Path lit by lightning, p.32
Path Lit by Lightning, page 32
Thorpe was the main attraction, according to Wellington G. Jones, a correspondent accompanying the team. “When he stepped from his automobile and walked across the field there was prolonged cheering until he lifted his cap.” In left field, Jim had to dodge holes as he chased fly balls and listened in bewilderment as local fans shouted “Horseshoes!” after every good play. His roommate Al Schacht came in as a reliever to win the game, and they all retreated to the Hotel Washington for a turkey dinner before piling into the six autos for the return ride through the darkness to Harrisburg.
A few days later, Iva took the train to Harrisburg with Jim Jr. in tow, arriving late on the afternoon of August 25. It was their first trip out of the city, although earlier they had tooted around the streets of Manhattan in Mrs. McGraw’s car. The plan was to stay a week with Jim at the team hotel during a long Indians home stand. A photograph of Jim holding Junior ran in the Harrisburg Telegraph and went out on the wires for newspaper display across the country. Jim was sitting down, dressed in a striped shirt and tie, a white porkpie hat with black band atop his head, gazing proudly at his son, alert and chunky in a sleeping gown. “If Jim Thorpe Jr. isn’t a ‘bear’ of an athlete in days to come, then this picture belies the truth you surely will agree,” the caption read. “Don’t you think the little papoose is the image of his ‘pap’?” The father’s ambitions for his namesake went beyond athletics; he said he hoped the boy would be more like his mother. “Jim will get the best education that can be had. There’s nothing too good for the boy, I can tell you,” he said.
Iva and Junior had no sooner settled in than the situation changed. Jim’s days with the Indians were done. “ ‘JIM’ THORPE GETS HIS RELEASE,” announced the Harrisburg Courier. “Harrisburg Cans Thorpe,” blared a headline in the Chicago Tribune. “Jim Thorpe Bounced by Harrisburg Club,” declared the New-York Tribune. The stories blamed Thorpe in various ways. “The big Indian was released because he has been practically worthless to the Harrisburg team, it is said,” wrote the New York paper. The Carlisle Evening Herald said Jim’s release “caused a sensation in the city” but was not a surprise because he “had been benched early last week” following “the remarkable work of William Tamm in the left garden.” The Chicago paper said it was “understood that Thorpe has been a disturbing influence in the camp of the Indians.”
In truth, Jim behaved no worse than most players on the team, a typical collection of baseball roustabouts. And although developing a sore arm, he continued playing well until two days before his release, making no errors in left, stealing two bases, and going eight for fifteen at the plate in his final games. Harrisburg dumped him for other reasons, mainly because they wanted to keep Tamm, who was younger and thought to have more baseball skills (wrongly as it turned out). What the stories revealed was how willingly and inaccurately the press would turn on Thorpe—a pattern that would haunt him the rest of his career.
* * *
EARLIER THAT YEAR, a rumor had flitted through New York that Thorpe would be the next football coach at Columbia University. It sounded plausible, at least from Jim’s perspective. Going back to his earliest days as a player, he had thought that someday he would coach. Hal Sheridan, lead sportswriter for United Press, filed a story in May, just after Jim was shipped to Jersey City, that used vague wording to imply that Thorpe was bound for Columbia, fudging the notion by saying that college sports fans were excited by the prospect and that school officials would neither confirm nor deny the rumor. The only thing that could prevent the hiring, Sheridan wrote, was money. Columbia would have to “revise their figures upward about four times” to match the salary Jim was getting from the Giants. That made it sound like Jim had planted the story himself, which was likely. The hiring did not happen.
But Jim did not stop looking, and in early September, after Harrisburg cut him loose and sent him back to New York to sit on McGraw’s bench, he landed his first coaching job. The offer came from Clarence C. Childs, head coach at Indiana University, who had been Jim’s teammate at the 1912 Olympics, winning a bronze medal in the hammer throw in Stockholm. Jim would coach the kickers and backfield men, Childs said, and would join the team in Bloomington when the baseball season ended. One year, four jobs, four cities, nowhere near the end of the trail.
