The worlds of sports and entertainment have grown increasingly intertwined over the years.
Celebrities have become regular (and regularly photographed) attendees at professional baseball and basketball games and, of course, the Super Bowl halftime show has always been an entertaining spectacle of big-name musical celebrities amid the year’s most-watched sporting event.
Meanwhile, more and more professional athletes have ventured into the realms of television and movies, doing cameos as themselves or even transitioning into full-on acting careers. Check out some of the athletes-turned-actors who have proven that succeeding in Hollywood is truly a matter of survival of the fittest.
Dwayne Johnson, Football And Wrestling
Before he was the versatile actor performing in everything from HBO’s “Ballers” to Disney’s “Moana,” Dwayne Johnson was a professional WWE wrestler, and his wrestling ring moniker, “The Rock,” lingers to this day. Even before that, however, the beloved beefcake (and 2016’s Sexiest Man Alive) enjoyed success on the gridiron as part of the NCAA championship team the Miami Hurricanes. Although he famously lost his starting lineman job to future NFL Hall of Famer Warren Sapp, things still worked out pretty well for “The People’s Champ.”
To this day, Johnson places a high priority on personal fitness, frequently posting images on social media of his workouts. For The Rock, mental prowess and physical fitness go hand in hand.
Terry Crews, Football
On “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” the exceptional physique of Terry Crews’ character is often woven into the jokes, as the actor is undeniably blessed with a body for fitness. So it will surprise nobody that Crews played football professionally before he began acting. He was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1991 and went on to play for the San Diego Chargers and Washington Redskins as well.
He left football in 1996 to pursue acting — and he was surprised that he didn’t immediately land roles in Hollywood.
“It was a big shock to me,” Crews told Business Insider. “I moved to Los Angeles thinking that because I was a football player, I was going to get a lot of big opportunities. They didn’t even have a football team then, nobody cared!”
Eventually, Crews (and his sculpted body) became recognizable as the hilarious hunk in the Old Spice commercials, and his acting career blossomed.
Ed O’Neill, Football
Ed O’Neill has made a career for himself in entertainment playing grumpy, blustery men who have plenty of opinions about marriage and fatherhood. His now-classic roles on “Married… With Children” and “Modern Family” may not lead you to assume he was once a dedicated football player, but he did, in fact, play football in high school and college before signing a contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1969. He was cut from the Steelers during training camp, however, which was just fine with the future Al Bundy.
He could have tried to sign with another team but decided against it.
“I thought, ‘I’m done,’” he explained in a 2016 episode of “The Rich Eisen Show.” “I had knee problems. And I was sick of football. If I had made the team, my life would’ve been probably different. Probably for the worse.”
(Excerpt) Read More at: TheDelite.com