopefully, I can get him to a game this year,” he said. “I told him: You have to come to a game. Come on. You got to show up.”

“People forget that Reggie came to Arizona State on a football scholarship and later switched to baseball. He had the natural ability of a Cassius Clay, but he didn’t care much for scrimmaging. … I’m sure Reggie could’ve been an All-Pro in football if he’d ever set his mind to it.” — Frank Kush.

As Herm Edwards walks the first floor of ASU’s football facility, he passes a familiar face. There, on the wall, is a black-and-white photo of teenaged Reggie Jackson. His right knee planted in the grass, his left arm resting on his left thigh, Jackson poses in his football uniform. He wears No. 29.

For two years under Kush, Jackson played running back and safety. “You played both ways in my era,” he said. On the freshman team in 1964, Jackson averaged 7.7 yards per carry and caught seven passes for 98 yards.

“When I came in from high school, even though I played defense the majority of the time, they put me down as an offensive guard so in freshman games, I was a pulling guard blocking for Reggie,” said Curley Culp, who would end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “We ran kind of a sweep play and he wasn’t shy about running into people. He was very aggressive.”

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In “Becoming Mr. October,” a memoir he co-wrote with Kevin Baker, Jackson recalled time spent at Camp Tontozona and the drills Kush ran to build toughness. One was called “bull in the ring.” Everyone would get in a circle and Kush would call out a player’s number, which made him the bull.

“Another player would run at you full speed,” Jackson wrote. “You had to find out where he was coming from — if he was behind you or on the side — and defend yourself in a one-on-one, head-on crash. I felt like I was in the middle more than anybody, and I wasn’t the best at it.”

Kush told a story about a practice in which he yelled at Jackson for poor blocking. Jackson, Kush said, got mad and walked off the field. Former standout Charley Taylor, visiting that day, stopped Jackson and talked him into returning.

“His (football) talent was there,” said Darrell Hoover, a football teammate, “but I don’t think his mind was there.”

Among the reasons Jackson chose ASU was because Kush promised he also could play baseball provided Jackson maintained a “B” average in the classroom.  According to Jackson biographer Dayn Perry, two baseball friends, Joe Paulson and Jeff Pentland, bet Jackson that he couldn’t make the team.

“Yeah, I might have said that,” Pentland said in a phone interview. As a freshman, he roomed with Paulson in an athletic dorm. Across the hall were Jackson and Culp. The group took playful jabs at one another. “We were only 17 years old,” Pentland said, “so our maturity level probably wasn’t way up there.”

One day after spring football practice, Jackson confidently walked to the baseball field, where coach Bobby Winkles wrapped up a varsity workout. Dressed in football gear, Jackson asked Winkles if he could take a few swings. Then he put on a hitting display.

Wrote Perry: “The sequence went something like this: swing and a miss, homer to right, swing and a miss, swing and a miss, 440-foot homer to center, take, take, homer to center.”

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Like in football, Jackson couldn’t play varsity that first baseball season, but his talent and potential were obvious.

“You had to be blind not to see it,” said Sal Bando, a future major leaguer who was two years ahead of Jackson at ASU. “He had raw tools. His bat speed. His foot speed. His strong arm. He just needed to play more.”

As a sophomore, the 188-pound Jackson started at safety for the football team, but his future was set. Over the offseason, his baseball skills had blossomed while playing in an amateur league in Baltimore, setting the stage for a breakout season in 1966. In the wood-bat college era, Jackson replaced Rick Monday in center field and hit .327 with 15 home runs. He earned All-America and national Player of the Year honors.

“One thing I always remember about Reggie, he hit the ball through the infield harder than anybody I ever saw,” said Pentland, who coached 17 years in the major leagues, which included stints with the Yankees, Dodgers and Cubs. “He hit these skimmers — like you skim (a rock) off a lake — he’d hit balls at ASU that the infielder would move after the ball was by him. That’s how hard he hit.”

In June, reports surfaced that the Mets wanted to take Jackson with the first pick of the MLB draft, but they ended up passing, selecting instead a catcher from Lancaster, Calif. Jackson had heard that the Mets passed because he dated a light-skinned Mexican-American, an issue he also encountered at ASU. (The Mets denied this.)

The Kansas City Athletics took Jackson with the second pick.

Looking back, Jackson said leaving school for pro baseball had nothing to do with sport longevity. And it didn’t even have much to do with preference. (Like Kush, Jackson believes he would’ve played in the NFL had he stuck with football.) It had to do with family.

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“We were poor colored folks,” Jackson said. “My father did a little six-month prison term, and my mom was taking care of him and the family. A couple of us were hanging around the home kind of on our own. We needed to get some money and I had a chance to sign a baseball contract and get a $100,000 bonus. That’s why I wanted to play baseball. I didn’t know about longevity. Longevity to me was six months away.”

In 1990, ASU honored Jackson, unveiling the slugger’s name and professional number, 44, on the right-field wall at Packard Stadium.

In 1993, the National Baseball Hall of Fame welcomed Jackson, who had hit 563 home runs (14th all time) over 21 seasons. During his induction speech, Jackson discussed Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King.

He also mentioned Frank Kush, saying the old football coach was like a combination of ornery owners Charlie Finley and George Steinbrenner.

“He taught you things as a young man that you needed to know,” Jackson recently explained. “How to sacrifice. How to deal with adversity. How to deal with punishment. He made a man out of you.”

Jackson lived in Tempe early in his pro career. He had a business office here. In 2011, he was a featured guest at “Fight Night,” a Valley event honoring Ali. But the last time Jackson visited ASU? “Oh, gosh,” he said. “I don’t even remember. I really don’t.”

Gary Walker, a lifelong friend and business partner, said it probably was during the end of Jackson’s career when he played for the California Angels from 1982-86. The Angels hold spring training at Tempe Diablo Stadium, about seven miles from the Tempe campus.

“To tell you the truth, I really can’t remember the last time he was here,” Walker said. “I know he has great affection for the school and I know he loves Herm Edwards. He was very happy that he got the job. In fact, those two remind me of each other in a way.”

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How so?

“Well, they’re not afraid to say what they think,” Walker said. “But they back it up and there’s a certain kind of beautiful honesty in each one of them.”

Jackson admits: He didn’t follow ASU much before Edwards’ arrival in 2017, particularly the football program. His reasoning: “They weren’t any good.” With Edwards in charge, he thinks that’s changing.

Jackson, 73, calls Edwards a life coach; tough enough to get results, yet personable enough to connect. Edwards has a way about him, Jackson said. He tells it like it is in ways everyone can understand. He’s a people person with great energy.

Told that Edwards gets up at 4 a.m. to work out, Jackson responded: “Yeah, I get up at 4, too — to go to the bathroom.”

Jackson — who remains a special adviser with the Yankees — wants to get involved. He’s talked with ASU Vice President of Athletics Ray Anderson about starting a scholarship in his name. Something that could help underserved students, similar to what he’s done through his “Mr. October Foundation for Kids.” Jackson said he’s always been a Sun Devil, but with Edwards and Anderson there, it’s more personal.

That means a trip.

“Herm is starting his third year, right?” Jackson said. “I’ve promised him I’m going to come to a game. I haven’t been, and I’m embarrassed. I need to get down there.”

(Top photo of Reggie Jackson: Focus on Sport via Getty Images)