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

by James W. Johnson

  It’s difficult to blame the players for their lack of confidence in trying for a field goal, despite the fact that the ball was directly in front of the goal posts at the 4-yard line. The Bruins had made only one field goal all season, and they had made only 10 of 19 extra-point attempts during the season, second to last among major teams on the West Coast. Perhaps a more puzzling question is why Robinson failed to carry the ball once the Bruins drove to the 3-yard line. Another is why Washington didn’t throw a high pass to his favorite receiver, the 6-foot-4 Woody Strode, who was covered by a 5-foot-11 defensive back.

  Coach Horrell said after the game that he considered sending in a man to try a field goal before the Bruins made their last first down, “but when the boys made first down on the Trojans’ three, I changed my mind. After all, these kids were doing pretty good without my help. Anything Mathews did from then on was good enough for me.”

  UCLA sent Strode and two others as decoys to the left, and Washington headed that way as well and then turned and threw a pass across the field to a seemingly wide-open Don McPherson. A Trojan defensive back was able to recover and knocked the ball away. Game over.

  Horrell pulled Washington with fifteen seconds left so that the crowd could recognize him in his last game. He received a standing ovation from the spectators, and several Trojans shook his hand and hugged him. “It was the most soul-stirring event I have ever seen in sports,” Strode said. “I have never been so moved emotionally,” Washington said, “rarely so proud of my country.”

  After the game Horrell was asked why he had declined to go for a field goal. “The game is over now; it makes little difference, don’t you think?” Robinson was devastated to miss out on the Rose Bowl game. He broke down in tears in the locker room.

  The Amsterdam News of New York editorialized in an article reprinted in the California Eagle two weeks after the game that “every red-blooded American must have felt proud” of Washington, whom it called “a great back, a good student, and a manly youth who had brought credit to his school, his race, and his country.” The editor noted that despite the love shown, Washington was “denied many privileges and rights . . . which make U.S. citizens the most blessed in the world.” Because he was black, jobs, including in the NFL, would be “closed to him.” The next day, when Tennessee was selected to play the Trojans, the Amsterdam News wrote a headline over the article that read, “And Rose Bowl Remains White as a New Lily.”

  More than four hundred thousand fans watched the Bruins that year—by far the most of any university in the country—and millions more tracked them by listening to the radio or reading newspapers. A week after the game a group of local businessmen invited the four African American Bruin football players and Tom Bradley to attend a banquet celebrating their accomplishments.

  Toastmaster Paul R. Williams, a noted architect and a USC graduate, told the players that the businessmen had arranged the banquet so that they could show appreciation to the UCLA coaches and the black athletes for their achievements on the field and in the classroom. He said the businessmen promised “to offer encouragement and assistance, financial and moral, in seeing that they get off on the right foot in pursuing their life’s work.”

  Coach Horrell attended the banquet and urged the black stars to complete their requirements for graduation, noting that “only about six percent of the athletes, otherwise eligible, are able to come up to UCLA’s scholastic requirements.” Washington spoke for his teammates when he responded, “There is so much to be said I hardly know where to begin, but I am certain I express the sentiments of the rest of the fellows when I say that we certainly appreciate this manifestation of interest in us. We want action and the opportunity to put our foot in the door. We will do the rest.” They spent the night playing ping pong and badminton during the banquet, which was held at Williams’s house. They put away steaks “suited to their he-man appetites.”

  Washington and Robinson were slighted in postseason honors, despite the backing of the mainstream and black press. Washington was particularly proud that he had played all but twenty minutes of the season on offense and defense during the 1939 season. “Records are made to be broken,” he said, “but when somebody breaks my endurance record, let me hear about it.”

  Washington led the nation in scoring and total offense. He ran up 811 yards rushing and 559 passing. He scored 5 touchdowns and threw passes for 7 more. His total offensive numbers were 1,370 yards. Robinson finished the season third in the PCC with 514 yards rushing in 42 carries, for an average of 12.23 yards a carry. He was second in punt return yards with 281 yards in 14 returns, for a 20.07-yard average per return. He also caught 6 passes for 145, a 24.17 average per pass.

