Path lit by lightning, p.38
Path Lit by Lightning, page 38
The Akron Beacon Journal called Thorpe “probably the most famous gridder who ever donned the moleskins” and “the example set before would-be stars by the best coaches in the game.” Acknowledging that Jim was not expected to start, the article added that “anyone who has studied the man knows that he could no more keep out of the battle, especially if his team is losing, than he could fly.” Pollard had hurt his shoulder a week earlier in Akron’s match against Cleveland, but sent a telegram to his coach a few days before the game. “You may be able to take me out of a game with Cleveland but nothing on earth can drag me out of the game with those Thorpe fellows,” Pollard cabled from Philadelphia, where he lived while studying dentistry and coaching at nearby Lincoln University.
Pro football was not as blatantly segregated as major league baseball, at least not yet. Pollard played for Akron at a time when great black baseball players were kept out of the whites-only majors and consigned to the Negro Leagues. But through the first half of the 1920s, there were only at most two or three black players in pro football in any season, Pollard the most prominent among them. Later, an unofficial policy among team owners kept all African Americans out of the league from 1934 to the end of World War II. Just as sportswriters invariably described Thorpe as “the big Indian” or “the great Redskin,” virtually every reference to Pollard included a casually racist phrase that categorized him by skin color. He was called “the dusky backfield man” and “the colored star from Brown” and “the dark-skinned one” and “the little colored boy.”
These came from reporters who admired him, or at least his skills on the field of play. Here is how the Beacon Journal scribe described Pollard when comparing him to Thorpe: “The next man who will be called for by the fans will likely be the Akron colored star, Fritz Pollard. This particular black chap weighs just 145 pounds but judging from the testimony of those who have played against him he must tip the beams to at least the 250 mark. Tis said he hits the line like a submarine destroyer although no one seems to be able to solve his method of attack…. He sidesteps, he straight-arms, he jumps, in fact he just naturally works thru the opposition like a snake in the grass. He is the original exponent of the true wiggling style of football.”
The game proved to be more than a two-star struggle. As expected, Coach Thorpe did not send player Thorpe onto the field until the third period, when Canton was trailing 10–0, and though the hometown crowd roared when they saw him enter, and though he was able to complete a few long passes to Guyon, his former Carlisle teammate, Jim could not prevent the shutout loss. But there was one notable on-field encounter, or near-encounter, between Thorpe and Pollard. It happened in the fourth quarter, Thorpe on defense, Pollard skirting around the end with the ball. “He dived for the little colored boy but Fritz cleverly sidestepped and as the Indian dove over Pollard’s head and went crashing into the ground, Fritz stopped just long enough to give Thorpe the ‘merry razz.’ ”
That description came from an Akron sportswriter who might have been sensationalizing the struggle between the two stars. His story claimed that when Pollard was late arriving at the field after a long drive from eastern Pennsylvania, Thorpe had disparaged him as being “yellow.” That did not sound like Thorpe. He was a rough-and-tumble player, but not verbally provocative and not racist. At the Stockholm Olympics he had been the strongest ally of the lone black athlete on the U.S. team, Howard Drew, and in a pro game a few years earlier he had stepped in to prevent racist teammate Greasy Neale from picking a fight with a black player at a game against Rochester.
In the event, Pollard got the best of Thorpe twice in 1920, leading the Pros to a 7-0 victory in a Thanksgiving Day rematch in Akron. Canton finished the season with a 6-4-2 record. By a vote of owners, the APFA silver trophy went to Akron (eight wins, no losses, and three ties), an action disputed by other teams with similar records. It was an inauspicious start for the league, but still a start. What would become of the APFA remained uncertain. Even the most optimistic predictions were cautious. “There is a tendency for development of the game, and possibly some day we may see a national league with representatives in the big cities,” wrote one New York–based sportswriter. “But that era seems quite a distance away…. Professional football may pay in places where there is not the lure of big college contests, but it will never rival the amateur brand.”
