Jim Thorpe
Jacobus Franciscus "Jim" Thorpe (May 28, 1887 - March 28, 1953) is considered by many to be one of the most versatile athletes that ever lived. He played professional baseball and football, and won Olympic gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon. He subsequently lost his Olympic titles for violating amateurism regulations. Only in 1983, thirty years after his death, his medals were restored.
Early life
A shroud of mystery surrounds Thorpe's birth, and information his place of birth, date of birth and full name vary widely. This is mostly due to the fact that no birth certificate has ever been found for Thorpe, who was born in Indian territory, which was not officially part of the United States at the time. In this article, we use the findings of Mallon (see references) , who checked his data against all available original documents.
Jim Thorpe was born on May 28, 1887 (many sources state 1888) in an Indian Reservation near the town of Bellemont, Oklahoma (not Prague, Oklahoma, as often seen). His full name is often said to be James Francis Thorpe, but this cannot be confirmed; Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe is the name on his christening certificate.
Thorpe's ancestry is rather complex, as both his parents were of mixed descent. His father, Hiram Thorpe had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother, while Thorpe's mother Charlotte Vieux had a French father and an Indian mother. Jim Thorpe was raised as a Sac and Fox, and his native name was Wa-Tho-Huk, meaning Bright Path. Thorpe's father is said to have had 19 children with five different wives, of which no less than eleven with Vieux.
Together with his twin brother Charlie, Jim Thorpe went to school in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, at the Sac and Fox Indian Agency School. Charlie died when they were 8, and Thorpe's parents died only a few years later. After briefly attending the Haskell Indian School in Kansas, Thorpe went to Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There, his athletic career would commence.
A rising star
Legend has it that Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and beat the school's high jumpers with a 5 ft 9 jump, still wearing plain clothes. Whether this is true or not, Thorpe's earliest recorded track and field results indeed are from 1907. But athletics was certainly not the only sport in which Thorpe engaged at Carlisle - other sports he participated in include football, baseball, lacrosse and even ballroom dancing.
He gained countrywide attention for the first time in 1911. As a running back for his school's football team, Thorpe scored all points in an 18-13 upset against Harvard. The following year, Carlisle won the national collegiate championship, lead by Thorpe, who scored 25 touchdowns and 198 points. Carlisle's 1912 record includes a 27-6 beating of Army. In that match, Thorpe scored a 92 yard touchdown, which was annulled because of a penalty. Thorpe, not discouraged, scored another touchdown on the next play, this time running 97 yards. Thorpe won All-American honours in both 1911 and 1912.
Football was - and would remain - Thorpe's favourite sport, and he only sporadically competed in track and field. Nevertheless, that would become the sport in which Thorpe would gain the most fame.
An Olympic hero
For the 1912 Summer Olympics, two new multi-event disciplines were on the programme, the pentathlon and the decathlon. A pentathlon based on the ancient Greek event had been organised at the 1906 Summer Olympics, but the 1912 edition would consist of the long jump, the javelin throw, 200 m dash, the discus throw and the 1500 m.
The decathlon was an entirely new event in athletics, although there had been a decathlon competition held during American track meets since the 1880s, which had featured on the programme of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. The events of the new decathlon were slightly different from the American version, however. Both events seemed fit for Thorpe, who was so versatile that he alone had formed Carlisle's team on several track meets. Therefore, Thorpe entered the US Olympic trials for both the pentathlon and the decathlon.
He easily won the Eastern Trials, winning three events, and was named on the team for the pentathlon, which also included future IOC president Avery Brundage. There were only a few candidates for the decathlon team, and the trials were cancelled. This meant that Jim Thorpe would contest his first - and, as it turned out, only - decathlon in Stockholm.
Thorpe's competition schedule for the Olympics was rather crowded, as he would also enter the long and high jump competitions. The first event scheduled was the pentathlon. Thorpe was the class of the field, winning four events. He only placed third in the javelin, an event he had not contested before 1912. Although the competition was primarily decided on place points, points were also calculated for the marks achieved in the events. Thorpe scored 4041.530 points, 400 points more than second-placed Ferdinand Bie of Norway.
The same day he won the pentathlon gold, Thorpe qualified for the high jump final. In that final, he placed fourth, and took seventh place in the long jump. Thorpe's final event was the decathlon, where tough competition from the local favourite, Hugo Wieslander, was expected. But Wieslander was no match for Thorpe either, and finished some 700 points behind Thorpe, who placed in the top tour four of all ten events.
As was the custom in these days, the medals were presented to the athletes during the closing ceremonies of the Games. Besides two gold medals, Thorpe also received two challenge prizes, which were donated by the king of Sweden (decathlon) and the czar of Russia (pentathlon). When awarding him his prize, the Swedish king Gustav V supposedly said to Thorpe "Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.", to which Thorpe allegedly answered with "Thanks, King".
Thorpe's successes had not gone unnoticed at home, and he was honoured with a ticker-tape parade on Broadway. He later remembered: "I heard people yelling my name, and I couldn't realize how one fellow could have so many friends."
Apart from his track and field appearance, Jim Thorpe also played in one of two exhibition baseball matches held at the 1912 Olympics, which features two teams made up of American track and field athletes. It wasn't Thorpe's first try at baseball, as would soon become known to the rest of the world.
Declared a professional
In 1912, strict rules regarding amateurism were in force for athletes participating in the Olympics. Athletes who received money prizes for competitions, were sports teachers or who had previously competed against professionals were not considered amateurs, and were not allowed to partake in the Olympics.
