Jackie Robinson is remembered for his exploits on the baseball diamond and for breaking the colour barrier in Major League Baseball. Today, major leaguers wear his number, 42, on their jersey sleeves every year on Jackie Robinson day (April 15) as a tribute to his legacy. What isn’t generally known about Robinson is that in 1939 he was part of an offensive football juggernaut at UCLA, sharing a backfield with the great Kenny Washington, then in his senior year. Another senior on that team was end Woody Strode, future breakthrough black action film star. He was “the body” long before Schwarzenegger’s extreme pumped-up android hit the screen. If Woody were around today, he’d give Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson some serious competition.
Woodrow Wilson Woolwine “Woody” Strode was born in a predominantly black neighbourhood of Los Angeles known as Furlong Tract, today considered part of the notorious South-Central Los Angeles. Woody’s parents had come west in 1900 to escape the severe racism in Louisiana, where slavery had existed only a single generation before. In areas like Furlong Tract, they could own businesses catering to a growing black community or find jobs of a more menial nature in the broader white landscape. Compared to what his parents had experienced in Louisiana, Woody never felt the same sting of racism, cushioned as he was by a growing black community in California.
“The racism out here was very subtle,” wrote Strode in his autobiography, Goal Dust. “A restaurant wouldn’t have a sign saying ‘Whites Only’ like they would in the South. They’d have a sign saying, ‘We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.’”
But even within the greater Los Angeles area, some communities were more racist, or certainly more openly racist, than others. Strode wrote that during the 1940s black people could not walk through Inglewood after dark. There was nothing subtle about the signs in Inglewood, which boldly declared: “No Jews and no coloureds are welcome in this town.” Even as late as 1960, there were no black children enrolled in any Inglewood school.
Strode got into UCLA on the basis of his athletic prowess, not just in football but in track and field as well. This prowess and his legendary physique, sculpted by his daily ritual of a thousand push-ups, a thousand sit-ups, and a thousand squats, led to one of Strode’s oddest and more famous encounters. Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker responsible for the infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, was preparing to make her masterpiece on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Olympia. Somehow she had seen photographs of Strode’s magnificent physique and she journeyed to Los Angeles with a German artist in order to paint the athlete for the official Olympic Art Show.
“You have the greatest physique of any athlete we have ever seen,” she told the young athlete as her artist circled and studied and took measurements. When Hitler saw the paintings he was astounded by Strode’s physical perfection and he sent Riefenstahl back to Los Angeles to film Woody engaged in vigorous physical pursuits connected to his track specialty, the decathlon. Riefenstahl wanted to take Woody up to Carmel and film him “against all that beautiful white scenery.” By this time, however, Woody’s friends had put him wise to the nature and goals of the Nazi party. He politely refused to take part in further activities with Riefenstahl. Still, he couldn’t help wondering why they had such interest in him.
“I’ve often thought that if Hitler had won the war,” he wrote, “they would have picked me up and either bred me or dissected me.”
Before Jackie Robinson joined the UCLA backfield, Strode and Kenny Washington were huge star athletes, capable of drawing crowds in excess of 100,000 to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 40,000 of whom were black. The only celebrities bigger than Washington and Strode in town were movie stars, and that depended on who they were and how their last picture had done at the box office. The press labelled them “the Goal Dust Twins,” a play on the advertising campaign by Fairbank’s Gold Dust Washing Powder that featured Goldie and Dusty, “the Gold Dust Twins,” two black, bald-headed, genderless twins doing dishes and other household chores. The slogan was “Let the twins do your work.”
Naturally, when Jackie Robinson came along and joined that dynamic duo at UCLA, the press leaped at the opportunity to expand their repertoire of nicknames. Thus, Strode, Washington, and Robinson became known as “the Goal Dust Trio.” Now you could “let the triplets do your work.” Jackie was the only UCLA athlete to ever letter in four varsity sports: track, basketball, baseball, and football, all that same year. In Woody’s estimation, baseball was Robinson’s weakest sport. In 1939, Jackie averaged twelve yards every time they handed him the ball. Of course, it helped that the defences of the time had to split their concentration across all three offensive threats.