  The California Eagle wrote that the black athletes “had done more to make the road of the Negro athlete easier to travel than a thousand sermons, proclamations or treatises.” It’s unknown if any of the help that was mentioned at the Williams banquet came about, but one thing is certain: those athletes had trouble moving on to their early careers because of racial discrimination. Looking back over the season, astute fans might also have noticed that despite their contributions to the team, neither Robinson nor Washington nor Strode was ever named team captain, a position that was determined by their teammates.

  13

  Decision Time

  “I guess we realized one of the most exciting times of our lives had just come and gone.”

  —Woody Strode

  Jackie Robinson had vowed when he arrived at Westwood that he would concentrate on football and track, but when the 1940 Olympic Games were canceled because of the war in Europe, he had no reason to focus exclusively on track in the spring. So when basketball season began in the winter, he was right there, ready to go.

  The team, loser of twenty-eight consecutive games, could use his help. Coach Wilbur Johns had seen Robinson play at Pasadena when he had helped defeat USC’s heralded freshman team and “was sold on the boy.” Johns said Robinson was “a great player. He has a world of natural ability.” His Pasadena coach, Carl Metten, predicted in September 1939 that Robinson would be one of the best players in the PCC. “He has wonderful speed and coordination,” Metten said, “and can dribble and shoot equally well with either hand. If he wants to make a basket he’ll do it.” Johns couldn’t wait for basketball season to start.

  The UCLA losing streak went to thirty-one games when the season started after two losses at Stanford and one at UC Berkeley. Robinson stood out in both Stanford games, scoring 23 of the team’s 28 points in the first game and 12 of the 36 in the second. The Bruins lost to the Golden Bears 39–33 despite Robinson’s 15 points.

  Robinson was unhappy with the pace of the game the Bruins were playing. Johns liked a slow-down, half-court offense while Robinson preferred a fast-break offense. The coach and player clashed. Robinson’s frustration and a couple of skipped practices brought the two together to work out a solution. Robinson agreed to be more cooperative—and the Bruins began playing a faster game.

  The change put an end to the losing streak when the Bruins beat UC Berkeley 35–33 with Robinson making a game-winning layup. Berkeley coach Nibs Price raved that Robinson had “more natural talent, speed, and spring than any man in the conference.” He called Robinson the best basketball player in the United States. But Price left Robinson off his all-conference team at the end of the season despite praising “the speed and shooting ability of the Bruin Negro,” and he picked another player on “basketball ability alone.”

  Shav Glick, a reporter for the Daily Bruin who had attended PJC when Robinson was there, said in 1997 that he marveled at “those hands, he was so quick. He’d steal balls so easily and just take off. He was very intelligent as an athlete. He could jump for a guy who was only six-foot and had that incredible quickness. He also had a good shot. Without any doubt, he could have played in the NBA.” Glick remembered that Wilbur Johns credited Robinson’s athletic talents to “beautiful timing and rhythm and ability to relax completely whe
never he wished. Robinson was always in perfect condition and was a great team player despite being an outstanding player.”

  Robinson wound up leading the PCC with 148 points, 10 points ahead of USC’s Ralph Vaughn. Because of his prowess on the basketball court, sportswriters sometimes called him the “Ebony Luisetti.” (Stanford’s Hank Luisetti was the first college basketball player to use the running one-handed shot that led to today’s jump shot.) About Luisetti, Robinson remarked, “Wear Luisetti’s shoes? Why, I couldn’t even carry them.” Ray Bartlett was a seldom-used player on that Bruins team.