* * *
IN THE FRATERNITY of twentieth-century sportswriters, Ring Lardner represented one distinct style, Grantland Rice another—Lardner with his affinity for busher dialogue and sarcasm bordering on knowing cynicism, Rice with his affinity for glorifying odes and an optimism overflowing into mythology and schmaltz. “He was the evangelist of fun, the bringer of good news about games,” a friend said at Rice’s funeral. “He was forever seeking out young men of athletic talent, lending them a hand and building them up; and sharing them with the rest of us as our heroes.” One of those heroes was Jim Thorpe.
Even as he perpetuated Indian stereotypes and advanced the dubious claim that Jim was such a natural athlete he did not have to practice, Rice was nonetheless an ardent Thorpe believer throughout his career. In churning out six columns a week for more than a half a century, an estimated twenty-two thousand columns comprising sixty-seven million words before he was done, along with more articles in national magazines, Rice occasionally returned to a favorite standard, picking various all-time athletic teams. Near the end of the 1920 season, writing in Leslie’s Weekly, Rice named the first of his all-time college football teams with the help of four noted college football men: Fielding “Hurry Up” Yost, the coach at Michigan; John W. Heisman, then coaching at Penn; Big Bill Edwards, a former star at Princeton who had written Football Days, a popular book about the sport; and Pop Warner, still coaching at Pitt.
Rice noted that Jim was the only player cited by all four. “Thorpe could do everything,” Yost exclaimed. Heisman said he was “almost as fast in football togs as in a track suit” and “strong in every department.” Edwards considered him “good enough for any backfield.” And Warner called him “the greatest halfback in all football history.” In all, Rice wrote, this meant Thorpe was “the greatest star in grid history.” Football experts had been saying much the same for the past decade, but what was important was its perpetuation now. Just as his talents on the field were diminishing, Jim Thorpe’s permanent place in the national consciousness was solidifying. Grantland Rice was making sure of that.
* * *
JIM WAS AN all-around athlete all around the year. Even home with his family he could not turn away. Football season over, baseball season not yet begun, he turned to basketball and played for the local American Legion team. He was not the best player on the hoops team—George McCool, a hot-shooting forward, scored most of the points—but he was a tenacious defender and the main gate attraction. “It was a rare opportunity to see Jim Thorpe, world famous athlete, in action,” declared a story in the Yale Record after a game against the Oklahoma City Ramblers filled the high school gymnasium one cold Wednesday night in late January 1921. He did not play for cash this time. The proceeds went to needy war veterans.
He was in Oklahoma that winter when he learned that his baseball peregrinations would take him to yet another city. At that point he had already played baseball in Rocky Mount, Fayetteville, Anadarko, New York, Jersey City, Harrisburg, Newark, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Boston, and Akron. Next stop: Toledo to play with the Mud Hens, who were owned by Roger Bresnahan, a former catcher who had once played for McGraw and the Giants. Toledo paid Akron $1,500 for the rights to Thorpe in a transaction that briefly passed Jim through Ty Cobb’s Tigers on the way to the minor league affiliate. Hitting .360 for Akron failed to increase Thorpe’s monetary value. His purchase price this time was half that of a year earlier, when Boston sold him to the Numatics.
The migratory life was not easy on the family, but Iva, with two little girls in tow, tried to follow Jim whenever she could. At the start of their marriage, when she rode the honeymoon train across the continent with the barnstorming Giants and White Sox, and then sailed the seas on the world tour, she’d delighted in being part of the action with her “Snooks.” Now the thrill was gone. Her motive was to hold the marriage together. On to Toledo.
The American Association of 1921 was a top-flight minor league, the teams stocked with future and former major leaguers and piloted by rising managers. The player-manager of the Louisville Colonels, Joe McCarthy, was on his way to a stellar quarter-century career managing in the majors, most of them with the New York Yankees, who won seven World Series championships during his reign. His winning ways were evident at Louisville, where he led the Colonels to the pennant, while the Mud Hens struggled and finished seventh in an eight-team league. But Jim did not struggle. He put together another outstanding season, his third in a row, this time batting .358 with 36 doubles, 13 triples, 9 home runs, and 34 stolen bases. Three of those homers came on one prolific day, July 13, at Borchert Field in Milwaukee against the Brewers. “He is in Toledo, and there are outfielders in the big leagues who would be better in Toledo and Jim in the majors,” noted a sportswriter for the Washington Evening Star. Not to happen.
