Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Jim Thorpe

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Alex Schmidt and special guest Joey Clift explore why Jim Thorpe is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Jim Thorpe, known for being an athlete. Thymus for being a native athlete. Nobody thinks much about him, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Jim Thorpe is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone.

As folks know, Katie is out. I have a wonderful returning guest on this show. He's an Emmy nominated and Peabody nominated comedy writer. He's a filmmaker. His short film, Pow, is streaming on YouTube. And his new book is up for pre-order. We're linking in everything. It's called We've Been Here the Whole Time, a Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America.

Please welcome back, Joey Clift. Hey, Joey. Wow, thanks so much for having me, everybody. I'm so excited that the fans of this podcast are called Ciphalopods. I feel like that's new. That was not when I first started. guesting on this. Yeah.

Joey goes way back on the show. And yeah, that's a new choice by our max fun members, like cephalopods. I feel like you could also do like syphomaniacs. I feel like you could go sypholus sufferers. I'm riddled with sypholus. Yeah. Oh, no. Can't make the birch.

Can't make any birch. Oh, it's too bad. Oh, dude. You know, the merch is just a t-shirt that says, I have syphilis. What's that tweet? A lot of questions are being asked about my shirt that are answered by my shirt. Yeah. For sure. Speaking of members and listeners, thank you folks for picking this week's topic. It's suggested by Dekoup Bear with support from John from Baltimore and many others in the polls.

Joey, what is your relationship to or opinion of Jim Thorpe? My relationship to Jim Thorpe is he's just a guy that I think looms very large in Indian country. like, you know, he's essentially like native Superman is like, I think the best way to describe it. Like, cool. If you talk to anybody that like has at all researched him, it's like he just comes across as this like really insane larger than life folk figure. And I researched him a little bit for my book. And it's like even in the process of it's just like, I thought I knew all the crazy stories. But just like doing a day of reading on him, it's just like, oh, there's like his low lights are other people's life highlights.

Like, you know, it's he's done so many insane. things, which I'm sure we're going to get into. And it's like, I'm sure we're going to talk about the highlights. But then there's also other things where it's just like, oh, also he did that and that is nuts. You know, yeah, huge fan. I've actually, I got to say I've been working out with a personal trainer for the past three years to like, you know, build muscle and get jacked. So like, I'm trying to enter into my Jim Thorpe era. I think that that's, that's probably the big change for me. You know, I know this is an audio medium, so you can't see me, but I'm so muscle-bound that you can't see the background behind me. It's just, it's just shoulders. It's just,

It's just lats behind me. You're the muscle version of that theory of what if the hockey goalie was just a big guy? Like he blocks the whole goal. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what if he was goal-shaped? Like, not athletic, probably sitting down while he's playing. But like, yeah. And yeah, when we emailed that was so cool that you have researched him.

You said some for your book, which is great. What else did you get to research for writing your book? It's basically like if the Daily Show or The Onion wrote a book about Indian country, like there's this really interesting statistic by this organization called Illuminative that basically showed that 87% of U.S. schools don't teach Native history past like 1900. And because of that, there's this huge knowledge gap of what non-natives don't know about native people. With the book, it was so fun to, you know, dive in and write chapters just like, you know, more explainer chapters about things like the land back movement.

What does that mean? What is that mixed with, you know, goofier chapters like, you know, here's a drawing of Cherokee president, Wilma Man Killer kicking Christopher Columbus in the nuts. Like, you know,

it's a little silly at times, a little informative at times. But my goal was basically just to create like, you know, something that was essentially like an easy lift for non-natives to learn about, you know, all the native stuff they didn't learn. about in school, while also hopefully being like cathartic for Native folks of like,

oh, that's really funny that you're dragging, like people that say that their mom is a Cherokee princess like that or whatever, you know. That's awesome. And that should exist. That's great. Oh, thanks. Yeah. And it's out in, sorry, when's it out, October?

Yeah. So the book comes out October 6th, which is during banned book week. So, like, I suspect this book might get banned before it comes out, which I'm excited about. You know, because it's just like, it's hard to write a book about Native history without being extremely critical of the U.S. government. So like, you know, so it's sort of like, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe pre-order it and buy it now because maybe it'll be illegal when it comes out. Who knows?

I'm going to drive some into the state of Florida and the trunk. Oh, yeah, truly, truly. And yeah, I'm actually, I'm excited. This is the first, I've been working on the book for the past year or so, and this is the first podcast where I've, like, had the opportunity to, like, really talk about it. Yay. Oh, good. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And thank you for jumping into this topic, too, because are you might be? of a sports fan? Because that's the main way I had heard of Jim Thorpe. Like, I had heard that he's native and then basically, oh, he's an Olympian, but from far long ago is what I mean. He's a member of the Sack and Fox Nation, which I think they're, another reservation is in Oklahoma, I believe. I forget where their Aboriginal territory is. His sports heyday was like the 1900s through like maybe the 1920s or something like that. And I would define myself as an extreme fair weather sports fan,

specifically geared toward Washington State sports. So like, and I'm surrounded by a lot of people who are huge fans of, you know, the Seattle Seahawks and stuff like that. But I had no idea that we were even going to be in the Super Bowl until like the week beforehand when I think my brother texted me and was just like, did you watch the finals? And then, you know, I went through about two weeks of being a diehard as Seahawks fan. And I was just like, I will die for this team. And now I've already forgotten that they existed now that they've won. So like. And then, you know, like I've talked about it in this podcast.

huge pro wrestling fan. So that's kind of my my entrance into athletics. I mean the the reason that I worked out with the personal trainer is that I like did one professional wrestling match two and a half years ago. And I did not want the the gimmick of the match to be like, oh, look how breakable that little man is. So like so I started working out with the trainer. I put on like 20 pounds in like a month or something like that. And like and now I'm just I'm just getting jacked for the next time they call me back into the ring, brother. ending that with the word brother means you're ready. That's good.

That's good. Yeah, yeah. Because I grew up really following team sports in the Chicago area, and then Jim Thorpe was in the category of athletes where it's the past. Even though he lived into our time, you know, it was like Babe Ruth. Like, oh, that's from long ago and then not modern. But it turns out he had an impact long beyond that time, too. It's really cool. I mean, his impact extends to, like, he was the first president of the president of the

National Football League. Like he was he was the he was the and that's just like that's one of those things for anybody else being the founding president of the NFL would be that would be all we'd be talking about whereas this is probably the only time we're going to mention it because he did so much crazier stuff. Pretty much yeah exactly yeah yeah he's he's all over all of our sports culture and everything else and yeah let's dive into it because on on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that is in a segment called Listen to your pod I'm going to learn something

That's secretly incredibly fascinating I really want to Come geek out with you Teach me all your numbers and stats Your numbers and stats Wow Shout out to everybody's favorite American boy Alex Schmidt

When we did a London live show That should have been the entrance music That would be great. And then it was submitted by Ian on the Discord. Thank you, Ian. We have a new name every week. Please make them as silly a wagon bat as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com.

