Path lit by lightning, p.34
Path Lit by Lightning, page 34
A trait of more dire consequence was his drinking. He was drawn to liquor and changed by it. His easygoing sensibility vanished; he could become ferocious when aroused. “Jim needed a lot of looking after and a lot of care, but he never drank the night before or the day of a game,” said Cusack, who occasionally roomed with him on the road. “Four drinks and he was gone. He’d get sick and want to die.” Iva had not seen that side of Jim before their wedding and was not listening when Pop Warner and her siblings tried to warn her before she married him. “I’d never seen him drunk. Then I learned,” she said. The problem grew apparent to her after they reached Yale. He rarely drank in her presence, and there is no evidence that he harmed her when drunk, but she felt the aftereffects. During her youth at Indian schools, she’d become a practicing Methodist and grew up believing that “drinking and smoking were strictly forbidden and were things that ladies and gentlemen in her generation did not do, at least to excess.”
But Jim and his pals behaved differently. In the offseason, Pete Calac visited their house so the two Carlisle pals could go hunting. They would stay up through the night, then head out before dawn to track raccoons and shoot squirrels out of the pecan trees. “I remember making huge breakfasts for them after they would come in—six eggs each,” Iva said later. Full and exhausted, Jim and Pete would doze off. “Then I’d be horrified to find the closets full of bottles. If you didn’t drink, you didn’t know. They were out there working up a huge appetite.”
* * *
ON APRIL 16, 1917, ten days after the United States entered the Great War in Europe, Bozeman Bulger of the New York World, the same columnist who two years earlier had declared that Thorpe had reached the end of the trail, offered a more optimistic assessment. At spring training with the Giants, Bozeman reported that Jim had “an excellent chance” of making the major league squad as the fourth outfielder. “If the big Indian does come through it will show what determination really can do,” he wrote. “Every man who knows Thorpe is pulling for him to land.”
But the cycle of loss and recovery continued. The season had barely begun when Thorpe was again dropped from the fickle McGraw’s plans, though what happened was a boon for him. He landed a job as a regular in the major leagues, just not with the Giants. He was sold outright to the Cincinnati Reds with a contingency in the agreement that McGraw had an option to take him back if the Reds later wanted to release or trade him. His manager now was his old teammate Christy Mathewson, who had retired from the Giants at midseason the previous year to take the Reds job.
Jim made his way to Cincinnati with Iva, who was three months pregnant, and Jim Jr., now a two-year-old. In a letter, Iva described her son as “a big, strong youngster. He looks like his Daddy, only has blue eyes, light hair and the fairest skin imaginable.” The Thorpes found an apartment on Northern Avenue a few blocks from the Cincinnati Zoo. As they were settling in, a syndicated column under Mathewson’s byline went out on the wires. While not directly criticizing McGraw for his handling of Thorpe, Mathewson presented a strong case for Jim as a bona fide major leaguer.
The Reds manager explained that his best outfielder, Edd Roush, was injured, and another regular had a sore arm, and without them he was in desperate shape. “I was up against it, so I wired McGraw for Jim Thorpe. Mac sold him to me.” The timing seemed right for everyone. Mathewson had heard that McGraw was ready to cut Jim loose again. He also heard that Jim was so frustrated “he even discussed quitting baseball and entering the oil business in Oklahoma City.” Then came the need in Cincinnati, and the encouragement of a manager whose personality could not have been more different from the old boss—from McGraw, the Little Napoleon, to Mathewson, the Christian Gentleman. Chief Meyers, Jim’s old teammate, thought that might make all the difference, saying that if “Jim ever got under a proper manager, he would make good.”
According to Mathewson, McGraw once told him that Thorpe was a great athlete and a good ballplayer, “but as Hughie Keough, who was on the Chicago Tribune before he died, once said, ‘The helluvit is he ain’t hittin.’ ” Now that Jim had the chance to play regularly, Mathewson thought he would prove he could hit, just as he had done with the Milwaukee Brewers the year before, although that was against minor league pitching. “He is that type of player who will keep plugging at a weakness until he has overcome it—and he knows his batting has kept him out of the regular order. Thorpe has all the qualities of a real sticker—a good eye, a nice position at the plate, and the ability to swing from either side. He stands up well to all kinds of pitching and does not stick his foot in the water pail when a twirler ropes through a fast one in the vicinity of his neck,” Mathewson noted. “When a man of Thorpe’s type gets his chance only once in a while, he is under quite a strain, for he feels he must make good then or he may never have another opportunity. He therefore presses, as we say in golf, and does not show his best.”
