The Black Bruins: The Remarkable Lives of UCLA's Jackie Robinson, Woody Strode, Tom Bradley, Kenny Washington, and Ray Bartlett

by James W. Johnson

  Bradley ended his college career as a three-year letterman. He competed in the 440-yard run, the 880, and the 1,600-yard relay. The 440-yard run was his best race. His best time was 48.2 seconds in 1939, considered excellent for that time. The world record, set in 1971, is 44.58 seconds. (The 400-meter, a shorter race, has been used to determine world records since then.)

  When Bradley later became the mayor of Los Angeles, he attributed his personal drive toward success to those years of running the 440. “My old track coach Ducky Drake . . . always used to push us to strive harder in the last 100 yards,” Bradley recalled. “He’d tell us, ‘Keep your knees up and run your guts out.’ It was the toughest race. You had to sprint all the way. After running 200 yards you were really in no shape to think about putting out any more. Well, we’d gone through the [1963] election and faded in the stretch,” but Bradley remembered Drake’s coaching and ran the final spurt to victory.

  Bradley ran track at the same time as USC track star Louis Zamperini, who would go on to world acclaim more than seventy years later as the subject of the best-selling book Unbroken (and movie by the same name) about his time as a Japanese prisoner during World War II. Zamperini won the mile and two-mile races while Bradley finished third in the 880-yard run in a triangular meet among UCLA, USC, and the Olympic Club on April 22, 1939. Once in a track meet against USC, Bradley, Berkley, Lacefield, and Strode accounted for 23 1/2 points of the 35 earned by the entire UCLA squad.

  9

  Under-the-Table Help

  “When they took me out to Westwood for the first time it was like taking a young boy to Disneyland.”

  —Woody Strode

  UCLA knew that if it wanted to be competitive on the football field, it would have to sweeten the pot for recruits. Several schools sought Washington, Robinson, Strode, Bartlett, and (to a lesser extent) Bradley.

  Strode revealed in his autobiography that UCLA offered to pay for him to attend remedial classes before enrolling at Westwood. But the university also gave him a scholarship and financial support. By today’s standards the financial aid would be illegal, and even then it was questionable, so much so that a widespread investigation of all PCC football programs was launched in 1940.

  If Strode’s package was any indication, more than likely Washington’s was even more lucrative, for he was the best player on the West Coast, perhaps in the country. Washington never publicly revealed what his benefits were, but Robinson’s became known.

  Strode wrote that UCLA “ended up taking care of me and my whole family while I was in school.” UCLA officials gave him one hundred dollars a month and an eleven-dollar meal ticket. “Every week they gave me twenty bucks under the table so I could pay the bills at home.” He also got a car, free books from Campbell’s Book Store, and all his clothes free from Desmond’s. He also sold his tickets to home games. “Well, you can imagine what a candy store that was for me,” he said.

  Strode noted that actor Joe E. Brown and wealthy real estate developer Ed Janss donated money to UCLA, and it was doled out for scholarships. Brown’s son played second string behind Strode and was student body president in the 1938–39 school year. Janss owned a great deal of property in Westwood. Brown and Janss gave Strode a tour of the campus while recruiting him. “This is where I want to be,” Strode told them. “Tell me what I have to do.”

  What Bartlett received to play for UCLA is unknown, but based on his career at PJC it is more than likely to have been similar to what Robinson got.

  Bradley received an athletic scholarship, but he never revealed the amount. Within eighteen months after attending UCLA, he said, he had saved enough money to buy a car, which he used to commute to the campus. He also gave rides to fellow African American students for ten cents.

  Alumni and boosters did most of the recruiting in those days, and that’s where the problems came in with the PCC investigators. For example, Bob and Blanch Campbell, who owned Campbell’s Book Store near the Westwood campus, were UCLA boosters. When Robinson was at PJC, the new coach, Babe Horrell, asked the Campbells whether they would join him in watching Robinson play . After the game, Horrell asked Bob Campbell, “Would you like to have Jack come over and play for us [at UCLA]?” Campbell replied, “Gee, that would be great. Do you think he would?”