That year, UCLA and USC were both undefeated going into the final game of the season, and the winner would be guaranteed a berth in the prestigious Rose Bowl. This game was the hottest ticket in town with 103,500 fans filling the seats, an all-time attendance record. It’s hard to believe from these two teams with such high-quality players on both sides of the ball, but they wound up tied 0–0. UCLA had a chance to win right at the end of the game. The Bruins were sitting on USC’s four-yard line, with just enough time on the clock to run one more play. The team could kick a field goal and win, or they could try to rush or pass the ball over the goal line for a touchdown. The coaches on the sidelines left the decision to the players in the huddle. They were the ones who had given the favoured USC team everything it could handle on the field that day, both defence and offence. The players, including Robinson, Washington, and Strode, voted to go for the touchdown. No one wanted the game to end on a simple kick.
Unfortunately for UCLA, the pass fell incomplete in the end zone and the game ended in a scoreless tie. In the Los Angeles Times, sportswriter Dick Hyland wrote a moving tribute to Strode’s performance on the field: “When a man does all he is supposed to do on every play, when on top of that he does things no one can fairly expect him to do, that man is playing great football. Woody Strode was great Saturday; he climaxed a fine football career and from now on he can think, if things ever seem tough, I did my part once.”
UCLA had to win the game to go to the Rose Bowl. In tying powerhouse USC, they proved to themselves, to their fans, and to the sportswriters across America that they belonged on the same field as USC. But a tie was as good as a loss. By virtue of entering the game ranked higher than UCLA, it was USC who was invited to play in the Rose Bowl game on January 1, 1940. Woody reflected later that “football is so much like life. Every time you get knocked down, you wonder if you want to get up. Sometimes, you wonder, ‘Is this worth it?’ But you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep on going.”
As the doors to the NFL were closed to black players, both Strode and Kenny Washington played semi-pro football for the Hollywood Bears of the Pacific Coast League. There were five other teams in the Pacific Coast League: San Diego, Fresno, Salina, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. At that time, there was no athlete more popular in the Los Angeles area than Kenny Washington. League games were advertised as “the Hollywood Bears with Kenny Washington” against whoever the other team happened to be. Nobody cared. The crowds came to see the great Kenny Washington play. He was paid $200 a game plus a percentage of the gate — taking home $500 a week in all — when one of the top NFL players was making $175 a week and no percentage of the gate. Even Woody was making roughly $300 per week, more than any comparable NFL player.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Woody was recruited to play with a West Coast air force team, the March Field Flyers, which, like other service teams, also played against university football teams. For many top athletes of the day, this was a way of serving in the military without seeing action overseas. He played three years of service football before being sent to the Pacific Theatre of the war, where he quickly learned what an easy time he and his fellow ballplayers had enjoyed in California while others had been fighting in places like Okinawa. He was there about three months before atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fierce Pacific war came to a sudden and silent finish. When Woody returned to California, the Hollywood Bears were practically waiting at the docks for him. The Bears had a game coming up against the San Francisco Clippers. Kenny Washington, who had been rejected by the armed forces following a succession of knee injuries, was with the team. The coach told Woody he’d had his old uniform hauled out of mothballs, just waiting for him. So Woody Strode stepped off a boat from the Pacific and into his old number, 17. He played forty minutes in his return to the gridiron.
Daniel Reeves was a young New York stockbroker who came into a fortune when his father sold a chain of grocery stores to supermarket heavyweight Safeway in 1940. In 1941, Reeves shopped around for a football team to buy and settled on the Cleveland Rams, which he purchased for $135,000 from a local Cleveland ownership group. In 1945, the Cleveland Rams won the National Football League championship at home in –22 degrees Celsius. Reeves celebrated that frigid victory by announcing that he was moving his team from Cleveland to sunny Los Angeles. Until then, there hadn’t been any major professional sports teams located on the West Coast. This was more than a decade before the New York Giants baseball team took up residence in San Francisco and the Brooklyn Dodgers in Los Angeles, breaking the hearts of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. (Cleveland football fans, however, would be spared a lengthy mourning period for the loss of their Rams as that same year, 1946, would see the birth of the All-America Football Conference, a new league, with a franchise in Cleveland, the Browns, named for their first head coach and part-owner, Paul Brown.)