16 Never Look Up
WHEN CLARENCE CHILDS COACHED THE Indiana University football team, he spent much of his downtime in the lobby of the Hotel Bowles at the corner of Sixth and College Avenue plotting and reminiscing in a huddle dubbed the Coaches Corner. Bloomington sportswriters in search of inside dope knew that was the place to go. One reporter wrote in the town’s Daily Telephone that “more football battles have been fought in the corner between Coach Childs and his friends than have ever been played on Jordan Field.” On the morning of October 8, 1915, the lobby filled with curious Hoosiers looking for something more—the appearance of a newly hired assistant coach. His arrival was awaited with such anticipation that journalists had estimated the time it would take him to reach Bloomington from New York. They were off by a half day. Jim Thorpe and his wife, Iva, came through the hotel entrance with their infant son at exactly 10:10 a.m.
No time to waste. After reconnecting with his former Olympic teammate in the lobby, Jim situated his young family in a suite upstairs, and by midafternoon he was at the University’s Jordan Field sporting an Indiana sweatshirt and cap, putting in the first day of work for the $2,078.69 he was being paid for the season. It was a Friday, and there was a home game the next day against Miami of Ohio. The students were so ecstatic to have a famous athlete on their sidelines that several hundred attended practice, with yell leader Chick Griffith organizing a nine-rah cheer for Jim. He “seemed greatly pleased with his reception and, with a broad grin on his face, bowed in acknowledgment of the cheers directed at him,” reported the correspondent for the Indianapolis Star, who interviewed him on the field. Thorpe said he wished he could have reached Bloomington sooner but was looking forward to coaching the running backs and kickers. It had been three years since he last starred for Carlisle. He dearly missed football and loved it as much as ever, he said.
The next day offered a promising start to his new career. Indiana tried only one forward pass all game, and that was incomplete, but ran the ball efficiently in swamping Miami 41–0, and Thorpe deserved at least some credit, according to Ralston Goss, sports editor of the Star. “Thorpe, by the way, has taken hold with a vim and, in a quiet way, has done much to instill confidence in the players,” he reported. Along with the confidence boost, Jim was also expected to work wonders with the Indiana punters and place-kickers after he had more time to teach them his tricks.
Thorpe was now the latest branch of a blossoming Pop Warner coaching tree. Pop himself had just escaped Carlisle, relatively unscathed from the 1914 scandal, and was reinventing himself at Pitt, where he would lead the Panthers to an undefeated season. Six of his old players followed him into the coaching ranks. Albert Exendine and Frank Mt. Pleasant—two of his sharpest former players, stars of the 1906 and 1907 squads—were now also head coaches, Exendine at Georgetown and Mt. Pleasant at Buffalo. Bill Gardner, a star end on those teams, had coached at Manuel High in Louisville and Sewanee in Tennessee. Lone Star Dietz, the grizzled lineman and assistant art director at Carlisle, had just traveled cross-country to begin his coaching career at Washington State. William Garlow had been hired to coach at West Virginia Wesleyan, and Mike Balenti, whose best sport was baseball, had dipped briefly into the football coaching ranks the previous season for a one-year stint at Chattanooga.
When a conversation went to subjects that Jim did not care about, it was hard to get more than a yes or no or not sure out of him. But as a tutor of kickers he knew what he was talking about and had much to say. The first trait he looked for was the ease with which a punter could drop the ball and swiftly raise the leg to meet it. If that did not come naturally, little else could help. The next thing he looked for was build. He thought a punter should be at least average height if not taller; a short punter was a rarity, his kicks more prone to being blocked. Even though Jim was adept at all forms of kicking, he thought of himself as the exception to the rule and urged his punters not to place-kick or drop-kick because the different motions developed different muscles. The place-kick demanded a straight-leg movement, while raising the leg for a punt required strong thighs and loose hamstrings.