And the quick first numbers are basically just establishing Jim's career here. Because 1951 is the first number. 1951 is when the Associated Press held a poll of sports writers. They chose Jim Thorpe as the greatest athlete of the first half of the 1900s. Like as soon as it was the halfway point of the 1900s, they voted him the greatest athlete. And then at the end of the 1900s, ABC's wild world of sports picked him as the century's greatest athlete. Yeah, I was going to mention that. That is something to me that's so interesting about him is like, yeah, halfway through the century, they were like, unanimous.

Like, oh, yeah, this guy's the century's greatest athlete. And then at the end of the century, they were like, I mean, I think that they nailed it in 1951. Yeah, yeah. And any poll has him very high still. There's also ESPN did a thing they called SportsCentury, where they did a retrospective greatest North American athletes. I think they did North American to leave off soccer players, basically. Because there are soccer players here.

Yeah, yeah. They ranked him seventh in the top hundred athletes behind Jesse Owens, Wayne Gretzky, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Babe Ruth, and Michael Jordan. And then also Thorpe was one of the only athletes on the list who did more than one sport. He was listed for football and baseball and track and field. Something that I think is once again worth underlining with that is that like he's number seven on that list and like his heyday was a hundred years ago. You know, like nobody alive today watched him play. There's not like footage of this guy playing, I don't think. But it's it's still, you know, a hundred years later with like no

no like thing that we can watch of him playing. Everybody's just like, yeah, I mean, like he's like probably the best. Like, that's entirely based on just stories and stats. I'm just like, yeah, you just can't beat that guy. But you're absolutely right. Like, without really footage or clear memories of Thorpe's career, he's toward the top of that century, even though he's not even totally from the 1900s. Thorpe was born in 1887. Wow. Lived to age 65, passed away in 1953. One amazing number is February 1908. In February 1908, Jim Thorpe, a attended a party celebrating Oklahoma statehood. It was still a territory when he was born.

Oh, wow, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. One key source for the episode is a book called Path Lit by Lightning. It's a biography by Pulitzer Prize winner David Moranis. And he talks about Thorpe, as Joey said, is part of the Sack and Fox Nation. There's a possible familial connection to Black Hawk, as paternal grandmother said, she was related to Black Hawk. Thorpe's mother was Pottawatomy. Both those people's are Algonquin speaking. And apparently Thorpe's Algonquin name was Watho Huck. And one of the more poetic translations of that is path lit by lightning.

Wow. His name means running in an amazing lightning way. Okay. So I have not read that book, but I have no doubt that every third sentence of that book is like, okay, this sounds crazy, but or like, okay, I'm not making this up. Like, this sounds fake, but this is real. As we talk about him, I'm going to turn into Chris Fireley when he did the Chris Farley show sketch where he's just like, do you remember? And like, can't believe it, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure.

It's, he has such a cool life. And another, like, truly shocking thing about him, the number there is 11. Thorpe was one of 11 children. And one of those children was Jim Thorpe's twin. Oh, I didn't know he had a twin. He had a twin brother who died of typhoid fever at age nine, partly because it's the 1800s. It's a hard time. It's sort of a what-if of sports history.

What if there were two people who are a lot like Jim Thorpe, right? That's two amazing champions. But also, it was a real turning point in Jim's life because basically both boys were sent to Indian boarding schools starting at age seven, which were essentially prisons. and they were run by white people to cut native people off from their culture. And then when Jim's brother Charlie died, he's grieving that relationship and getting no help. So he basically constantly escaped the school and just like hid in the woods and hunted and hung out with people he met. And so that led his family to send him to another school in Pennsylvania. They grew up in Oklahoma, but they sent him to the Carlisle Indian school in Pennsylvania.

And that's where he starts his sports career because that school was competitive in the new field of college sports. I was actually asked by the Dickinson College, which is located in Carlisle, to come out and do like, you know, talk about Native comedy. This was, I want to say, like, a year or two ago. So shout out to Dickinson College. Thanks for bringing me out. And when I talk about like all of this native history that just your average person doesn't know about, it's like, I mean, Indian boarding schools were nuts. It's like up until I think like I want to say I'm probably going to butcher this, but I think like the Indian Child Welfare Act passed in like 1978, 1979, somewhere on there. It was like not just legal, but it was like the government process to literally go on to res's and like kidnap native kids and take them to these boarding schools.

Like there are a lot of stories of literally just like government agents driving around trucks on res and just snatching kids up. And, you know, in these schools it was like, you know, one thing that they did is they like forcibly cut, you know, kids long hair off, which is traditional. a lot of native folks. They, if you spoke your tribe's language, you'd be like abused. There was like, there was a lot of, um, this is, you know, a comedy podcast. So it's like a, you know, dark to immediately go into, but it's like there are so many, you go to these schools and there's like unmarked graves of native kids that died due to their, the treatment that they faced on these schools.

So it's truly like, you know, definitely a dark time in American history. Um, and it is so interesting to me to see Jim Thorpe come out of, um, that process. and really like, I feel like it, like, strengthened his view on his culture and, like, also probably just like, if you can survive that, then yeah, you can win the Olympics, no question, you know? But especially visiting Carlisle and being on those grounds, it's like there is definitely a lot of talk of like, this is where Jim Thorpe trained. They're very, they're very proud of that, you know.

Everything else is like, oh, this was horrible monster stuff. But, like, 99% very depressing and dark, 1%, like, oh, it's cool that Jim Thorpe was here. Yeah, it's all of it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And also that's good to bring up that a lot of kids basically got kidnapped because apparently the Thorpe kids, Jim's mother, Charlotte, was a devout Catholic and was excited that the schools pushed Christianity. So it seems like Jim Thorpe was sentenced on purpose, but a lot of kids weren't, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and the founder of the Carlisle School, his name was Richard Henry Pratt. His maxim was, quote, kill the Indian, save the man. So not great. Yeah, it's like real. There's, there's, there's, There's also a drawing of, I think, Deb Holland kicking General Pratt in the nuts in my book. So, like... Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah. Let's just say, you know, like, you could sis. But, like, it's... Yeah, you know, you hear that as like, oh, that was the tagline of these schools. You know, it is... Yeah, publicly. Yeah, publicly. Yeah, yeah, publicly.

Yeah, yeah, publicly. And something that's so crazy to me, this is just, like, the smallest aside, is that, like, Carlyle was, I think, one of the more famous Indian boarding schools, and it was active in I want to say like it was like the 30s, 40s, 50s, something like that. Carlisle was also where the Washington, D.C. NFL team, which previously didn't have a great name when it comes to Native folks, that was where their training camp was. So like literally in the same town, like this is, and this is like crazy to me. Carlyle, Pennsylvania.

