A black-and-white photograph of Jim Thorpe in his Canton Bulldogs football jersey. The photo was taken between 1915 and 1920.
School period
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, United States
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where Jim studied.
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
Thorpe in Carlisle Indian Industrial School uniform, circa 1909
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
Stroud, Oklahoma, United States
The Sac and Fox Indian Agency school, where Thorpe studied.
College/University
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
155 E Indian Ave, Lawrence, KS 66046, United States
Haskell Indian Nations University (formerly Haskell Institute), where Thorpe studied.
Career
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
1912
Thorpe tackling a dummy, that is made of weights and pulley on wire, with coach Warner.
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
1912
Stockholm, Sweden
Thorpe at the 1912 Summer Olympics
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
1912
Celtic Ave Queens, NY 11377, United States
American footballer and athlete Jim Thorpe competing for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at the United States Olympic trials in Celtic Park, New York, on May 18, 1912.
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
1913
Polo Grounds, New York City, New York, United States
American multi-sport athlete and Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, here of the New York Giants baseball team, waits for a pitch during a game at the Polo Grounds, New York City, New York.
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
1915
Polo Grounds, New York City, New York, United States
Jim Thorpe takes some ground balls at the Polo Grounds before a game in 1915.
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
Thorpe as a member of the New York Giants
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
Thorpe, circa 1910
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
A low-angle view of athlete Jim Thorpe, wearing a Canton Bulldogs football jersey, circa 1925.
Gallery of Jim Thorpe
Jim Thorpe of the New York Giants poses for a circa 1918 portrait.
American footballer and athlete Jim Thorpe competing for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at the United States Olympic trials in Celtic Park, New York, on May 18, 1912.
Polo Grounds, New York City, New York, United States
American multi-sport athlete and Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, here of the New York Giants baseball team, waits for a pitch during a game at the Polo Grounds, New York City, New York.
Jim Thorpe, in full James Francis Thorpe, was an American athlete. He gained prominence as one of the most accomplished all-around athletes in history, who in 1950 was selected by American sportswriters and broadcasters as the greatest American athlete and the greatest gridiron football player of the first half of the 20th century. Thorpe won Olympic gold medals for the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon.
Background
Ethnicity:
Jim was of mixed Native American, Irish, and French ancestry.
Thorpe was born near Prague in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) on May 28, 1888; the son of Hiram Thorpe of Irish and Sac and Fox Indian extraction and Charlotte Vieux of Potowatomi and Kickapoo extraction. He was raised with a twin brother, Charlie, on a farm. His twin brother, Charlie, died when he was nine years old. His mother died of blood poisoning before he was a teenager. Four years later, shortly after Thorpe entered Carlisle, his father died.
Education
Thorpe first attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency school in Stroud, Oklahoma. He ran away from school several times, so his father sent him to the Haskell Institute (now Haskell Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1904, the sixteen-year-old Thorpe decided to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where, in 1907, his athletic abilities attracted the attention of the famous coach Glenn S. "Pop" Warner. Warner made Thorpe his protégé, apparently with the expectation of achievement in track, rather than in football.
In the fall of 1908, however, when a regular halfback was injured, Warner put Thorpe on the varsity football team for the game with the University of Pennsylvania. He ran sixty-five and eighty-five yards for touchdowns that enabled the small Indian school to defeat the prestigious Ivy League university. That game made Thorpe a headliner and inaugurated one of the most unusual success stories in American sports history.
Thorpe left Carlisle in 1909 and for the next two years worked at manual labor and played semiprofessional baseball in the Carolina League. He apparently did not realize the implications of this for his future athletic career and later remarked that several college players who were regarded as amateurs "back home" had played in the same league.
In 1911, Warner urged Thorpe to return to Carlisle, suggesting that coaching and practice might give him an opportunity to participate in the 1912 Olympics. Thorpe then came into his own as a football player. Under the leadership of Percy Haughton, Harvard was the acknowledged and seldombeaten leader among college football teams. Carlisle defeated Harvard in 1911, with Thorpe kicking four field goals and carrying the ball seventy yards for a touchdown.
He excelled in the school's other football games, and that winter Walter Camp listed Thorpe on his All-American team. During that academic year, Thorpe participated in every intercollegiate sport in which Carlisle engaged: basketball, hockey, boxing, tennis, and track. But it was to track and field, with the prospect of the forthcoming Olympics, that he paid special attention.
Thorpe's track potential was evident in 1907 when he cleared the high jump bar at 5' 9" while dressed in street clothes. Following the spring of 1909, when he starred in track, he left the Carlisle school with two other students to go to North Carolina where they played baseball at Rocky Mount in the Eastern Carolina Association. Thorpe pitched and played first base for what he said was $15 per week.
The next year, he played for Fayetteville, winning 10 games and losing 10 games pitching and batting .236. These two years of paid performances in minor league baseball would later tarnish his 1912 amateur Olympic status. For two years, Thorpe had a rather aimless life while not playing baseball, drifting from village to village in Oklahoma before a former teammate at Carlisle asked him to return to school. He did so in the fall of 1911. Thorpe led Carlisle to outstanding football seasons in 1911 and 1912. In 1911, against Harvard's undefeated team under the renowned coach Percy Houghton, he kicked four field goals, two over 40 yards, en route to a stunning 18-15 victory. Carlisle lost only two games in 1911 and 1912, splitting with Penn and Syracuse, while conquering such teams as Army, Georgetown, Harvard, and Pittsburgh. In his last year, he scored 25 touchdowns and 198 points and was named All-American by Walter Camp for the second consecutive year.