  Horrell said he was working to bring Robinson to play for UCLA in 1939. He took him to the Campbells’ bookstore, and the Campbells eventually hired him to work there. Bob Campbell remembered Robinson as a dependable, charming young man. “[He] was always eager to cooperate,” Campbell said. “We seemed to hit it off very well and became lifelong friends.”

  Washington and Strode also worked for the Campbells. Bob Campbell was a member of the Young Men’s Club of Westwood Village, a booster club started in 1933. He was its first president. Before then, Campbell said, “We had been helping the football players in various ways. I’d been giving them books and supplies to help them.” He and other boosters decided to form the club. “We decided to really organize, like the other schools,” he said. “We aided the players substantially and gave the boys what the other schools were giving.”

  The help still was forthcoming when Robinson stepped onto campus. The 1931 Plymouth that Robinson drove to UCLA was replaced by a newer Ford “that somehow he had managed to acquire.” UCLA was only trying to play catch-up with what other schools had been doing for years. Bartlett believed that the Campbells had arranged for Robinson to acquire the Ford. He noted that the Campbells had loaned him twenty-five dollars, interest-free and without security, to help him buy a car, “and when I paid them back, they were shocked.” Providing jobs for athletes was common. Several schools in the conference allowed players to “work” for their tuition and fees in various make-work tasks on and off campus. One USC athlete’s “job” was to empty the campus pay phones once a week. Athletes turned in time cards for hours not worked.

  Because of such inducements the presidents of the ten PCC schools agreed to hire former FBI agent Edwin H. Atherton to investigate the California schools. (Atherton would later become the conference’s commissioner.) “Atherton was one tough dude,” the Los Angeles Times’ sportswriter Melvin Durslag recalled in a 1991 column, “impressively incorruptible.”

  The PCC’s Northwest members—the University of Washington, Washington State, the University of Oregon, Oregon State, the University of Idaho, and the University of Montana—apparently were behind the demands for the investigation because they felt at a disadvantage in recruitment and finances with the big-city schools of California. For example, PCC schools took home big paychecks—$85,000—for playing in the Rose Bowl. (Today the money is split among all the schools in the Pac-12 Conference.) Of the twenty-three Rose Bowls in which the PCC participated between 1916 and 1940, the four California schools were in sixteen of them. In addition, the California schools had a bigger population base on which to draw to fill their stadiums. Los Angeles, for example, had a population of 1.5 million in 1939, while Eugene, Oregon, home of the Oregon Ducks, had 21,000. In 1939 UCLA had gross receipts of $550,000, while Washington State in tiny Pullman (even today the population still is only about 31,500) took in about $81,500. Said one Southern California official, “The Northwest colleges are jealous of our success. They can’t whip us on the athletic field, so they are trying to do it behind closed doors at conference meetings. It’s just a gang-up deal.”

  On January 5, 1940, right after the Rose Bowl, Atherton issued a two-million-word report that cost $40,000 and had taken two years to prepare. It documented the abuses and violations of PCC rules, including high-pressure methods to attract recruits, trips and entertainment for recruits paid for by alumni, financial inducements in the form of jobs, and payment for jobs not actually worked. Atherton singled out UC Berkeley, UCLA, and USC for offering subsidies, free equipment, and entertainment to high school students. Among the violations Atherton pointed out were the same inducements that Strode had received to attend UCLA. In all, ten high school players were d
eclared ineligible to play at UCLA, USC, and UC Berkeley. Atherton felt it was unfortunate that his actions to ban the players hurt the players more than the schools. “The sad part of it is that the schools are in no position to punish overzealous alumni or friends who make these boys ineligible by their activities,” he said.

  Campbell recalled that “we had a little mix-up” when Atherton began looking into alumni and booster interactions with the athletes. Campbell told Atherton that the Young Men’s Club had nothing to hide. Most of the aid to athletes came not from campus sources but from booster clubs. “We decided to let him see what we were doing. Atherton told me afterward that we were the only club that let him see their books,” Campbell said. “The other schools showed him a little bit, but he had to dig out all of the rest.”

