He Wore a Helmet to Hide His Face – and Built a Real Football Career Doing It
John David Washington didn’t play football because he loved football. He played it because he wanted to be an actor and couldn’t figure out how to become one without everyone in the room already knowing who his father was. “I jumped in and hid in this football persona, this athlete, literally putting on a helmet to hide my face, hide my identity,” he told WSJ Magazine in 2021. The sport was a disguise. It just happened to last six years and produce a legitimate professional career.
He was a running back at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and a good one. His senior year he led the conference in rushing with 1,198 yards, a school record at the time. He averaged 5.6 yards per carry, scored nine touchdowns, and added ten receptions for 69 yards. By the time he graduated in 2006, he held Morehouse’s single-game rushing record (242 yards) and career rushing record (3,699 yards), marks that stood until 2011.
The St. Louis Rams signed him as an undrafted free agent in May 2006. He didn’t make the active roster – he spent time on the practice squad before being cut – but the signing was real. In 2007 he crossed into NFL Europe and played for the Rhein Fire in Germany, which was where a lot of borderline NFL prospects went to extend their careers by a season or two, sometimes longer.
Then the United Football League. In 2009 he was drafted by the California Redwoods – the team later relocated and became the Sacramento Mountain Lions – and he stayed with them for four seasons. Over that stretch he carried the ball 123 times for 500 yards and four touchdowns, added 15 catches for 101 yards, and held a roster spot in a league that folded suddenly in October 2012. The career ending wasn’t a decision he made. The league just stopped existing.
The question searchers keep arriving at – did he actually play professionally, or is this a celebrity trivia footnote – has a clear answer. Six years. Three leagues. Four seasons in the same professional franchise. That’s not a cup of coffee; it’s a career, just not the one his father had.
But here’s what the football years were covering up. Washington told CBS Sunday Morning that even as a kid watching his father on the set of Glory, he knew he wanted to act. The problem was Denzel Washington. Not the man – the shadow. He had a great game at Morehouse once, ran for a significant number of yards, scored. The headline read something like “Denzel’s son runs for X yards.” He was 19 or 20, carrying the ball for a historically Black college in Atlanta, and the story was still about his father. Football didn’t solve that problem. It just gave him something to do while he tried to figure out how to live with it.
To get around it when auditioning, he lied. He told people his father was a construction worker. Or in jail. “I felt like there was no way people would take me seriously, even if I was good,” he said. “They would always judge me. So I hid who my father was.” He auditioned for Ballers – the HBO series where he’d play an NFL wide receiver named Ricky Jerret – and didn’t tell Denzel until he had the part. Wanted to prove to himself he’d gotten it without the name doing any work.
Christopher Nolan cast him in Tenet in 2020, and afterward described him as “one of the greatest collaborators I’ve worked with.” Peter Travers at Rolling Stone noted that Washington brought “a natural athletic grace to the stunts and hand-to-hand combat.” That athleticism came from somewhere specific: six years of professional football, not a trainer hired for a film role. The two careers turned out not to be as separate as Washington had imagined when he put the helmet on.
He was inducted into Morehouse’s Den of Honor in 2024. The bio on the athletics page describes him leading the conference in rushing and setting school records. It also mentions BlacKkKlansman and Broadway. Both things fit on the same page without much tension now. They didn’t, for a long time, fit in the same sentence.
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