While Thorpe played for the Mud Hens that spring and summer, several changes were made in the American Professional Football Association. League officials replaced Jim as president with Joe Carr of the Columbus Panhandles. Thorpe’s visibility was essential for publicity that first year, but the owners now felt they needed a businessman at the top. On the field, the league would now follow college rules. Off the field, the owners would tighten control over players, among other things agreeing to territorial rights in which teams had claim to players who lived or went to college in their region. More teams were added, expanding the league to a bulky twenty-one franchises, though several proved financially untenable and folded during or after the season.
The Staleys of George Halas moved from Decatur to Chicago, and by the end of the year changed their name to the Bears. The largest city fielding a new team was New York, with the Brickley Giants. The smallest was Green Bay, Wisconsin, with a team called the Packers. The New York team lasted one year. The Packers survived and thrived, staying in the league even as all other teams except the Chicago Cardinals and Decatur Staleys eventually folded. Even those two teams had to move to stay viable. Only the Packers kept at it while playing with the same name in the same city, tiny Green Bay. Not owned by a wealthy benefactor but publicly held by the people, the Packers went on to win a record thirteen championships and sport the best won-lost percentage of any pro football team over a century of games.
When the 1921 season began, Thorpe was not only no longer the league president, he was no longer in Canton. The Bulldogs had moved on from their aging star, and he from them. Along with his Carlisle running buddies Pete Calac and Joe Guyon, he switched allegiances to the Cleveland Indians. Also joining him in Cleveland was his longtime friend Jack Cusack, the founder of the Bulldogs who had returned temporarily from the Oklahoma oil business. “While assisting in the building of a refinery in Arkansas, I developed a severe case of malaria and found it necessary to leave that locality for a while, so I decided to go back to Canton until I recovered,” Cusack recalled. “Jim Thorpe had transferred his interests to the Cleveland Indians, and the old warhorse asked me to come to the Ohio metropolis and look after his financial affairs. His contract called for a guaranteed amount for each game or a percentage of the gate, whichever was greater.”
Even with Thorpe and the new recruits, the Indians struggled on the field and at the gate. They won three and lost five, although all but their loss to Halas’s Chicago squad were close games. In looking after Jim’s interests, Cusack determined that he was being shorted after many games as owners manipulated the gate receipts through various deceptions, including inflating the number of complimentary tickets. Twice he found discrepancies where the receipts were about a thousand dollars less than they should have been, considering ticket sales, and in both cases the supposed complimentary tickets were far in excess of what they should have been. “In both instances, after strong and vivid argument, I succeeded in collecting our share of the deficiencies,” Cusack later wrote.
The last scheduled game of the season was at the Polo Grounds in New York against the Brickley Giants, led by Charles Brickley, a former All-American from Harvard who had been on the 1912 Olympic team with Thorpe (competing in the hop, step, and jump) and had played against him in the Ohio League as a member of the Massillon Tigers. Now they were two grand old men in a young man’s sport. Brickley was thirty, four years younger than Thorpe, but looked the older of the two, balding and pudgy around the middle. Jim played while Brickley remained on the sidelines. Cleveland ended up winning 17–0 in a game contested in the mud before a disappointing crowd of five thousand fans. Jim kicked a field goal and an extra point and pulled off one exciting run recounted excitedly by syndicated columnist Sid Mercer. It started with Jim running one direction and then changing course, looping the other way from ten yards behind the line of scrimmage. Then:
He plunged right into a group of five or six Brickley huskies all intent on tackling him. The way Jeems went through those boys carried us back to the day when he raced up and down the plains of West Point with cadet tacklers clinging to him but not impeding his progress. That was some ten years ago, and if Thorpe has since forgotten anything about gaining through a broken field he recalled it…. It was a broken field indeed after he finished with it. The first tackler to dive at Thorpe was strong armed and spilled in a mud puddle. The second fared worse. Thorpe’s left shoulder encountered the tackler’s chest and knocked him flat on his back. A third man grabbed the Indian around the legs and slipped off. By this time they had slowed Jim up, but they hadn’t stopped him. He still had a trick or two. By revolving his body Thorpe shook off one or two tacklers who had now fastened themselves to him. All the time he was making progress toward the enemy’s goal. At last he stumbled, just as two more of Brickley’s players loomed in front of him. As he fell, he rolled over and advanced the ball a little farther. He was down, and several of his opponents were out.
