Path lit by lightning, p.26
Path Lit by Lightning, page 26
Thorpe emerged from the ordeal toughened but not ashamed. “While my castle fell about me, the American people, the student body of Carlisle, and my girl remained loyal,” he wrote later. “I could ask for little more. Once I had made up my mind to face the world with the truth, I was no longer nervous or worried about the matter. I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint and considered the episode just another event in the red man’s life of ups and downs.”
12 Among the Giants
POP WARNER AND HIS CONTACTS in major league baseball wasted no time. On January 31, 1913, the same day the bronze bust and silver chalice were loaded aboard the SS New York for their return to Stockholm, front offices of five major league teams sent representatives to Carlisle or were talking to Pop on the phone with the goal of signing his fallen star. If the amateurs wanted to erase Jim Thorpe, the professionals were eager to embrace him, and to do so they had to go through the Carlisle coach, who declared that Jim would sign with the highest bidder. Pop was working it both ways, cleansing himself of any guilty foreknowledge of Thorpe’s playing for pay in the minors while at the same time looking out for his future in the big leagues. Their relationship was complicated but bound together by mutual need.
Pittsburgh had been recruiting Thorpe for months and the team’s Pennsylvania scout was certain Jim had promised he would give the Pirates first consideration. The president of the Cincinnati club, August Herrmann—of whom Damon Runyon once wrote “his nose was bulbous, his complexion at all times as red as the sunset”—thought he had a “tacit understanding” that Thorpe would sign with the Reds. The Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Browns were also in pursuit. All had a chance, but then Warner arranged a call with John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants. McGraw and Warner were old friends, Jim liked New York City, and the Giants were the dominant team in the National League. “I got Thorpe on the long-distance telephone in Carlisle and he accepted my offer,” McGraw recalled. It was not quite that simple.
First Thorpe told the Pirates that he would stand by his earlier word to consider Pittsburgh first. But owner Barney Dreyfuss, skeptical of Jim’s baseball skills, gave him a weak offer, no more than a forty-five-day probationary contract. As Dreyfuss told the story, he was so impressed by Thorpe’s integrity in keeping the earlier promise that he decided he could not in good conscience prevent Jim from getting a better deal. It might have been an effort by Dreyfuss to save face, or he might not have wanted Jim in the first place, but in either case his statement accentuated Thorpe’s sense of honor at a time when it was being questioned. With the Pirates out of the way, Thorpe and Warner made a counteroffer to McGraw, who accepted it, raising the price to a salary of more than $5,000, with a bonus. There was speculation, never documented, that a finder’s fee for Warner was also part of the deal. Late that night, a telegram reached the Giants confirming the verbal acceptance along with news that Warner and Thorpe would come to New York the next day for the formal signing.
The business office of the New York Baseball Club in the Fifth Avenue Building was the place to be on the afternoon of February 1. Sportswriters, photographers, newsreel cameramen, and Giants fans crammed into the room hours ahead of time awaiting the three o’clock event. One scribe said he had not seen such anticipation since Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the so-called Great White Hope, huddled in the back room of a restaurant in Hoboken, New Jersey, to ink the contract for their world heavyweight boxing match in 1910. When Warner and Thorpe arrived, they eased through the crowd for a private huddle with McGraw before the public display. Jim was nattily dressed for the special occasion in a blue Norfolk jacket and purple fedora. McGraw knew Jim only by reputation. He had never seen him play baseball. Warner reassured him that Thorpe was a good teammate and had a knack for observing others do something on the track or playing field and then performing the same act “just a little bit better.”
After the backroom meeting, the pact was consecrated with a staged signing ceremony as photographers posed Jim at various angles with pen in hand, McGraw smiling at his side. Jim was reluctant to say much about his previous experience as a pro. “That is something I don’t want to talk about. The sooner it is dropped the better. I want to forget it all,” he said when asked about his days in Rocky Mount. As cameras clicked, a Giants official asked Thorpe what his Indian name was. Jim paused, then said, “Drags-his-ropes.” C’mon, really. But Jim kept the ruse going, gently mocking the question. No mention of his Sac and Fox birth name, Wa-tho-Huk, or Path Lit by Lightning. “Drags-his-ropes,” he repeated, smiling. Not that he could control the way the press would play on his Indianness. The sober New York Times could not resist calling him “Chief Thorpe,” while noting that in appearance despite “his swarthy face” there was “little about Indian Thorpe to suggest the redman of the forest. He looked more like a big college student who had just stepped out of a Broadway toggery shop.”