Starting in practice the week after the Miami game, he began imparting his ideas to the Indiana kickers. He taught them that, much like a batter in baseball, it was essential for a punter to keep his eye on the ball throughout the kick. They should choose their direction first, which side of the field they would aim the punt toward, and then never look up. He told them to “hold the ball as far away from the body as possible, directly in front of the kicking foot, with one hand on each side of it and the outer point of the ball slightly lower than the end nearest the body.” Then drop the ball so that it fell toward the leg without turning. Extend the kicking foot and swing the leg mostly from the hip, bending only slightly at the knee, meeting the ball about two and a half feet from the ground. To get the most power in the kick, bend the body backward slightly while following through with the kicking leg as high as possible. Much like a baseball pitcher, an effective punter needed good control and should be able to put juice on the ball, he said. Striking the pigskin at a slightly different point of the foot could produce various results. If the ball was not caught by the punt returner, subtleties in the kick could make it bounce left or right, forward or backward, or drop flat as if it were deflated.
This was a living legend standing there telling them how to punt, and the Indiana boys were anxious to hear about his experiences at Carlisle. He told them about the time he kicked the ball so high and far he was able to run down and field it himself. He remembered a game against Princeton when his boot went the entire length of the field, end zone to end zone. And then he demonstrated how he did it. One afternoon as he was coaching the kickers, a group of boys from nearby Margaret McCalla elementary school—the Skirvin brothers and a friend—walked over to watch football practice after school let out.
“We lingered in the grass, close to the eastern goal post, and looked on as the kickers did their stuff,” Herbert H. Skirvin recalled. “Taking turns, five backfielders got off some pretty good punts traveling about forty yards in the air on average. The big stranger talked with them a few minutes and then put on a demonstration of his own. He punted four balls all of them sailing downfield from 45 to 55 yards in the air. Several gridders came over for a closer look and we asked one, ‘Who is that guy?’ The player replied, ‘That’s the great Jim Thorpe. He’s one of our assistant coaches.’ The name did not mean anything to us then. But having heard the word great, seeing the man kick and noticing he looked like an Indian, we wedged in as near as possible. From this vantage point we heard one of the backfielders ask Thorpe, ‘What was the longest punt you ever got off, coach?’ In so many words, Thorpe answered, ‘I’ll try to give you a show,’ and he told the center to heave him another ball. Catching the ball at the goal line he took a couple of strides forward and gave the pigskin a terrific smash with his foot. As the plunk reverberated over the area, the ball soared through the air landing seventy-five yards away then bouncing over the goal line…. It was almost unbelievable….”
Quite a story—but like many Jim Thorpe stories, this one should be received with a degree of caution. It came from an older man recalling a moment in his childhood, and it was told long after Thorpe had become immortalized. In describing the encounter, Skirvin joined the multitudes who saw Thorpe do something extraordinary on a football field or track and later transformed a memory into a Homeric ode to otherworldly prowess. Sometimes the memories were accurate, sometimes not. That is how athletic myths are made, by the desire to rise above life’s ordinariness and associate with the transcendent. Myths at once distort a specific reality and fill a human need, revealing a larger truth.
Indiana was a state institution with a large student body to draw from and was part of the prestigious Western Conference comprising the big land-grant colleges of the Midwest plus two private schools, Northwestern and Chicago. But Jim soon learned that the talent in Bloomington was inferior to what he was accustomed to at Carlisle. After the easy win against Miami of Ohio, Indiana lost three games, tied one, and won one, finishing the season with a 3-3-1 overall record, 1-3-1 in conference play. There was only so much he could do as an assistant coach; he could not put himself in at left halfback or as the kicker. But fans expected more, demanded more, and Jim tried to accommodate them. In one of the defeats, a 10–9 loss to Ohio State at Columbus, he performed at halftime, setting “the crowd wild with exhibition punts of 85 yards and perfect dropkicks from the center of the field.” The halftime performance became part of his routine through much of the rest of his career, showing off either his powerful leg or his Indian heritage, or both.
Not long after the loss to Ohio State, one of Jim’s former teammates from Carlisle visited him in Bloomington. It was Bill Gardner, the star end on the 1907 Indians who was now supplementing his income playing football for pay on Sundays in Canton, Ohio. Gardner had been assigned by Jack Cusack, owner of the Canton Bulldogs, to persuade Thorpe to join the team for its final games of the season. The Bulldogs were part of a loosely affiliated network of teams competing in what was known as the Ohio League, considered the incubator of professional football (although some city clubs had slipped money to players now and then going back to the 1890s).