  Coach Johns became Robinson’s biggest booster. Although Robinson liked to play a fast-paced game, if the situation called for it, he could slow down to help the Bruins hold a lead. “He might have been the greatest of all basketball players,” Johns said, if he had focused only on basketball. “His timing was perfect. His rhythm was unmatched . . . [and] he always placed the welfare of the team above his chance for greater stardom.”

  No sooner was basketball season over than Robinson left his gym shoes for his baseball cleats. On March 10, 1940 Robinson and Bartlett joined the baseball squad, and with little practice Jackie played his first game.

  Booster Bob Campbell remembered Robinson pitching part of one game against UC Berkeley:

  It had started to rain in the top half of the fourth inning. Cal was way ahead, and UCLA was trying to keep the game going so that they wouldn’t complete five innings and make it a game. . . . Cal came to bat in the first half of the fifth. UCLA had a little consultation and Jack went in to pitch. He pitched high and outside to them so they couldn’t possibly hit them; the catcher couldn’t catch them, and he took his time about going to the backstop to get the ball. And they couldn’t be called strikes, so they got walks. Cal protested against it, and the umpire said there was nothing they could do about it, that Cal had swung at everything in the top half of the fourth inning to hasten the game. They couldn’t do anything to make him pitch better to them. Finally, it got to raining so hard that they called the game off and started over again the next day with a doubleheader.

  Robinson batted .097 with 6 hits in 62 at-bats, 1 home run, and 1 RBI that season. (He got 4 of those hits and stole 4 bases, including home, in his first game.) He also made 10 errors, with a .907 percentage for the season. Robinson told sportswriter Roger Kahn thirty years later that he “was dog tired. Playing and practicing all the sports I did without a break just wore me out.”

  Despite his errors Jackie was a “hell of a defensive player,” Bartlett said. “He could field so well that he stayed in the lineup, and they hoped that he could get on base. At the time it was his worst sport, but he developed his talent after he left.” Nonetheless, the sports editor of the Los Angeles Daily News said that if there were no boycott of black players in Major League Baseball, Robinson “would have been sought by a half dozen major league scouts.”

  Carl McBain, a hurdler on the track team, knew what made Robinson a great athlete: “As a track man, he was outstanding. And why he was so good in all sports, I’ll tell you. His first two or three steps were so much faster [than those of other athletes]; he would go off and he was ahead of everybody. Like, every time. At fifty yards he could beat anybody. At one hundred yards, I could catch him. In basketball, is that important? Football? Baseball?”

  On May 25 Robinson won the PCC broad jump championship with a leap of 25 feet even, a jump that broke the conference record by two inches. He later won the broad jump championship of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) by jumping 24 feet, 10 1/4 inches.

  Daily Bruin sportswriter Milt Cohen, who was graduating that summer, submitted one final column that turned out quite prophetic. He wrote that he hoped the black athletes would be given a chance to show their skills in professional sports. He pointed out that fans might welcome an opportunity “to see men like Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington play big league baseball.” It seemed unlikely they would be given that chance. “Someday a man will come along who will sign a Negro to play for his team—and then this so-called tradition [of barring African Americans] will be shattered.”

  The summer of 1940 also was a turning point for Tom Bradley: he decided to leave the university a year shy of graduation. He had been contemplating becoming a teacher, but in his junior year he decided, along with three of his friends, to take an exam for entrance into the Los Angeles Police Academy. “I had no dream,” Bradley said, “no thought of becoming a police officer but I went along just to keep them company.”

  Bradley and his friends joked that if they were admitted, they would find themselves on the right side of the law. Bradley thought he would spend a couple of years on the police force and return to school. He told no one—not even his mother or his wife-to-be, Ethel Arnold—that he had taken the test. He told them only after he had accepted a job. “My mother had such total faith and confidence in me that she might discuss a decision, but she would never really argue with a decision that I made,” he said. His trusted adviser at UCLA, Adaline Guenther, told Bradley she thought his being a police officer was “a tragic waste of my talents.”

