Jim Thorpe: All American Athlete, Olympian, Hero
James Francis Thorpe (Sac and Fox (Sauk): Wa-Tho-Huk, translated as “Bright Path”;[4] May 22 or 28,[2] 1887 – March 28, 1953)[5] was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics (one in classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon). He also played football (collegiate and professional), professional baseball, and basketball.
He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the contemporary amateurism rules. In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored his Olympic medals with replicas, after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell outside of the required 30 days. Official IOC records still listed Thorpe as co-champion in decathlon and pentathlon until 2022, when it was decided to restore him as the sole champion in both events.[6][7][8][9][10]
Thorpe grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Indian Territory (what is now the U.S. state of Oklahoma). As a youth, he attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was a two-time All-American for the school’s football team under coach Pop Warner. After his Olympic success in 1912, which included a record score in the decathlon, he added a victory in the All-Around Championship of the Amateur Athletic Union. In 1913, he played for the Pine Village Pros in Indiana.[11] Later in 1913, Thorpe signed with the New York Giants, and he played six seasons in Major League Baseball between 1913 and 1919. Thorpe joined the Canton Bulldogs American football team in 1915, helping them win three professional championships. He later played for six teams in the National Football League (NFL). He played as part of several all-American Indian teams throughout his career, and barnstormed as a professional basketball player with a team composed entirely of American Indians.
From 1920 to 1921, Thorpe was nominally the first president of the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL in 1922. He played professional sports until age 41, the end of his sports career coinciding with the start of the Great Depression. He struggled to earn a living after that, working several odd jobs. He suffered from alcoholism, and lived his last years in failing health and poverty. He was married three times and had eight children, including Grace Thorpe, an environmentalist and Native rights activist, before suffering from heart failure and dying in 1953.
Thorpe has received numerous accolades for his athletic accomplishments. The Associated Press ranked him as the “greatest athlete” from the first 50 years of the 20th century, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him as part of its inaugural class in 1963. The town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania was named in his honor. It has a monument site that contains his remains, which were the subject of legal action. Thorpe appeared in several films and was portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the 1951 film Jim Thorpe – All-American.
Early life[edit]
Information about Thorpe’s birth, name and ethnic background varies widely.[12] He was baptized “Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe” in the Catholic Church. Thorpe was born in Indian Territory of the United States (later Oklahoma), but no birth certificate has been found. He was generally considered to have been born on May 22, 1887,[5] near the town of Prague.[13] Thorpe said in a note to The Shawnee News-Star in 1943 that he was born May 28, 1888, “near and south of Bellemont – Pottawatomie County – along the banks of the North Fork River … hope this will clear up the inquiries as to my birthplace.”[14] Most biographers believe that he was born on May 22, 1887, the date listed on his baptismal certificate.[15] Thorpe referred to Shawnee as his birthplace in his 1943 note to the newspaper.[14]
Thorpe’s parents were both of mixed-race ancestry. His father, Hiram Thorpe, had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother.[16][17] His mother, Charlotte Vieux, had a French father and a Potawatomi mother, a descendant of Chief Louis Vieux. Thorpe was raised as a Sac and Fox,[18] and his native name, Wa-Tho-Huk, is translated as “path lit by great flash of lightning” or, more simply, “Bright Path”.[12] As was the custom for Sac and Fox, he was named for something occurring around the time of his birth, in this case the light brightening the path to the cabin where he was born. Thorpe’s parents were both Roman Catholic, a faith which Thorpe observed throughout his adult life.[19]
Thorpe attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency school in Stroud, with his twin brother, Charlie. Charlie helped him through school until he died of pneumonia when they were nine years old.[20] Thorpe ran away from school several times. His father sent him to the Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, so that he would not run away again.[21]
When Thorpe’s mother died of childbirth complications two years later,[22] the youth became depressed. After several arguments with his father, he left home to work on a horse ranch.[21]
In 1904, the sixteen-year-old Thorpe returned to his father and decided to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There his athletic ability was recognized and he was coached by Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner, one of the most influential coaches of early American football history.[23] Later that year the youth was orphaned after his father Hiram Thorpe died from gangrene poisoning, after being wounded in a hunting accident.[22] The young Thorpe again dropped out of school. He resumed farm work for a few years before returning to Carlisle School.[21]
Amateur career[edit]
College career[edit]
Thorpe in 1912
Thorpe tackling a dummy that is made of weights and pulley on wire, with Coach Warner, 1912
Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and, still in street clothes, beat all the school’s high jumpers with an impromptu 5-ft 9-in jump.[24] His earliest recorded track and field results come from 1907. He also competed in football, baseball, lacrosse, and ballroom dancing, winning the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship.[25]
Pop Warner was hesitant to allow Thorpe, his best track and field athlete, to compete in such a physical game as football.[26] Thorpe, however, convinced Warner to let him try some rushing plays in practice against the school team’s defense; Warner assumed he would be tackled easily and give up the idea.[26] Thorpe “ran around past and through them not once, but twice”.[26] He walked over to Warner and said, “Nobody is going to tackle Jim”, while flipping him the ball.[26]
