Thunder and Lightning

A  century after Jim Thorpe first found athletic fame at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, his sporting career is preserved primarily by witnesses’ words rather than by objective measurement. When he was at his peak, in the early 1900s, his best sport, football, was in its infancy, a rough game undergoing basic rule changes and largely devoid of statistics. What made him exceptional in any case was the unquantifiable combination of power and speed, only hinted at in yardage totals or points. Florid descriptions by the sportswriters of the day and recollections by those who played with him and against him make up a majority of the record. One reporter described his broken-field running as demonstrating “amazing intelligence,” as he evaded tacklers “by an easy lope that carries him over the ground at remarkable speed without betraying any undue haste.” His famed coach at Carlisle, Pop Warner, taught his player the technique of “unexpected contact,” which Thorpe mastered, where you sometimes fake the defensive player to make him stop moving, “then, wham, you hit him with the hip or stiff arm,” in the words of a teammate.

In Kate Buford’s biography “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe,” the most objective measurement given for Thorpe’s all-around athletic ability is in a section on his performance at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, where he won both the five-event pentathlon and, competing only six days later, the decathlon. Most impressive, she notes, was his time in the final event of the decathlon, the 1,500 meters, which he won in 4 minutes 40.1 seconds; it would be 60 years before an Olympic decathlon gold medalist would do better. Such speed and stamina emanated from a 176-pound man with an 18-inch neck and a 42-inch chest perched over a 32-inch waist and 24-inch thighs. As Buford writes of his feats in all sports, “his spectacular Olympic performance reinforced the un­recorded claims.”

Paradoxically, his 1,500-meter time, and all his marks in the individual events of the pentathlon and the decathlon, remain officially unrecorded, the result of the International Olympic Committee’s decision in 1913 to strip him of his title and medals for having participated in minor league baseball games before the Olympics, a violation of the organization’s draconian rule on “amateurism.” Only posthumously, in 1982, would his gold medals be reinstated, but each event’s numbers remained blotted out, and Thorpe was simply made a “co-champion” with the silver medalists who had subsequently been elevated to gold. Bud Greenspan, the filmmaker who has specialized in Olympic subjects, wrote in The New York Times about the righting of this wrong and the compromise it involved: “The joy felt by the entire sports world is somewhat diluted.”

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