The Los Angeles Rams expected to play in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was already the home of both the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins, and though neither team was anxious to share their digs with a professional football team, they really had no say in the matter. The Coliseum was publicly owned, and permission to lease the facility for Sunday football games would have to come through the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission. When a number of black sportswriters, led by Halley Harding of the Los Angeles Sentinel, learned of the Rams’ lease application, they demanded that the commission make its acceptance conditional on the signing of black players by the Rams and, in particular, that one of those players be Kenny Washington. It didn’t matter that Washington’s best days were behind him. This was about honouring the greatest black sports figure on the West Coast.
The commission listened to an impassioned address by Harding about the contribution Black Americans had made to the war effort and to the original NFL before black players had been systematically squeezed out. Harding and the other black writers found an unexpected ally in commission member Roger W. Jessup, who told the Rams’ representatives at that meeting, “I just want you to know if our Kenny Washington can’t play, there will be no pro football in the Los Angeles Coliseum.” The commission decided to grant a three-year lease to Reeves on the condition that he sign Kenny Washington to play for his team.
Reeves and the Rams organization were backed into a corner. He’d already committed the team to the move and no other football venue on the West Coast could fit 100,000 fans. And so he agreed to sign Washington who, in turn, requested that the Rams also sign his best friend and Hollywood Bears teammate, Woody Strode. Washington did not relish the idea of being the lone black player on an all-white team in an all-white league. And, as far as the Rams were concerned, well, someone had to room with the black guy; why not another black guy?
What is truly fascinating is that three players from the same 1939 university team broke the colour barrier in two major professional sports in the United States: Robinson in baseball, Washington and Strode in football. It took eight years for Robinson and seven for Washington and Strode, who, by the time they signed with the Rams, were shadows of their former selves. Robinson, at twenty-seven, was entering his prime as a baseball player. Washington was only twenty-eight but he had a lot of wear-and-tear on his knees, including off-season surgery. Woody was thirty-one, still an amazing physical specimen but older, slower, wiser, and more protective of his body. Woody did not play much that season, riding the bench for the majority of games.
Woody had never been keen on carrying the weight of expectation that came with being a racial ground-breaker. He intended to live as a free bird. He fully embraced a California laid-back lifestyle before most Californians even knew one existed. Breaking the colour barrier in the NFL would never bring the kind of glory that Jackie Robinson’s ascension to the Dodgers would in 1947. Professional football, at that time, had none of the history, popularity, or American mythology attached to baseball. Woody also never faced the same animosity on the gridiron that Robinson faced on the diamond.
For one thing, in a physical sport like football, unless someone notified you ahead of time that they were going to inflict extra punishment on you because of the colour of your skin, how would you know the difference? During one Rams game, when Kenny Washington was lying on the turf, an opponent went to kick him in the head. Washington caught sight of him at the last second and managed to move his head out of the way. When one of his white teammates mentioned the incident in the locker room, Washington just shrugged.
“It’s hell being a Negro, Jim,” he said.
For Robinson, every act of aggression on the diamond sent a message that said, for the most part, “We don’t want you here.” No one was more surprised than Woody Strode when Jackie kept it together in the face of all that animosity. Strode could hit back. Jackie Robinson could not; he’d made a promise to Branch Rickey. Years later, Strode famously said, “If I have to integrate heaven, I don’t want to go.”
The next year, Woody was cut by the Rams. Too old, they said. At thirty-two he was in better shape than anyone on the team, but no matter. The Rams wanted him gone. He thought he might give pro wrestling a try. He had done some professional wrestling back in 1941 after getting out of school. Then a former teammate with the Rams, Les Lear, called to offer Woody a contract with a team called the Calgary Stampeders up north in Alberta, Canada. The Stampeders were offering $5,000 for the season plus $100 a week for living expenses. That was more than he had been making with the Rams. Hell, it was close to what the Rams were paying their star attraction, Kenny Washington.
