Path lit by lightning, p.64
Path Lit by Lightning, page 64
The eventual elimination of strict amateur rules seemed inevitable in the post-Brundage period. Part of it had to do with so many blatant examples of athletes being punished for trivialities, such as when the great hurdler Lee Calhoun was suspended in 1958 for appearing with his wife as newlyweds on the television show Bride and Groom, an act said to violate General Rule VII, Section 1D forbidding athletes from “capitalizing on their athletic fame.” Part of it had to do with the uneven international playing field Brundage had tried to ignore—the reality that athletes in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations had been professionals all along, funded by the state in service of Cold War bragging rights. And part of it had to do with a larger cultural shift in the 1960s and 1970s away from the archaic sensibility of elitist old boys competing for the pure love of sport, blissfully unconcerned with the economic necessities of most athletes. But if change was coming, it was at a glacial pace. It was not until 1973 that Olympic athletes were finally allowed to accept aid for training. Soon thereafter the amateur requirement was stricken from the Olympic charter, but the deletion was Pyrrhic; nothing was modified in the Olympic rule book.
The movement to restore Thorpe’s medals waned and waxed year by year. As Patsy’s health declined, her role as Jim’s promoter diminished, but there was no shortage of others to take up the mission. Jim’s children, sportswriters, biographers, fraternal organizations, politicians—every few years someone would resuscitate the cause. The first step toward restoration came when the AAU changed course and retroactively recognized Thorpe’s amateur status. The move led President Richard Nixon to declare Jim Thorpe Day on April 16, 1973, saying that “millions of young people who aspire to great achievements transcending a disadvantaged background continue to take heart from Jim Thorpe’s example.” Two years later, after Patsy died in Hesperia, California, at age seventy-seven, the movement regained momentum in Washington. Grace Thorpe was working on Capitol Hill in 1975 as an intern in the office of James G. Abourezk, a Democratic senator from South Dakota and chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. At the urging of Grace and her siblings, Abourezk cosponsored a Senate resolution calling on the IOC to follow the AAU’s lead and restore Thorpe’s amateur status. Grace saw it as the first move in a two-step process that eventually would lead to the return of his medals. First clear his name, then restore his Olympic achievements.
In tandem with the Senate resolution came another endorsement from the White House, this time a letter from President Gerald R. Ford to Brundage’s successor at the IOC, Michael Morris of the United Kingdom, known by the title Lord Killanin. “To Americans of Indian heritage, Mr. Thorpe… is a hero, and in the American Indian’s struggle for human dignity and freedom, Jim Thorpe represents a man who was able to contribute significantly to American society while retaining the values of his cultural ties with the past,” Ford wrote. “For this reason, I urge your committee to consider the AAU’s request.” Ford, who excelled as a football center at the University of Michigan, said he was writing as a private citizen “with a lifetime interest in sports.” He hoped the IOC would “act with a sense of equity in the light of history and the contribution that Jim Thorpe has made to the world of sports.”
Still, the old guard resisted. When Jack Thorpe took the cause to Montreal during the 1976 Olympics, the IOC executive committee placed the question on its agenda but swiftly tabled the matter. The Thorpe children felt demoralized, but the campaign continued. More petition drives, more newspaper columns, more statements of support from fraternal and business organizations in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, more support from the White House (now from the administration of Jimmy Carter), more letters by the bagful from schoolchildren around the country. Still nothing but dismissiveness from the Olympic powers that be. When sixth-grade students at Little Axe Elementary School in Norman, Oklahoma, conducted a letter-writing campaign, Robert Paul, longtime director of communications for the United States Olympic Committee, wrote back with responses that seemed jarringly disproportionate in their biting sarcasm to the young audience he was addressing.
To Autumn Colwell he wrote: “Really, Autumn, the medals are not part of the rich heritage of your state or the Sac and Fox tribe. Mr. Thorpe had left Oklahoma by then and the medals were ill-gotten.”
To Belinda Thornhill he replied: “May I ask you, Belinda, if you win a prize and disobey the rules of the contest would you consider that you had won the prize fair and square? That is what you are faced with in judging Mr. Thorpe.”
And to James Ray: “I have promised other members of your class that I shall never enter the state of Oklahoma because of statements which I made based on facts that were not acceptable to the members of your school.”
Finally, in the early 1980s, the resistance broke. A combination of the relentless efforts of Jim’s supporters, a change in leadership in the Olympic movement, and the imminent return of the games to Los Angeles made the difference. When the long-sought victory arrived, even though it turned out to be partial, there was considerable jockeying for credit. All seven Thorpe children played roles, even as disagreements arose among them and Charlotte in particular felt she was unfairly overshadowed. Robert Wheeler, Thorpe’s first biographer, and his wife, sociologist Florence Ridlon, were tireless once they turned from chroniclers of the Thorpe saga to promoters of the cause, forming another Thorpe foundation and bringing aboard a roster of luminaries, including House Speaker Tip O’Neill; decathlete Rafer Johnson, who assumed Thorpe’s title as the greatest athlete in the world at the Rome 1960 Olympics; and Billy Mills, the long-distance runner from the Oglala Sioux Nation who stunned the world by winning the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.
