Ray Woods played football fairly well, but he was too light to be a star. He wasn’t bad at baseball, but not a major leaguer. Still, he wanted to be an athlete.
One day Woods was getting some exercise in a local pool, practicing dives off a board. His form wasn’t very good, because Woods tried to leap up as high as he could and paid no attention to how he hit the water.
“Ray,” a friend who was watching said to him, “you’re doing it all wrong. It doesn’t matter how high you jump. Try to concentrate on hitting the water cleanly.”
“Who said height doesn’t matter?” Woods retorted. He reminded his friend that an old-timer named Steve Brodie had become famous by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. His friend turned away in disgust. But Woods began to think about Steve Brodie. Perhaps he too could make a name for himself by jumping into the water from high places.
Without fanfare, Woods went to New York City. He reached the Brooklyn Bridge, climbed up over the railing, and while onlookers gasped, he jumped. Not only was he uninjured, but Woods did not even need a boat to fish him out of the river.
Overnight he became famous. State fairs all around the United States invited him to make high dives from an assortment of towers. Woods became a great attraction, and in all he made 184 jumps. Only once did he have an accident, but he wasn’t seriously hurt.
Then Woods decided to leap from the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco. The authorities did their best to stop him, but he managed to make the jump. It turned out badly. Perhaps he misjudged the height or was caught by air currents. Whatever the reason, Woods kept flipping over, and he landed on his back. He lived to tell the tale, but he spent two years with straps around his body to heal the broken bones in his back. Two years after the accident he returned to jumping.
Then on April 10, 1942, Ray Woods had his last bit of bad luck. While fishing from a rowboat in the St. Johns River in Florida, he noticed that his line was tangled. Woods fell into the river and drowned.
How strange that a man who had survived jumps of hundreds of feet into the water, should die after falling just a few inches over the side of a rowboat!
Scoring a goal in hockey is usually a big moment for a player. But a Detroit player named Leo Labine once scored a goal he would rather have forgotten.
Montreal was leading Detroit by one goal with seconds left to play. Montreal was playing a man short and there was a face-off in Montreal’s zone. The Red Wings pulled their goalie, so that they could mount a six-man power play against Montreal’s five defenders. It seemed a great chance to score.
At the face-off, Labine won the draw. He shot a pass toward his point man, who was stationed at the blue line. But the pass went awry, and the puck slid all the way down the ice, 180 feet into the unprotected Detroit net! Labine was credited with a goal–against his own team.
From Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
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