Cusack sent Gardner to Bloomington with an enticement that meant more than old school sentiment: a promise of $250 per game. It was an offer Jim would not refuse. That was nearly twice as much as the league’s best players were making, and Cusack, then only twenty-four, the chief clerk at a gas company, understood the risk. “Some of my business advisers frankly predicted that I was leading the Bulldogs into bankruptcy by paying Jim the enormous sum,” he said later.
There were ample reasons to believe they were right. Pro football ranked near the bottom of sporting attractions, far below college football, major league baseball, boxing, tennis, golf, and horse racing. There was little professional about the Ohio League except the modest salaries. No team was on sure financial footing. Every year for a decade, the league had been shape-shifting, with teams folding, moving, and being born again. Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Dayton, Akron, Cincinnati, Canton, and Massillon were among the Ohio cities that at one time had teams in the league. Games rarely drew more than a few thousand fans, and often only a few hundred, even for the most competitive contests. The atmosphere was freewheeling and rife with deceit. The free agency of the National Football League a century later would look restrictive compared with the movement of players in 1915, when it was not uncommon for talented ringers to switch teams game by game, ignoring a gentlemen’s agreement among owners against raiding the opposition. Much like the baseball minor leagues Jim had played in earlier in his career, the football teams in the Ohio League were stocked with college players—even college coaches—using aliases to avoid being declared ineligible at their schools.
All of that made Cusack’s $250-a-game offer seem chancy. On the other hand, Thorpe was a proven gate attraction and always a favorite subject for the national press. The economy in Ohio was on the upswing in 1915, in part because the war in Europe brought more business to manufacturers in the industrial Midwest. Maybe it was the right name at the right time, Cusack thought, when people with more disposable income would spend some of that to see the famous Indian athlete. He considered it worth the gamble, and he was right. Bob Carroll, the noted football historian, called Cusack’s hiring of Thorpe in early November 1915 “the single most important pro football action ever taken up to then.” The creation of the NFL was still five years away, Carroll said, “but its beginnings were in 1915” when Thorpe came to Canton.
Not that Thorpe immediately decamped from Bloomington to take up the life of a pro in Canton. He kept his day job at Indiana and came to Canton only for the final two games, with little time to practice with the team. On November 13, after helping coach Indiana to a win over Northwestern in a Western Conference road game, Thorpe left the squad in Chicago and traveled four hundred miles east to Canton for his first game the next day against their main rival in the nearby Ohio town of Massillon. In some ways, it was an inauspicious start. Thorpe’s name drew an uncommonly large crowd, at least six thousand, and Jim played well when he was in the game, once breaking off a forty-yard run before slipping in the mud; but the Bulldogs coach, Harry Hazlett, refused to start Thorpe and played him only sparingly. The Massillon Tigers, led by former Notre Dame quarterback Gus Dorais, a passing wizard, and his college teammate and receiver Knute Rockne, won 16–0.
Some said Hazlett declined to play Thorpe more because he was upset by the salary. Some said it was because Thorpe had not been able to practice with the team beforehand. One sportswriter attributed it to the fact that “the famous Indian athlete lacked the necessary wind to carry him through the entire contest.” In any case, the reaction was the same. Fans roared when Jim had the ball and were angry that they did not see more of him. Cusack was upset too, so much so that he fired Hazlett and installed Thorpe as the player-coach for the rematch in Canton two weeks later.
Town and team rivalries held special importance then, as always. When Jim returned to Bloomington after Canton’s loss, he began preparing for another rivalry game, the intrastate contest between Indiana and Purdue. It was the last game of the season for both teams, the last ever to be played at Jordan Field (which was being replaced by a new stadium), and a special homecoming to which every living Indiana U. athlete had been invited—all of that plus Jim Thorpe on the sidelines and the brotherly competitiveness between major state schools brought the largest crowd of the year. To steer clear of the hubbub, Childs and Thorpe moved their players to a sanitarium in nearby Martinsville to stay the night before the game. Nearly fifteen hundred Purdue fans paid $1.50 round-trip to ride special trains along the Monon Route between West Lafayette and Bloomington on game day, arriving at the station in time to see a parade of hundreds of IU old boys marching through downtown behind the band on the way to the field.
