The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1983 - 2009
The claim: Born and schooled in Fort Wayne, the strongest claim this section contains. Roderick Kevin Woodson was born on 10 March 1965 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the youngest of three siblings, and attended R. Nelson Snider High School, class of 1983, starring in football, basketball, and track. Every fact in this article is downstream of that sentence: the most decorated athlete Fort Wayne has ever produced began as a Snider Panther, in the same school that sent Sharon Wichman to Mexico City.
Purdue: At Purdue, Woodson was a 1986 consensus first team All-American who finished his college career holding thirteen individual school records, playing defensive back and, when the Boilermakers needed him, nearly everywhere else. The National Football Foundation, inducting him into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2016, records the rest of the college line: the Purdue Athletics Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Big Ten's defensive back of the year award now named the Tatum-Woodson award in part for him. He was also a hurdler of genuine class, one of only two athletes in the Pro Football Hall of Fame who also earned a world ranking in the high hurdles.
The professional: Seventeen NFL seasons followed, with Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Oakland, as a cornerback and then a safety of the first rank. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility and inducted at Canton on 8 August 2009, a member of the NFL's 75th Anniversary Team and of its All-Decade Team for the 1990s. His Super Bowl ring came with Baltimore, a fact this section needs later, when the city's Super Bowl lineage is counted. Fort Wayne's own honour is smaller and, for the record's purposes, better: on 22 April 2012 his bronze Hometown Hall of Famer plaque was dedicated at Snider, in the school where the whole claim started.
Sources:
- National Football Foundation, Rod Woodson College Hall of Fame profile: born Fort Wayne, 10 March 1965; Snider High School; the thirteen Purdue records; the 2009 and 2016 Hall of Fame inductions.
- Fort Wayne Community Schools, Rod Woodson record: Snider class of 1983, the Hometown Hall of Famer plaque dedicated 22 April 2012.
- Pro Football Hall of Fame record, class of 2009, as carried in the National Football Foundation biography.