There’s no blueprint for becoming a legend in Hollywood, and while John Wayne is undoubtedly one of the most iconic figures to have ever graced the silver screen, he only ended up trying his luck in the film industry when his extracurricular activities caused his initial plan for success to go up in smoke.
It’s a famous part of his folklore that ‘The Duke’ began his career under inauspicious circumstances, working as a prop boy and uncredited extra in countless pictures throughout the 1920s before the first year of the next decade gave him his biggest platform yet when Wayne played his first-ever leading role in Raoul Walsh’s western, The Big Trail.
It would be another few years before the star recognisable the world over began to truly form, though, with his first time collaborating with John Ford on the 1939 classic Stagecoach laying down a marker for everything audiences would come to know and love about ‘The Duke’ for in the years to come.
Once he’d fine-tuned his persona and weaponised it to become one of the biggest draws in the business, Wayne never looked back, holding onto his A-list status with an iron grip. He remains one of the defining names in the history of American cinema almost half a century after his death, but that domino effect was only kicked off when he injured himself indulging in an unlikely hobby.
While a student – and socialist-leaning one, at that – at the University of Southern California, Wayne was a member of the football team. When he wasn’t required on the field, he was fond of a spot of bodysurfing, which almost ruined everything when a broken collarbone not only stymied his athletic aspirations but cost him the scholarship his education was dependent on.
As friend and former teammate Eugene C Clarke remembered it, the future superstar was staring a pivotal crossroads right in the face. “Duke was in bad shape, financially,” he recalled, per USC. “He owed money to the fraternity for his dues, room and board, and he didn’t have a dime. The fraternity was urging him to pay up; he felt his football playing days were over because of his bad shoulder.”
With his options more limited than ever, Clarke conceded that Wayne “did what he felt he had to do,” which in this case was to “quit school and work at the studios.” His fledging football career still came in handy, with his coach Howard Jones regularly handing tickets for USC games to silent-era star Tom Mix, who then helped ‘The Duke’ get his foot in the door as a prop boy and extra.
It might be a broad generalisation, but it nonetheless remains accurate that if it weren’t for a freak surfing injury that shattered his collarbone, movie stardom wouldn’t have even been at the forefront of Wayne’s thinking when football was always his first love.