Yeah, Carlyle, Pennsylvania. Like, literally in the same town, you had, like, native kids, like, having their, like, culture, like, literally, like, forcibly stripped from them. And then literally across the town, you had an NFL team named, like, the Washington R. that everybody's celebrating, you know? So it's like just even within that town, it is just such a wild dichotomy. So, but that said, something that I think is so cool. And this is once again, one of a trillion cool things about Jim Thorpe's career is,

I believe the Carlisle Indian School football team played against the, I want to say it was like the Army or the Navy, like the football team that the military had, you know. And I think it was in the, I forget it was in like the early 1900. or 1910s or something like that. This was only a few decades after like the Wounded Knee Massacre, which happened in 1890. And Jim Thorpe was on the Carlyle Indian School team. And on the military team was former or was not yet President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Like he was, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was on that team.

The game ended with Carlisle just absolutely shutting out the military team. And Jim Thorpe was the star player. there are some rumors that he maybe gave Dwight D. Eisenhower a career-ending knee injury. And this is the sort of thing where like, it is an interesting thing of like, oh, you know, you have 20 years after the wounded knee masker, you have this team of native football players just absolutely demolishing this military team in football with Jim Thorpe as like the lead of the native team. And like, you know, Dwight D. Eisenhower who won World War II on the, you know, the military team. And what also makes this an interesting footnote is Dwight D. Eisenhower. at the end of his second presidential term, he gave a speech to his fellow politicians.

And in that speech, he talked about how good of a football player, Jim Thorpe was. So 40 years after, he got absolutely wrecked by Jim Thorpe in football, he was so haunted by his last speech as president. He was just like, he was so good. You have no idea.

So, like, once again, the guy that won World War II and was president for two terms, that was the thing he focused on is just like, I still think about how good that guy was. Because you'd think he'd be like, here's what D-Day was like. But no, it's like, I was on a field with Jim Thorpe.

Yeah, I was on a field with Jim Thorpe. And he wrecked me. Like, yeah, he wasn't talking about, yeah, this is what D-Day was like. I'm really proud that we won World War II or whatever. He was just like, you have no idea how fast his throws were. Yeah, that. That fits basically every story about him, like how he got his reputation because his athletic career basically started because he was at Carlyle and walked onto the fields of teams.

Yeah. The quick number there is 1907. So one year before this party for Oklahoma Statehood, Thorpe sees the track and field team practicing, walks over in street clothes and beats everyone at high jump. That's the start of his sports career. Yeah, and I'm sure like, this is something that Eisenhower talks a little bit in his speech. He's just like with no training. Yeah, he just rolled up. Yeah, he just rolled up and like broke world records.

Like, you know. Yeah, and then that's how he just kind of proceeded to be on Carlisle's baseball team. And then they were relatively new football team. As Joey said, they were facing the Army team, the Navy team from the military academies. And this was early enough in history that U.S. college football. wasn't that much of a thing. So it was the military academies, some of the Ivy League schools, and a couple other colleges in the region were the only ones with teams, and Carlisle played all of them.

And also, white newspapers would try to describe Carlisle beating the Ivy's in football as, like, not a game that counted. You know, they would just say, like, oh, well, they have some students who are secretly older and none of it really counts or matters, you know. But Carlisle tended to beat them pretty frequently. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Well, that's, that's like the, we've talked about on this pod before, but it's like, that's like the history of native stuff is just like, oh, like trying to discredit, trying to make native people seem bad in the press so that you can discredit our cool accomplishments, you know, so that all, that's all part for the course for sure. Like, if there had been a national college football championship, they would have been a contender for it. It just wasn't like organized yet. The papers wanted to act otherwise. Something I talk about with Jim Thorpe is like, you know, we mentioned Michael Jordan earlier in that like Michael Jordan is. You know, like, Michael Jordan is. is thought of so omniprescently as the best to ever do it, that like the term the Michael Jordan of podcasting or whatever is like a thing.

We all understand like, oh, that means the best in podcasting. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, Alexman. Yeah, I was going to say, Alex Mitt, the Michael Jordan of podcasting. Joey Cliff, the Michael Jordan of podcast guesting? Sure, why not? Yes, correct. Yeah, yeah.

And Jim Thorpe is like if somebody was the Michael Jordan of every sport, you know. Yes. It's just like, oh yeah, I'm sure that if Jim Thorpe played Michael Jordan in basketball, he'd probably like dunk on him. Yeah, pretty much. Like he just, if basketball had been more of a sport at the time, he probably would have played it. It just wasn't really going yet. Yeah, probably would have played it. Probably would have been the best.

Yeah, like apparently one game of football in 1911, he was the running back and the kicker despite having a leg injury and basically just gutted out a win against Hart. Harvard where he kicked four field goals and constantly, I think the position was called half back or something, but he just did everything hurt and won the game pretty much by himself. He's like a tall tale. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the sort of thing where it's like, I've never heard that story, but I immediately believe it. Like, you know, it's, yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure the final score of that game was just like Harvard Zero, Carlisle, 7,000 with only Jim Thorpe on the field. Which is like 2,500 field goals? That's about right. Yeah. Yeah, he probably just, you know, it's just like, his leg like, people don't know this. His leg had like a hinge where it could go in a circle. Like, you know, it could like spin like it's a like like it's on a wheel. So he just did that.

He just had like them throwing footballs and he was machine gunning out field goal kicks. He does feel like the influence for most sports as depicted in Looney Tunes. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. And our next number here, two, which is that Jim Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals. It's at the 1912 Summer Olympic Games. He won the decathlon and won something called the traditional pentathlon. This was the fifth ever Summer Olympics.

Stockholm hosted it. Thorpe was the first person to win both the pentathlon and the decathlon. And the other number is 30 because there have been 30 Summer Olympic games and still no one else has done it. Thorpe is the only one. A couple of things I want to add to that. There was a quote from the this was the Olympics in Sweden, I believe, and King Gustav 5 of Sweden said to Jim Thorpe, you, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.

So even the king of Sweden was just like, yeah, you're the best man. And he broke a bunch of world records on those individual events. And those world records, this was, you mentioned in, you know, the early 1900s, those records were not beaten until 1948, almost 40 years later, you know. So, and that's like, in Jim Thorpe's time, it's like, think about, think about in terms of, you know, in terms of sports progress, like the technology, the training, like just the increased knowledge over the span of 40 years. And like Jim Thorpe was able to surpass all that just on absolute dominance of the, of all things sport, you know. Yeah, because if people don't know, the pentathlon is five different events and the decathlon is 10 different events. So it's two medals, but a combined performance in 15 things.

Yeah, for sure. It's really good. And something that is also such an interesting fact about that is that the day before he was going to run on one of these events, somebody stole his athletic shoes, like the cleats that he was going to run in. And once again, this is a story that sounds fake, but it's very real. So that morning, he couldn't find his shoes. Somebody stole them. So he literally went to a garbage can, fished out two random unmatching pairs of shoes that were different sizes.

One of the shoes was like two sizes too big. So he just wore like three extra pairs of socks to make it fit. And then he not just got the gold medal, but broke the world record with two shoes he fished out of the garbage that didn't fit him. I looked so hard and immediately found, but I looked so hard for pictures because I was like, that's fake. That's a fake story.