A few days later, Iva took the train to Harrisburg with Jim Jr. in tow, arriving late on the afternoon of August 25. It was their first trip out of the city, although earlier they had tooted around the streets of Manhattan in Mrs. McGraw’s car. The plan was to stay a week with Jim at the team hotel during a long Indians home stand. A photograph of Jim holding Junior ran in the Harrisburg Telegraph and went out on the wires for newspaper display across the country. Jim was sitting down, dressed in a striped shirt and tie, a white porkpie hat with black band atop his head, gazing proudly at his son, alert and chunky in a sleeping gown. “If Jim Thorpe Jr. isn’t a ‘bear’ of an athlete in days to come, then this picture belies the truth you surely will agree,” the caption read. “Don’t you think the little papoose is the image of his ‘pap’?” The father’s ambitions for his namesake went beyond athletics; he said he hoped the boy would be more like his mother. “Jim will get the best education that can be had. There’s nothing too good for the boy, I can tell you,” he said.
Iva and Junior had no sooner settled in than the situation changed. Jim’s days with the Indians were done. “ ‘JIM’ THORPE GETS HIS RELEASE,” announced the Harrisburg Courier. “Harrisburg Cans Thorpe,” blared a headline in the Chicago Tribune. “Jim Thorpe Bounced by Harrisburg Club,” declared the New-York Tribune. The stories blamed Thorpe in various ways. “The big Indian was released because he has been practically worthless to the Harrisburg team, it is said,” wrote the New York paper. The Carlisle Evening Herald said Jim’s release “caused a sensation in the city” but was not a surprise because he “had been benched early last week” following “the remarkable work of William Tamm in the left garden.” The Chicago paper said it was “understood that Thorpe has been a disturbing influence in the camp of the Indians.”
In truth, Jim behaved no worse than most players on the team, a typical collection of baseball roustabouts. And although developing a sore arm, he continued playing well until two days before his release, making no errors in left, stealing two bases, and going eight for fifteen at the plate in his final games. Harrisburg dumped him for other reasons, mainly because they wanted to keep Tamm, who was younger and thought to have more baseball skills (wrongly as it turned out). What the stories revealed was how willingly and inaccurately the press would turn on Thorpe—a pattern that would haunt him the rest of his career.
* * *
EARLIER THAT YEAR, a rumor had flitted through New York that Thorpe would be the next football coach at Columbia University. It sounded plausible, at least from Jim’s perspective. Going back to his earliest days as a player, he had thought that someday he would coach. Hal Sheridan, lead sportswriter for United Press, filed a story in May, just after Jim was shipped to Jersey City, that used vague wording to imply that Thorpe was bound for Columbia, fudging the notion by saying that college sports fans were excited by the prospect and that school officials would neither confirm nor deny the rumor. The only thing that could prevent the hiring, Sheridan wrote, was money. Columbia would have to “revise their figures upward about four times” to match the salary Jim was getting from the Giants. That made it sound like Jim had planted the story himself, which was likely. The hiring did not happen.
But Jim did not stop looking, and in early September, after Harrisburg cut him loose and sent him back to New York to sit on McGraw’s bench, he landed his first coaching job. The offer came from Clarence C. Childs, head coach at Indiana University, who had been Jim’s teammate at the 1912 Olympics, winning a bronze medal in the hammer throw in Stockholm. Jim would coach the kickers and backfield men, Childs said, and would join the team in Bloomington when the baseball season ended. One year, four jobs, four cities, nowhere near the end of the trail.
