The great race

July 29, 2021

By JASON CATO, Tribune-Review

Halfway home, “Long John” Woodruff made his move.

It wouldn’t be his last.

The young, novice runner raced before 110,000 people packed into Olympiastadion, including those in a special box built for Adolph Hitler. The German chancellor and his Nazi brass believed the Berlin Games – the Hitler Games – would showcase the dominance of the Aryan race on the world stage — even as the they tried to exclude athletes who were Jewish or of color.

Woodruff paid no mind.

He stared down the man leading the pack in the 800-meter final in the 1936 Olympics, the last that would be held before World War II engulfed the globe and derailed his athletic career.

John Woodruff, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh, wins the 800-meter race at the Olympic Games in Berlin, in this Aug. 8, 1936 file photo. (AP).

The 21-year-old from Connellsville, standing 6-foot-3, towered over the field. His dark skin also made him stand out as one of two Black athletes in race. He closed in on the other, Canadian middle-distance runner Phil Edwards, and set in behind him.

“I decided I am going to exercise a little strategy – to make sure I won the race by laying back in second position,” Woodruff would later explain. “The plan was to wait until last 300 meters and start my kick.”

Soon, strategy and patience were all but exhausted.

Woodruff had been told to follow Edwards, who was known for his fast start. Instead, the Canadian set a “very, very slow pace.”

Two runners, then a third, pulled up on Woodruff’s right — boxing him in. Each step led him further into a nightmare.

He had to break out. But how? If he forced his way, he would be disqualified.

Pressure forced the drastic – and perhaps his only shot.

“The only way I could get out of that box was to stop,” Woodruff told the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996.* “So, I stopped.”

Or it surely seemed.

“He didn’t stop completely,” said longtime friend Herbert “Herb” Douglas, who at 99 is the oldest living U.S. Olympic medalist, having won bronze in the long jump at the 1948 London Games. “He says he did, but if you see the film … he really slowed down.”

Regardless, Woodruff faded from second to third from last, as he slowed and watched as the rest of the world’s best blurred by. It seemed his only chance.

Suddenly, he dug in a left spike, then a right.

“I actually started the race twice,” Woodruff said.

(*Note = All quotes attributed to John Woodruff are from a 1996 oral history interview with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, unless otherwise noted.)

Woodruff’s roots

John Youie Woodruff was born July 5, 1915, in South Connellsville. He arrived nearly 20 years after his family landed in Fayette County and was one of 12 children born to Silas and Sarah Woodruff. Two died young. Johnny was the youngest to survive. He grew up poor with a brother and eight sisters atop Reidmore Road.

“We didn’t have too much,” Woodruff recalled later.

Silas worked the coke ovens for Henry Clay Frick’s company. He also dug coal and carried hod on construction jobs, including the building of Connellsville schools.

Sarah did “day’s work” — washing laundry and performing other tasks for local families.

Chores kept Woodruff from playing football, his first love, when his mother ruled he got home too late to help cut wood and haul coal. “My chores came first,” Woodruff said.

Hard work was his family’s legacy, on both sides.

His parents had been born after the Civil War to freed slaves in Virginia. Silas and Sarah wed Oct. 24, 1894. She was 19, he 22, according to marriage records. The bride, born in 1875, was the daughter of Wilson and M. Henry. The groom was the son of Wyatt and Sally Ware Woodruff.

The history of the Woodruff, or Woodroof, family in Virginia can be traced back at least to John Woodruff’s great-great grandparents, Edmund Lee Woodroof and Mary Glovene Woodruff. Their son, Jesse Wyatt Woodruff, and his son, Wyatt, both lived in Pedlar, Amherst County, a village near Lynchburg, according to late 1800s census records.

The name Woodruff was the surname of a white family who owned slaves at Locust Ridge, which later became Sweet Briar Plantation. A burial ground for white descendants on the Amherst County property was called “Woodruff’s Mound.” Today, that former plantation is Sweet Briar College.

Woodruff, one of four Black students at his high school, quit at age 16 to find work during the Great Depression. No jobs at a local factory emerged. He then tried to join the Navy, only to be told the quota for African American enlistees had been met.

Short on choices, he returned to school.

A coach convinced his mother to let him run track, promising to have him home in time for chores.

Finding his stride

Woodruff ran his first track meet in West Virginia. He did not place.