The pressing question was whether Thorpe could make it as a major leaguer. McGraw expressed optimism based on Jim’s physique and all-around skills, especially under the manager’s expert tutelage. “He is a big, strong, clean-cut fellow and I think I can make a ballplayer out of him,” McGraw said. “I know one thing, anyway: I’ve started with much rougher material than Thorpe and developed some stars. I can tell more about him when I see him on the diamond, but from all I can see now I think he has the makings of a good ballplayer.” As the New-York Tribune put it, by signing with the Giants Thorpe had “graduated from the Glenn Warner school and matriculated into McGraw college.”
Some were not convinced. “Thorpe a Joke on Ball Field,” blared a headline in the Boston Globe the next morning. Five athletes who’d played against Thorpe in the Eastern Carolina League asserted that he was nothing more than a “fair minor league pitcher, a poor hitter and a worse fielder, and that his only asset was speed on the bases, which availed little as he seldom got on the bags.” By giving him a “fancy” salary—and five grand was considered generous in that era for a player signed out of school—the Giants would end up feeling badly burned, the players said. A writer on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was not expecting magic from Thorpe or wizardry from McGraw: “If he should prove a fizzle in the major leagues, Jim Thorpe will not be the first phenom who shriveled when he became a Giant.”
Another reason for McGraw’s gambit soon became apparent. Hours after meeting with Warner and Thorpe, McGraw had a final discussion with Ted Sullivan, personal agent for Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, and finalized plans for the Giants and White Sox to embark on a world tour together at the end of the 1913 season. The idea of the tour had been hatched in December when McGraw was in Chicago as part of his offseason vaudeville routine, talking baseball onstage and taking questions from the audience for a thousand dollars a week. While there he met with Comiskey in the back room of Smiley Corbett’s bar on Chicago’s East Side. Here were the most colorful and controversial bosses in baseball. Two Irishmen. McGraw, a five-foot-six rooster as crafty and manipulative as his nicknames, the Little Napoleon and Muggsy. Comiskey, a portly and miserly owner known as the Old Roman and Commy. Each had been scheming separately to take his team around the globe. After meeting, they concluded it would be smart to make it a package deal with teams from America’s two largest cities.
Now, on the same Sunday morning of February 2 that newspapers heralded McGraw’s signing of the famous Jim Thorpe, companion articles announced that the Giants and White Sox would tour the world. This was no coincidence; the events were intertwined. McGraw and Comiskey were famous in the United States, as were their great players like Rube Marquard and Christy Mathewson and young Buck Weaver, but no one in Japan or China or Italy or England had heard of them. There was only one player who would be recognized wherever the White Sox and Giants went and prove to be a gate attraction for the entire trip around the world—the untested Giants rookie Jim Thorpe.
* * *
THERE WAS NO Grapefruit League in major league baseball then. Spring training was a movable feast, with teams relocating from one southern city to the next. Only one of eight National League teams, the Chicago Cubs, trained in Florida in 1913, and this was their first year in Tampa. Three teams warmed in Georgia—the Boston Braves in Athens, the Brooklyn Dodgers in Augusta, and the St. Louis Cardinals in Columbus. The Philadelphia Phillies set up camp in Southern Pines, North Carolina; the Pittsburgh Pirates were in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the concept of spring training began in 1886; and the Cincinnati Reds trained in Mobile, Alabama. McGraw’s Giants were hundreds of miles apart from the rest, in the hot-mineral-water resort of Marlin Springs, Texas, halfway between Dallas and Houston.