Les Lear and Woody had become friends during the one season they were together in Los Angeles. After spending the 1947 season with the Detroit Lions, Lear had been approached by Calgary’s owners and offered the position of player-coach with full control over the on-field personnel. Lear was as close to a homegrown Canadian as they come. He had grown up in Winnipeg and played for the hometown Blue Bombers, winning two Grey Cups, in ’39 and ’41, before joining the Cleveland Rams. He was exactly the kind of prototypical head coach the league desired (but has never yet consistently developed): Canadian-bred, experienced in the Canadian game but knowledgeable of the American game, and familiar with American talent and American football ingenuity. With only five spots available for imports, Calgary was counting on Lear, with his experience in the NFL, to fill those positions with the best available bang for the buck. Les Lear had gone up against Strode in practice day after day for a year. He was well aware of what Woody Strode brought to the table: size, speed, strength, and devotion to fitness.
Les Lear had warned him that he’d better bring his old shoes and pads because he doubted that the team could find any to fit him. Just because they could pay him a decent salary didn’t mean they could afford to outfit him. There were three other American imports with Woody that year: Keith Spaith, Pete Thodos, and Rod Pantages. Spaith, a quarterback, had played college ball at USC and played the 1947 season with the Hawaiian Warriors of the Pacific Coast Football League. He then tried out for the Rams but was cut, and Lear grabbed him to lead the Stamps’ offence. Lear planned to use a stripped-down version of the complex Los Angeles Rams offensive playbook, and both Spaith and Strode had a working understanding of its nuances and its emphasis on the forward passing game.
The Stamps played their home games out of Mewata Stadium (Mewata means “O be joyful” in Cree), a 10,000-seat stadium. The stadium was much smaller than Woody was used to playing in, but the field was wider and longer, allowing runners and receivers more room on the outside. With his size, Woody tended to stand out on the field no matter how large its dimensions; off the field he was like a magnetic pole drawing attention everywhere he went. Because he had Native-American blood on both sides of his family, Strode was very popular with the Indigenous people around Calgary. According to Strode, he did not need to broadcast his racial makeup to the First Nations community; they just saw it in him. Members began to show up at his downtown hotel, bringing gifts of wild game and traditional clothing on a regular basis.
That first year in Calgary for Woody, the Stamps went undefeated during the season and remained so in the two-game, total-points semifinal, winning by a combined score of 21–10. The Calgary Stampeders were off to the Grey Cup game in Toronto. That year marked the beginning of what would become a Canadian football tradition: the great migration of fancy western-dressed football fans to the East via rail, hooting and hollering, drinking and dancing, creating the greatest moveable party on the continent.
The train east contained thirteen cars. One car carried a dozen horses and a chuckwagon. On arrival, the revellers invaded Toronto City Hall, cooking flapjacks and bacon in front of the building and handing them out to hungry Torontonians, who were fascinated by this unrestrained display of Western chutzpah. The Calgary Stampede had come to Ontario’s staid capital, not just to show support for their football team but to create a buzz about their hometown tourist attraction. In so doing, they revolutionized the way Canadians viewed the Grey Cup. It was transformed from a single game into a week-long national celebration, long before the NFL copied the template for its Super Bowl, an annual two-week orgy of hype and overkill.
The Stampeders wisely took an earlier train to avoid the party and get in a little practice in the eastern time zone. Every time the train stopped, Lear had the players outside doing calisthenics or running laps around the train, regardless of the weather, even in knee-deep snow. The team stayed in Oakville and practised on a football field at Appleby College, six hours a day, including time spent watching game film of the Ottawa Rough Riders, an unusual practice at the time. They watched their opponent with interest, a team known for its “sleeper” play where an on-field offensive player did not return to the team huddle and instead might linger near the sidelines behind the line of scrimmage, hopefully unnoticed by the defence. At the snap of the ball, he would suddenly come to life and dash downfield uncovered to await a pass from the quarterback. This play was eventually outlawed, like the spitball in baseball, because it was stretching the rules and nature of sportsmanship. But it would be Calgary in the 1948 Grey Cup game that would turn the tables on Ottawa.
