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Woodrow Wilson Woolwine "Woody" Strode (July 25, 1914 – December 31, 1994) was an African American decathlete and football star who went on to become a film actor. He was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in ''Spartacus'' in 1960. He served in the United States Army during World War II. ==Early life and athletic career== Strode was born in Los Angeles, California. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School in South East Los Angeles and college at UCLA, where he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. His world-class decathlon capabilities were spearheaded by a plus shot put (when the world record was ) and a high jump (the world record at time was ). Strode posed for a nude portrait, part of Hubert Stowitts's acclaimed exhibition of athletic portraits shown at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (although the inclusion of black and Jewish athletes caused the Nazis to close the exhibit).〔Stowitts, Hubert Julian. American champions; fifty portraits of American athletes by Stowitts, Tiergartenstrasse 21a, Berlin, 9.–15. September 1936, unter dem Protektorat des Amerikanischen Botschafters und Mitwirkung der Vereinigung Carl Schurz, anlässlich der XI. Olympiade, special sport exhibition. Stowitts, 1936〕 Strode, Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson starred on the 1939 UCLA Bruins football team, in which they made up three of the four backfield players.〔B.J. VIOLETT – (TEAMMATES RECALL JACKIE ROBINSON’S LEGACY ). UCLA Today magazine, 1997〕 Along with Ray Bartlett, there were four African-Americans playing for the Bruins, when only a few dozen at all played on other college football teams.〔("Kenny Washington )" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''〕 They played eventual conference and national champion Southern Cal to a 0–0 tie with the 1940 Rose Bowl on the line. It was the first UCLA–USC rivalry football game with national implications. When World War II broke out, Strode was playing for the Hollywood Bears Football team but soon joined the United States Army Air Corps and spent the war unloading bombs in Guam and the Marianas, as well as playing on the Army football team at March Field in Riverside, California. After the war, he worked at serving subpoenas and escorting prisoners for the LA County District Attorney's Office before being signed, briefly, to the Los Angeles Rams along with Kenny Washington. They were the first African-American players to play in the NFL for many years. When out on the road with the team, Strode had his first experience with racism, something he wasn't aware of growing up in Los Angeles. "We were unconscious of color. We used to sit in the best seats at the Cocoanut Grove listening to Donald Novis sing. If someone said, "there's a Negro over there,' I was just as apt as anyone to turn around and say 'Where?' I had a black principal in my grammar school when I was a kid. On the Pacific Coast there wasn't anything we couldn't do. As we got out of the L.A. area we found these racial tensions. Hell, we thought we were white." Strode and fellow UCLA alumnus Kenny Washington were two of the first African-Americans to play in major college programs and later the modern National Football League, playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. No black men had played in the NFL from 1933 to 1946.〔NFL 2001 Record and Fact Book, Workman Publishing Co, New York,NY, ISBN 0-7611-2480-2, p. 280〕 UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson would go on to break the color barrier in Major League baseball (in fact, all three had played in the semi-professional Pacific Coast Professional Football League earlier in the decade). He played for two seasons with the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union in Canada, where he was a member of Calgary's 1948 Grey Cup Championship team before retiring due to injury in 1949. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Woody Strode」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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