The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 84: A Very High Bar

Episode Date: November 21, 2017

He was willing to play the white-man's game - he just wished they had told him the rules first.

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This is the way I heard it. Watohuk watched from a distance as the men in underpants and funny shirts tried but failed to jump over the high bar. Dressed in work boots and heavy coveralls, he was not exactly attired for track or field, but Watohook was not inclined to make excuses. So when his classmates took a break, the newest student at the Carlisle Indian School jogged across the cinder track, accelerated at the last moment, and glided over the bar with. with room to spare. Five feet nine inches. A new college record. A hundred yards away, Coach Pop Warner dropped his clipboard in surprise and ran over to investigate. Coach Warner was

always on the lookout for raw talent, and what he had just seen was impossible to ignore. Have you ever played football? The coach asked. No, said Watohuk. I've never played anything. Coach Warner handed the young Indian an odd-shaped ball and led him over to the scrimmage. He explained the drill in simple terms. The goal is to run to the other end of the field without dropping the ball or being tackled by any of these men. Do you understand? Well, Tohuk nodded. A dozen men spread out on the field before him.

Coach blew a whistle and the young Indian sprung into action. He sidestepped the first two men who tried to bring him down and, leapt over the next three. The remaining seven came at him like a wall, so Watojok put his head down and accelerated. It was a bit like a bowling ball, colliding with a cluster of unsuspecting pins. He simply ran through them like a human battering ram and into the end zone. The new kid smiled at the flabbergasted coach and said, nobody tackles Watojok. That season, Watojok scored a record 25 touchdowns for Carlisle and became the first collegian to rush for over 2,000 yards. With Pop Warner's encouragement, he would go on to distinguish himself in track and field,

lacrosse, boxing, tennis, wrestling, and baseball. And just for grins, he entered the intercollegiate ballroom dancing competition and won that too. What Tohook was so good at everything, Coach Warner insisted he try out for the U.S. Olympic team in 1912. So he did. At the trials, he dominated every event, except for the javelin, which he threw from a standing position. No one told with Tohook he could have a running start.

He came in second anyway. Eight months later in Sweden, he won a gold medal in the pentathlon. The shot put, the long jump, the high jump, the hundred meter. He was simply unstoppable. It was the decathlon, however, that separated Watojok from every other athlete on the planet. Not only did he excel in all ten events, he beat the silver medalist by nearly 700 points and set a world record in the 1500-meter race.

His performance prompted King Gustav to declare him the world's greatest athlete. And the Associated Press agreed. Had Wheaties been around back then, Watojouk would have surely been the world. first to appear on the front of their box. Or then again, maybe not. Eight months after his triumph in Stockholm, the International Olympic Committee demanded the medals be returned. Apparently, Woto Hook had been paid a few dollars to play baseball back when he was in school.

No one told him about that rule either. But Watook was not inclined to make excuses. He gave the medals back. and apologized for the confusion. Today, if you search the Internet under Watojook's Christian name, the name people used to chant in stadiums all over the country, you'll find a faded photo taken a few minutes before his record-breaking performance 100 years ago. Look closely at the man staring back at you,

and you'll see an expression rarely found on the face of the modern-day superstar, a strange mix of pride and humility, of certainty, and bemusement. It's the expression of a man who knows with absolute certainty he's about to win a gold medal, running in someone else's shoes. It's true. With Tohook's shoes were stolen on the second day of the decathlon, so he and Pop Warner rummaged through trash cans until they found some replacements. They were mismatched and the wrong size. so a tow hook wore extra socks to compensate.

Look at his left foot in the photo, and you'll see for yourself. The man whose Indian name meant Bright Path, set a world record, and won a gold medal, running in shoes he found in a dumpster. Fame comes and goes, and records are made to be broken. But if true greatness is to be celebrated, let's not forget the first man to be dubbed the world's greatest athlete. A true champion whose gold medals were eventually returned and whose face finally made it onto a box of Wheaties

90 years after he stunned the world. A proud man who was not inclined to make excuses. A man still remembered by some as Jim Thorpe. That's the way I heard it. If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Granger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters,

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