That was one of only two times in his high school career he failed to win. The other, ironically, came in a meet at the University of Pittsburgh.

Woodruff won the other 14 meets he raced, his coach later recalled, with the youngster setting county, state and national records, including the U.S. high school mile record in 1935 – the year his mother died of cancer at age 59.

“I came along very, very fast,” Woodruff said. “I just came into my own.”

He wanted to go to Ohio State due to the success of Jesse Owens, who in 1935 set three world records and tied a fourth in less than an hour at the Big 10 championships – a feat that sent his star rising.

Woodruff’s father finished the eighth grade, his mother the fourth. None of his siblings graduated high school. His primary motivation for school was to stave off truant officers.

“That was the extent of it,” Woodruff said.

A group of Connellsville businessmen who had gone to the University of Pittsburgh hatched a plan.

Woodruff ended up as a member of Pitt’s track team on the school’s Oakland campus.

“That was just unheard of in my family, of going to college,” Woodruff said.

Athletics was his only path to get there.

”I had exactly 25 cents in my pocket, when I got to the University of Pittsburgh,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff wasn’t the first Black athlete to attend Pitt. Harry Wooten and Hubbard Hollensworth earned their degrees in 1911.

Still, his presence marked another seminal moment.

“This is the middle of the Depression. African Americans basically come to campus with holes in their pockets,” said Samuel W Black, director of African American Programs at Pittsburgh’s Senator John Heinz History Center. “Woodruff was a pioneer at Pitt.”

“Johnny Woodruff, he paved the way,” Douglas said, “and he paved the way for many.”

Though he was on the track team and attended classes, Woodruff wasn’t allowed to live on campus.

Instead, he spent his four years at Pitt living in the Centre Avenue YMCA in the Hill District. For a while, he cleaned up after football and basketball games to make money. He finally landed a job tidying up campus grounds – which allowed him to eat in the school cafeteria.

Woodruff along with other athletes from the University of Pittsburgh. (University of Pittsburgh)

The experience wasn’t unlike what Owens had in Columbus, where he worked part-time operating a freight elevator at the Ohio State House while running track and attending class. He, too, was barred from living in a dorm. Instead, he lived in an off-campus boarding house with other Black students.

“It was just unheard of to give African Americans a scholarship in the 1930s,” said Tyrone Owens, 68, a retired teacher and track coach in Cleveland public schools and the second cousin of Jesse Owens. “After the 1936 Olympics, and going into the 1940s, things began opening up.”

Making ‘the boat’

Though he vowed never to return to Connellsville, Woodruff planned to visit for the summer – to see his father, family and friends.

But he had bested all the half-milers at Pitt during his freshman year. The coach asked if he wanted to try to make the Olympics. Woodruff had never even considered it.

He won the U.S. Eastern Olympic Trials, then a week later lost the AAU national championship by one foot. At the U.S. Olympic trial finals another week later at Randalls Island, N.Y., Woodruff cruised through the semifinal, finishing one-tenth of a second off the world record, before capturing the U.S. championship.

He “made the boat,” as Black athletes called the chance to go to the Olympics. Woodruff was one of 18 African American athletes – the most ever – to make the U.S. team.

“The furthest I had ever been away from home was when I went to the University of Pittsburgh, 51 miles away,” Woodruff said.

Team USA sailed across the Atlantic aboard the S.S. Manhattan. Woodruff’s roommate was Mack Robinson, the older brother of Jackie Robinson – who a decade later would break the color barrier in modern Major League Baseball. Woodruff and Robinson also bunked together in the Olympic Village in Germany.

“A lot of people probably don’t know Jackie Robinson’s older brother was on that Olympic team,” Tyrone Owens said.

Silas Woodruff listened nervously as the radio crackled back in Connellsville. In his first heat, Johnny finished third – so close to winning, but too far back to comfort his nervous father. Silas marched a slow, concerned path down a hallway and out the back door, pacing alone in his garden, his daughter said.

When his son breezed through his semifinal, winning by 20 yards, Silas exhaled.

The final would again test a father’s resolve.

Determination

More than half the race was over when Woodruff resolved to float back, moving from second to sixth. Other runners likely thought he had quit.

“I’m boxed in, I can’t do anything about it,” Tyrone Owens, who worked and coached for decades at the school where his cousin trained, said of what an athlete might think in such a dire situation. “I’ll quit; I’ll accept the place I’m getting.”