All of this for a ten yard gain.
Other than Thorpe’s run, the contest offered little drama. The Brickley Giants gained one first down for the afternoon. But if the game itself was forgettable, what happened at halftime and then after the game at the Hotel Imperial and Penn Station were memorable. The halftime featured what the game did not, a one-on-one duel between Thorpe and Brickley, competing in the dying art of the drop-kick. When the football was rounder, more like a rugby ball than the sharply conical shape it would become, extra points and field goals were often drop-kicked—that is, there was no holder; the kicker merely dropped the ball and booted it just as it hit the ground. Thorpe was known for his powerful leg, as was Brickley, who at Harvard had booted thirty-four field goals, including many with the drop-kick. Their contest began at the twenty-five-yard line and moved back from there to midfield and beyond. As was often the case in that era, when all statistics depended on the eyes of fallible sportswriters, accounts differed on the results. Although it was agreed that each man made six of twelve attempts, some credited Brickley with a long drop-kick of fifty yards and Thorpe of forty-five, while others insisted that Thorpe connected from fifty-five yards while Brickley’s boot from there struck the crossbar.
After the game, the Cleveland team returned to the Hotel Imperial at Broadway and Thirty-Second Street. The same routine after every road game: they would wait at a hotel until management representatives came by with the check for proceeds from the game. This time they expected to split $3,750 among the players. Thorpe and Cusack, who shared a room, became suspicious early that evening when a bellhop stopped by with a statement covering hotel expenses. Cusack guessed what that meant: the team treasurer and his lawyer were trying to skip town without paying the men. Pro football was a money hustle of one sort or another in those days, and here was a classic case. Cusack and Jim raced over to Penn Station a few blocks away and found the treasurer and lawyer waiting for the next train to Cleveland, set to leave in a half hour. Cusack described what happened next, which sounded like material for Damon Runyon:
“I demanded that he return to the hotel and pay the players, but he refused, saying they would receive expenses only. Getting nowhere, and with time running out, I sought out two detectives stationed in the lobby and explained the situation, whereupon they decided—for a certain sum—to help us…. When the train was announced and the gates opened for boarding, the two men reached for their [traveling bags], but at that juncture the detectives grabbed them and we all went down to a precinct station in a taxicab. The two frustrated birds of passage were not long in deciding they did not care for the atmosphere of the police station and agreed to return with Thorpe and me to the hotel. There, with several big gridsters giving me silent support, I succeeded in convincing the treasurer that the time for settling accounts was at hand.”
A second game between the same two teams had been scheduled for Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, but that was canceled after the first game drew so poorly. Cusack instead arranged more exhibition matches for the Indians, including one against the Richmond Athletic Club on December 10 that ended in a scoreless tie. While that game was being played, Iva was back in Yale delivering the third Thorpe girl, Grace Frances. Nine days later, Jim finally made it back to Oklahoma, off the road at last, if only briefly.
In what had become an annual tradition, word spread during the winter that he was through with sports and would enter the business world. Newspapers around the country ran a column by Cleveland-based syndicated columnist Norman Edgar Brown asserting that Thorpe’s football days were done and “it is a good bet that he will not return to baseball. Time has taken its toll.” Time’s toll was indisputable, the rest premature. For all his strength on the fields of play, Jim’s interior dialogue was a churning river of uncertainty and longing for something just out of reach—and occasionally his angst burst into the open as a declaration that he was retiring. And then, inevitably, he would return to what he knew, to the world of sports.
