Jim Thorpe and his older half-brother Frank entered a saloon in Shawnee, Okla. Jim set a dollar coin on the bar. Frank proposed a wager — Jim could jump straight into the air from where he was standing and come down on the bar. The unbelieving onlookers plunked their silver coins down on the bar to accept Frank’s proposal.
In “Undefeated: Jim Thorpe And The Carlisle Indian School Football Team,” one of Steve Sheinkin’s many fast-paced, cinematic nonfiction histories for young adults (actually, readers of all ages can enjoy Sheinkin’s books), Sheinkin describes what happened next: “Jim bent his skinny legs and leaped and soared and landed with a crash, two boots on the bar. Frank scooped up the money. Jim jumped down, and the brothers hurried out the swinging doors.”
But this kind of activity what was not what Hiram Thorpe had in mind when he allowed his son Jim, who had run away from other Indian schools where he had been sent, to live at home. At the Thorpe farm, Hiram and Jim constantly argued over what Hiram considered his son’s aimless behavior, especially Jim’s lack of interest in education, which, Jim Thorpe would later say, “was all book work, and I never did like books.”
In a letter to the U.S. government official overseeing the Sac and Fox Indian reservation, Thorpe’s father wrote, “I cannot do anything with him so please at your earliest convenience attend to this for he is getting worse every day — and I want him to go and make something of himself for he cannot do it here.” The Sac and Fox agent arranged for Thorpe’s enrollment in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa.
The 15-year-old Thorpe arrived in Carlisle on February 6, 1904. Three years later, Thorpe and a few friends were walking across the Carlisle campus toward the sports field, hoping to get in a few innings of baseball before sunset. By this time, Thorpe, 19, had grown strong and broad-shouldered, nearly six feet tall, but still skinny at 140 pounds.
As Thorpe and his friends crossed the track, he observed the school’s track team practice the high jump. But when the bar was raised to 5-foot-9, no one could clear it. They were about to call it a day when Thorpe offered to try.
The athletes snickered. One joked, “He thinks he’s a grasshopper.” They stopped snickering, however, when Thorpe made the jump over the bar. He had broken the school record.
When the school’s track coach, Glenn “Pop” Warner, heard what Thorpe had done, he put Thorpe on the track team.
Thorpe spent the summer of 1907 living the good life in the athletic quarters, where he ate well and was no longer required to do farm work. In late summer, after observing the football team at their practice, Thorpe told Warner, who was the football coach as well as the track coach, that he wanted to play football too.
Warner told Thorpe, “I’m only going to tell you once, Jim. Go back to the locker room and take that uniform off! You’re my most valuable track man, and I don’t want you to get hurt playing football.”
When Thorpe refused to leave the field, Warner finally grunted, “All right, if this is what you want, go out there and give my varsity boys a little tackling practice.” Tossing a football to Thorpe, Warner added, “And believe me, that’s all you’ll be to them.”
Sheinkin writes, “There in front of him was the famous Carlisle School football team, a diverse group of Native Americans from all over the country. There was the team he’d been hearing about, dreaming about, since he was a kid. The players were spread out on the grass, maybe five feet between each man. There was no chance for a runner to get very far. That was the point. This was a tackling exercise.
“Thorpe started forward. The first few defenders got low and grabbed for his legs. Thorpe spun free and continued. Another group dove at him. He lifted his knees high and churned through outstretched arms. Picking up his pace, he faked out the next few tacklers; then, with a bit of open field around him, he turned on the sprinter’s speed and was gone.”
Afterwards, a huge grin on his face, Thorpe tossed Warner the football. “I gave them some good practice, right Pop?”
If you read “Undefeated,” I believe you will have difficulty putting the book down before finishing it, as you read about Thorpe’s four seasons playing football for Pop Warner — while Thorpe also remained on the track team. As summarized by Sheinkin: “Carlisle compiled an almost impossible forty-three wins, against only five losses and two ties. Along the way, they managed to pull football kicking and screaming, out of the Stone Age and into the modern era, putting it on the road to becoming America’s favorite sport … Today many fans have no idea that one of football’s all-time greatest teams was the Carlisle Indians.”
Especially unforgettable was Sheinkin’s description of the Nov. 9, 1912, football game between Carlisle and Army at West Point. Final score: Carlisle 27, Army 6. Although it was a crushing loss for Army, its players, including future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, were good sports about it, surrounding Jim Thorpe and shaking hands with him.
Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics, one in classic pentathlon, another in decathlon. He would later play professional football, baseball and basketball. But football was his favorite sport.
When Thorpe was on his way with Coach Warner and track star Louis Tewanina to Sweden to represent the United States in the Olympics, the U.S. government did not consider Native Americans to be U.S. citizens. Although regarded as the best athlete in America, Thorpe was legally a ward of the state.
When Thorpe telegraphed the government agent at the Sac and Fox reservation to send him $100 from his account for his trip to Sweden with the Olympic team, the agent refused, suggesting Thorpe quit “gallivanting around the country “and get to work on his land allotment at the reservation. Thankfully, Warner was able to find money in the Carlisle budget to cover travel expenses for himself, Thorpe and Tewanina.
In his book, Sheinkin is highly critical of the U.S. government’s history of discrimination and violence against Native Americans. Government-supported Indian schools like the one at Carlisle were designed to erase Native American cultures.
Although Thorpe faced the world’ best all-around athletes in Stockholm’s Olympic Stadium, he beat them all in the high jump and 110-meter hurdles and finished near the top in everything else.
At the medal ceremony, Sweden’s King Gustav gave Thorpe his gold medals. As he bent forward to place a laurel wreath on Thorpe’s head, Gustav proclaimed, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”
I had a good laugh when I read how Thorpe replied. “Thanks, King,” he said.
This post was originally published on here