But Woodruff had no such inclination. Once space allowed, he shifted to an outside lane and dug in.

“He just ran around all of them like they were standing still,” Douglas said. “He was going to outrun everyone, (even) if he had to double them.”

With a nearly 10-foot stride, Woodruff easily moved from almost last to a fighting chance. He breezed past the pack and again took aim at Edwards.

Woodruff sailed to the front, then Edwards regained the lead. The American pumped his muscular arms and churned his long legs around the bend. On the turn for home, he again forged ahead.

For about nine seconds, Johnny Woodruff finally ran free, bowing his chest and breaking the tape. An Olympic champion.

“Whenever you stop and break a rhythm, that usually finishes you,” he later admitted.

A sports columnist in New York called it “the most daring move ever seen on track.”

“Regardless of the fact that Jesse Owens gets the limelight – and he should, he got four gold medals – that does not diminish Woodruff,” said Black, of the Heinz History Center. “You can’t erase that film. … I don’t think a race like that has happened again.

“This is the Olympic Games. Everybody is a champion. … Jesse never did that. Jesse never had to go from last to first.”

Silas Woodruff again had again listened to the radio broadcast, this times at a neighbor’s house.

“When the radio man said Johnny had crossed the line first, then I was satisfied,” the proud father told the Connellsville paper the next day, noting he didn’t “yell or holler… or anything.”

Later, he strode downtown to celebrate. His daughter said he didn’t get home until 2 in the morning.

Debunking theory

Woodruff said he did not realize the full importance of his victory until it was over. There had been some talk of a boycott, but he had not been a part of it.

His focus was not on politics.

“My only objective when I got into a race was to win,” he said.

Winning in Berlin, however, meant everything.

“It was very definitely a special feeling in winning the gold medal and being a Black man,” Woodruff said. “I was very happy for myself as an individual, for my race, and for my country.”

Of the 18 African Americans who completed, 10 won a total of 14 medals – including eight golds.

“What we did is we destroyed (Hitler’s) master race theory. That made me feel very good,” Woodruff said. “We destroyed his theory whenever we started winning those gold medals.”

Black, of the History Center, said he views Woodruff’s race as an example of the African American experience.

“That there’s adversity, but you always had to have some type of strategy to get around the racism, to get around the discrimination, to get around the oppression,” he said. “I always thought of Woodruff’s race as being indicative of that. It’s a great metaphor for the African American struggle.”

The collective success of Black athletes in the ‘36 Games made a tremendous impact — both on sports and American society.

“Those African American athletes who won medals in Berlin really had an impact to the degree of showing that African Americans … are some of the greatest athletes in this country,” Black said. “This is still 11 years before Jackie Robinson integrates baseball, which basically shatters the ceiling for integration across sports. But that 1936 Olympic team really was the foundation for everything we would see in the future of sports in America.

“There was still a struggle, but you could no longer bar African Americans if they had the talent and if they had the ability to compete.”

His oak

Woodruff stood on the podium and listened to the “Star-Spangled Banner” being played.

“We weren’t instructed as to how we were to salute. At one point, I said should I give a Nazi salute or should I give an American salute?,” he said. “I was nervous, very nervous – and very confused, as a young man.”

Along with his medal, the German Olympic Committee presented every gold medal winner with another gift: an oak sapling cultivated from Germany’s Black Forest. Though it was not from Hitler or his Nazi regime, some called the trees “Hitler oaks.”

American athletes were presented with 24 saplings. Some threw theirs overboard on the way home. Others never made it out of government quarantine.

Woodruff’s oak was first planted the Connellsville Free Library before being moved to the new high school stadium, finished in 1938.

It towers above the south end of the stadium, stretching some 85 feet into the sky.

Woodruff’s oak is one of four still believed to be alive in the United States. Two are in Los Angeles. One given to Owens stands at James Ford Rhodes High School in Cleveland, though it appears on its last leg.

A sapling from Owens’ tree was recently planted at Rockefeller Park along Cleveland’s University Circle area “to keep this legacy alive” about the Olympic movement and African American success, Tyrone Owens said.

“There are still a few around that can continue to tell that story,” he said. “It’s a story to tell from generation to generation, and it shouldn’t be forgotten. … It’s a good story.”