The game itself was a tightly contested affair. With a minute left in the first half, Spaith dropped back and hit Woody Strode with a pass that took the ball down to the Ottawa fourteen-yard line. One Stampeder, receiver Norm Hill, did not return to the huddle after that particular play, instead lying on the field close to the sidelines as if he’d been injured on the previous play. No one noticed — no one except Pete Thodos, who returned to the huddle wondering where his teammate was. He was quickly shushed and told that Norm was “sleeping.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” he said.
The referee was hovering nearby and Spaith asked him to avoid looking toward the sidelines if at all possible. On the snap of the ball, Hill jumped to his feet and took off for the end zone. Spaith let the ball fly. Hill juggled the ball in the end zone and it popped up in the air just as he was knocked flat by the defensive back. Hill hit the ground and sat up. The ball fell into his lap. Manna from heaven. He secured the ball for the touchdown. It wasn’t pretty but it counted; it would gain a degree of infamy as the “sitting touchdown.”
Strode would put his stamp (so to speak) on the game in the second half. The quarterback for the Rough Riders threw an overhand lateral pass that his receiver missed. Everyone on the field assumed it was just an incomplete pass and stopped playing; everyone except Woody, that is. With teammates on the sidelines screaming “Pick it up!” Woody grabbed onto the loose ball.
“An official got out of the way as I picked it up. That’s how I knew I could run.”
And run he did. For a ways. Then he lateralled the ball to a teammate who took it down to the ten before getting tackled. On the very next play from scrimmage, Pete Thodos ran the ball in for the winning touchdown. In Woody’s autobiography, he never lateralled the ball, and neither was he or anyone else tackled short of the goal line. According to him, he ran the ball in himself for the winning touchdown and left the field on his teammates’ shoulders with a bottle of rye whisky in his hand. Now, he may very well have left the game on his teammates’ shoulders. He had, it could be argued, made the deciding play of the game by picking up the fumble and taking it downfield. So that part could be true. But by the time he wrote his book he had been a Hollywood star for forty years, so why not embellish. It’s not like anyone in Hollywood was ever going to check the facts regarding a game played over forty years before in another country.
When the game ended in victory for Calgary, the western celebrants descended upon the Royal York Hotel in the heart of conservative Toronto. On November 29, 1948, sportswriter Jim Coleman reported in the Globe and Mail: “The football game for the Grey Cup was contested officially in the stadium and was continued unofficially in the hotel lobby. At 5:01 p.m. the goalposts were borne triumphantly through the front doors and were erected against the railings of the mezzanine. At 5:02 p.m. two platoons of bellboys circumspectly removed the potted palms, flower vases and anything that weighed less than three thousand pounds.”
The bellboys were presumably attempting to limit the damage. According to legend (and Woody’s memoirs), Strode burst through the front doors of the Royal York astride a pure white horse, wearing “a white linen cowboy-type suit, reddish lizard-skin boots, and a navy blue silk scarf around my neck.” He paraded the horse around the lobby, once again clutching a bottle of Canadian rye whisky in one hand (along with the reins) and waving his ten-gallon hat in the other. The horse reared up and Woody let out a war whoop to applause and encouragement from the hotel guests. As the police closed in to restore order, Woody charged out of the hotel and into the night aboard his magnificent steed.
Did Woody really ride a horse into the Royal York lobby? It’s doubtful. But it makes for a good story. And the story that someone had ridden a horse into the Royal York lobby had existed for years before Woody claimed credit in his autobiography.
On the return train to Calgary, Woody and the rest of the team joined the fans, the cowboys and cowgirls, the horses, and the chuckwagon for a continuous two-thousand-mile-long party.
