Triumph and despair

Few remember, but the name Jim Thorpe was once synonymous with athletic prowess. The all-star played football and baseball, won Olympic gold medals in 1912 and was, in many ways, the first sports superstar. A Native American of the Sac and Fox, he was embraced by the sporting public as both an American and as an aboriginal. And his meteoric rise was only equaled by his dismal fall. Kate Buford chronicles it all, working hard to separate the mythology (there is much) from the fact in this sprawling biography.

Football fans will likely find Buford's description of football 100 years ago eye-opening. The contests were tough and dangerous then, making the controversy over today's "helmet hits" look quaint by comparison. In 1904, more than 200 players were injured, and 21 were killed in the game. Officials belatedly took action, changing the rules after the 1909 season, in which 36 fatalities were recorded. 

Thorpe's athletic rise coincided with the rise of team sports that would later dominate the 20th century. Buford argues that it dovetailed neatly with the disappearance of the frontier, and an effort to re-create through competition the energy of the pioneer in the age of Teddy Roosevelt's "strenuous life." War metaphors abounded. Baseball was the "bloodless battle." Football was a ritualized conflict.

Of course, it wasn't lost on spectators that Indians (Buford uses the terminology of the day to keep the narrative brisk) were now fighting the white man on the field, and often winning.

Don't blame the Indians: The WASPs had created that metaphor in the first place. As early as 1896, Henry Cabot Lodge, speaking in the spirit of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism that marked the day, declared the "injuries incurred on the [football] playing field" to be "the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors."

But Lodge and company hadn't counted on Thorpe and the Indian footballers of Carlisle University, a school exclusively for Native Americans. 

Stories abound about the discovery of Thorpe's skill at college. Buford finds at least one reliable account: When Thorpe applied for the Carlisle football team in 1907, Coach "Pop" Warner handed him the ball as a joke and told him to run through the dozen defenders as "tackle practice." Thorpe ran, dodged and swiveled his way through the defense. An angry Warner cried," You're supposed to let them tackle you, Jim!"

"Nobody is going to tackle Jim," Thorpe declared. He made the team.

> Email Michael Jackman