Hero’s welcome

Once the team returned to America, New York City hosted a ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes. Jesse Owens rode solo sitting atop a convertible.

Cleveland later hosted its own parade for Owens, as Connellsville did for Woodruff.

An estimated 10,000 showed up for the special day in Fayette County – which Woodruff shared with surviving members of the high school class of 1886. He rode in an open convertible with his father along with his track coach from Connellsville and Pitt.

“Woodruff given great welcome,” the banner headline across the Connellsville paper read the following day.

“I’m the proudest father in town, and I feel I’ve got the best boy in the world,” The Daily Courier quoted Silas Woodruff saying afterward. “That is a blessing God has given me.”

The accomplishments of Woodruff and other African Americans on the 1936 team proved without a doubt that Blacks could compete, Douglas said. Their performances helped others get opportunities – even if the opportunities for those Olympians weren’t what they had hoped when they returned home.

“Opportunities were very nil. That was Jim Crow times,” said Douglas, who after his track days ended became a corporate leader. “I was born 59 years after slavery, so I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Jesse Owens struggled to get a good job. Many of his early opportunities to make money came as sideshow gigs pitting “the fastest man alive” in races against horses, cars, motorcycles and trains — even a dog.

Though he won a silver medal in Berlin, Mack Robinson returned to California and took a job sweeping the streets of Pasadena – sometimes while wearing his USA Olympic jacket.

“You don’t get Jackie Robinson’s fight for Civil Rights without Mack Robinson,” said Lou Moore, an author and professor of African American and sports history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. “Having to see his brother as a street sweeper wearing his Olympic jersey, that set this fire in Jackie that never went out.”

Reality soon returned to Woodruff and others, despite their medal take.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are born in Oakland in Pittsburgh or Oakland, Calif., or in the Mississippi Delta, segregation still existed,” said Black of the History Center. “Coming back from Berlin with a gold medal and No. 1 ranking in the world hardly mattered.

“Would he face the same type of discrimination as your average African American? The answer is yes.”

No matter how fast Woodruff ran, Jim Crow filled his shadow.

In 1937, African Americans were barred from a race at the U.S. Naval Academy because of state segregation laws in Maryland. New York University pulled out of the meet rather than leave Jimmy Herbert behind. Pitt went – without Woodruff.

“Here I am, an Olympic champion,” he said. “Left behind, because of racial discrimination.”

That same year, Woodruff set an 800-meter world record – 1 minute, 48.8 seconds –at the Pan American Olympics meet in Dallas. Officials later rescinded the record, saying the track was six feet short.

When he graduated in 1939, Woodruff said he was left off a Pitt walk of fame.

“I didn’t make it, in spite of the gold medal that I’d won and bringing the school international recognition,” Woodruff said. “So that let me know just what the situation was. Things hadn’t changed.”

‘Don’t go’

Herb Douglas grew up in Hazelwood and was already an accomplished track athlete by his early teens.

At age 14, he met Jesse Owens in 1936 when the track legend came to Pittsburgh’s Watt Street Elementary, where he stumped for Alfred Landon, the Kansas governor running for president as a Republican.

Owens later explained that Landon shook his hand. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt “didn’t even send me a telegram,” he said.

Four years later, Douglas would meet Woodruff for the first time when the Olympic champion summoned him to the Hill District YMCA. Douglas had just won Pennsylvania high school track championships in the 100, 220 and long jump. Of course, he knew who Woodruff was.

“He called me over to meet in person,” Douglas said. “I remember him sitting down, and I’m nothing but a skinny kid.

“He said don’t go to Pitt.”

It wasn’t a difficult decision.

“The coach never offered me a scholarship after winning three state championships,” Douglas said. “It must have been Jim Crow.”

Instead, he enrolled at Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Catholic college in New Orleans where Ralph Metcalfe – a member of the 1936 Olympic team and four-time Olympic medalist – was track coach.

Douglas later returned to Pittsburgh to help his father, who became blind when Douglas was 5. He ran a parking garage at Ellsworth and College in Shadyside.

Douglas eventually did enroll at Pitt – on a football scholarship.

His friendship with Woodruff would never end.

“He was like my big brother, and Jesse was, too,” Douglas said.

Douglas has little doubt that Woodruff would have competed in more Olympics – and won more gold medals.

After the 1936 Olympics, Woodruff never lost a race. He was an NCAA champion from 1937-39. In his final meet at the 1940 Compton (Calif.) Invitational, he set an American indoor record in the 800 meters that would stand for 12 years.