The change seemed promising at first. Mathewson gave Jim a place in the Cincinnati outfield, where he contributed regularly. He made headlines in Chicago on May 2 at the end of one of the most remarkable games in major league history. For nine innings, each team was held without a hit by the opposing pitcher, Fred Toney for the Reds and Hippo Vaughn for the Cubs. In the tenth, Reds shortstop Larry Kopf broke up Vaughn’s no-hitter with a single. After advancing to third on an outfield error, he scored when Thorpe nicked a slow bounder between the mound and first and legged it out for an infield hit, bringing home Kopf for what proved to be the winning run as Toney completed his extra-innings no-hitter in the bottom of the tenth.
But by mid-June, just as the team’s outfield roster returned to full strength, Jim’s average started declining, and Mathewson worried that the words of Hugh Keough were ringing true again—the helluvit is he ain’t hittin. Jim found himself on the short end of an outfield platoon with Greasy Neale, another two-sport star who also played and coached football. Neale was in the lineup against righty pitchers and Jim against lefties. Most pitchers hurled from the right side, so Greasy played more. Baseball writers still looked for any chance to get Thorpe’s name in print. On July 18, newspapers around the country carried a story about Jim in Philadelphia accomplishing something at the Baker Bowl “that no other ball player has ever succeeded in doing during the thirty years the park has been in use.” What did Jim do? He hit a ball so far over the left-field fence that it landed on Lehigh Avenue, a “tremendous feat” that elicited “most vigorous recognition” from the fans. Only one problem: his momentous home run came during batting practice, not in the game.
When he did something notable in a game, the press was still prone to using stereotypes to describe his feats. That same week the Philadelphia Public Ledger ran a banner headline across the sports page that recycled General Sheridan’s violent old phrase: “THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN IS A DEAD INDIAN, AND THIS APPLIES TO JIM THORPE, OF REDS.” The story described Thorpe as “a real Redskin” and implied that he deserved the death penalty for driving a home run into the centerfield stands and bringing home another run with a single in a win over the Phillies. It also pointed out that Neale was hitting over .300 and “Big Jim Thorpe cannot show anything like this in the averages.”
In August, as the gap between the batting averages of Neale and Thorpe widened and Jim’s playing time decreased, reports surfaced that other clubs were interested in him. The Yankees assigned Joe Kelly, one of their top scouts, to sit in the stands at Crosley Field during a Reds home stand and compile a report on Thorpe. The assumption was that the Yankees would make a deal for him before Kelly left town. Then Jack Hendricks, manager of the Indianapolis Indians in the American Association, came to Cincinnati to talk to Mathewson about acquiring one of his outfielders, preferably Thorpe. Before any move could be made, Mathewson called McGraw, who had first rights. Concerned that two of his outfielders might be drafted into the war, McGraw decided to pull the string one more time and yank Jim back to the Giants for the stretch run. Five seasons now of this on-again, off-again relationship between the Little Napoleon and Jim, a perpetual yo-yo loop from potential and hope to inertia and dysfunction.
* * *
BEFORE THE TRANSACTION sending Jim back to New York from Cincinnati was announced, Iva wrote a letter from their Northern Avenue apartment to the superintendent at Carlisle. The school had gone through two leaders since Moses Friedman was discharged. The new man was John Francis Jr., a Kansas native who had worked at the Indian bureau in Washington for much of his career, rising from clerk to run the land office and then the education division. Francis must have suspected before he arrived that he was being sent to oversee the last days of Carlisle, and it became obvious soon enough, as he began sending dispatches back to the home office seeking advice on how to best manage demise and decay.