  As a result of the investigation, Earl J. Miller, UCLA’s athletics faculty representative, “cut some of the boys off when he learned [the club] was paying them for work they didn’t do.” Campbell called Miller to ask, “What good is that going to do if we aren’t going to have any boys left?” Miller replied, “Oh, we’re going to have boys left. We’re just eliminating these things as we come to them. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to do this.”

  Campbell said all UCLA players stayed in school, “and they scraped up money from somewhere. In a few months we gave them money again without worrying about going through channels. We found out that every school was giving the boys money one way or another, so everybody went on doing just what they’d been doing before.” Despite the lengthy and costly investigation it was business as usual at the California schools.

  10

  Filling the Coffers

  “They came to see Kenny and me play.”

  —Woody Strode

  During the years before Washington, Strode, Robinson, and Bartlett joined the Bruins, the UCLA athletic program had accumulated a net loss of $249,187 for all sports. But football was the biggest revenue producer, and those revenues soared from 1936 to 1940. That’s not to say that revenues rose dramatically because of the black players alone but because of the better teams on which they played a major role. Certainly their exciting athletic ability proved a huge drawing card. Woody Strode remembered minorities flocked to the UCLA football games because of the African American players: “If we drew one hundred thousand people to the Coliseum, 40,000 of them would be black; that was about every black person in the city of Los Angeles. We received a lot of attention from the press and that added to our exposure.”

  In the mid-1930s the university recognized that if it were to have a financially stable athletic program, it would have to have a winning program. That meant recruiting the best players available, and those just happened to be players like Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson.

  In 1933, partly because of the expenses of joining the PCC, UCLA’s athletic program had accumulated a net loss of $178,159. By the 1936–37 school year it had increased, as noted above, to $249,187. The football team had a 6-3-1 record. By the end of the 1938–39 athletic year, when Washington and Strode played, the Bruins’ record was 7-4-1, and the net loss had been reduced to $244,733. The next year, when the four African Americans played, the Bruins’ record improved to 6-0-4, and the net loss dropped to $150,810. The next season, when just Robinson and Bartlett took the field, the team won one game and lost nine, and the net loss was down to $111,813. The loss wasn’t entirely erased until 1944–45. While the four were playing, the athletic department’s revenues offset expenses by about $133,000.

  Coach Spaulding was back for his fourteenth year but announced that 1938 would be his last season. He was going to devote his time fully to being athletic director. He ended his career at UCLA with a 72–51–8 record. His PCC record was 33-34-6.

  UCLA fans received a scare in mid-January 1938 when rumors circulated that Washington and Strode were considering transferring to the University of California at Berkeley. A Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that a “secret conference” had been held between the two players and a Berkeley assistant in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day, when the Golden Bears played Alabama in the Rose Bowl. The writer claimed he was told that one player would not transfer without the other. The article remarked without explanation that “it is felt [UC Berkeley], larger of the two schools, offers greater opportunity for the future of both youths.” It also noted that a “feeling of loyalty” toward UCLA was a big obstacle in making the transfer. Ultimately both players remained at Westwood.

  In the first game of the 1938 season, the Bruins were favored to defeat the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, from the Western Conference (which later became the Big Ten). One reason was Washington, whom Los Angeles Times sports columnist Braven Dyer described as “the mighty colored boy who runs with the elusiveness of a moonbeam and throws with the power and accuracy of a howitzer.” But it was Woody Strode who stood out in the dominating 27–3 win over the Hawkeyes in front of a Coliseum crowd of forty thousand. Strode, described as “the giant Negro right end,” blocked a punt that led to a UCLA touchdown, recovered a fumble in the Iowa end zone for another touchdown, and partially blocked a second punt.