16 Never Look Up
WHEN CLARENCE CHILDS COACHED THE Indiana University football team, he spent much of his downtime in the lobby of the Hotel Bowles at the corner of Sixth and College Avenue plotting and reminiscing in a huddle dubbed the Coaches Corner. Bloomington sportswriters in search of inside dope knew that was the place to go. One reporter wrote in the town’s Daily Telephone that “more football battles have been fought in the corner between Coach Childs and his friends than have ever been played on Jordan Field.” On the morning of October 8, 1915, the lobby filled with curious Hoosiers looking for something more—the appearance of a newly hired assistant coach. His arrival was awaited with such anticipation that journalists had estimated the time it would take him to reach Bloomington from New York. They were off by a half day. Jim Thorpe and his wife, Iva, came through the hotel entrance with their infant son at exactly 10:10 a.m.
No time to waste. After reconnecting with his former Olympic teammate in the lobby, Jim situated his young family in a suite upstairs, and by midafternoon he was at the University’s Jordan Field sporting an Indiana sweatshirt and cap, putting in the first day of work for the $2,078.69 he was being paid for the season. It was a Friday, and there was a home game the next day against Miami of Ohio. The students were so ecstatic to have a famous athlete on their sidelines that several hundred attended practice, with yell leader Chick Griffith organizing a nine-rah cheer for Jim. He “seemed greatly pleased with his reception and, with a broad grin on his face, bowed in acknowledgment of the cheers directed at him,” reported the correspondent for the Indianapolis Star, who interviewed him on the field. Thorpe said he wished he could have reached Bloomington sooner but was looking forward to coaching the running backs and kickers. It had been three years since he last starred for Carlisle. He dearly missed football and loved it as much as ever, he said.
The next day offered a promising start to his new career. Indiana tried only one forward pass all game, and that was incomplete, but ran the ball efficiently in swamping Miami 41–0, and Thorpe deserved at least some credit, according to Ralston Goss, sports editor of the Star. “Thorpe, by the way, has taken hold with a vim and, in a quiet way, has done much to instill confidence in the players,” he reported. Along with the confidence boost, Jim was also expected to work wonders with the Indiana punters and place-kickers after he had more time to teach them his tricks.
Thorpe was now the latest branch of a blossoming Pop Warner coaching tree. Pop himself had just escaped Carlisle, relatively unscathed from the 1914 scandal, and was reinventing himself at Pitt, where he would lead the Panthers to an undefeated season. Six of his old players followed him into the coaching ranks. Albert Exendine and Frank Mt. Pleasant—two of his sharpest former players, stars of the 1906 and 1907 squads—were now also head coaches, Exendine at Georgetown and Mt. Pleasant at Buffalo. Bill Gardner, a star end on those teams, had coached at Manuel High in Louisville and Sewanee in Tennessee. Lone Star Dietz, the grizzled lineman and assistant art director at Carlisle, had just traveled cross-country to begin his coaching career at Washington State. William Garlow had been hired to coach at West Virginia Wesleyan, and Mike Balenti, whose best sport was baseball, had dipped briefly into the football coaching ranks the previous season for a one-year stint at Chattanooga.
When a conversation went to subjects that Jim did not care about, it was hard to get more than a yes or no or not sure out of him. But as a tutor of kickers he knew what he was talking about and had much to say. The first trait he looked for was the ease with which a punter could drop the ball and swiftly raise the leg to meet it. If that did not come naturally, little else could help. The next thing he looked for was build. He thought a punter should be at least average height if not taller; a short punter was a rarity, his kicks more prone to being blocked. Even though Jim was adept at all forms of kicking, he thought of himself as the exception to the rule and urged his punters not to place-kick or drop-kick because the different motions developed different muscles. The place-kick demanded a straight-leg movement, while raising the leg for a punt required strong thighs and loose hamstrings.
Starting in practice the week after the Miami game, he began imparting his ideas to the Indiana kickers. He taught them that, much like a batter in baseball, it was essential for a punter to keep his eye on the ball throughout the kick. They should choose their direction first, which side of the field they would aim the punt toward, and then never look up. He told them to “hold the ball as far away from the body as possible, directly in front of the kicking foot, with one hand on each side of it and the outer point of the ball slightly lower than the end nearest the body.” Then drop the ball so that it fell toward the leg without turning. Extend the kicking foot and swing the leg mostly from the hip, bending only slightly at the knee, meeting the ball about two and a half feet from the ground. To get the most power in the kick, bend the body backward slightly while following through with the kicking leg as high as possible. Much like a baseball pitcher, an effective punter needed good control and should be able to put juice on the ball, he said. Striking the pigskin at a slightly different point of the foot could produce various results. If the ball was not caught by the punt returner, subtleties in the kick could make it bounce left or right, forward or backward, or drop flat as if it were deflated.