Iva knew none of this. In her letter, she wanted to know if Carlisle might enroll her younger brother, Clyde, who at age nineteen had been working for the Santa Fe railroad in Needles, California, sweltering in the summer heat of the Mojave Desert. Iva had not seen Clyde in four years, she wrote, “but he seems to be a bright, ambitious boy” who wanted to improve his education. Carlisle would be good for him, she assumed, just as it was for her. Her fondness for the school had not diminished since she graduated in 1912 as class elocutionist. “If Mr. Thorpe plays on an eastern team next year I am going to come to the commencement at Carlisle,” she wrote. “There is nothing I would enjoy more than to see the dear old place and my many friends there.” Just as Iva was unaware of the deteriorating condition of her alma mater, Clyde was unaware of how Jim’s drinking was ripping the fabric of his sister’s marriage. Unlike Iva’s older siblings, Earl Miller and Grace Morris, all Clyde could see was his brother-in-law’s fame and he assumed all was well. “Jim certainly is doing fine, isn’t he?” he wrote to Iva. “Tell him I congratulate him and wish him the utmost success in anything that he endeavors.”
Clyde never became a student at Carlisle and Iva never returned for a commencement there, even though she was on her way east again with Jim within days of writing her letter. With the Yanks now joined in the world war, pressure was mounting on the school to close and allow the campus to revert to its original military use. More and more Carlisle boys were leaving to enlist. One day that summer the AP listed the names of Carlisle athletes who were joining the armed forces, “and in a short time Germany will most likely hear their war whoop: Enoch Owl, Earl Wilber, George Kaquatosh, David Crow, and Edward Thorp, a brother of the famous Jim.” Edward became a bugler in the U.S. Navy, where he learned to call out Reveille, Mess Call, Evening Colors, Taps, Man Overboard, and Abandon Ship.
At age thirty, married with one child and another on the way, Jim registered for the first draft that summer but was not called and did not enlist. Other Carlisle alumni were already in the armed services, including Gus Welch, Jim and Iva’s close friend and best man at their wedding. Welch took leave from law school at neighboring Dickinson College when the U.S. entered the war and was now at Fort Niagara in New York training to be an officer. His commanding officer praised Welch as a “natural soldier” who was so tireless that “no amount of work dulled his enthusiasm.”
Another Carlisle friend, Sylvester Long, who’d interviewed Jim and Iva during the 1912 graduation period for the class Character Book and helped Jim train for the Olympics by going on long runs with him through the countryside, was already engaged in trench warfare overseas. He now went by the name Sylvester Chahuska Long Lance. Not waiting for the American entry, he enlisted with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and was in France in April 1917 when they faced the German Sixth Army at the gruesome Battle of Vimy Ridge. In a letter to Welch at Fort Niagara, a Carlisle official wrote that he had heard Long Lance “had been wounded in the head with a shell fragment but is getting along very nicely.” This came at about the same time that the Washington Post published a long feature story on Long Lance that said he had “gone through the terrible battle of Vimy Ridge unscratched and emerged the only surviving officer of his rank in his battalion.”
The headline and subhead of the Post story portrayed Long Lance as the most interesting man in the world. “SYLVESTER CHAHUSKA LONG LANCE, FULL-BLOOD AMERICAN INDIAN, FOUGHT BRAVELY AT VIMY RIDGE. Trick Rider, Fistic ‘Meeter of all Comers,’ All-Round College Athlete, Essayist, Musician, Movie Hero, Carlisle and St. John’s Graduate, President Wilson’s Appointee to West Point Cadetship, He Now Turns Up as First Lieutenant of Princess Pat’s Crack Canadian Unit.” A breakout quote said that he “Defeated Thorpe in three-mile run.” The story also said he was born into the Eastern Cherokee tribe of North Carolina and had traveled with a Wild West show when he was thirteen.
Sylvester Long was indisputably intelligent and talented. Over his lifetime he awed people with the variety of his skills. But what he was more than anything else was a master of deception, one exaggeration or fabrication after another, Long Lance a concoction of his own imagination. The wound in France came when he broke his nose falling on his face. He never rose above the rank of sergeant. While it was true that he won an appointment to West Point, he never enrolled there. He might have been a better distance runner than Thorpe, but they never competed officially in a three-mile run.
* * *
JIM FINISHED THE Giants season in his usual spot, on the bench, watching as his team clinched the National League pennant and then lost to the White Sox four games to two in the 1917 World Series. The national pastime was not a national obsession that fall as the press and public focused on a more important team fighting overseas. The Giants and Sox had traveled the world together four years earlier, but Jim was among only a handful of players from that trip still around either club. He almost got into one World Series game, the fifth at Comiskey Park, when he was listed in the starting lineup playing right field but was removed for a pinch hitter in the top of the first—perhaps a fitting coda to his playing days under McGraw.