  The Bruins traveled to Eugene, Oregon, for their next game to take on the University of Oregon Ducks. One sportswriter picked UCLA to win by three touchdowns. It wasn’t to be. Trailing 14–12 with a minute to go, the Bruins’ Charlie Fenenbock broke out for what appeared to be a 55-yard game-winning touchdown. A referee didn’t think so. He said Fenenbock’s knee hit the ground when he cut back during his run, although Fenenbock said he just put his hand on the ground to right himself from falling. The Bruins were infuriated, but the call stood. Game over; 14–12 Oregon.

  Washington had a poor game. He was trapped behind the line of scrimmage several times and fumbled twice. He gained just 33 yards in 12 carries. He was becoming a target because of the hype over his talent. For the next game, against the University of Washington Huskies, Washington was moved to fullback to make room in the backfield for Fenenbock. Spaulding hoped with both of them on the field, attention might free up Washington’s running game.

  The Huskies had won all of the first four games against UCLA without allowing a single point to the Bruins: 19–0, 10–0, 14–0, and 26–0. This time it was UCLA’s turn to shut out the Huskies. Kenny Washington scored both touchdowns in a 13–0 victory, one on a lateral after a Huskies fumble and the second on a 1-yard run. Other than that, he had a mediocre day with 22 yards on 10 carries.

  Los Angeles Times reporter Dyer wrote the lateral play showed that “true sportsmanship and team play draws no color line.” Jack Montgomery had recovered the fumble, and when he was about to be tackled, he lateraled the ball to Washington. Montgomery ran downfield to throw a block that made Washington’s sailing clear to the goal line. The play, Dyer said, “revealed alertness of mind and body, fighting ability and co-operation to the nth degree.”

  Next the Bruins traveled north to play UC Berkeley, but they were overmatched. The Golden Bears ran over them 20–7 and held Washington in check. He ran for 54 yards on 13 carries and fumbled three times. The game wasn’t as close as the score might indicate. The Berkeley rooting section yelled “small fry” at UCLA throughout the game in reference to the football prowess (or lack thereof) of “Cal’s cousins.”

  In their next game, the Bruins overpowered the University of Idaho Vandals 33–0, the “marauding moleskins from Moscow.” Washington ran for 123 yards on 9 carries. The Bruins beat Stanford 6–0 on October 30 in the Coliseum behind “the colored boy,” Washington, who ran for 104 yards on 23 carries.

  UCLA traveled to Pullman, Washington, on November 5, and Washington had runs of 24 and 51 yards in a 21–0 rout of the Washington State University Cougars. Strode, who was described as “Kenny’s sun-burned playmate,” blocked a punt that led to Washington’s first touchdown. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Frank Finch also credited the “the Jewish jitterburg,” Izzy Cantor, for “looking pretty good.” Washington finished the game with 137 yards on 18 carries.

/>   UCLA went out of its conference to play the University of Wisconsin Badgers of the Western Conference in a November 12 game. The Bruins fell to the Badgers 14–7 and fumbled ten times, six of which Wisconsin recovered. Wisconsin also dropped the ball eight times but retained possession on seven. After the game Badgers coach Harry Stuhldreher, one of the famed Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, praised Washington: “That Washington is a sweet football player.”

  In their second to last game of the regular season, the Bruins were demolished by USC 42–7 in front of sixty-five thousand fans at the Coliseum. UCLA struck first after a USC fumble on the opening kickoff. After that it was all USC. Washington had a poor game. He had three passes intercepted, one of which was returned 52 yards for a touchdown. Washington also fumbled a punt that gave the ball to the Trojans on the Bruins’ 16-yard line. Total yardage favored the Trojans, 287 to 64, not a particularly fruitful afternoon for the Bruins.

  The Bruins finished their regular season with a 6–6 tie against Oregon State before seventy-five hundred fans at the Coliseum. Even though they rolled up 388 yards and 23 first downs to the Beavers’ 114 and 3 respectively, the Bruins had to rally to earn the tie. They twice failed to score within the 5-yard line. A missed drop-kick field goal attempt from the 17-yard line with five seconds to go kept UCLA from the victory.