But no, there's photos of him wearing the stupid shoes. It's great. There's photos of him holding up the shoes. And it's like, yeah, they look real beat up, like two shoes that you find in a garbage can and one is way bigger than the other one. So it's like he, so like he while in that situation, like created a world record that took 40 years to beat. So imagine how like I would do if he just had his regular shoes. Like even even with like, you know, even with something like that working against him, he still is the best. Exactly.

Yeah. We're going to come back in a little bit. to his dominance. But the last few numbers here, the next number is January 1913. So less than six months after the Stockholm 1912 summer games, in January 1913, a football coach named Pop Warner let himself into Jim Thorpe's home, collected Thorpe's two gold medals, box those up with some other prizes that the King of Sweden gave Thorpe and mailed it to Stockholm.

And soon after that, the Olympic Committee officially rescinded. to Jim Thorpe's gold medals and tried to give them to the second place finishers, the Swedish decathlete Hugo Wieslander publicly refused to accept it. But they tried to do that. Wow. Good on Hugo. Yeah, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier about, like, different newspapers when Thorpe's, you know, football team would, like, annihilate Ivy League schools

is doing the thing where you're just like, okay, that game didn't count for these reasons. So, Thorpe, I think, technically played. like one game of like quote unquote like pro baseball or something like that he made like 50 bucks playing baseball at some point so like they found this and they were like okay technically you were ineligible to play in the Olympics because you were a pro athlete so because of this like you know absolute technicality we're going to like say that we're going to take away your medals and say that you're not an Olympic athlete a big thing that a lot of native folks were focused on for a lot of years is just like essentially calling out like this is like um you should honor this amazing athlete especially

now when you have like pro players playing in the Olympics all the time you know it's um so it wasn't until i think fairly recently i want to say just the past couple years or so where the Olympics finally kind of said okay yeah you're right jim thorpe earned those medals we should give them back to them but it took it took like decades and decades and decades of like you know letter writing campaigns activism and awareness to get the Olympics to just honor this like amazing athlete who, you know, I'm sure had his medals taken away, you know, largely for racism, you know. Exactly right.

And yeah, like you said, very recently, it was 22. Yeah. Is our last number. That's when the IOC all the way reversed the decision and put him back in the books as a two-time gold medalist in 1912. Yeah. So like over a hundred years. And that gets us into more about it.

And takeaway number one. A gang of men across the U.S. and Europe stripped Jim Thorpe of his gold medals in a scheme to protect their own reputations. Yeah. It's racist and they were trying to like prop up their high paying jobs as unpaid amateur athletics administrators and Olympics guys. That to me is something that is so disappointing about this. And like once again, like shout out to that guy who refused the medal. Like I mean, good, good on him. Like that's like, that's like, that's real.

And that's like, that's like that's good. That's good allyship, you know, and I think that that to me is like such a shame of stuff like this of like that's, you know, not just speaking specifically about native stuff, but any marginalized communities. It's like oftentimes our accomplishments and our, you know, additions to culture and society are like taken away from us just because like, you know, for lack of a better term, it makes like white people look bad, you know? And it's like, I'm sure this is definitely one of those things where it's just sort of like, oh, he he smashed the world record to such a level that it's. It's like now, you know, the athletic administrators in Sweden are just like, nobody in Sweden's ever going to beat that world record, you know. And, you know, it's just like you're goosing the books to prop up your own accomplishments while like deliberately stripping away the accomplishments of this like clearly genius level athlete. Exactly, yeah. And in this takeaway, there's two biggest villains, but a lot of other guys too. Their names are Pop Warner and Avery Brundage. And especially Pop Warner is.

sort of famous today because of like youth football leagues in the U.S. are often called Pop Warner. Like he made himself very famous as a sort of patriarchal coach of young people playing football. But as we said, he broke into Jim Thorpe's house to take the gold medals to mail them back, among other things. To break into Jim Thorpe's house is scary for 20 different reasons. Because one is just like, what if he was home? It's just like, I'm pretty sure that Jim Thorpe could beat the shit out of Pop War. Without even seeing a picture of Pop Warner, I think Jim Thorpe could take him.

Also just like, oh, man, doing that on an Oklahoma Res at any point, like, oh, man, that that guy didn't get decapitated is nuts. You know, without even really researching much on Pop Warner, that just feels like professional butt hurt jealousy on that guy because he wasn't as good of a football player as Jim Thorpe, you know. It's almost more that Warner wanted to make sure nobody knew that Warner probably knew that Jim Thorpe had gotten a little bit of money for playing minor league baseball. Because then Warner would be guilty of tricking the Olympics, basically. But he did. Yeah. So that guy's...

Yeah. Hot take. Pop Warner is a jerk. Yeah, because key sources here, David Moranis' book, also two features for American Indian magazine. which is a publication of the Smithsonian. The writers are James Ring Adams and Molly Steffy. Jim Thorpe is suddenly the most famous athlete in the world.

He tries the high jump at college in 1907, and then he wins two gold medals. And as Joey said, the King of Sweden tells him he's the greatest athlete on Earth five years later. Yeah. And so he's the biggest story on Earth in sports. And then in Southbridge, Massachusetts, a baseball writer is interviewing a minor league baseball. manager. And that guy mentions that Jim Thorpe played minor league baseball at one point.

And this gets reported in the Worcester Telegram and becomes global news. Because if Jim Thorpe had been paid any money at all, he was officially ineligible to be an Olympian, according to the rules back then. Yeah. I mean, it does make sense. The biggest performance enhancing drug in the world is playing minor league baseball for sure. The other weird thing is apparently they played him $5 a game in a very low-level North Carolina circuit. He played for the Rocky Mountain Railroaders in 1909 and the Fayetteville Highlanders in 1910. And his stats were only just okay.

It was just something to do in the summer between semesters at Carlisle. And he wasn't really trying to make money. And we think he told everybody he was doing this at Carlisle in particular, because in Pop Warner's written notes that we still have, he didn't. not record Thorpe as being, like, out of college or anything. He recorded him as being, quote, on leave, which was a notation for he's going to come back and keep playing for us. So Warner broke the college rules and the Olympic rules, but Thorpe just, like, wasn't able to convince the public that Warner was lying when Warner later said, oh, I didn't know, and I thought he was graduated, and a bunch of

other lies. That's, yeah, Pop Warner. Like, one of the chapters in my book or Runner in my book is just a list of people who aren't invited to the powwow. And, uh, you know, so like, you know, maybe I'm going to try to add Pop Warner to that list now. It would make sense. He is really dark, but basically Pop Warner was a coach at Cornell University before he was at Carlisle. And Warner conflicted with Cornell's administration because especially at the beginning of the 1900s, people were afraid that football was killing too many of the players because it was so brutal. Right. And so Warner quit. And, and moved on to Carlisle where he could form a new football team comprised of native guys whose health people did not prioritize.