This was a living legend standing there telling them how to punt, and the Indiana boys were anxious to hear about his experiences at Carlisle. He told them about the time he kicked the ball so high and far he was able to run down and field it himself. He remembered a game against Princeton when his boot went the entire length of the field, end zone to end zone. And then he demonstrated how he did it. One afternoon as he was coaching the kickers, a group of boys from nearby Margaret McCalla elementary school—the Skirvin brothers and a friend—walked over to watch football practice after school let out.
“We lingered in the grass, close to the eastern goal post, and looked on as the kickers did their stuff,” Herbert H. Skirvin recalled. “Taking turns, five backfielders got off some pretty good punts traveling about forty yards in the air on average. The big stranger talked with them a few minutes and then put on a demonstration of his own. He punted four balls all of them sailing downfield from 45 to 55 yards in the air. Several gridders came over for a closer look and we asked one, ‘Who is that guy?’ The player replied, ‘That’s the great Jim Thorpe. He’s one of our assistant coaches.’ The name did not mean anything to us then. But having heard the word great, seeing the man kick and noticing he looked like an Indian, we wedged in as near as possible. From this vantage point we heard one of the backfielders ask Thorpe, ‘What was the longest punt you ever got off, coach?’ In so many words, Thorpe answered, ‘I’ll try to give you a show,’ and he told the center to heave him another ball. Catching the ball at the goal line he took a couple of strides forward and gave the pigskin a terrific smash with his foot. As the plunk reverberated over the area, the ball soared through the air landing seventy-five yards away then bouncing over the goal line…. It was almost unbelievable….”
Quite a story—but like many Jim Thorpe stories, this one should be received with a degree of caution. It came from an older man recalling a moment in his childhood, and it was told long after Thorpe had become immortalized. In describing the encounter, Skirvin joined the multitudes who saw Thorpe do something extraordinary on a football field or track and later transformed a memory into a Homeric ode to otherworldly prowess. Sometimes the memories were accurate, sometimes not. That is how athletic myths are made, by the desire to rise above life’s ordinariness and associate with the transcendent. Myths at once distort a specific reality and fill a human need, revealing a larger truth.
Indiana was a state institution with a large student body to draw from and was part of the prestigious Western Conference comprising the big land-grant colleges of the Midwest plus two private schools, Northwestern and Chicago. But Jim soon learned that the talent in Bloomington was inferior to what he was accustomed to at Carlisle. After the easy win against Miami of Ohio, Indiana lost three games, tied one, and won one, finishing the season with a 3-3-1 overall record, 1-3-1 in conference play. There was only so much he could do as an assistant coach; he could not put himself in at left halfback or as the kicker. But fans expected more, demanded more, and Jim tried to accommodate them. In one of the defeats, a 10–9 loss to Ohio State at Columbus, he performed at halftime, setting “the crowd wild with exhibition punts of 85 yards and perfect dropkicks from the center of the field.” The halftime performance became part of his routine through much of the rest of his career, showing off either his powerful leg or his Indian heritage, or both.
Not long after the loss to Ohio State, one of Jim’s former teammates from Carlisle visited him in Bloomington. It was Bill Gardner, the star end on the 1907 Indians who was now supplementing his income playing football for pay on Sundays in Canton, Ohio. Gardner had been assigned by Jack Cusack, owner of the Canton Bulldogs, to persuade Thorpe to join the team for its final games of the season. The Bulldogs were part of a loosely affiliated network of teams competing in what was known as the Ohio League, considered the incubator of professional football (although some city clubs had slipped money to players now and then going back to the 1890s).
