Jim Thorpe cleared a school record high jump while still in street clothes
Walking past the Carlisle track one day in 1907, a young Sac and Fox student stopped, tried the high jump in his everyday clothes, and beat every jumper on the team with a school record. Five years later Jim Thorpe won two Olympic golds, and he went on to play professional football, baseball and basketball.
Even his birth is murky: no certificate survives, and dates in 1887 and 1888 circulate, some from Thorpe himself. He grew up in Indian Territory, in what became Oklahoma, raised in Sauk culture under the name Wa-Tho-Huk, roughly the bright path lightning makes across the sky. His childhood was hard. His twin brother Charlie died of pneumonia when they were nine, his mother died two years later, and he repeatedly ran away from school, once leaving to work on a horse ranch.
At Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania he came under Pop Warner, one of early football's most influential coaches. Warner hesitated to risk his best track athlete in such a rough game, so Thorpe asked to run a few plays against the defence, went past and through them twice, and tossed Warner the ball saying nobody was going to tackle Jim. He became a three-time All-American. He also played lacrosse, boxed, and won the 1912 intercollegiate ballroom dancing title.
At the Stockholm Olympics of 1912 he took gold in the pentathlon and decathlon, with a record decathlon score, the first Native American to win Olympic gold for the United States. Then came disgrace: he had been paid to play two seasons of semi-professional baseball, breaking amateur rules, and lost his titles. The International Olympic Committee returned replica medals in 1983, 30 years after his death, and only in 2022 listed him again as sole champion.
He played six major league baseball seasons with the Giants and others, helped the Canton Bulldogs to three professional football championships, and was briefly the nominal first president of the league that became the NFL. After he stopped playing at 41, the Depression hit, and his final years brought poverty and ill health. The Associated Press named him the greatest athlete of the century's first half.
Source: Jim Thorpe
