Biographies of athletes often follow a predictable course. From humble beginnings, the aspiring youngster rises, by sheer physical gifts and perhaps a dose of intangible moxie, to a pinnacle of athletic fame, then the long decline toward a life of nostalgia, or maybe sorrow and despair. Some prominent figures don’t conform to this narrative arc: Roberto Clemente, for instance, died at the height of his powers, while engaged on a humanitarian mission. The cruelest pattern, though, is the quick ascent and painful and protracted decline, and that is ultimately the design that emerges out of this copious biography of perhaps the greatest pure athlete ever, Jim Thorpe.
Thorpe’s story is heart-rendingly tragic, but Buford’s account is compelling and at times exhilarating, at least in the first half.He was born in what was then the Indian Territory, on the Sac and Fox Reservation, just a year or so before the formation of Oklahoma Territory and the Sooner land grab, and somehow his whole life would be lived in the confusing margins between Indian and white identity.His parents, both of mixed blood—his mother Potawatomi and French, his father Sac and Fox and English—were big and athletic people who wanted their kids to live out in the broader world.Hence, a series of Indian training schools defined Jim’s youth, most of the experiences negative—his twin brother died at one of them when they were nine, and after that Jim frequently ran away and drifted back to the reservation.Finally, at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, sent hundreds of miles from home by his father in a last-ditch attempt to civilize him, Jim discovered track and field and football, and was simultaneously discovered by Carlisle’s enterprising coach, Pop Warner.From the years 1908 to 1912, the two of them (Jim always attributed almost supernatural power to Warner’s presence in his life) redefined modern athletic history.
Carlisle, although tiny and populated mainly by mainly students straight off thereservation (many arrived illiterate and impoverished), played all of the football powerhouses of the eastern United States, including Harvard, Yale, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Army.Warner was a football genius, among the first to exploit the forward pass and double-reverse as the game evolved.In Jim, he found the ultimate triple-threat player, equally adept at passing, running, and kicking.Buford outlines game scenarios in which Jim dazzled the crowds, Carlisle’s opponents, and the press with his non-pareil touchdown runs and 50-yard drop kicks.
Almost incidentally, Jim’s secondary prowess, in track and field, pushed him into international fame, with gold medals in pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.His triumphant return as the most famous American (both Native and general) in the world, followed by a final football season in which Carlisle upset Army and Jim personally confronted and vanquished, among others, Dwight Eisenhower, put Thorpe at the pinnacle of the athletic world.
And then scandal hit, revelations that Jim had played minor league baseball in the summers during college, in an obscure league in North Carolina, alongside scores of other college athletes from Ivy League schools—but Jim, unlike most others, hadn’t used an alias.As Buford portrays the matter, Jim became a scapegoat for a semi-farcical “code of the amateur” that didn’t at all befit the landscape of rough-and-tumble American culture and sports.But the damage was done, both to Thorpe’s records and to his character.From his twenty-fifth year onward, or downward, binge-drinking and fits of anger would plague his public and private life.
Perhapsthe most surprising part of Buford’s book is devoted to the ten or so years after the scandal, when Jim could draw on his raw athletic ability and a still-intact pride.I was relatively unaware of his professional baseball career, and I was amazed that he jumped in the deep end of the pool in the year after the scandal, playing all the 1913 season with the best team, the New York Giants, and the toughest manager, John McGraw, in the National League.That Jim struggled with McGraw’s hyper-controlling approach is no surprise. “When McGraw advised Jim to avoid alcohol because no Indian knew how to drink,” Buford recounts, “Jim shot back, ‘What about the Irish?’McGraw bristled.’Don’t get smart with me,’ he said.” Jim never adjusted to hit major league pitching well, and though he continued in the major leagues and then the minors for several more summers, the writing was on the wall the very next spring: “[On] March 7, in Fayetteville, George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth, a rookie in spring training with his first professional team, the minor league Baltimore Orioles, hit a long home run into a cornfield; it sailed past the white post that had been placed to mark a homer Jim had hit from the same diamond a few years before.” Though he had a brief flash of baseball clarity in 1919, after being traded by McGraw to the Boston Braves (as late as early August, his .366 batting average topped both of the American League leaders, Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson!), an injury made this great half-season his baseball swansong.
But no matter about the summers, because in the autumns from 1915-1919 Jim had been helping to invent professional football, leading the Canton (Ohio) Bulldogs as they vanquished all comers from the industrial belt centered around eastern Ohio, and especially tipping the scales in the brutal inter-county rivalry with the Massillon Tigers.In his last great season for Canton, Jim single-handedly beat two of the preeminent legends of American football, first George Halas’ Hammond (Indiana) All-Stars—Halas offered the seminal quote on Jim: “He ‘loved to feel the crunch of flesh against flesh'”—and then a Massillon team with Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne filling in at end. (Rockne recounted that after he finally tackled Thorpe, Jim responded: “You shouldn’t do that, Sonny. All these people came to watch old Jim run.”) But that was Jim’s last great season, at age thirty-three, and though he would play on in increasingly obscure and even humiliating venues (at one point on a team that performed Indian dances and circus-like acts at half-time), the last thirty-three years of his life would be characterized by a confusing and mostly failed venture to live up to his own image.
The concluding half of Buford’s book is painstaking and pain-inducing in its detail. Failed marriages, estrangement from his children, and the constant struggle for money seemed to thwart every opportunity for Jim Thorpe to normalize his life.Only in the midst of his long and inglorious run as a Hollywood Indian extra did a glimmer of hope arise, as Jim became an advocate for his fellow Indians after decades of living obliquely toward his ethnic identity. Finally, the making of The Jim Thorpe Story, starring Burt Lancaster, in 1951, followed by Jim’s election as “Greatest Male Athlete of the Half-Century,” provided some comfort in his final years.Buford’s epilogue, covering the period from Jim’s death in 1953 to the restoration of his Olympic medals in the much-heralded move by the International Olympic Committee in 1983, offers an important addendum to the story. The downright bizarre path by which Jim’s body came to be buried in Jim Thorpe (nee Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk), Pennsylvania perfectly fits the quirky and querulous nature of the whole second half of this narrative.
If Buford’s undigested research creates the weariness of literary overkill, nevertheless she is persuasive when she insists that, both for better and for worse, Jim Thorpe’s true story is indeed stranger than most fictional tales of rising and falling heroes.As we approach the hundredth anniversary of his incomparable 1912 achievements, may we remember him at his apex.
Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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