Cusack sent Gardner to Bloomington with an enticement that meant more than old school sentiment: a promise of $250 per game. It was an offer Jim would not refuse. That was nearly twice as much as the league’s best players were making, and Cusack, then only twenty-four, the chief clerk at a gas company, understood the risk. “Some of my business advisers frankly predicted that I was leading the Bulldogs into bankruptcy by paying Jim the enormous sum,” he said later.
There were ample reasons to believe they were right. Pro football ranked near the bottom of sporting attractions, far below college football, major league baseball, boxing, tennis, golf, and horse racing. There was little professional about the Ohio League except the modest salaries. No team was on sure financial footing. Every year for a decade, the league had been shape-shifting, with teams folding, moving, and being born again. Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Dayton, Akron, Cincinnati, Canton, and Massillon were among the Ohio cities that at one time had teams in the league. Games rarely drew more than a few thousand fans, and often only a few hundred, even for the most competitive contests. The atmosphere was freewheeling and rife with deceit. The free agency of the National Football League a century later would look restrictive compared with the movement of players in 1915, when it was not uncommon for talented ringers to switch teams game by game, ignoring a gentlemen’s agreement among owners against raiding the opposition. Much like the baseball minor leagues Jim had played in earlier in his career, the football teams in the Ohio League were stocked with college players—even college coaches—using aliases to avoid being declared ineligible at their schools.
All of that made Cusack’s $250-a-game offer seem chancy. On the other hand, Thorpe was a proven gate attraction and always a favorite subject for the national press. The economy in Ohio was on the upswing in 1915, in part because the war in Europe brought more business to manufacturers in the industrial Midwest. Maybe it was the right name at the right time, Cusack thought, when people with more disposable income would spend some of that to see the famous Indian athlete. He considered it worth the gamble, and he was right. Bob Carroll, the noted football historian, called Cusack’s hiring of Thorpe in early November 1915 “the single most important pro football action ever taken up to then.” The creation of the NFL was still five years away, Carroll said, “but its beginnings were in 1915” when Thorpe came to Canton.
Not that Thorpe immediately decamped from Bloomington to take up the life of a pro in Canton. He kept his day job at Indiana and came to Canton only for the final two games, with little time to practice with the team. On November 13, after helping coach Indiana to a win over Northwestern in a Western Conference road game, Thorpe left the squad in Chicago and traveled four hundred miles east to Canton for his first game the next day against their main rival in the nearby Ohio town of Massillon. In some ways, it was an inauspicious start. Thorpe’s name drew an uncommonly large crowd, at least six thousand, and Jim played well when he was in the game, once breaking off a forty-yard run before slipping in the mud; but the Bulldogs coach, Harry Hazlett, refused to start Thorpe and played him only sparingly. The Massillon Tigers, led by former Notre Dame quarterback Gus Dorais, a passing wizard, and his college teammate and receiver Knute Rockne, won 16–0.
Some said Hazlett declined to play Thorpe more because he was upset by the salary. Some said it was because Thorpe had not been able to practice with the team beforehand. One sportswriter attributed it to the fact that “the famous Indian athlete lacked the necessary wind to carry him through the entire contest.” In any case, the reaction was the same. Fans roared when Jim had the ball and were angry that they did not see more of him. Cusack was upset too, so much so that he fired Hazlett and installed Thorpe as the player-coach for the rematch in Canton two weeks later.
Town and team rivalries held special importance then, as always. When Jim returned to Bloomington after Canton’s loss, he began preparing for another rivalry game, the intrastate contest between Indiana and Purdue. It was the last game of the season for both teams, the last ever to be played at Jordan Field (which was being replaced by a new stadium), and a special homecoming to which every living Indiana U. athlete had been invited—all of that plus Jim Thorpe on the sidelines and the brotherly competitiveness between major state schools brought the largest crowd of the year. To steer clear of the hubbub, Childs and Thorpe moved their players to a sanitarium in nearby Martinsville to stay the night before the game. Nearly fifteen hundred Purdue fans paid $1.50 round-trip to ride special trains along the Monon Route between West Lafayette and Bloomington on game day, arriving at the station in time to see a parade of hundreds of IU old boys marching through downtown behind the band on the way to the field.
