Why Rod Woodson Snubbed the Steelers to Go to France Coming Out of Purdue

Rod Woodson held out on Chuck Noll and the Pittsburgh Steelers after they drafted him in 1987, and he did it from a hurdles track in Nice, France. The Hall of Fame defensive back walked Rich through the decision on The Rich Eisen Show, starting with the 4.29 forty he ran at the combine and ending with cigarette smoke wafting out of the Steelers' training room.

Woodson confirmed the forty time that has lived in combine lore, then described how casually he treated the trip. "I just drove from drove to Purdue, went there for what I think we're there for two and a half days, did the combine and drove back to school," he said.

After Pittsburgh selected him 10th overall, Woodson did not report. He flew to Los Angeles, joined the LA Track Club and chased a different ceiling. "I think I had the fourth fastest time in the world that year," Woodson said of his hurdles work, noting that he could not sign his Steelers contract without forfeiting his amateur status in track.

The holdout produced one of the great negotiating lines in draft history. Woodson said agent Jim Boston flew to Los Angeles to deliver the team's offer, the largest the Steelers had ever made a first-round pick. Woodson was not moved.

"Well, Mr. Boston, with all due respect, you can tell them I never had money. I don't know what money feels like in my pocket," Woodson said. "But tomorrow I will be in Nice, France. And I got on the plane the next morning and went to Nice, France."

What followed was a year Woodson described as a young man's gift. He ran in Spain, in Morocco, and at Berlin's Olympic Stadium, the same track where Jesse Owens humiliated Hitler's regime in 1936. Rich connected the thread, recalling an early NFL Network assignment calling a Berlin Thunder game off a monitor and Woodson casually noting he had run track in that stadium.

Woodson eventually signed in late October and played five games as a rookie. He never delivered the holdout speech to Chuck Noll directly. "I didn't tell Chuck Noll to his face. I told Jim," Woodson said. He never spoke to Mr. Rooney either, dealing only with Dan Rooney and Boston.

The culture shock came on draft night and on game day. Woodson took the call from Pittsburgh on a rotary phone in Fort Wayne, Indiana, having never spoken to the team during the pre-draft process. "I never talked to the Steelers. Ever. The whole process," he said.

The locker room delivered the punctuation. Woodson said he walked into the training room at halftime of his first game following a familiar smell from his childhood and found John Stallworth on the table puffing a cigarette.

"This is not college anymore," Woodson said. "This is not college."