  Bradley decided he needed a police job for when he and Ethel were married. That summer he received notice that with a score of 97 percent on the written examination he had finished near the top of the five thousand candidates taking the test. Then he had to take an oral examination. “I remember very well telling the oral board . . . [that] I wanted to do something to help change the image of law enforcement,” Bradley said. “And they looked at me as though I were crazy—one man who’s going to change the whole image of the police department.” He passed that exam too and was told he could start the academy without finishing college.

  Bradley was aware that there was an “unofficial quota” on the number of black officers hired and promoted in the department, but he wasn’t deterred. He noted that it was difficult to weed out black candidates when they had finished high on written and oral examinations but that it could be done with a medical examination. A police department physician told him he had a heart murmur that might keep him off the force. He was incredulous because of his many years of sports. So he appealed to an outside physician and was termed fit. He was asked by a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1982 why he bothered. He replied, “Because I decided I was not going to let anybody tell me no.”

  The job at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) paid $170 a month and came with a good pension plan. Bradley never regretted his decision. “I always had the most interesting and challenging assignments, and it became a great joy for me to work as a police officer,” he said.

  Strode’s last year at UCLA proved difficult for him and his family. In late December, Strode told Davis J. Walsh, a columnist for the Los Angeles Examiner, that before football season he and his family “had nothing to eat but beans. For breakfast. And dinner. And supper.” Once the season began, Strode ate with the team, but his family still went without. He gave some of the money he earned at on-campus jobs to his family. At one point he sold his tickets to the UCLA-USC game “for what they’d bring. . . . I’d like to see anybody with a well-filled belly and a righteous sense of ethics try to make anything out of that.”

  After the season Strode realized he would have to earn money to help his family. He left UCLA without his degree. He had been a student at UCLA for six and a half years, including his extension years. He had been planning on competing in track in the spring of 1940 and graduating. But when the Olympics were canceled, Strode said tongue-in-cheek that “I wasn’t ever going to be a brain surgeon. I was an athlete so . . . I decided not to hang around.”

  14

  Passed Over by the NFL

  “You know . . . [Washington] would be the greatest sensation in pro league history with any one of your ball clubs . . . [yet] none of you chose him.”

  —NBC Radio commentator Sam Balter to NFL owners

  The local media began stumping for Washington to be named a first-team All-American soon
after the 1939 season ended. The Los Angeles Examiner opined that Washington was an obvious pick and “one gent who just won’t miss” the honor. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Washington deserved the honor because his “passes are poison, his tackling fierce, his blocking ‘heavy’ and his squirming, shifty fast-away running a despair to defenders.”

  Although statistically Washington was ahead of Tom Harmon, the Michigan standout, Harmon was named a first-team All-American while Washington was selected for the second team. The press called the slight laughable and lamentable. But none referred to it as racism, blaming instead East Coast bias. The Los Angeles Examiner thought that Washington had been passed over because he had often been overshadowed by Robinson, “which is bad for ballyhoo.” Teammate Woody Strode said, “Kenny didn’t make the first team because of prejudiced voting. . . . The whole thing was a big joke.”

  The Daily Bruin came to Washington’s defense as well. “It’s with a distinct sour taste in our mouth that we read the lists of All-American selections that are now pouring out of all sections of the country,” columnist Milt Cohen wrote. “We don’t care what they do with any other ball player in the nation—but we don’t like the way they’re treating our Kenny Washington.”

  Washington had “put to shame those All-America pickers who inexplicably failed to include the great Negro halfback on their ‘must’ list,” the Los Angeles Times wrote. The Pasadena Star-News joined in: “Anyone who picks an All-America team and leaves [Washington] off needs to have his head examined.”

  Crisis, the NAACP magazine, also weighed in on the controversy. In the January 1940 edition Roy Wilkins wrote in an editorial that Washington had been more than slighted. He stated that Washington was well worthy of the honors except for the “one thing wrong with him: he was several shades too dark.”