At the beginning of the next season, Woody sustained an injury that limited his effectiveness. He suggested to Les Lear that a good insurance policy might be to sign a former teammate of Woody’s from the Hollywood Bears, Ezzrett “Sugarfoot” Anderson. Together, Lear and Strode embarked on a recruiting trip to Los Angeles where they found Anderson on the set of Everybody Does It, starring Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas.
“Woody told Les Lear I was the greatest tight end in the world. So they talked me into coming to Calgary,” said Anderson years later.
Anderson was twenty-nine at the time and making a living playing bit parts in Hollywood films in a time when black parts were mostly domestic servants, slaves, porters, Tarzan extras, or simply wide-eyed comic caricatures. He had gotten his membership in the Screen Extras Guild and the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 while playing with the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference. The owners of the team were Hollywood heavyweights Don Ameche (thus the name “Dons”), Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby, and they helped him supplement his income in an era when West Coast football stars were every bit as popular as Hollywood stars in Los Angeles. His first big “small” role was as a stable hand and horse-walker named Walkin’ Murphy in the film Seabiscuit, Hollywood’s first attempt to bring the story of America’s beloved, indomitable racehorse to film.
Anderson was a natural for films. He lived his life in dramatic fashion, dressed well, wore lavender perfume, and played football with an exaggerated air of showmanship. There was no such thing as an easy catch for Sugarfoot. According to Strode, with Ezzrett every catch appeared far more difficult than it really was. If he made a tackle, he was the last to emerge from a pile, lifting his body from the turf like Lazarus rising from the dead, ensuring that every set of eyes in the stadium recognized the magnificence of his achievement. He played the game as if at death’s door until it was time to spring into action, on offence or defence. In the home of Hollywood, his ability to grab the spotlight played well with the fans. It remained to be seen how it might play in Calgary.
Woody Strode and Ezzrett Anderson bookended Calgary’s front line, both offensively and defensively. They also shared a hotel room in downtown Calgary.
“We had a suite with a jukebox and all our favourite records,” wrote Strode in his memoir. “We didn’t need an icebox; we’d just sit a case of beer outside the window and five minutes later we’d have ice-cold beer.”
Anderson claimed that he loved Calgary from the moment he arrived and that once, no doubt after a few of those weather-chilled beers, he confessed to Strode that he prayed both to God and to Woody. Strode wondered why in the world anyone would pray to him. Anderson’s answer was direct: because Woody was responsible for bringing him to Calgary. He told Woody that his mother had picked cotton when he was a child, and that she used to pull him through the fields on a sack because she couldn’t leave him while she worked and she couldn’t afford not to work. Woody, who had enjoyed a much easier upbringing in California, envied his friend’s total embracement of Canada.
“You’re getting more out of this than I am,” he admitted.
Woody’s life waited for him back in California. He was never ungrateful for the treatment he received in Canada or the lifestyle he was able to enjoy, but he missed his family and the California vibe. Ezzrett, on the other hand, would commute to Los Angeles for three years, taking small film roles during the off-season, before finally moving his family up to Calgary full-time in 1952. To his kids, he might as well have moved them to the Arctic Circle, it seemed such a cold and remote existence. But he remained confident that they would come around in the end, and they did, growing up playing the winter sports so foreign to their former Southern California life.
In 1949, the Stampeders were favourites to repeat as Grey Cup champions. Sportswriter and editor Tony Allan with the Winnipeg Tribune gave the most obvious reasons: “As if it wasn’t bad enough last year trying to figure a means of stopping Spaith and Strode — and nobody did, by the way — the problem is worse this season with Sugarfoot Anderson operating on the other flank.”
Once again, the Stampeders were the dominant force in Canadian football during the season except for one minor hiccup, a 9–6 loss to Saskatchewan preventing them from achieving two unbeaten seasons in a row. Keith Spaith, with Strode and Anderson as his two bookends, formed a potent passing attack that few defensive backs could cover completely because of their size and strength. For the second year running, Spaith would be named the Most Valuable Player in the WIFU. Sugarfoot led all receivers with thirty catches for 539 yards and five touchdowns.