In late January 1913, American newspapers published stories in which it was claimed that Thorpe had played professional baseball. It is not entirely sure which newspaper first brought the story; the earliest article found is from the Providence Times, but the Worcester Telegram is usually mentioned as the first with the story. Thorpe had indeed played semi-professional baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910, and had received a small amount of money for playing.
Although the public did not seem to care much about Thorpe's past, the Amateur Athletic Union, and especially its secretary James E. Sullivan, took the case very seriously. Thorpe wrote a letter to Sullivan, in which he admitted playing semi-professional baseball:
"(...) I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names. (...)"
His letter didn't help, and the AAU decided to retroactively withdraw Thorpe's amateur status, and requested the IOC to do the same. Later that year, the IOC unanimously decided to strip Jim Thorpe of his Olympic titles, medals and awards, and declared him a professional.
While Thorpe had indeed played for money, his disqualification was in fact not according to the regulations. In the rulebook for the 1912 Olympics, it was stated that any protests had to be made within 30 days from the closing ceremonies of the Games. The first newspaper reports only appeared in January 1913, about six months after the Stockholm Games had concluded. However, AAU and IOC officials were apparently ignorant of this rule, or chose to ignore it. There is also some evidence that Thorpe's amateur status had already been questioned long before the Olympics, but that this had been (deliberately) ignored by the AAU until they were confronted with it in 1913.
The only positive side to this affair for Thorpe was that, as soon as the news got out that he had been declared a professional, offers came in from Major League Baseball (MLB) teams to join them.
Baseball and football
In 1913, he joined the New York Giants as an outfielder. He would remain with that team until 1919, save 1917, when he played most of the season for the Cincinnati Reds. He closed out his Major League career with the Boston Braves in 1919. In 289 games, he averaged .252, batting in 82 runs. He would continue to play baseball with teams in minor leagues until 1922.
But Thorpe had not abandoned football either. Back in 1915, Thorpe had signed with the Canton Bulldogs. They paid him $250 a game, which was an incredibly high wage in those days. The independent team was successful, and won titles in 1916, 1917 and 1919. In 1920, the Bulldogs were one of the four teams to form the American Professional Football Association, which would become the National Football League two years later. Thorpe was named the APFA's first president, but continued to play for Canton, coaching the team as well.
Thorpe never played in a championship team, although he played for six different teams between 1920 and 1928. He retired from pro football aged 41, having played 52 NFL games.
Later life and death
After his athletic career, Thorpe had trouble finding work, and went from job to job, as so many during the Depression. Among others, he featured as an extra in several movies, usually playing an Indian chief in western movies. But he also worked as a construction worker, a bouncer, and joined the Merchant Marine.
By the 1950s, Thorpe had virtually no money left, and when he had to be admitted to the hospital to be treated for cancer in 1950, he could only afford his bills because he was allowed as a charity case.
Three years later, Thorpe suffered from a heart attack while eating dinner with his wife in his trailer home in Lomita, California. Artificial respiration briefly revived Thorpe, but he lost consciousness shortly afterwards, and passed away, aged 65. But Thorpe's fame did not die with him.
Legacy
Initially, Thorpe's family wanted to bury him in Oklahoma and erect a monument there, but the governor did not allow this. When Thorpe's third wife, Patricia, heard that the small Pennsylvania town of Mauch Chunk was desperately seeking for anything to attract business, she struck a deal with the town. The town bought the athletes remains and erected a monument for him, and renamed the town in his honour: Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Thorpe's monument, featuring the quote from Gustav V can still be found there.
Thorpe also found great acclaim with the press. Before his death, in 1950, an Associated Press poll among sportswriters voted Thorpe the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century, while another poll elected him as the best football player over the same period. By the end of the century, memories of Thorpe had faded a little, but he still featured in the top of many "athlete of the century" lists.
In 1951, while Thorpe was still alive, a feature film about his life was released. Jim Thorpe - All-American starred Burt Lancaster, and was directed by Michael Curtiz (best known for Casablanca). Thorpe didn't earn a penny for the 1951 movie, as he had already sold the film rights to MGM in 1931 (for $1500).
In 1986, the Jim Thorpe Award was established, awarded to the best defensive back in college football.
Reinstated
Over the years, many attempts have been made to reinstate Thorpe's Olympic titles, many of them started by one of Thorpe's eight children (Thorpe had three daughters and fours sons from his first two marriages). Most persistent where Robert Wheeler and Florence Ridlon. They succeeded in having the AAU and United States Olympic Committee (USOC) overturn their decisions and restore Thorpe's amateur status prior to 1913.
In 1982, they set up the Jim Thorpe Foundation, and managed to get support from the US House of Representative and Congress. Armed with this support, and evidence from 1912 showing Thorpe's disqualification had occured outside of the 30-day limit, they finally got attention from the IOC, which had not made any attempts to reinstate Thorpe.
In October 1982, the IOC Executive Committee approved to reinstate Thorpe. In an unusual ruling, however, they declared that Thorpe was now co-champion with Bie and Wieslander, although both athletes had always said they considered Thorpe to be the only champion. In a ceremony on January 18, 1983, two of Thorpe's children, Gale and Bill, were presented with commemorative medals. The original medals, which had both ended up in museums, were both stolen and are still missing.
References
- Jim Thorpe, the Legend Remembered, by Rosemary Kissinger Updyke, 1997
- In the Matter of Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe, published in The 1912 Olympic Games - Results for All Competitors in All Events, with Commentary by Bill Mallon and Ture Widlund, 2002.
- The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics (Sydney 2000 Edition) by David Wallechinsky, 2000.
- Jim Thorpe: The World's Greatest Athlete by Robert W. Wheeler, 2003