The Greatest Athlete in the World
One of my childhood obsessions that has extended into adulthood is the story of Jim Thorpe, the Native American man whom Sweden’s King Gustav told - “You Sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.’’
I’m not sure why Thorpe is so interesting to me. I have read all the books, beginning with The Best of the Athletic Boys by Jack Newcombe and The Real All-Americans by Sally Jacobs. I even watched the terrible 1951 Hollywood film starring Burt Lancaster as Thorpe.
My fascination must have something to do with his great athletic achievement against all odds; something to do with Thorpe’s story still hiding in front of us while Tom Brady buffs his vanilla image on golf courses and YouTube.
And it is an incredible story. In 1912 Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in the decathlon and the pentathlon. Despite this, Thorpe was stripped of his medals on a technicality. It is a tragedy that has lasted a century. Only last week, 110 years later, did some measure of justice arrive for Thorpe. The International Olympic Committee restored Jim Thorpe in the record books as the sole winner of those gold medals. The restoration of Thorpe’s titles is an admission by a white dominant society that it was wrong. How often does that happen?
The gold medals were part of an athletic career in which Thorpe excelled in football, baseball, basketball, track & field, lacrosse - even ballroom dancing. But for Thorpe, a Native American from the Sac & Fox Nation, it was also a career of resilience, of overcoming racism, discrimination, erasure and injustice at the hands of the U.S. government. And of generosity in the face of that injustice.
For the unobsessed, here is the Thorpe story.
Jim Thorpe was born in Indian territory in what is now Oklahoma. His native name was Bright Path. Running away from a troubled childhood, he ended up at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a federal financed boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Far from being a safe haven, Carlisle was designed to indoctrinate natives into Christianity and to wipe out their heritage and language. Sent to these schools as small children, their hair was cut, their clothes thrown away and their traditions and language erased. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,’’ the saying went.
There is no way of saying it nicely. These schools were brutal, barbaric, and designed to institute cultural genocide. The government sponsored more than 400 establishments, often partnering with religious groups to run them. Sexual abuse and corporal punishment were the norm. Incredibly, the schools were financed in part by money actually owed to the native tribes with whom the government signed peace treaties.
Thorpe arrived in Carlisle in 1903. Ironically, it is today the site of the U.S. Army War College.
The football and track coach at Carlisle was Glenn “Pop’’ Warner, by then famous for his football innovations that include the forward pass, the hidden ball trick and formations like the single wing. He was the same Pop Warner after whom you’re child’s “Pop Warner Football’’ league is named.
At Carlisle, Thorpe led a small but fast, all native, football team. He played offense, defense and kicked four field goals in an 18–15 upset of Harvard, then a top-ranked team in the early days of college football. In another sad irony Carlisle also beat West Point 27-6. While the U.S. Army was wiping out native people and their culture in the American West, those same natives beat the Army on the football field.
In 1912, Thorpe scored 25 touchdowns and 198 points, unheard of during the years when American football was a plodding slog compared to the acrobatics of today.
“...he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw,’’ said the captain of the West Point team, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yes, that Eisenhower.
But Thorpe wasn’t finished. He entered the 1912 Olympics and ran an, unheard of at the time, 100-yard dash in 10 seconds. He then won the decathlon and pentathlon by record margins despite wearing scavenged track shoes from the dumpster, having lost his regulars. Every athlete has nightmares of forgetting their equipment the night before a big game. Researchers and historians differ on whether the shoes were lost or stolen, but what matters is that Thorpe persevered and won.
His victory, however, was short lived. Back then, so-called amateur rules forbade athletes from competing in the Olympics if they’d made money elsewhere. It came to light that Thorpe had played semi-pro baseball for $2 per day during a summer tour. The Amateur Athletic Union, the governing body of U.S. sports, outed Thorpe to the International Olympic committee, which stripped him of his medals and titles.
For over a century Thorpe’s family and friends have worked to have his titles restored. And finally, after decades of negotiation between Olympic committees from various countries, justice prevailed. Last week, after calling him a co-winner for decades, the IOC restored Thorpe as the sole winner of his two Olympic events. His family were given replica gold medals. The real ones were lost long ago.
It is hard to understand what it’s like to wait 110 years to be vindicated, for a wrong to be righted. It is a way of life for Native people.
Billy Mills, a member of the Oglala Sioux nation who won the 10,000 meter race at the Olympics in 1964, broke down in tears when he heard the news about Thorpe being restored as the sole winner.
“I just felt so elated,’’ Mills told a reporter. “When they announced he was the sole recipient I started to cry and in my body, I felt for the first time, I am an Olympian.’’
After the Olympic debacle, Thorpe went on to win three pro football championships in the early NFL, was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame and was the league’s first commissioner. Let that sink in. The first commission of pro football was a Native American.
Later, Thorpe made a living as a Hollywood actor. He helped establish the Native American Actors Guild, dedicated to finding Native Americans jobs in the film industry. Hollywood back then made films about a vanishing native culture but did little to support the victims of the crime. Thorpe did.
Thorpe died in 1953. And only in the following years have we been lucky enough to fully understand this great athlete and human being.
I called up the Native American filmmaker Nedra Darling, a co-founder of Bright Path Strong, the organization dedicated to clearing Thorpe’s record, and the producer of an upcoming documentary film on his life. Her father was close friends with Thorpe and she was raised around his legend.
“He was never bitter about what happened to him,’’ she said of Thorpe, “it did not stop him.’’
Nedra’s father often repeated this lesson to her. Don’t be bitter about the injustice they’ve felt at the hands of a racist society, where Native people were not citizens until 1924. That’s right. When Jim Thorpe won two gold medals and was named an All American, he was not even an American citizen.
It might give Thorpe’s family some comfort to read about the efforts of Deb Haaland, the U.S. Interior Secretary. She is leading a multi-phase investigation into the boarding school system Thorpe endured. It’s an investigation that has already made several shocking discoveries.
The investigation is the first official attempt by our government to confront a system of racist dehumanization that helped wipe out a culture and led to hundreds of deaths of innocent children at the hands of religious and cultural bigots. One can only hope the investigation leads to a Truth & Reconciliation Commission and an official apology from the government for crimes committed.
The U.S. is far behind the Canadians, who are in the midst of their own reckoning with native people. Just yesterday, the Pope traveled to Alberta, Canada to apologize for the Catholic church’s role in running what the NY Times called “gruesome centers of abuse.’’
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Pope Francis said.
It’s a start.
PS — If you want to contribute to Nedra Darling’s documentary film project about Thorpe, click here.