Sometimes during pre-game workouts, the three would give the fans a highly entertaining aerial display of circus catches, with Spaith as straight man firing passes to Strode and Sugarfoot, a gridiron version of the Harlem Globetrotters or the Kansas City Monarchs (who played rapid-fire shadow-ball infield drills without a baseball that would have fans gasping at the illusion). These were the moments when these black athletes demonstrated their true prowess, not just as skilled players but as entertainers capable of connecting with an audience.
The Western semifinal that year was a two-game, total-points affair between the Stampeders and their archrivals, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the only team to beat them during the regular season. While Strode and Anderson were treated like royalty in Calgary, Les Lear warned them that Saskatchewan’s Taylor Field might not top the list of most racially tolerant environments. Roughrider fans were known to give a rough ride to all visiting players regardless of their ancestry, but Lear feared Strode’s and Anderson’s size and colour might make them particularly enticing targets. In fact, according to Sugarfoot, Lear flat-out told them “to keep our helmets on when we were on the sidelines to avoid getting hit on the head by bottles thrown by the fans.” Lear grew up playing football in western Canada so the two star players presumed he knew what he was talking about. They kept their helmets on.
Calgary won the first game of the semifinal, 18–12. Sugarfoot caught six passes for ninety yards and one touchdown. But Woody separated his shoulder and required freezing at halftime. By the end of the game he was in such pain that further medication was necessary. This time, however, he decided to opt for more traditional Canadian methods of pain management.
“The doctor came to see me. He said, ‘Woody, do you want me to give you a shot for the pain?’ ‘No!’ I said, ‘Give me some whiskey!’ And the Canadian boys brought me some of their finest rye whiskey, emptied half the bottle, and filled it up with beer. I drank that and they picked me up and carried me to the train.”
The second game of the semifinal was played on Calgary’s home field, Mewata Stadium. As time was winding down on the game, Saskatchewan had the ball deep in Calgary territory with the score 8–4 in their favour. They lined up for what should have been a routine field goal that would give them an 11–4 win as well as an overall victory edge in total points. But the Roughrider kicker, Buck Rogers (for real), missed. As the Stamps, leading the two-game semifinal in total points, were about to let loose in celebration, the referee whistled for an offside penalty. No! And the offender was none other than playing-coach Les Lear, the man the players called Lord Lear or just “the Lord” for his tough, no-nonsense attitude. Sugarfoot, who was captain of the team, confronted Lear, a story he clearly relished telling some seventy years later on a video clip for the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame and Museum: “And I walked up to him and I said, ‘Lord, this year I’m playing with you for the first time and everything, but if you ever jump offside like that again, I’m going to choke you.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘I’ll never do it again, Sugar.’”
There was much laughter in the retelling, but one can only imagine what a humbling moment it must have been for a tough-nosed head coach to be called out for such a potentially costly mistake. The ball was moved five yards closer to the goalposts. This time, Saskatchewan opted for a different kicker, Del Wardien, in hopes he could succeed where Rogers had failed. The Roughriders should have stuck with Rogers. Wardien shanked the ball low and wide of the uprights. This time, Lear and the rest of the Stampeders managed to stay onside. Calgary still lost the game 9–4, but they won the Western championship by a hair on total points, 22–21. For the second year in a row the Stamps were off to the Grey Cup in Toronto.
Their opposition in the 1949 Grey Cup game would be the Montreal Alouettes, champions of the Big Four in the East. Once again, it seemed that half the city of Calgary hopped aboard the train for the journey east and, for good measure, brought their horses. Everybody was looking for a repeat of last year’s festivities. Like the year before, the participation of Calgary and its fans had generated something unusual in Canadian football — national interest in the Grey Cup game. Scalpers were reported to be getting astronomical prices for a pair of tickets. Some as high as $10.00 a pair!