He's a horrible person. Yeah, for sure. I think that that for me, like, I think that there's like interesting context about like all of this in that, you know, one, I mean, there's like really, there's definitely a parallel between like native folks having their culture forcibly stripped from them as children and Jim Thorpe playing within the rules of white society. and then having his accomplishments in that society strip from him, you know. And then there is also just something about like Pop Warner like couldn't hack it as a football player. So instead he tried to like exploit, you know, one of the most marginalized communities at the time where it's like literally it was like in some states. So it's like still legal to murder native people. And then there was like a native person who like got a bunch of good accomplishments and he was just like no, no, no.

You know, it's just truly it speaks one societally and two, that guy in particular. You know. Completely. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, Warner in the process of trying to cover his own, but went out of his way to send Thorpe's medals to Sweden before anyone in Sweden even asked for them. And then also every other administrator from, like, Carlisle's superintendent to the head of the U.S. Amateur Athletic Union, made sure to say, oh, there's no way we could have known Thorpe had a baseball career. even though Almanacs published by the sporting news had Thorpe listed as a baseball player both years. And then the scheme proceeds to go global because the Swedes decide to go with these charges against Thorpe because it helps them hide a program where the Swedish Olympic Committee indirectly paid every Swedish athlete to train.

Six months before the 1912 games, the Swedish Olympic Committee paid employers to give paid leave to anybody who was going to be an athlete so they could just train Allspring instead of working. But that was through enough different hands that they could get away with it. And then they pointed to Thorpe as a different thing. Yeah, it's like, oh, this guy several years ago made $5 playing baseball. Let's get him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's almost like there's two different systems of justice for different types of people.

You know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like the optimism and the good news out of that is once again, Jim Thorpe was so good that he was able to push. passed all of that. He was so good that like even after that like, you know, 40 years later, they were like, yeah, no question. Best athlete of the first half of the century. And then 50 years after that, no question. Best athlete of the 20th century, you know. And then, you know, 20 years later, like 100, over 100 years after they stripped his medals, like who in any sport is remembered

20 years after they retire? Like this guy, you know, like 100 years after he won the, over 100 years after won the medals, like over seven years after he died, it was still like, oh, he was so good that we need to give him his medals, you know, the amount of obstacles this man had in front of him, not just in terms of like access, you know, things like not having like shoes to run in on his, you know, when he won the Olympics to like, you know, an entire system of people who were trying to like strip his accomplishments away. And still you had like Dwight D. Eisenhower, you know, in his last speech as president being like, oh, his tackles hurt so much. Like, you know, even as the greatest of all time in a lot of different things,

you still have to, like, fight so hard for your accomplishments to count and your accomplishments to matter. And it's like, that speaks to how good this man is. 100%. Yeah, yeah. And kind of the opposite of that is the other villain here, guy named Avery Brundage. Avery Brundage is essentially a failed athlete. He was another U.S. athlete in those events that Thorpe was in in 1912, who Thorpe blew away.

But Brundage didn't need to get paid for sports because he was an entrepreneur running a construction company, too. So he was rich. And then Brundage worked his way into being a U.S. Olympic Committee administrator, then ahead of the whole International Olympic Committee, partly through racism and partly through a grudge of Thorpe kicking his ass in 1912, was the, the leading person preventing Thorpe from getting his medals back or getting back in the record books. And we're pretty sure he's a racist because Brendidge also formed very close relationships with a couple of German athletes and then became a key pusher for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Hitler's Berlin. Like he was pretty comfortable with Nazi ideology in public.

Wow, Jesus. So that guy for incredibly racist reasons and personal, sports grudge reasons made it so it took until 1983 for the IOC to give any credits of Thorpe. They held a ceremony with a group of his children, giving them replicas of the medals. The originals were lost. And then in 2022, they finally all the way put him back in the record book.

So I love that this guy saw an extremely talented native athlete and he was like, no thank you. And then he saw Hitler and he was just like, wait a second. This guy's got some good ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Just like, oh, wait, tell me more about more about your ideas. Oh, a final solution? Wow. Yeah. Like in the run up to the 1936 Olympics, Brandage was telling reporters that claims about Hitler were sensationalized. Yeah. So like, he didn't need to do any of that. He's just an American sports administrator.

Yeah. Well, it's like, you can look at these two people and I think it is, I don't think it's controversial to say that those people, you know, it's just like truly wild. Truly what monsters. Yeah. So he had some real villains in his life and truly dominated at his sports. So I'm going to say, okay, so we talked about how Jim Thorpe is the Michael Jordan of every sport. I think that those two guys are the Michael Jordan of a . . . . . . just like, you know, they're just like constantly putting up wins on being bad people. Just like, wow. I mean, you know, the word goat is thrown around a lot, but those guys were the goat of just, like, being awful.

Like a s-goat or something, like a s-goat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And folks, that's a ton of numbers and a giant takeaway. We're going to take a quick break and then have some thrilling takeaways about just how amazing Jim Thorpe was. And we're already talking about that, but we'll continue. Hey, folks, I want to say thank you for support for today's show to ExpressVPN. Because here's the thing. Going online without ExpressVPN is like scuba diving in a suit made of meat.

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To find out how you can get up to four extra months, expressvpn.com slash sif. We're back. And I'm of course joined by Joey Clift, and we have more takeaways about Jim Thorpe being amazing, starting with takeaway number two. two, Jim Thorpe's greatness as an Olympian is basically impossible to compare to other athletes. And we've talked about this some with his shoe issue for sure and also his records, but he's just fundamentally not possible to compare to other greats because of the uniqueness of everything he did. Yeah, I mean, we talked about earlier about how this is a person who, like, in some cases, literally just walked off the street in street clothes and then immediately just dominated everybody

in whatever random sport they're playing that he probably never played. before that. And, you know, so it's like, how good would that guy have been with any training, you know? Like, how good would that guy have been with like just shoes that fit? Like, you know, he's somebody that like was really amazing and a genius in a lot of ways, but also just like so physically capable, such a raw talent. If you were to invent a sport on the spot, I'm sure Jim Thorpe within 20 seconds would be the best to do it. You know, that guy could win a gold metal in Calvin Ball if you wanted to. You know, it's, uh, it's hard to compare because our athletes nowadays, they like train.

They have like macro diets. They, um, you know, they have, uh, you know, like science created like equipment that like, you know, increases their aerodynamics by whatever percentage. And like, it is just one of those things where it's like, oh, Jim Thorpe was just, in a lot of times, a dude in street clothes who just was the best. And like, you know, and it is like, you look at that. that guy's numbers and you're like, oh, that guy could probably just like fresh out of bed, not training, not stretching, like probably still win gold medals today, you know?

