Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Legend of Jim Thorpe

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

Jim Thorpe was a Native American of the Sac and Fox Nation. He was born in 1887 in what was then known as the Indian territory and today is known as the state of Oklahoma.  He excelled at every sport he attempted, at every level he played at. He played professional football and baseball, won two Olympic gold medals, and found a place in the Football Hall of Fame.  Many considered him the greatest athlete of all time, yet he died in poverty, with many of his greatest accomplishments taken from him. Learn more about Jim Thorpe, one of the world’s most gifted athletes, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Search Past Episodes at fathom.fm Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jim Thorpe was a Native American of the Sack and Fox Nation. He was born in 1887 in what was then known as the Indian Territory and is today known as the state of Oklahoma. He excelled at every sport he attempted, at every level he played at. He played professional football and baseball, won two Olympic gold medals, and found a place in the Football Hall of Fame. Many consider him the greatest athlete of all time, yet he died in poverty, with many of his greatest accomplishments taken from him. Learn more about Jim Thorpe, one of the world's most gifted athletes on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Any debate about something like who is the greatest athlete of all talking? is a question that can never be resolved. After all, how do you compare someone with incredible strength versus someone with incredible speed? How does a great sprinter, like Usain

Bolt, compare against a great marathoner like Elliot Klipchowgay? What about athletes who excel in one sport? How do you compare Serena Williams versus Michael Phelps versus Alexander Corellon? When people bring up Jim Thorpe in the discussion of the greatest athlete of all time, it isn't because he excelled at one thing. It is because he excelled at many things. multiple team sports, and multiple individual sports. Jim Thorpe was born in what was then called the Indian Territory in 1887. His father was half Irish and half Sack and Fox. His mother was half French and half Potawatomi.

Technically, he was not an American citizen when he was born, as citizenship wasn't extended to all Native Americans at that time. He was raised in the Sack and Fox tribe and was given the name Wathowhuk, which means path lit by a great friend. flash of lightning. He had a twin brother who died at the age of nine from pneumonia. He was sent to an Indian boarding school in Kansas where he ran away from school. His mother died in childbirth when he was 11, and then he went off to work on a ranch. In 1904, at the age of 16, he returned to his father and agreed to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The Carlisle School was the premier school

for Native Americans in the United States at that time. And it is not the sort of institution that would exist today. The school's stated goal was the cultural assimilation of Indians into greater European American society. In fact, the motto of the school's founder was, quote, kill the Indian, save the man. After a year in the Carlisle School, Thorpe's father died of gangrene from a hunting wound, leaving him as an orphan. Thorpe's career in athletics began in a storybook fashion. In 1906, he was walking past the athletic track at the Carlisle School wearing street clothes, when the track and field team was practicing. Without changing clothes, and having never attempted a high jump before, he jumped five feet nine inches, which was the school record. Carlisle's football and track coach was

the legendary Pop Warner. Thorpe wanted to play football, and we're talking American football here just so everyone is clear, but Warner didn't want him to get hit and potentially lose his top track star. So during football practice, he let Thorpe have the ball and told his defense to tackle him thinking it would make him give up his football dreams. Thorpe took the ball and ran through and around everyone going into the end zone. And then he did it again. After that, he threw the ball back to Pop Warner saying, quote, nobody is going to tackle Jim.

In 1911, on the back of Jim Thorpe, the Carlisle School became one of the country's top football teams. Jim was the premier player on the team for offense, defense, and special teams, playing the positions of running back, defensive back, place kicker, and punter. They beat the nation's top team Harvard 18 to 12 with Thorpe kicking four field goals. The team finished the season 11 and 1. In 1912, Thorpe scored 25 touchdowns, ran 1,800 yards, and scored 198 points in 12 games. They actually played 14 games, but the stats for the other two have been lost. They played Army, again one of the best teams in the country, and won.

He had a 92-yard rushing touchdown, which was called back due to a penalty. And on the next play, he ran it in for a 97-yard touchdown. On the Army team was a young cadet by the name of Dwight Eisenhower. He later recalled, quote, 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. End quote.

1912 was a great year for Thorpe. The Olympics were being held in Stockholm that year, and there were two new events that were introduced, the decathlon and the pentathlon. Thorpe entered the U.S. Olympic qualifiers and easily won. He outright won three of the five pentathlon events and was runner-up in the other two. He then was named to the decathlon team when the qualifier was canceled.

And I should note that he never competed in either the decathlon or the pentathlon up until this point. He also qualified for the Olympics in the high jump and the long jump. And just to make the story even better, he hadn't been competing in track and field for the last several years, only football. When he went to Stockholm, he crushed the competition. He won four of the five events in the pentathlon and took third in the javelin, an event he had never competed in in his life prior to 1912.

He finished fourth in the high jump and seventh in the left. long jump. Then in the decathlon, the first and only time he had ever competed in a decathlon in his life, he took the gold medal and setting the record that stood for 14 years. He placed in the top four in all 10 events. And just to put this into context, Jim Thorpe competed in 15 different events between the pentathlon and the decathlon. The pentathlon consisted of the 200 meters, the long jump, the javelin, the discus, and the 1,500 meters. The decathlon consisted of the 100 meters, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 meters, discus, 110-meter hurdles, pole vault, javelin, and 1,500 meters.

