Goal Dust by Woody Strode & Sam Young

Author:Woody Strode & Sam Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 1990-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Integration of Pro Sports

During my three years at March Field, Leo and I lived on base during the week and came home to Los Angeles on the weekends. Leo kept his car on base and we’d drive home together. But if I had to make the trip by myself, I would just hitchhike; I never rode the bus once.

Because of the uniform, I never had to worry about getting a ride. Everybody respected the man in uniform; black or white it didn’t matter, they’d stop right away and pick you up. There was no fear, no knocking of the heads, because drugs hadn’t taken over our society yet. Drugs changed the whole culture of America because the guy who really needs the drug can’t afford it. That’s when it got into the mad area.

We were into alcohol; that was it. When Leo and I came home on the weekends, we’d meet up with Kenny, when Kenny was in town, at Billy Berg’s, drink and listen to the swing. We were all married, so we’d grab the wives and meet at the club. And when we headed back to base we always had four or five cases of whiskey in the trunk.

Whiskey was hard to come by during the war, but Kenny had a connection. He’d get the whiskey for us and Leo and I would fight all the way back to the base. He wanted to charge forty dollars and I said, “Fifty!” I said, “If we get caught, they’ll have us in front of the Commanding Officer so we might as well get as much as we can.”

The whiskey came from a liquor wholesaler who owned the San Francisco Clippers football team. Kenny played for him during the war years. Normally Kenny would have never left Paul Schissler but when the war came, Schissler went to organize the Fliers and this guy in San Francisco offered Kenny $500 a week to play football; plus he offered Kenny some sort of job working with his company after Kenny retired from football.

Like I mentioned before, Kenny didn’t go into the service because of his bad knees. The first really bad injury came at the end of our 1941 season with the Bears. Kenny went to make a cut; he planted his foot and when he went to push off, the knee just gave out. I could hear that thing go clear across the field; it sounded like a guitar string popping.

Kenny had an operation and that got him out of the service. Instead, he went on the USO tour. That’s when he gave up being a policeman. When he came back from the tour, he started playing football up in San Francisco. I used to laugh about that; Kenny wasn’t physically fit for the armed services, and he ended up making a fortune playing football during the war.

But the government did use Kenny Washington. They sent famous black athletes like Kenny overseas to talk to the segregated black units. He went to Alaska and he went to the Burma Road.

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