Exactly. It seems like it. Like, because we have some specific scoring for how he did. And again, a lot of it was in found shoes that did not fit. But like, David Moranis says that in 1912, the way the pentathlon was scored is you want the lowest amount of points. Like if you're first in an event, you get one point. second place gets two points and so on. In the five pentathlon events, Jim scored a total of seven

points. And that kind of thing, people like kind of lean on their couple of best events or whatever. He was just the best or second best in the world at all of it. And the next closest competitor had 21 points. He blew everybody away. Wow, that's like, what a spread. Also, if you're that, if you're that guy and you're like feeling really good about 21 points, that's probably your like career best and you see this guy just dunking on you in literally every event. You're just like, maybe I'll win a bronze medal, who knows? And especially Avery Brandage, because apparently in the 200-meter sprint,

Thorpe beat him by a second and a half, which in a sprint is an ocean of time. Like, you look silly behind him. One thing I want to say is I actually just found the quote that Dwight D. Eisenhower said about Jim Thorpe. This is related to what we were saying about how him just being so naturally good at this stuff. So here's the quote.

Once again, nearly 50 years after losing to Jim Thorpe, in that football game. One of his last speeches as president, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, 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. If we have any of those geniuses around here, they don't have to work, but all the rest of us do. I like that he's saying it partially. It's like, you can tell that he's like, haunted by this. He's just like, I have to like, I worked so hard to become president with the knowledge that there's this man that probably fresh out of bed with no training or practice could be a million times better than me.

It feels like such an exception to that U.S. mentality of like any individual can do anything if they try hard enough. And I feel like Eisenhower must have seen himself as an example of like you can be president and some Supreme Allied commander in Europe. But also you can't beat Jim Thorpe and anything. Yeah, there's no world. He probably, if he was in charge of the U.S. Army, he probably would have won world or two like two years faster. Like, you know, it's just like, sorry, man. Yeah, just dunking Hitler into a trash can somehow. That would be sick.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, another amazing Thorpe thing is he apparently could have won more medals if that had been his mindset. that. What? Today's Olympics, there's a lot of focus on like a metal count. Yeah, like Michael Phelps is an example. Exactly. Michael Phelps or Simone Biles or somebody, they're saying, oh, they've won the most medals

all time. And he could have been kidding, but Thorpe was so focused on just these two events, the pentathlon and the decathlon. He allegedly did not enter the swimming events because why bother? And one really cool thing about the U.S. team in 1912 is that there was a group of star native athletes. It was not just Thorpe. There was a distance runner named Louis Tuanema who was Hopi, a Pinobscot athlete named Andrewsacallexis. The Canadian team also had Korean matinee athletes. And then one of the U.S. swimmers was Duke

Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian, who's arguably the founder of surfing later. Wow. But he won a total of five Olympic medals as a swimmer in his career. Okay. So we, we, we, have a history of amazing native athletes who have won Olympic gold medals. There was also another this was into the future by a couple of decades, but Billy Mills is another fantastic native athlete who I believe won at least the Olympic gold medal in running. And I think that he's the most recent native person to win an Olympic gold medal. Just a small side about Billy Mills. He's still with us and he's really dope. I think he's Lakota. I forget what tribe he's in. The way that he ran in distance running is usually when you're doing distance running, you run at like a

consistent pace. He would start every race at a dead sprint and get far ahead of everybody. Then he would just sit down until he could see the other people like, you know, crossing the, you know, the corner or whatever. And then he would stand up and sprint again. And I, like, I met Billy Mills. He, he has a documentary, a really fantastic documentary called Remaining Native that was directed by Page Bethman that's specifically about this young native runner named Koo Stevens. And it's kind of about like running and also like, you know, how Koo does this to honor his culture and kind of goes into his grandfather's history in boarding schools and stuff like that. But it's not specifically about Jim Thorpe, but it is a really great documentary to seek out if you

want to see sort of like the amount of work that native athletes have to do, you know, coming off of reservations to be the best. And then additionally, there's just a lot of really great like boarding school information and just like why a lot of native athletes do what they do, you know, from an emotional and personal level. So, yeah, remaining native, it's a great doc. Definitely check it out. But yeah, so that's, I got to say that is, you know, I wasn't going to say it up top, but that's one of the reasons I'm working out is like, I feel like I can be the next native to get a gold medal in something. And like, unlike Jim Thorpe, I'm not trying to be good at one event. I'm just trying to win the

gold in as many events as possible. Curling, why not, you know? That's so cool you've met that guy Billy Mills. Wow. I feel like the Olympics may be more than any of the other sports, like as we watch it at home and partly because of how they do the packages about the athlete's lives. But we really are primed to try to like get out there, you know? We're like, yeah, if they can heroically go get a gold, maybe I can jog or something. I don't know if there.

Look, I don't pay attention to the Olympics. I'm not a big sports guy except for pro wrestling. but like if there's an Olympic, an Olympic competition in taking a nap on your couch, give me the goal already. And then the announcers are like, Joey Clift has trained with Garfield. He's trained with all the greats. Yeah, and then they'll take away my gold medal because they found out that I ate a bunch of lasagna beforehand. Look, for napping, lasagna might as well be a performance enhancing drug.

pretty much, yeah. So, and Thorpe, when he met Duke Kahanamoku, apparently a lot of these guys met on the steamship to Europe. There was a big like sending off on the East Coast and then they went to Sweden. But Kahanamoku got to know Thorpe on the ship and sort of jokingly asked Thorpe why he didn't add swimming to his repertoire. And according to the Library of Congress, Thorpe grinned and said, Duke, I saved that for you to take care of. Which, like, I don't assume forp could have just won an Olympic medal in swimming, but he kind of sounds like he could have won an Olympic medal in swimming.

Like, why not? He did everything else really well. What I like about that is that is both, like, the most native, community-based answer that he could give and also the cockiest answer that he could give. Yeah. I feel like while he was saying that he probably was tussling this man's hair. He was just like, oh, get him slugger. Yeah, so like Thorpe had a very not metal count oriented approach. He was basically scammed and blackballed out of being in more than one Olympics.

For so many reasons, we cannot rate his greatness against other people. Like he was in somebody else's shoes and only did that one amazing Olympics. And so there's nobody like him. It's just a totally unique person in the history of sports forever. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. He is somebody that, you know,

I mean, especially for native folks, it's like, and part of this is due to like, you know, systemic erasure and invisibility and stuff like that. But up until recently, we just didn't really have a lot of heroes in the media. And it is so cool that, you know, I mean, that Jim Thorpe is still talked about on reservations. There's like friends of mine still wear old Jim Thorpe, like football jerseys that you can buy. And they like, if you go to a pow, you're at least going to see a couple of like Jim Thorpe recreation football jerseys from when he played, you know, college football. He's somebody that, yeah, like over, you know, over 100 years after he won those gold medals, 70 years after his heyday, like, there's still T-shirts with Jim Thorpe's face on it that you can see, you know, like at any native gathering, you know, and it's, it's cool that like he was,

you know, so great at sports. But it was also cool that like he really gave us this feeling that like, even though this country's worked so hard to, you know, like in a real way, like exterminate us, we can fight and we can work hard and we can overcome. So just definitely shout out to Jim Thorpe, not just as, you know, this amazing athlete, but also just like what he represents in terms of like indigenous excellence that we can all hopefully strive to do, you know. I really like that. Yeah, true, true excellence. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Just like he was the best. Like it's not just native folks saying that. It's like ABC saying that, you know. Yes. It's like widely agreed and understood. It's like Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player maybe. Jim Thorpe is definitely the greatest athlete.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like a known thing. Yeah. And that excellence also. So it gets us into our last takeaway here. Because takeaway number three, Jim Thorpe is buried in a town named Jim Thorpe

after building up baseball and football and Hollywood. He's buried in a Pennsylvania town called Jim Thorpe. But he died with very little money. That's part of why the burial is located there. But he should have gotten more money for building up at least three giant institutions in American culture. Yeah, the original president of the NFL. Yeah.

