by #LizPublika
Widely considered to be one of the most versatile athletes and Olympians in modern sports, Jim Thorpe’s accomplishments were nothing short of legendary. From being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class in 1963 to a town in Pennsylvania being named in his honor, the world-revered sportsman is the most decorated Native American athlete of all time. His is a story for the ages.
Though information about his background varies quite a bit, it is believed that James Francis Thorpe — meaning "Bright Path" — was born on either May 22nd or 28th, in 1887, and passed away on March 28th in 1953. The American athlete and Olympic gold medalist was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation in Indian Territory (now the U.S. state of Oklahoma), making Thorpe the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics.
Thorpe had a difficult childhood. Jim’s twin brother Charlie passed away when the boys were only nine years old. The youngster lost his mother a few years after that. Both of the events affected Thorpe, who ran away from school often enough to be sent away to an boarding school by his father. But In 1904, the sixteen-year-old Thorpe returned home, where decided to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Sadly, the youth was orphaned later that year, when his father Hiram Thorpe died from gangrene poisoning after being wounded in a hunting accident. Thorpe dropped out of school once again and resumed farm work before returning to Carlisle School in 1907. That’s when his athletic career truly began; as Thorpe was passing the track in his street clothes, he beat all the school's high jumpers with an impromptu 5-ft 9-in jump and changed the trajectory of his life.
Thorpe served as Carlisle's one-man team. According to his obituary, 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. He could long jump 23 ft 6 in and high-jump 6 ft 5 in. He could pole vault 11 feet; put the shot 47 ft 9 in; throw the javelin 163 feet; and throw the discus 136 feet.
His athletic ability was recognized by Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, one of the most influential coaches of early American football history. Warner was hesitant to allow Thorpe, his best track and field athlete, to compete in a game as physical as football. But Thorpe was committed to changing Warne's mind and convinced the coach to let him try some rushing plays in practice against the school team's defense. Thorpe "ran around past and through them not once, but twice.”
Not only did Thorpe become a first team All-American twice (in 1911 and 1912), he also competed in baseball, lacrosse, and ballroom dancing, winning the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing championship. And, in the spring of 1912, he started training for the Olympics; while he initially had confined his efforts to jumps, hurdles and shot-puts, he now added pole vaulting, javelin, discus, hammer and 56 lb weight.
Thorpe was super busy during the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. The first competition was the pentathlon. He won four of the five events and placed third in the javelin, an event he had not competed in before 1912. Thorpe won the gold medal. 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.
Thorpe's final event was the decathlon, his first (and only) decathlon. Thorpe placed in the top four in all ten events, whose Olympic record of 8,413 points stood for nearly two decades. And because someone had stolen his shoes just before the competition, he found a mismatched pair of replacements from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them. Overall, Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon.
The medals were presented to the athletes during the closing ceremonies. Along with the two gold medals, Thorpe also received two challenge prizes, which had been 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 allegedly replied, "Thanks, King.”
After his victories at the Olympic Games in Sweden, on September 2, 1912, Thorpe returned to Celtic Park, the home of the Irish American Athletic Club, in Queens, New York (where he had qualified four months earlier for the Olympic Games), to compete in the Amateur Athletic Union's All-Around Championship, where he won seven of the ten events contested and came in second in the remaining three.
With a total point score of 7,476 points, Thorpe broke the previous record of 7,385 points set in 1909 (also at Celtic Park), by Martin Sheridan, a five-time Olympic gold medalist and the champion athlete of the Irish American Athletic Club, who watched his record break. After the fact, he approached Thorpe, shook his hand and said: "Jim, my boy, you're a great man. I never expect to look upon a finer athlete."
In late January 1913, news broke that Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1909 and 1910. At the time, strict rules regarding amateurism were in effect for athletes participating in the Olympics, so athletes who received money prizes for competitions, were sports teachers, or had previously competed against professionals, were not considered amateurs and thus barred from competition.
College players, in fact, regularly spent summers playing professionally in order to earn some money, but most used aliases, unlike Thorpe. Although the public did not seem to care much about Thorpe's past, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and especially its secretary James Edward Sullivan, took the case very seriously. Although Thorpe had, actually, played for money, the AAU and IOC did not follow their own rules for his disqualification.
The rulebook for the 1912 Olympics stated that protests had to be made "within 30 days from the closing ceremonies of the games." The first newspaper reports did not appear until January 1913, about six months after the Stockholm Games had concluded. There is also some evidence that Thorpe was known to have played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics, but the AAU had ignored the issue until being confronted with it in 1913.
But there was a flip side to this discovery; as soon as the news declared Thorpe a professional, he received offers from established sports clubs. In 1913, he played football for the Pine Village Pros in Indiana and signed to play baseball with the New York Giants. He even played professional basketball, a fact most were unaware of until a ticket that documented his time in the league was discovered in an old book in 2005.
From 1920 to 1921, Thorpe was nominally the first president of the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL in 1922, though he never played for an NFL championship team. He retired from professional football at age 41, having played 52 games for six teams from 1920 to 1928. The end of his sports career coincided with the start of the Great Depression, during which he struggled to earn a living.
He was cast in a few films. In the 1932 comedy Always Kickin', Thorpe was prominently cast in a speaking part as himself, a kicking coach teaching young football players to drop-kick. In 1931, during the Great Depression, he sold the film rights to his life story to MGM for $1,500 ($30,000 today). Thorpe portrayed an umpire in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. He played a member of the Navajo Nation in the 1950 film Wagon Master.
Thorpe was also memorialized in the Warner Bros. film Jim Thorpe – All-American (1951), starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Michael Curtiz. Thorpe was paid $15,000 by Warner Bros. plus a $2,500 donation toward an annuity for him by the studio head of publicity. The movie included archival footage of the 1912 and 1932 Olympics. Thorpe was seen in one scene as a coaching assistant. It was also distributed in the U.K., where it was called Man of Bronze.
Apart from his career in films, he worked as a construction worker, a doorman/bouncer, a security guard, and a ditch digger. He briefly joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1945, during World War II. Thorpe was a chronic alcoholic during his later life. He ran out of money sometime in the early 1950s. When hospitalized for lip cancer in 1950, Thorpe was admitted as a charity case.
Jim Thorpe lived his last years in failing health and poverty before suffering from heart failure and dying at the age of 65 in 1953. 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. In 2022, the IOC decided to restore him as the sole champion in both the decathlon and pentathlon.
In 2018, Thorpe became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame. The fitness center and a hall at Haskell Indian Nations University are named in honor of Thorpe. Jim Thorpe was and remains an anomaly in sports. While he was certainly a Jack of all trades, he was also a master at most. From his storied abilities to his relentless ambition, Jim Thorpe remains an exceptional human in sports history.