McGraw and crew traveled to Texas by train from New York, with several stops along the way, the longest in St. Louis, where players from other parts of the country assembled for the team’s first roll call at the Planter’s House Hotel. The Little Napoleon was flush with power granted him by Giants owner Harry Hempstead. He had just signed a five-year contract extension with a yearly salary of $20,000 and full control of his club. He was fully committed to baseball now, he said, after selling a billiard hall in New York and dropping his vaudeville routine. Although many had expected his newest recruit to board the train in Harrisburg, there was no sighting of Jim there, and he was not at the Planter’s House either. What had happened? Speculation popped in the press that Thorpe was having second thoughts about baseball and had been enticed by promoters to become part of a traveling athletic show with wrestler Frank Gotch and boxer Luther McCarty. But rumors always hovered around him, and like most this one was bogus. Jim caught up with the train for the final leg from Arkansas to Texas.
Baseball fans and sportswriters greeted the train at station stops to grill McGraw about the team’s prospects and seek a glimpse of the ballplayers. In Texarkana, some townsfolk demanded to see the player who “muffed the ball.” That was a reference to Fred Snodgrass, the Giants centerfielder who had dropped a fly ball in the tenth inning of the decisive last game of the 1912 World Series against the Boston Red Sox, a play that became infamous as “the Snodgrass muff.” “One of them had a lariat in his hand,” reported the Sporting News about the inquiring fans. “But that might not have meant anything as lots of persons out here own a lariat. Perhaps it was just as well that Snodgrass wasn’t along.” At another stop a sheriff boarded the train and asked to see Thorpe. His teammates were leery of the request, wondering whether Jim was in trouble, and kept quiet, though it turned out the man just wanted to shake Jim’s hand.
Team headquarters in Marlin Springs was at the Arlington Hotel, a spacious resort of red brick and white stone with its own billiard hall, reading room, barbershop, and underground passageway to the sanitarium bathhouse next door. The ballpark was two and half miles away, a trek the players made by foot every morning as part of McGraw’s training regimen. Thorpe was assigned a room with the other Native American on the team, John Meyers, a good-hitting catcher who came out of the Cahuilla nation in California. In the baseball world, inevitably, he was known as Chief Meyers. An Associated Press account announcing that the two could be roommates overflowed with racial stereotypes, jocularly treating them like uncultured savages. “When John Tortes Meyers and James Thorpe meet in the Giants training camp there may be a clash between the tribe as to which will be entitled to the rank of chief of the clan of two, but nobody anticipates a scalp dance that is always preliminary to the digging up of the tomahawk. On the contrary, both Indians will bunk under the same tepee while here and be inseparable roommates when under the roofs of the white man’s skyscraping hotels.” Another paragraph in that same report was worse, reflecting a deeper strain of racism against black citizens. “Rain here today,” it began. “Murphy [the groundskeeper] took a bunch of darkies out to Emerson Park yesterday when the weather looked a wee bit promising to drain the field….” A reminder that unlike Native Americans, the only way African Americans could get on the ballfield was to tend the grounds.
Oscar Colquitt, the Texas governor, played hooky from his duties in Austin to take in the first day of Giants spring training. McGraw had two of his players, Larry Doyle and Harry McCormick, choose up sides for an exhibition game, and the governor, known as Little Oscar by his critics in the state legislature, threw out the first pitch, which got decent reviews from the New York press corps—“not one of those ladylike thrusts so common among the public officials.” Doyle chose Thorpe for his team and played him at first base. Even the veterans stopped to watch Jim warm up. He was a curiosity, the main attraction in camp. At one point McGraw sidled up to Christy Mathewson and asked, “What do you think of him, Matty?” Looks like he has the natural ability, Mathewson responded, and the manager agreed. No regrets about signing him.
Mathewson—the Big Six—was the team’s immortal, a brilliant veteran pitcher who had won at least twenty games each of the previous ten years and four times had won more than thirty, always with an earned run average under 3.00 and five times under 2.00. In 1905, he had led the Giants to the championship by pitching three shutouts within a six-day span in the World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics. Like many star athletes based in New York, he had his own newspaper column, or at least one written under his name. His ghost was John Neville Wheeler, who wrote for the New-York Tribune and the McClure Newspaper Syndicate and defined his job as “using other men’s brains.” With Mathewson’s sharp insights as material, Wheeler had written his Pitching in a Pinch—an insider account of what it was like to pitch in the big leagues (and a book that later would be praised by none other than Thorpe’s business teacher at Carlisle, the poet and intense baseball fan Marianne Moore). In Marlin Springs, he quickly set his sights on Thorpe.