That is definitely a bummer in Jim Thorpe's story is that it feels like in his lifetime, he was not financially compensated for, I mean, he was, I'm sure he made money at some point, but it's like he was not financially compensated to the level that an athlete of that level should be compensated. I mean, he died. Like, you know, I think he was a construction worker in his later life and like no, no shade on construction workers. But like, and this is a person who did so much amazing work, like, you know, not just on the field, not just in sports, but. also an administrative roles like being the president of the NFL. And, you know, he, he spent a lot of the 1920s, you know, as an actor. Like he moved to Hollywood and he was in a lot of films here and there. And he specifically worked very hard to really elevate sort of the community of native folks working in the entertainment industry. Like I think that he was one of the key people in, because even then there was like non-natives who said that they were native to get roles in like John Wayne movies or whatever, you know.

And he created this, I think. think it was like some kind of system to basically see if somebody was actually native or not that was like circulated to the studios and um something that like i think about is just you know like a native person working in hollywood now is it's like we are you know even just in the community that we have of 500 or so native folks working the entertainment industry we're like literally in jim thorpe shadow in and the things that we're doing right now are like basically echoes of the things that he built you know like a hundred years ago and um you know so there is there's a really cool connection there. But, you know, he's definitely somebody that, like, it is a shame that he did not die

a trillionaire, you know, because he should have, you know. Yeah, the value of what he supported and built up is many billions of dollars. Yeah. That's so cool about his legacy in Hollywood, too. Because, yeah, he, like he said, he was a construction worker, and apparently he was, like, building things in Southern California because he was trying to get movie roles and trying to connect with people in Hollywood and then just like worked that in the meantime. Yeah. I'm not familiar with the exact specifics on that, but I think that there was a across the street from the Chinese theater in Hollywood, there was actually like a native arts market cafe kind of area that kind of became like a social centerpiece of sort of, you know, the native Hollywood

of the 1920s or whatever. And like Jim Thorpe was apparently always there, you know, it's so it is. Wow. Yeah. In a in a real way, he was like not just building up his own, you know, resume. He was like building up the community in a way that like I just really respect. And, you know, it's like outside of him being, you know, somebody that could have ripped Hitler's head off and dunked him in two seconds and he wanted to. He's also a guy that was like very much focused on like his culture, community, elevating other native folks. And, you know, we could all strive to be like him physically, but also just in what he represented and what he was as a person is just like, you know, That to me is like almost as impressive as him scaring Eisenhower so much that 50 years later he was still talking about him, you know? Really, yeah, building community. It's really cool. Yeah. And it even his like Hollywood fame, if he had any, was that they made a biopic of him in 1951, which he only got to cameo in because he didn't look young like he did in his athletic days. But Bert Lancaster, who is not native, played him.

And then the same director who made Casa Blanca directed it. Like, it was a huge release. And so that also helped build up his story, hopefully. There's a couple of other Jim Thorpe projects that are in the works right now. Like, I'm not super up to date on it. But I think Angeline and Joan Lee's production company has been working on a Jim Thorpe biopic for the past little bit. I think starring Martin Sendsmeyer, who is a very Jim Thorpe build. He's a super great actor who is native, who's been in a ton of things.

So, like, there's a couple of other kind of Jim Thorpe projects in various stages of development. So you will probably see another Jim Thorpe biopic that's high budget and really cool in the next couple years for sure. That would be awesome. Yeah. It feels way overdue. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And also, like, that community building you describe in Hollywood, he was doing it while needing to work for a living. Because in football and baseball, he did not make nearly enough money to be set for life or anything like that.

Which, once again, the president of the NFL. Right. You would think that is lucrative. And he first jumped into baseball because when this scandal removed his gold medals, he was basically ejected from college and Olympic sports. And baseball seemed like just the most lucrative sport he could play next. And the New York Giants signed Thorpe and basically used him as a promotional stunts. Right. Apparently in February 1913, newspapers ran the combined story of Jim Thorpe is signed with the New York Giants baseball team.

And after the 1913 season, they'll take. do a world tour featuring Jim Thorpe and really not much else. Because nobody likes baseball really outside North America. Right. Yeah. Like they even brought the Chicago White Sox along to be a team for Jim Thorpe to play against. It was the main thing. But as amazing of an athlete as Thorpe was, he was sort of a regular professional baseball

player. Apparently he didn't hit off-speed pitches very well. So in actual Giants games, they didn't use him very much. sort of wasted his time on these promotional games. So much like Michael Jordan, he was not great at baseball. Hey, wow, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, like baseball's tricky, okay?

It's extremely specialized, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Pop Warner probably died rich, you know, and he probably saw no punishment for breaking into this man's home and stealing his gold medals. But it is also a testament to each man's accomplishments. that like Jim Thorpe is remembered as being this like almost mythical figure that you constantly have to remind yourself like, oh, no, this is a real person that really did all of this crazy stuff. You know, still honored, you know, like over 100 years after his sort of, you know, physical heyday.

Whereas Pop Warner is just like, oh, yeah, the pee wee football guy, I guess, you know. So yes. So there is, I think, something poetic that it's like history remembers one of them better than the other for sure, you know. I do like that, yeah. And there's also another nice thing about community and how Thorpe played football. Because he goes on to be playing pro football basically once that's available. He stops baseball, starts football. And he played for six teams within just eight years because they kept getting founded and kind of coming apart.

It was a really chaotic new business. Thorpe celebrity was a lot of what drew people at all. And for two years of his pro career, he was the star and coach of a team in Ohio called the Uriks. Indians. Hell yeah. Which was a roster of native players. Great. Like he helped other native people find a job in pro sports.

Also, can you imagine being coached by Jim Thorpe? That would be like so intimidating. I wonder if it would be like, there's a story about Ted Williams, the baseball player. Yeah. Who was just this genius hitter. And the story about him is he got hired as a hitting coach after he retired and could not explain how to hit because he was just too naturally good at it. He didn't have any advice for regular humans.

