‘Hammer’ Can’t Stop Making Hits

You want to succeed in show business? Make a name for yourself in Hollywood?

Forget the Method School of Acting. Never mind the Broadway stage. Skip the film makers’ workshops.

The Rose Bowl is ideal training ground. So is the Super Bowl. A Trojan locker room used to be the best and surest way to the executive offices or sound stages of MGM, Warner Bros. or RKO. Hit that line, “Fight On For Old SC” and win not only a Rose Bowl but an Oscar.

Check the history. John Wayne, no less, came from an SC line to a John Ford western to all-time cowboy star. So did his teammate, Ward Bond. Ben Hibbs and Aaron Rosenberg started out throwing blocks and making tackles before they ended up making Academy Award movies. Like Bond, they played in the Rose Bowl before they played in or made movies. Cotton Warburton went from cutting tacklers to cutting movies.

So, Fred Williamson was breaking no new ground when he went from a backfield to a backlot, from starring in a stadium to starring on a screen.

But Fred didn’t make his reputation in nearby campuses. He grew up thousands of miles from the sound stages. Sports-struck Hollywood didn’t come for him, he came to them.

You may remember Fred Williamson in his earlier incarnation. He was the original Deion Sanders, a defensive back who grew tired of its anonymity and responded with a flair for personal promotion.

He answered to the nickname “the Hammer” in honor of the forearm lick he gave receivers on their way to run under a pass. On his good days, he ran up more kayoes than Joe Louis.

He played in the first Super Bowl. For the Kansas City Chiefs against the storied Lombardi Packers. But he stole the spotlight right out from under the Pack with outrageous interviews in which he assessed their lineup contemptuously.

“They don’t have the speed or deception to get away from me,” he sniffed disdainfully. “I’ll just dump them when they leave the line of scrimmage. Drop the hammer on them.”

The league had been having trouble selling tickets to that first game. But not when the Hammer got through boasting. He became the Bad Guy. Which delighted him. When he got hurt in the game, half the fans--and the entire Green Bay bench rose to cheer. Williamson thought that was fun.

“It proves controversy sells--if you can handle it,” he said. “I can handle it.”

Williamson was born for Hollywood. He had the requisite genius for self-promotion. He was the first player to wear white shoes, even though he had to pay a $100 fine every game to do so--in an age when his yearly salary was $9,500.

He had been on a track-and-field scholarship at Northwestern when a new coach there, fellow by the name of Ara Parseghian, spotted him hurdling and running the 100 and said, “Hey, kid, you ever tried football?”

Williamson wasn’t too thrilled. But when Parseghian sweetened the scholarship pot, his eyes got round.

“Whoa! There’s money here!” he told himself.

He became a good enough player so the San Francisco 49ers drafted him.

“Their scout, Pappy Waldorf, dropped $1,500 on my bed--in one-dollar bills,” Williamson recalls. “I thought, ‘I’m rich!’ ”

San Francisco Coach Red Hickey made a defensive back out of him. When Williamson developed his hammer throw--”It’s a blow that’s perpendicular to the earth’s latitude,” he explains--the Oakland Raiders in the then-rival AFL lured him away with more money.

When his pro career ended, he turned to architecture, his major at Northwestern.

“I got claustrophobia,” he says. “I kept looking around for someone to drop the hammer on.”

When he saw on TV an episode of the series “Julia” one night, he told himself, “I can do that!”

So he could. He sold his belongings, bought a trailer and headed for Hollywood.

“I’ve always been aware of marketability. Everything I did on the field was calculated to market myself. How many cornerbacks you see on the cover of magazines? I had ‘em printing photographs of my closet full of alligator boots!”

Hollywood was no match. Fred dropped the hammer there, too. When he arrived at the gates of 20th Century Fox to see Hal Kantor, the producer of “Julia,” he was told he could not be admitted.

So he drove down the street to a phone booth, called the front gate and lied.

“This is Mr. Kantor’s office,” he told the guard. “A Fred Williamson is expected here. Please admit him.”

When he got through the gates, he told the receptionist in Kantor’s office, “Tell him the Hammer is here to see him.”

Kantor was amused at the chutzpah but he wanted to know, “Can you act? Have you had experience?”

Oh, sure, Williamson assured him. “I was in ‘Raisin in the Sun’ in Montreal and Ontario and in Shakespeare in Winnipeg.”

“Was that a lie?” Williamson is asked.

“Of course,” he answers, smiling. “I’d never been on a stage in my life. So I put the locales in Canada. I felt it would take them some time to check.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Williamson, who never experienced a self-doubt in his life, took to Hollywood like a flea to a sleeping dog. He treated the town like a tight end going out for a long one in his territory. He played roles black actors had never tackled--a gangster, a cowboy, a con man. When he wanted to title a picture “The Legend of Nigger Jim,” the studio almost had a heart attack. But the picture grossed more than $40 million, big money in those days for a shoestring production.

He made more than 52 films and produced or directed about 30 of them. Banks trusted him. He personally bicycled cans of film around Europe, declining the traditional offers of $3,000 per territory and holding out for 50 times that amount.

He is still wearing white shoes, figuratively. He is still, so to speak, picking off passes. He is immensely popular overseas.

“My pictures are action pictures,” he says. “A foot in the mouth translates worldwide. A joke does not translate worldwide. A punch in the jaw doesn’t need a subtitle.”

He is the only player in the Hollywood scene who wears a Super Bowl ring to production meetings. He will star this winter in Quentin Tarantino’s “From Dusk Till Dawn” and, in March, in his own film titled, “Original Gangstas” which will feature Jim Brown and Paul Winfield in the roles of famous actors and athletes who go back to the mean streets of Gary, Ind., (where Williamson was raised) and root out gang rule.

He still feels he is playing cornerback.

“A cornerback is a loner,” he says. “It’s his job to keep the game honest. Make sure nobody gets behind him.”

A Super Bowl is good training for a guy guarding the corners in Hollywood, too.