In the earliest part of the 20th century , when golf , horse racing , boxing and baseball ruled the sporting universe , Jim Thorpe ( 1887 - 1953 ) emerged as maybe the great athlete the world had ever known . Some might fence , more than a century later , that he still is .
What places Thorpe in that conversation , still — and , yes , he should be there — is something more than his unbelievable skills . It ’s more than the fact that he excelled in many summercater , both on the amateur and professional levels . It ’s more than that he had a huge hand in gettingAmerica ’s favorite sport , professional football , off the earth and run .
Thorpe , a Native American who was n’t evenconsidered an American citizenwhen he bedaze the man at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm , Sweden , should be list among the greatest jock ever ( if notthegreatest ) for everything he went through plainly to compete . And for what that meant to millions around the man .
" He glamorized the Olympics and romanticize sports by being this phenomenon that came from out of nowhere and astonished the world , " say Kate Buford , the generator of " Native American Son : The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe , " a 2010 biography . " He became this gold standard of the perfect jock who could do anything . Anything . We wo n’t see his like again . "
A Rough Road to Greatness
To value how Jim Thorpe became the greatest , you have to see where he started . Born to parents of European and Native American inheritance , Thorpe was raise in Indian Territory — what is now Oklahoma — as a member of theSac and Fox tribe . It was a arduous upbringing during which he was send out to schooling ( and scat aside from school ) several times . His duplicate brother give out when he was 9 . His mother pass away in childbirth a couple year later .
separate from his family , hundreds of statute mile from home , and hale to learn a unlike polish , Thorpe thrived . The cause was simple : athletics . Specifically , the fledgling sportswoman of American football .
Thorpe had playact football in one of his premature schools , but under Carlisle ’s fabled four-in-hand , Glenn " Pop " Warner , he became a sensation . Though ab initio considered too small to encounter , Thorpe grew into a big , punishing runner and kicker . Warner would latersay of Thorpe :
Carlisle became anational powerhouse , and Thorpe a two - time All - American . In November of 1912 , Thorpe lead Carlisle in a biz against Army and a vernal plebe namedDwight D. Eisenhower . The grandness of the game — one in which a schooltime of Indians faced off against a team fill with the sons and grandsons of the soldiers who killed thousands of Indians and forced them from their homeland — was not lost on anyone there . Carlisle won , 27 - 6 .
By that time , Thorpe already had become a worldwide submarine at theStockholm Olympics — represent the United States though Native Americans did not have citizenship — after winning both thedecathlonand the pentathlon by unprecedented margins . His performance remind Sweden ’s King Gustav V to tell him , " Sir , you are the big jock in the world . "
But Thorpe ’s performance at the Olympics unveiled more : With his authorisation , Thorpe express that athletic contest were no longer the sole view of racy , ashen Europeans .
" In an geological era when White Anglo - Saxon Protestants , WASPs , regulate everything — they governed the Olympic commission , they governed the Ivy League college , they call the shot , they were see as the elite — anybody who was not a WASP in general , whether you were Amerindic , Judaic , Italian , Irish , Catholic , Asian , you were not run into as part of the power structure , " Buford say . " Part of the reason that hoi polloi embraced Thorpe so much is that they loved guys who could come out and beat the big boy at their own secret plan . "
Making the Argument
Thorpe ’s Olympian medals would be stripped less than a year after he won them when it came to light that he had played baseball in the summer for relieve oneself pay , against the Olympian rule of amateurism . The determination was considered an scandalization by many , even then . It finally was turn over in 1983 , 30 years after his death .
He was nominate the first Chief Executive of the American Pro Football Association in 1920 ( the forerunner to today ’s National Football League ) , played 12 years as a professional , was named to the all - decade team of the 1920s and was in the maiden class of thePro Football Hall of Fame . He also playedprofessional baseballand , though he was n’t deal quite as effective at that mutation , he steady improved over a six - class career , mostly with the New York Giants . He even had a brusk career on a barnstorm professional basketball team .
The acclaim did not interpret into much success in his post - athletic vocation . After his playing 24-hour interval , he kicked around in several job , include a lot ofmostly uncredited partsas an Indian in Hollywood westerns . Still , his athletic achievement , despite all the challenge he confront throughout his life-time , survive on . In 1950 , the Associated Press polled C of sportswriters across America , who named him the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century .
" He was such an amazing athlete … he was so good , [ masses ] were in veneration of him . His athletic power outflank whatever lurk preconception there may have been about him being an Indian , " Buford says . " He proved what he could do on the field of operation . And nobody could argue that . "