Yeah, it's like, hey, you thought I just hit in some home runs. Yeah, he was like, why can't you hit that ball? I would hit it every time. And it's just because he's Ted Williams. Yeah, I'm sure Jim Thorpe, it was just like, hey, you thought of just like kicking seven field goals in one game while also being the quarterback? With a hurt leg? Yeah, just do it.

Yeah, just do it. I mean, look, why don't you have any gold medals? That's sad. And with Thorpe's passing, he became one of the only people in. the world whose name is a town. And it's because apparently in 1954, his widow, he had three wives, his widow, Patsy Thorpe, was on like a trip to the Philadelphia area for like charitable foundation business kind of stuff and saw a TV news report in the hotel about depressed former coal towns. And a town called Mauschchunk needed economic stimulation. Also, the Thorps didn't.

have much money and the governor of Oklahoma had vetoed a bill that would have funded an Oklahoma memorial to Thorpe. Right. So she talked this town in Pennsylvania into being the final resting place of Thorpe in exchange for changing their name to Jim Thorpe and being a living memorial to him. There is some controversy there and you mentioned this earlier in that the family and I think specifically the second Fox Nation is like they're working now to try to relocate his remains to his tribe's homelands. I'm not an expert on that exactly. process, but there is some controversy about like, it's cool. There's a town named after him and that that is definitely a huge honor to him, but it's like, oh, he also should maybe be buried with his people,

you know, so that that that I feel like is something that is going to be, you know, a continued sort of, you know, piece of work over the next little bit that, you know, I would not be surprised if at some point in the future he was relocated to his homelands. But that is still like, once again, so impressive that like literally like a failing town was just like, we need to be named after Jim Thorpe so people like us, you know, and there's a mausoleum dedicated to him there. I have not had a chance to visit it, but it's like it is, that feels like the appropriate level of respect for this guy to have a town named after him. Exactly all around.

Like, yeah, because also Patsy Thorpe was Jim's third wife and he had eight children with his previous two wives. Apparently, many of them opposed her actions on this. So yeah, there's a lot of people who want him to be relocated back to where he's actually from. And at the same time, he's just such an amazing human being that he could essentially immediately after his passing have a random town named after him. Like, that's pretty cool. I'm sure like the body wasn't even cold and they were just like, we got to name something after him.

Yeah. Like society was like, we have to honor the greatest athlete of all time like the king of Sweden said. Yeah, for sure. Come on. It's just like this is how good he was with like a million levels of things. trying to kneecap him, you know. If Jim Thorpe had any level of support or like there was like less systemic racism at the time, there would be a country named after him, you know?

It's like this guy got this with so with everything working against him, you know. So what would he have if he had just less things working against him? I'm imagining him as like an Eisenhower type president, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Like two terms and easily elected and yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, oh, he doesn't, you know, his policy.

He's don't set the world on fire, but he also doesn't mess things up too bad. And it's kind of just based on his celebrity. But everybody afterwards is like, oh, yeah, he was pretty good. Yeah. We make random white college football coaches into senators. Yeah. Jim Thorpe would have been a two-term president. No problem.

Oh, yeah. Or like, there's no question. Like, it feels like if Jim Thorpe was around now, it's like, oh, yeah, he'd be like a senator in Oklahoma for a couple of years or something like that. He would have at least had like a Jesse Ventura career, you know? Right. I forgot Jesse Ventura was a governor. on an independent ticket. Amazing.

Yeah. Look, I love Jesse Ventura, big pro wrestling fan. Peggy Flanagan, who's an amazing native politician. She's the current lieutenant governor of Minnesota. She's running for the Senate this year. I'm like, I like Jesse Ventura. I hope Peggy Flanagan wins. Everybody should vote for Peggy Flanagan.

I didn't know she's running. She should win. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, she's great. Yeah, yeah. She said good things about the ice stuff and everything. Look, if it was like, every state gets two senators, if it was Jesse Ventura and Peggy Flanagan, I would move

to Minnesota. I'd just be like, great, a pro wrestler and a dope native politician. Hell yeah. It's a pretty good package. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. And I want to say another thank you to Joey Clift for hopping in and helping us make episodes while Katie's away and also adding all sorts of really special experiences and ideas to this one. And again, Joey's book is available for pre-order with most.

authors who come on the show. They're on the show because hopefully people will order the book and then allow them to keep being authors, right? The title of the book is, we've been here the whole time, a not so sacred guide to all things Native America, written by Joey Clift, illustrated by Denei artist Julie Five Ash, and it has an introduction by Shane Hawk, the writer and co-editor of Never Whistle at Night, which is a dark fiction anthology by Native folks. As he said, it's a lot of amazing history and stories and more. And it's a lot of amazing history and more and in a way that's accessible and fun and funny. Please check it out. Again, it's we've been here the whole time. And hey, you're in the outro of this episode. It's got fun features for you,

such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, a gang of white men across the U.S. and Europe strip Jim Thorpe of his gold medals in a greedy scheme to protect their own butts. Takeaway number two, Jim Thorpe is probably the greatest Olympian of all time. and that's impossible to compare to other athletes for a lot of reasons, such as Thorpe having to wear shoes that he found in the trash that weren't the same size. Takeaway number three, despite being underpaid by baseball, football, and Hollywood, Jim Thorpe built community and institutions for all those things,

and is buried in a town named after him. And then a ton of stats of numbers about everything from the 1800s origins of Jim Thorpe's life to the extraordinary and unparalleled accomplishment of being the only winner of a pentathlon and decathlon in the same Olympics. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show. Every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related.

related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the amazing life of Grace Thorpe. Grace Thorpe is Jim Thorpe's daughter and shockingly unknown outside of his story. Visit sifpod.f.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a pretty extraordinary biography of Jim Thorpe. It's truly a fascinating read. We only touched on fragments of it. It's called Path Lit by Lightning. It's written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Moranis, and it's the life of Jim Thorpe, who again had a native name that can be translated as Path Lit by Lightning. I'm also linking a couple other books about Native Lerner,

life in America, including Who Belongs, Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South, that's by Michaela M. Adams, and also Black Hawk, the Battle for the Heart of America. That's by historian Carrie A. Trask. I looked back to that because, again, there's possibly a genetic relationship between these two Sack and Fox Nation people, Black Hawk and Jim Thorpe. Other key sources include a lot of material from the Smithsonian, including a postal museum exhibit about Jim Thorpe featuring stamps, another paraphernalia featuring him, NPR coverage of the effort to restore Thorpe's records in the Olympic record books, and a couple features for American Indian magazine, one by writer James Ring Adams, another by writer Molly Steffey.

That page also features resources such as native-dashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncieh Lanoppe people, and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigoke people, and others. Also, Joey taped this on the traditional land of the Gabrielina Or Tongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, Joey's location and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 93. That's about the topic of chocolate. One fun fact there.

German chocolate cake is a relatively new recipe, and it's named after a person with the last name German. It has very little ado with the country or people of Germany. So I recommend that episode. I always recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budo's Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode.

Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly. incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists' own shows. Supported directly by you.