“Johnny would have made that team (1940), and he would have won,” Douglas said. “He would have made three Olympic teams had there not been a World War.”

The 1940 Olympics in Tokyo, as well as the 1944 Games planned for London, were canceled, ending Woodruff’s track career.

Serving his country

Woodruff graduated from Pitt in 1939 with a degree in sociology and earned a master’s degree from New York University.

He then joined the Army, serving as a second lieutenant before the U.S. entered the war. At Fort Ontario (N.Y.) in 1941, Woodruff trained on a cinder track – where Owens once ran with him during a visit.

During World War II, Woodruff served in the Pacific with the 369th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Regiment, which earned the nickname Harlem Hellfighters in World War I. He climbed to the rank of captain before leaving the Army in 1945.

He re-entered service for the Korean War in 1947, serving as battalion commander. The U.S. military integrated the following year. Woodruff left active-duty service for good in 1957 as a lieutenant colonel, joining the reserves.

Woodruff’s service was exemplary, even laudable.

Yet, he wasn’t alone.

A number of African Americans who won Olympic medals – even gold – slipped into military dress to again honorably serve the United States.

Others of his time included:

• Eddie Eagan, boxing (1920) and bobsled (1932) champion; Army, World War II.

• Ralph Metcalfe, who eventually served as a U.S. congressman from Illinois; 4 x 100-meter champion (1936); Army.

• Harrison “Bones” Dillard, 100-meter (1948), 110-meter hurdle and 4 x 100-meter relay (1952) champion, member of the Army’s 92nd Infantry, or Buffalo Soldiers, World War II.

• John Davis, weightlifting champion (1948, 1952); Army, World War II.

• Mal Whitfield, 800-meter and 4×400-meter champion (1948), as a Tuskegee Airman in the Army, World War II; 800-meter champion (1952), Air Force, Korean War.

“It’s hard to wrestle with the idea of what these guys had to go through – that society hasn’t opened up for them,” said Moore, the Michigan professor. “But you put USA on your chest and then you are fighting for your country, but your country still doesn’t open up for you.”

Woodruff worked for a short time at Schieffelin & Company, a wine and spirits importer and distributor in Philadelphia that eventually became Moet-Hennessy. He went on to work for the New York City Children’s Aid Society and taught school in the city and served as a recreation center director for the New York City Police Athletic League as well as an investigator for the New York Department of Welfare and parole officer for New York State.

He remained committed to track as an official for the annual Penn Relays in Philadelphia, where he once raced as an athlete, and returned to Connellsville – where a street and park are named in his honor – each year to serve as the official starter and present trophies to winners of the John Woodruff 5K Run and Walk.

“I never made a lot of money, but I made a living,” Woodruff said. “The compensation I got from that was helping people. I helped a lot of people, a lot of people.”

Golden legacy

In 2001, the long legs that carried Woodruff to Olympic glory were amputated due to poor circulation and pain.

He returned to Pitt in 2006, when he received a formal apology from then-Chancellor Mark Nordenberg for being left behind for the Naval Academy meet. He was honored at halftime of the Pitt football homecoming game – Woodruff at midfield in his wheelchair 70 years after his gold-medal run.

“That meant so much to him,” Douglas said.

The Naval Academy issued an apology in 2009 — two years after Woodruff’s death.

Woodruff died Oct. 30, 2007, in Fountain Hills, Ariz. He was 92 and the last living gold medalist from the 1936 Olympics. He is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. In 2012, a sapling from his Olympic oak was planted near his grave.

“That tree is part of his legacy,” Douglas said. “He brought that tree back … and he didn’t put it in his backyard. He gave it to where it should go – to influence other kids.

“If you went to Connellsville, you had to go by and see the tree. That’s what he thought of it.”

But Woodruff’s legacy is in more than a tree.

“He was the epitome of class. On and off the field, I wanted to be like John,” Douglas said. “John Woodruff was the epitome of what is right.”

“To me, John Woodruff stands out as one of the great American sports heroes,” Black said, “and his race is exemplary of what you are taught in this country, if you are an athlete – the type of determination you are supposed to have, the will you are supposed to have, the class you are supposed to have.

“Looking at what did that race mean outside of the race itself, I don’t know how you can measure that.”