5 Actors Who Were Almost Professional Athletes

Hollywood is full of near misses, roles that almost went to someone else, films that almost never got made. Fewer people talk about the near misses that happened before the fame, back when these future stars were chasing an entirely different dream. Some came within a single injury, a single roster cut, or a single tryout of a career spent on a field or a court instead of a soundstage.

1. Terry Crews and his six seasons bouncing around the NFL

Long before Brooklyn Nine-Nine or his Old Spice commercials, Terry Crews was a legitimate NFL prospect out of Western Michigan University, where he earned all-conference honors as a defensive end and played on the 1988 Mid-American Conference champion Broncos. The Los Angeles Rams took a chance on him, and in the 1991 NFL draft, the 6’2″, 245-pound Crews was drafted in the 11th round by the Los Angeles Rams. His career never quite took off, but it was long and scattered. He played in 32 games for three NFL teams over a career that stretched from 1991-1996, though much of that time was spent either on a practice squad or unemployed. He even headed to Düsseldorf, Germany in February 1995 to play for the World League of American Football’s Rhein Fire, playing well enough to score a one-year contract with a Washington, D.C. team. By 1997 the football dream was over, and he pivoted straight into acting.

2. Dwayne Johnson’s brief, humbling stint in the CFL

Before the biceps and the blockbusters, Dwayne Johnson was a former University of Miami lineman with NFL aspirations who instead landed on a practice roster north of the border. He signed with the Calgary Stampeders, where that much-admired athlete was a former University of Miami player with NFL dreams relegated to a CFL practice roster and earning $300 a week. It did not last long. The cut came fast and it stung. The wrestler-turned-actor was released by the CFL team when he was 22 years old, just two days after playing in his first pro football game. He has talked about that moment for decades, once writing that being cut by the team in 1995 was the best thing that could have happened to him. With almost no money left after the flight home, he leaned on wrestling training instead, a decision that eventually built the career the world actually knows him for.

3. Kurt Russell’s promising run as a minor league infielder

Kurt Russell already had a decade of child acting behind him when he decided to test himself on a baseball diamond instead. He signed with the California Angels organization and made his professional debut in 1971, when actor Kurt Russell makes his professional baseball debut by collecting a double, single, and two stolen bases for the Bend Rainbows of the Northwest League California Angels minor league affiliate. He was good enough that year to make the league’s all star team as a second baseman. Two years later, everything changed in an instant. While Russell was in the field turning the pivot of a double play early in the season, the incoming runner at second base collided with him and tore the rotator cuff in Russell’s right (throwing) shoulder. The injury effectively ended any realistic shot at pro ball, and the injury forced his retirement from baseball in 1973 and led to his return to acting. It is easy to wonder, watching him play Wyatt Earp decades later, what an alternate version of his life on a big league infield might have looked like.

4. Burt Reynolds and the injuries that redirected a football career

Burt Reynolds arrived at Florida State on a football scholarship with real promise as a halfback, and his freshman season backed that up. Reynolds ran for 134 yards and 2 touchdowns on 16 carries in his freshman season, and also had four catches for 76 yards. His college roommate, longtime broadcaster Lee Corso, later said plainly that he had a dream of playing in the NFL and he loved football. Then the injuries piled up, one after another. He suffered a knee injury that cut the season short and missed the 1955 season after surgery, then returned to Florida State in 1957, but a car accident cost him his spleen and reaggravated his knee injury, ending his college football career. He walked away from the field and toward a stage instead, eventually finding his way back to football on screen through films like The Longest Yard and Semi-Tough, roles that let him relive, at least for a couple of hours at a time, the career injuries had taken from him.

5. Geena Davis and her unlikely run toward the Olympic archery team

Geena Davis is the outlier on this list in the best way, because she did not grow up chasing a sport. She picked up a bow for the first time at 41, inspired after watching the 1996 Games, since the star of Thelma and Louise and The Accidental Tourist was inspired to take up archery after watching Justin Huish win two gold medals at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Within two years she was shockingly competitive. Her rise culminated at the actual Olympic trials semifinals in 1999, a fact confirmed at the time by wire reports noting she made it to the semifinals just two years after taking her first archery lesson, finishing 24th out of 28 competitors. She did not make the team, and rain reportedly did not help her cause, since her coach explained she was having trouble adapting to the rain, noting it’s tough because they never get to practice in the rain in California. Still, reaching an Olympic semifinal in a sport she had barely touched two years earlier remains one of the more genuinely surprising athletic footnotes in any actor’s biography.

These five stories share a common thread even though the sports and eras are all different. Each of these actors got close enough to a professional athletic career to feel it slip away, whether through injury, a roster cut, or a narrow miss at trials, and each one turned that setback into a different kind of career entirely. It says something about how thin the line can be between two very different lives, decided sometimes by a single torn shoulder or a single rainy afternoon.