Best Performance in Changing Sport

Everybody knows who Jackie Robinson was. Lots of people know who Kenny Washington was. Pioneers. Individuals who fought for African-American rights in a day when it was a fight in the dark, when the support system was not forthcoming.

They ministered to group esteem on the field and battled for it off the field. They made their country a better place. For everybody.

But what about Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode? Only a few know his name, his part in this story.

In many ways, Woody Strode was the best of them. He certainly was the first of them.

Woody Strode was one of the most magnificent physical specimens ever to walk on an athletic field--or anywhere else. Leni Reifenstahl, no less, Hitler’s official film documentarian, posed him for one of the two paintings commissioned by Hitler for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Reifenstahl told Woody, “You have the most beautiful physique of any athlete we have ever seen.” But they posed him with a spear and loincloth.

Woody’s physique was at once his glory and his downfall. Hollywood couldn’t let him alone. Robinson and Washington, for all their titanic talents, were hardly Greek statues. Woody was.

He might very well have been the superior athlete of the three, too, although Robinson’s drive made it unlikely anyone short of Ty Cobb could have combined motivation with sheer talent any more successfully than Robinson.

Woody was bucking house odds in another direction. His speed, loping change of direction and long arms made him a natural for basketball. But it wasn’t an economically attractive sport in those pre-NBA days. College recruiters didn’t want to win any Final Fours, they wanted to win Rose Bowls.

Woody Strode had what they were looking for in abundance. As usual, black players were sought out for need. UCLA at that time was a struggling young state school in the shadow of USC, Stanford and just about every other school in the Pacific Coast Conference. Strode recalls that the team set a league record kicking from its end zone, 23 times in a game against Oregon, and practice consisted of one hour of rehearsing goal-line stands.

Woody Strode and Kenny Washington and, later, Jackie Robinson changed all that. They had the other teams practicing the goal-line stands.

For all of that, Woody Strode suffered another penalty ascribable to his physique. Although he was sinewed like a lion, he had the tall, reedy look of the born end.

Today, it’s a glamour position. Jerry Rice is nearly as big a star as Joe Montana. A Cliff Branch, Crazylegs Hirsch, Paul Warfield, Bob Hayes or Steve Largent makes the Hall of Fame. Ends get drafted before running backs.

But in Woody’s day, it was an overlooked position. A quarterback threw the ball five times a game not 50. A team that passed on its own side of midfield was considered an aerial circus. Two incomplete passes in a row and you were penalized, when Woody took up the game. Ends were picked, if you can believe it, for their tackling ability. Woody played both ways.

Even after a breathtaking 80-yard pass from Washington to Strode, nobody caught on. Not till Clark Shaughnessy brought the T-formation to college football at Stanford in 1940 did the pass really come into its own.

Woody was a complete athlete. He excelled in so many track and field disciplines that he became a decathlete and might well have won the gold at the Berlin Olympics--he used to compete neck and neck with the eventual winner there, Glenn Morris--but he had to pass up the Olympic trials to make up units for his college eligibility.

Woody still remembers with horror those early bouts with the groves of academe. Writing in his biography, “Goal Dust,” he has said, “I remember sitting in an algebra class, thinking I was flunking Spanish.”

Born and raised in L.A., Woody had no problems with racism until he was drafted into the Air Corps to play football with the March Field team. He found out that the team was integrated but the base wasn’t. He could block for the white boys, but he couldn’t go to the PX with them. Woody refused to play till he could be housed with the rest of the team.

“Some of them white boys from the South didn’t know we could talk--except for ‘Yassuh!’ But before the year was out, we were good friends and teammates,” Woody recalls.

After the war, the Rams moved west from Cleveland. But the politicians wouldn’t let them use the Coliseum--unless the Rams agreed to sign Kenny Washington and Woody Strode.

They were not the first black players in the NFL--one or two had made it in the incubator days of the league 25 years before--but they were the most significant. They opened the floodgates. That one UCLA team did more to integrate American sports than the Civil War.

Still, Hollywood lured Woody off the playing fields and away from his place in history. He became an especial pet of the hard-fisted, hard-crusted old director, John Ford, who loved massive physical specimens in the foreground in his movies--John Wayne, Ward Bond, Grant Withers. And Woody Strode.

Ford’s vision of the old West didn’t include guys who lisped, and Strode made nearly a dozen pictures for the flinty old Irishman, playing Pompey in almost the first Western in which a black played a lead, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” He made the obligatory “Tarzan’s Last Chance” movies, but he also played prominently in C.B. DeMille films such as “The Ten Commandments.”

Woody currently can be seen in the revival of “Spartacus,” which is going into re-release April 26, and in which he and Kirk Douglas stage one of the most famous movie fights ever filmed.

For Woody, movie stardom in more than 60 films was gratification enough. But his most important role as part of the triumvirate that changed the pattern of professional sports forever is the one for which he really should receive his Oscar.