Thorpe first gained nationwide notice in 1911 for his athletic ability.[27] As a running back, defensive back, placekicker and punter, Thorpe scored all of his team’s four field goals in an 18–15 upset of Harvard, a top-ranked team in the early days of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).[26][28] His team finished the season 11–1. In 1912 Carlisle won the national collegiate championship largely as a result of Thorpe’s efforts: he scored 25 touchdowns and 198 points during the season, according to CNN‘s Greg Botelho.[23] Steve Boda, a researcher for the NCAA, credits Thorpe with 27 touchdowns and 224 points. Thorpe rushed 191 times for 1,869 yards, according to Boda; the figures do not include statistics from two of Carlisle’s 14 games in 1912 because full records are not available.[29]
Carlisle’s 1912 record included a 27–6 victory over the West Point Army team.[13] In that game, Thorpe’s 92-yard touchdown was nullified by a teammate’s penalty, but on the next play Thorpe rushed for a 97-yard touchdown.[30] Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played against him in that game, recalled of Thorpe in a 1961 speech:
Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.[23]
Thorpe was awarded third-team All-American honors in 1908,[31] and named a first-team All-American in 1911 and 1912.[13] Football was – and remained – Thorpe’s favorite sport.[32] He did not compete in track and field in 1910 or 1911,[33] although this turned out to be the sport in which he gained his greatest fame.[13]
In the spring of 1912, he started training for the Olympics. He had confined his efforts to jumps, hurdles and shot-puts, but now added pole vaulting, javelin, discus, hammer and 56 lb weight. In the Olympic trials held at Celtic Park in New York, his all-round ability stood out in all these events and so he earned a place on the team that went to Sweden.[13]
Olympic career[edit]
For the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, two new multi-event disciplines were included, the pentathlon and the decathlon.[34] A pentathlon, based on the ancient Greek event, had been introduced at the 1906 Intercalated Games.[35] The 1912 version consisted of the long jump, javelin throw, 200-meter dash, discus throw, and 1500-meter run.[34]
The decathlon was a relatively new event in modern athletics, although a similar competition known as the all-around championship had been part of American track meets since the 1880s. A men’s version had been featured on the program of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. The events of the new decathlon differed slightly from the American version.[36][37]
Both events seemed appropriate for Thorpe, who was so versatile that he served as Carlisle’s one-man team in several track meets.[13] According to his obituary in The New York Times, he could run the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat; the 220 in 21.8 seconds; the 440 in 51.8 seconds; the 880 in 1:57, the mile in 4:35; the 120-yard high hurdles in 15 seconds; and the 220-yard low hurdles in 24 seconds.[13] He could long jump 23 ft 6 in and high-jump 6 ft 5 in.[13] He could pole vault 11 feet; put the shot 47 ft 9 in; throw the javelin 163 feet; and throw the discus 136 feet.[13]
Thorpe entered the U.S. Olympic trials for both the pentathlon and the decathlon. He easily earned a place on the pentathlon team, winning three events. The decathlon trial was subsequently cancelled, and Thorpe was chosen to represent the U.S. in the event.[38] The pentathlon and decathlon teams also included Avery Brundage, a future International Olympic Committee president.[39]
Thorpe was extremely busy in the Olympics. Along with the decathlon and pentathlon, he competed in the long jump and high jump.[40] The first competition was the pentathlon on July 7.[41] He won four of the five events and placed third in the javelin,[42] an event he had not competed in before 1912.[7] Although the pentathlon was primarily decided on place points, points were also earned for the marks achieved in the individual events. Thorpe won the gold medal.[43] That same day, he qualified for the high jump final, in which he finished in a tie for fourth. On July 12, Thorpe placed seventh in the long jump.[41][44]
Thorpe’s final event was the decathlon, his first (and as it turned out, his only) decathlon.[41][45] Strong competition from local favorite Hugo Wieslander was expected.[46] Thorpe, however, defeated Wieslander by 688 points.[47] He placed in the top four in all ten events, and his Olympic record of 8,413 points stood for nearly two decades.[24] Even more remarkably, because someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete, he found a mismatched pair of replacements, including one from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them.[48][49] Overall, Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon.[50]
As was the custom of the day, the medals were presented to the athletes during the closing ceremonies of the games. Along with the two gold medals, Thorpe also received two challenge prizes, which were donated by King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon and Czar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon. Several sources recount that, when awarding Thorpe his prize, King Gustav said, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world”, to which Thorpe replied, “Thanks, King”.[51][52] Thorpe biographer Kate Buford suggests that the story is apocryphal, as she believes that such a comment “would have been out of character for a man who was highly uncomfortable in public ceremonies and hated to stand out.”[53] The anecdote appeared in newspapers by 1948, 36 years after his appearance in the Olympics and time for myth making,[54] and in books as early as 1952.[55]
Thorpe’s successes were followed in the United States. On the Olympic team’s return, Thorpe was the star attraction in a ticker-tape parade on Broadway.[51] He remembered later, “I heard people yelling my name, and I couldn’t realize how one fellow could have so many friends.”[51]
Apart from his track and field appearances, Thorpe also played in one of two exhibition baseball games at the 1912 Olympics, which featured two teams composed mostly of U.S. track and field athletes.[56] Thorpe had previous experience in the sport, as the public soon learned.[57]
- Thorpe shaking hands with Moses Friedman while Glenn “Pop” Warner (left), Lewis Tewanima (center), and a crowd look on
- Thorpe in Carlisle Indian Industrial School uniform, c. 1909
- Thorpe, c. 1910
