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Jim Thorpe (1888-1953)
Jim Thorpe is considered by many people to the best all-around athlete of the first half of the 20th century. He
excelled at every sport he ever tried, and he made sports history at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.
A member of the Sauk-Fox nation, Thorpe was the great-grandson of Black Hawk (see no. 14). He grew up in
Oklahoma, where Black Hawk's descendants were moved after they were ousted from their land in Illinois and
Iowa.
As a child, Thorpe attended first a mission school, and then Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Then he enrolled
at Carlisle Industrial Indian School, a famous vocational school for Native Americans in Pennsylvania. It was at
Carlisle that Thorpe began his athletic career.
While there, he lettered in ten sports: football, baseball, track, boxing, wrestling, lacrosse, gymnastics, swimming,
hockey, and basketball. He also won prizes for his marksmanship, and, in his spare time, played golf. In 1911
and 1912, Thorpe was an all-American football player, helping Carlisle defeat some of the best college teams of
those years: Harvard, Army, and Pennsylvania.
In the summer of 1912, Thorpe headed to Stockholm, Sweden with the U.S. Olympic team. His performance at the
Olympics was historic. He won both the pentathlon and the decathlon, winning the decathlon with a score
almost 700 points ahead of the second-place finisher. It was to be 36 years before another Olympic athlete performed as well in the decathlon.
Unfortunately, a few months later, the Olympic Committee took Thorpe's medals back, because he had played
professional minor league baseball during summers off from Carlisle. The decision was always controversial,
with many people feeling that Thorpe had been penalized unfairly for a minor infraction. In 1982, the
International Olympic Committee finally restored his records and medals.
Returning home, Thorpe became a professional football and baseball player, helping to make football a popular
American sport. He played for the Canton Bulldogs, the team that won the title of "world champion" in 1916,
1917, and 1919. In 1920, Thorpe became the first president of the American Professional Football Association.
Two years later, it became the National Football League. He also founded and played on an all-Native American
team, the Oorang Indians.
After retiring from sports, Thorpe worked at various jobs, including managing recreation for the Chicago Park
System, lecturing on sports and Native American issues, and sailing with the Merchant Marine.
In 1950, sportswriters and broadcasters for the Associated Press named Thorpe "the greatest American football
player" and the "greatest overall male athlete" for the first half of the 20th century. Three years later, he died of
a heart attack.
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