During the summer of 1912, before his last year at Carlisle, Thorpe was chosen to represent America at the Stockholm Olympics in the decathlon and the pentathlon. He was an easy victor in the pentathlon, winning four of the five events (broad jump, 200-meter dash, discus, and 1,500-meter race), losing only the javelin. In the decathlon, Thorpe set an Olympic mark of 8,413 points that would stand for two decades.
A half-year later, charges against Thorpe for professionalism led to a confession by him that he had been paid to play baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910. Shortly thereafter the Amateur Athletic Union and the American Olympic Committee declared Thorpe a professional and asked him to return the medals won at the Olympics and erased his name from the record books.
Thorpe, a great athlete but not a great baseball player, almost immediately signed a large $6,000-per-year, three-year contract with the New York Giants, managed by John J. McGraw, principally as a gate attraction. His six-year major league career resulted in a .252 batting average with three teams: New York, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Braves. He batted .327 in 1919, his last year in the majors.
Thorpe signed to play professional football in 1915 with the Canton Bulldogs for the "enormous" sum of $250 a game. Attendance at Canton immediately quintupled, and Thorpe led Canton to several championships over its chief contender, the Massilon Tigers.
In 1920, he was appointed president of the American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the National Football League. Thorpe was the chief drawing power in professional football until Red Grange entered the game in 1925. Following his play at Canton, Thorpe played for the Oorang Indians, Cleveland Indians, Rock Island Independents, and several other teams before bowing out at the age of 41 with the Chicago Cardinals in 1929.
Out of sports, Thorpe was not as successful. With the coming of the Depression, he did bit parts in Hollywood movies, was a day laborer in Los Angeles, and had a ghost-written book published at the time of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Jim Thorpe's History of the Olympics. He continued through the 1930's with rather insignificant movie parts, and he was asked regularly to give lectures on his athletic career.
He joined the Merchant Marines late in World War II. Following the war, he became a member of the recreation staff of the Chicago Park District in 1948.
Honors for past athletic achievements kept coming to Thorpe. At mid-century, the Associated Press polled sportswriters and broadcasters to determine the greatest football player and most outstanding male athlete of the first half of the 20th century. Thorpe outdistanced Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski for the former and led Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey for the latter, being paired with Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the outstanding female athlete. This recognition, however, did not influence the U. S. Olympic Committee to help restore his Olympic medals. There had been an attempt in 1943 by the Oklahoma legislature to get the A. A. U. to reinstate Thorpe as an amateur.
Outside of athletics, Thorpe's life had much more tragedy than two gold medal losses. His place in sport history, though, was established well before he died of a heart attack in Lomita, California, at the age of 64 on March 28, 1953.
Thorpe was baptized in the Catholic Church. His parents were both Roman Catholic, a faith which Thorpe observed throughout his adult life.
Views
Quotations:
"Track and field, because it was something I could do by myself, one-on-one, me against everybody else."
"I have always liked sport and only played or run races for the fun of the thing."
"The Yankees, you see, they're a money team, they're the class of baseball. You don't ever bet against that."
"I am no more proud of my career as an athlete than I am of the fact that I am a direct descendant of that noble warrior (Chief Black Hawk)."
"I never was content unless I was trying my skill... or testing my endurance."
Membership
From 1920 to 1921, Thorpe was nominally the first president of the American Professional Football Association (APFA), which became the NFL in 1922.
American Professional Football Association (now National Football League)
,
United States
1920 - 1921
Personality
Jim was a warm and loving father and a devoted husband.
Physical Characteristics:
Thorpe was 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) tall and weighed 202 lb (92 kg).
Thorpe suffered from alcoholism and lived his last years in failing health and poverty.
Quotes from others about the person
King Gustaf V: "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world. I would consider it an honor to shake your hand."
Dwight Eisenhower: "Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw."
Abel Kiviat: "He was the greatest athlete who ever lived... What he had was natural ability. There wasn't anything he couldn't do. All he had to see is someone doin' something and he tried it... and he'd do it better."
Chief Meyers: "Jim was very proud of the great things he'd done. A very proud man... Very late one night Jim came in and woke me up. He was crying, and tears were rolling down his cheeks. 'You know, Chief,' he said, 'the King of Sweden gave me those trophies, he gave them to me. But they took them away from me. They're mine, Chief; I won them fair and square.' It broke his heart and he never really recovered."
Connections
Thorpe married three times and had eight children, one of whom died in childhood. In 1913, he married Iva M. Miller, whom he had met at Carlisle. They had four children: Gail Margaret, James F., Charlotte Marie, and Grace Frances. Miller filed for divorce from Thorpe in 1925.
In 1926, Thorpe married Freeda Verona Kirkpatrick. They had four sons: Carl Phillip, William K., Richard A. and John R. "Jack." Kirkpatrick divorced Thorpe in 1941, after they had been married for 15 years.
Lastly, Thorpe married Patricia Gladys Evelyn "Patsy" Askew (née Woodbury) on June 2, 1945. The couple stayed together until Thorpe's death.
Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team
A great American sport and Native American history come together in this true story for middle-grade readers about how Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner created the legendary Carlisle Indians football team, from New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Award recipient Steve Sheinkin.
2017
Jim Thorpe: Olympic Champion
A biography of the American Indian known as one of the best all-round athletes in history, for his accomplishments as an Olympic medal winner as well as an outstanding professional football and baseball player.
Jim Thorpe's Bright Path
A biography of Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, focusing on how his boyhood education set the stage for his athletic achievements which gained him international fame and Olympic gold medals.