“Well, I have had my first look at Jim Thorpe, the great Indian athlete, and he has impressed me favorably,” Wheeler wrote under the Mathewson byline after the first ten days of practice. “I think he will make it as a big league ball player. McGraw has also been impressed by the Indian and is devoting a great deal of his time in watching him work and giving him tips.” The column said that Thorpe seemed anxious to make good. “The first day that the boys were out on the field… he was throwing the ball around as if it were midseason. McGraw warned him about this. ‘Be careful old boy, you may want to use that wing next week,’ McGraw said. Thorpe responded, ‘But I am in condition.’ ”
The Mathewson column described Jim as “big and wonderfully fast for his size—the fastest big man I ever saw, I think.” He seemed humble and eager to learn. “He strikes me as being a typical Indian as I have always pictured the race in my mind,” Mathewson told Wheeler. “He sits silent most of the time but by the keenness of his eyes you can tell that he is taking in every word that is being said.” One advantage Thorpe had over other raw recruits, Mathewson thought, was that he already had experience playing before large crowds. What position McGraw would play him was still to be determined. “Thorpe handles himself pretty well in the outfield and his great speed should make him a valuable gardener, but it is still a question whether he would hit hard enough to be able to hold down that berth.”
A few days later, the first picture of Thorpe in the violet-striped Giants uniform ran in the Sporting News under the caption: “THORPE IN GIANT WAR PAINT.” His work in camp, the accompanying story said, was helping to dispel the notion that Jim would only be a “circus card” for the New York team. But there was more to baseball than that.
The essence of Jim Thorpe the athlete was that he could do it all. In football, he could run, block, throw, tackle, punt, and place-kick. In track and field, he could run fast, jump high or far, clear hurdles, put the shot, and hurl the discuss. He was great at everything from ballroom dancing to marbles, and there seemed an ease to him in most everything he did. Baseball was different. Being a natural athlete did not translate into being a natural ballplayer. The baseball writers came to Marlin Springs inclined to praise him, aware that the name Thorpe attracted readers; yet they also saw a rawness in his play during intrasquad games. On the afternoon of March 11, they watched in awe as he smacked a home run off Mathewson that sailed over the deep left-field fence and bounced onto a tennis court, eliciting a declaration from McGraw that they had all just witnessed “the longest hit in the world.” Yet a few innings later they saw Jim make “a large fat muff” of a fly ball in the outfield. It was like that day after day, though long hits were less frequent than awkward swings and misses at curveballs.
As spring training neared an end, Jim and the Giants faced another problem from his bush league days. McGraw had scheduled two games against the Texas League team in Beaumont, but decided not to bring Thorpe, afraid “they might enjoin or even kidnap the Redskin and hold him for ransom.” Beaumont management asserted that Jim belonged to them. It was a tenuous claim that went back to the brief period in 1911 when Jim played minor league ball in Oklahoma. According to Beaumont, it obtained Thorpe’s contract from a financially desperate Oklahoma City team, which in turn had picked it up from Anadarko. Jim never played for Oklahoma City or Beaumont, and no one had mentioned any of this until now that he was a gate attraction as the greatest athlete in the world. When Sam Crane, a New York sportswriter and McGraw’s close pal, heard about the claim, he asked Beaumont’s manager what he wanted. “Six thousand iron men in cash and I want it quick,” came the reply.
Beaumont “had about as much chance of collecting money on Thorpe as from the defunct Louisiana Lottery,” Crane wrote. He was right, but just to be sure nothing funny happened, McGraw left Jim behind when he took the Giants to Beaumont.
Mathewson was not the only Giant with a syndicated newspaper column. McGraw also had one; his ghostwriter was Harry Cross, a Harvard man who worked for the New York Times. After setting the squad he would take north with him, McGraw, writing through Cross’s typewriter, belittled members of the New York press corps for reporting that he was using Thorpe to sell tickets while privately believing he was not a major leaguer.