By the time he reached Canton for the football season, the Bulldogs had already played two games, including an 80–0 thumping of the Altoona Indians. His teammates again included some Carlisle athletes, this time Pete Calac and William Garlow, along with his outfield platoon partner in Cincinnati, Greasy Neale, who coached West Virginia Wesleyan on Saturdays and played for Canton on Sundays under various aliases. Neale was talented in all three of his athletic iterations, as an outfielder in baseball and as an end and then a coach in football, eventually leading to his enshrinement in the College Football Hall of Fame. He was also a virulent bigot.
Baseball was segregated, so Neale did not face black players when he played with the Reds, but there were a few African Americans in college football then, most notably Paul Robeson, the multitalented All-American end at Rutgers, and Neale as coach at West Virginia Wesleyan refused to play against him or any team that fielded a black player. There were also a few blacks in professional football in 1917, a half decade before the race curtain fell on that sport. In the fourth game of the season, Canton played at home against a team from New York, the Rochester Jeffersons, whose star left halfback, Henry C. McDonald, was black. After one play, Neale tried to rough up McDonald and snarled at him, “Black is black and white is white where I come from and the two don’t mix.” A fight seemed imminent when Thorpe pulled his belligerent teammate away from McDonald and shouted, “We’re here to play football!” As McDonald recalled the scene, Thorpe effectively put a stop to Neale’s racial aggressions for the rest of the game.
Pro football in its infancy was violent enough without the extra component of prejudice, and Jim was as rough-and-ready as anyone in the league, an equal-opportunity pain inflictor. He used his shoulders as weapons, lowering and then uppercutting them into would-be tacklers with a ferocity so sharp some insisted he must have lined his pads with sheet metal, which was not true. They were made of hard sole leather.
Unless he had too much to drink, Jim was gentle off the field. On the field he was a different character. “The dirtier the football got, the meaner Jim got,” Pete Calac once recalled. “The pros would gouge your eyes, knee you on every play and just outright slug you time and again. With Jim, they would just pile on. But he wore longer cleats and when they got him on his back he would double up and start kicking his way out of the pile. He was provoked… but he answered them, too. He would stand out there at halfback and yell across the line to tell them where he was going to run. We’d open a hole in the line and Jim would run over anyone else who got in his way.” Joe Guyon, another of his Carlisle teammates who turned pro, said Jim perfected a technique they were taught by Pop Warner: fake a defender, make him stop, then charge right at him and hit him with a hip or a stiff-arm and crush him. Warner called it “unexpected contact.”
Jack Cusack recalled that Jim would kid him before a game by making a face and saying he planned to eat a few raw steaks so he could go out and kill the opposition. “Then he’d laugh and say, ‘Aw, Jack, I don’t need steaks to do that,’ ” said the Bulldogs owner. “And he didn’t. He was so fast that before you knew it he’d stiff-arm the linebacker and give the safety the hip and be gone. I guess the thing I remember most about him is the fear other players had of tackling him. The particular way he had of holding his hips out and using that stiff-arm they don’t use anymore.”
Most of the world had no clue about American football, much of the country knew little about the professional game, attendance was spotty, lineups were as fluid as the names or pseudonyms of players—all of that, and yet it seemed every week there was a matchup in the Ohio League billed as a world championship. The Bulldogs played four such games in 1917. “Indian Jim Thorpe, alias Canton football team, limped back to Canton Sunday afternoon still retaining the championship of the earth,” declared the Akron Beacon Journal after the Bulldogs defeated the Akron Pros 14–0 on November 14. When they went on to twice defeat the Youngstown Patricians, the papers called it a sweep of a “home and home football series for the professional championship.” And finally came the two games against rival Massillon. The first game was played in the late-afternoon darkness and a blizzard so blinding that few fans could see the field by the fourth quarter. Thorpe dominated the game, leading his team to another world championship 14–3. But the next week, Massillon, now led by Charles Brickley, the former All-American halfback at Harvard, won 6–0 and claimed the world title for themselves. By that measure, Thorpe and his Bulldogs had won three world championships and lost one in a span of five weeks.