Woody was in rough shape for the game. He could not raise his arm above his shoulder, which made it nearly impossible to reach for a pass over his head, taking away his height advantage. He did not practise catching passes in the run-up to the game. He didn’t even want to think about what it would feel like to get hit in the shoulder. Just before the game, his teammates held him still while the team doctor stuck a metal syringe loaded with novocaine into Woody’s shoulder … six times. He could feel the needle scraping against bone. And pretty soon he felt nothing. You could have driven a spike into his shoulder and he wouldn’t have felt it. He was good to go.
The Varsity Stadium field, however, was not in as good shape as Woody. Whatever stadium crew existed had not bothered to cover the field the week before the game. The field was muddy in most areas, partially frozen in others, with small patches of snow spread throughout the field providing the only spots of traction available. There was no point in getting frustrated by conditions. It was the same for both sides. And so Les Lear gave the team his usual pre-game pep talk — “I’ll see you at the end of the game if they don’t take you out on crutches” — and sent the Stamps onto the gridiron.
With only one of his favourite passing targets functioning at anywhere near 100 percent, quarterback Keith Spaith had a miserable day. He threw for four interceptions and coughed up the football when he was hit by Montreal strongman Herb Trawick, who picked up the loose ball and carried it into the end zone. It was Trawick’s second fumble-recovery of the game. Not to be outdone by Trawick’s heroics, Sugarfoot also recovered a fumble and carried it downfield for a touchdown. Woody was forced to pull himself from the game with five minutes left, his arm hanging useless and throbbing at his side, the freezing worn off, the pain too much to endure. He watched helplessly from the sidelines while the clock ticked down and the Alouettes celebrated their victory.
Although the mood on the train heading west was more subdued than it had been the previous year, you wouldn’t know it by the turnouts at every whistle stop along the route. In Winnipeg the team drew a thousand fans to the train station. Bagpipers led an impromptu parade. They were given the kind of reception generally reserved for conquering warriors. The players were overwhelmed by the reception they received in the West, even in hardcore Roughrider land. And there were no more popular players than Woody Strode and Ezzrett Anderson. But nothing could have prepared the team for the reception they got when they reached Calgary.
“When we came to Calgary — the population in 1949 then was a hundred and twenty-five thousand people — we had lost the Grey Cup but sixty thousand people were at the train station … which was unbelievable to me,” recalled Sugarfoot, some sixty years later, with amazement.
The city council had declared a half-day civic holiday and local schools did the same so that children could attend the festivities. Almost half the city turned out to greet the Stampeders. There was a parade throughout the downtown core, beginning and ending at the train station. Woody, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, played guitar while Sugarfoot, dressed in a long fringed jacket and a white cowboy hat, serenaded the crowd, much to the fans’ delight. That was Woody Strode’s swan song in Calgary.
Woody returned to California and the world of wrestling. But a whole new world of opportunity opened up for him in Hollywood. He became great friends with John Ford and made four films with him, including playing the title character in Sergeant Rutledge. Strode is probably best remembered for his role in Spartacus as Draba, a gladiator slave who must fight the title character, played by Kirk Douglas, to the death in the arena. When they first meet in the film, Spartacus asks Draba his name.
“You don’t want to know my name,” Draba replies. “I don’t want to know your name.”
“Just a friendly question,” says Spartacus.
“Gladiators don’t make friends. If we’re ever matched in the arena together, I have to kill you.”
Thankfully, he was never required to go that far on the gridiron. In all, Woody Strode made seventy films. There were black stars who were bigger attractions, like Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, but none were busier. He was really the first black action star. In 1980, Woody Strode was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in Oakland, California. His last film, The Quick and the Dead, starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Russell Crowe, was released in 1995, a year after his death from lung cancer.
Ezzrett “Sugarfoot” Anderson played five more years with Calgary before retiring. He started up a number of businesses in the city and even had his own radio show for a time, playing his favourite jazz recordings. He maintained a connection with the Calgary Stampeders for the rest of his life. He was in all respects a local legend and a proud Canadian. The man Calgarians came to know as “Sugarfoot” died on March 8, 2017. He was ninety-seven years old.