According to legend, when he was awarded as gold medals by King Gustav V of Sweden, he told Thorpe, sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world. To which Thorpe replied, thanks, King. He came back home and competed in the amateur athletic, Union, or AAU's national championships, where he won the individual all-around championship by setting a new record. And just to put a cherry on top of 1912, Jim Thorpe won the NCAA National Championship in Ballroom Dancing. In January of 1913, Thorpe was rocked by a newspaper story that alleged that he had played professional baseball before the Olympics. In 1909 and 1910,

he had played minor league baseball for $2.00. game to make money in college. Because it violated amateur rules, the AAU retroactively revoked his amateur status, and the Olympics stripped him of his medals and his records. This was rather ridiculous. For starters, baseball wasn't an Olympic sport. Second, he was only given enough money to cover his expenses. And finally, the Olympics had a rule that any rules violations had to be reported within 30 days.

The first reports didn't appear until half a year. after the Olympics were over. Stripping Jim Thorpe of his gold medals was one of Olympic history's greatest travesties. Even in 1913, most commentators of that era thought it was outrageous and that he had his medals taken away simply because of his race. But more on this in a bit. Now that his amateur status was revoked, he could actually play professional sports. He was one of the rare free agents in professional baseball, and in 1913, he decided to sign

with the New York Giants. and they went to the World Series that year. Over the course of six years, he played for three other major league teams, including the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Braves. He also played for the Chicago Whitestocks on barnstorming tours, as well as multiple other minor league teams. His baseball career was good but not great. He was more of a box office attraction for teams to sell tickets.

While he was playing professional baseball, he was also playing professional football. Professional football was just in its early stages, so it wasn't as developed as professional baseball was. In 1915, he signed with the Canton Bulldogs for $250 per game, making him the highest paid player in professional football. Before Thorpe was on the team, about 1,200 people would show up for Canton's games. For Thorpe's first game, 8,000 people were in attendance.

Canton joined the American Professional Football Association in 1920, and Jim Thorpe was selected as the league's first president, and he was still playing and coaching for Canton the entire time, so he was replaced the next year. He played for a series of pro football teams through 1928. He was named to the first all-NFL team in 1923, to the all-1920s decade team, and later to the NFL's 50th anniversary team in 1969. While many people don't know it, he also played professional basketball after his retirement from football. When Jim Thorpe's athletic career was over, his success on the field didn't translate.

to success in later life. Professional athletes didn't make very much money back then, and he was never able to save up very much. After sports, he had a hard time keeping a job. He took bit parts in movies, usually playing the role of an Indian chief. He dug ditches, was a bouncer, and a security guard. He was very generous with what money he had

often helping other Native Americans. However, by 1950, it had left him broke. Towards the end of his life, he also became an alcoholic. He was considered a charity case when he was admitted to the hospital in 1950 for cancer. And Jim Thorpe died of a heart attack in 1953 at the age of 65. His death was not the end of the Jim Thorpe's story, however. Thorpe died in California, and his body was taken to Oklahoma for services and burial.

There was a movement to erect a monument to Thorpe, but the governor vetoed the $25,000 which would have been allocated for the monument. Without telling anyone, Thorpe's wife, his third wife, had his body shipped to Pennsylvania. The towns of Mock Chunk and East Mock Chunk were merging and wanted to create an attraction to draw visitors. So they basically paid Thorpe's widow to have Jim buried there, a city that he had never set foot in in his life. The new combined city was renamed Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. His son and the Sack Fox tribe sued to get his remains return to Oklahoma, and it went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but they refused to hear the case.

In 1963, Thorpe was part of the inaugural class of the pro football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, where he once played. He was previously inducted into the college football Hall of Fame in 1951. At the close of the 20th century, he was named at or near the top of most lists of the greatest athletes of the past 100 years. In 2018, Jim Thorpe was placed on the U.S. $1 coin. But there was still the issue of his gold medals that were taken away. For decades, there was a movement to get the International Olympic Committee to reverse its decision. The AAU and the U.S. Olympic Committee eventually reversed their decision regarding Jim Thorpe's amateur status, but the IOC was adamant.

Eventually, in 1983, the IOC Executive Committee agreed to reinstate Jim Thorpe's gold medals. But in a very unusual move, they only recognized him as a joint gold medal holder with the other men who placed behind him. Those men, Ferdinand B of Norway and Hugo Vicerlander of Sweden, never recognized themselves as Olympic champions. Eventually, on July 14, 2022, the International Olympic Committee eventually recognized Jim Thorpe as the sole gold medalist in both the decathlon and pentathlon of the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, 107 years after he was stripped of his medals. Where Jim Thorpe sits on the list of all-time great athletes is up for debate. What can't be denied is that there hasn't been an athlete like Jim Thorpe since. It wasn't just that he was a good athlete.

It was that he was an incredibly versatile athlete. He was a world-class competitor in multiple solo athletic disciplines and team sports, and he seemed to do so almost effortlessly. His unique abilities across so many different sports are why many have declared Jim Thorpe to be the world's greatest athlete. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thorne Thompson and Peter Bennett.

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