The role that Wheeler and Ridlon played was vital and should not be undervalued. But it can also be noted that the one decisive legal argument they were said to have unearthed serendipitously while researching at the Library of Congress—an Olympic bylaw that said any protest regarding a contestant on the grounds of professionalism had to be filed within thirty days of the prizes—was nothing new. It was something that Swedish authorities and the New York Times correspondent in Stockholm had made abundantly clear as soon as the controversy broke in 1913. As the Times reported then, the Swedes’ first response was to say that it was too late to strip Thorpe of his medals because 180 days had passed by the time his pro baseball history was exposed.
The revelation of that long-ignored rule nonetheless added legal weight to the moral and common-sensical arguments in Thorpe’s favor. In quick succession, Congress passed a concurrent resolution calling on the IOC to recognize Thorpe’s records and return his medals, and William E. Simon, the former treasury secretary under Nixon who had become chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, felt he had enough ammunition to persuade the IOC executive board, now led by president Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, to change its position. On October 12, 1982, Olympic authorities restored Jim’s amateur status and scheduled a ceremony at which his children would be presented with the medals.
That moment arrived on January 18, 1983, at the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, seventy years to the month after Jim had been stripped of his medals. Samaranch was there with a cavalcade of Olympic officials. Six of the seven Thorpe children came along with more than thirty grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whose high-pitched whoops of appreciation during the event seemed to startle the executive suits in the room. For all of Jim’s troubles—his struggles with alcohol, his nomadic lifestyle, his Sisyphean cycle of finding and losing jobs, his bad luck and mistreatment, his dysfunctional marriages, his time away from his sons and daughters when they were young—the Thorpe family did not wither but thrived from one generation to the next, producing military officers, government workers, college graduates, and Native American activists.
Carl Phillip retired as a lieutenant colonel who had served in the South Pacific during World War II, then Korea and Vietnam before earning a business degree from Maryland. Bill, another veteran, worked in the aircraft industry. Gail worked for the Girl Scouts of America, obtained a master’s degree in tribal management, and helped shape Indian policy in Washington. Charlotte devoted herself to her father’s cause, considering it emblematic of the larger mistreatment of Native people. Grace led the life of an activist, getting her start during the occupation of Alcatraz Island in late 1969, when she served as a publicist and negotiator for the American Indian protestors, a sensibility she passed along to her children and grandchildren. And Jack returned fully to his roots. As chief of the Sac and Fox Nation, he entered the Biltmore Hotel in a flowing headdress and the ceremonial regalia of his father’s Thunder Clan. In the arc of the Thorpe story, as great as Jim’s athletic achievements were, the productive if occasionally quarrelsome family he and his first two wives, Iva and Freeda, left behind was also an impressive legacy.
As it unfolded, the Los Angeles ceremony provoked a range of emotions. First came a sense of relief. Jack Thorpe said their hearts were overflowing with joy, that the spirit of his father was looking down on them, and that this marked “one of the first times in the history of the United States that an Indian has his honors restored to him.” But there was also an unshakable sense of disappointment, as Bill Thorpe put it, that “this couldn’t have been done thirty years ago.” Burt Lancaster shared that sentiment, saying he “felt a certain cynicism that he didn’t get it before. What does it mean now? There is a feeling of bitterness that it didn’t get done in its own time.”
The disappointment intensified as the hollowness of the gesture set in. The family did not receive Jim’s old medals. After seven decades, they were missing. In their place, gold vermeil duplicates were cast from the original mold at the Swedish foundry. And the two trophies Jim had won and returned—the grand bronze pentathlon bust and silver decathlon Viking ship—were not part of the restoration. They remained at the Olympic headquarters in Switzerland. But the medals and trophies were only symbols of what Jim had achieved. Of more lasting importance would have been the acknowledgment of him as the clear winner in Stockholm and a rewriting of the official record to establish that fact. Instead, the IOC declared him cochampion with the athletes who finished second, Ferdinand Bie of Norway and Hugo Wieslander of Sweden, the runners-up who had been named gold medalists when Jim was disqualified. And even his status as cochampion was devalued when the IOC refused to modify the official report of the games, meaning that his record-smashing performances in the ten decathlon and five pentathlon events are missing from the documentation. As sportswriter and author Sally Jenkins, an astute and fierce critic of Olympic hypocrisy, later noted: “It made him an asterisk, not a champion. It was lip service, not restitution.”
The campaign to restore the records would resume in the first decades of the twenty-first century, still without resolution, another dream deferred.
* * *
MOST OF WHAT Patsy promised would happen in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, never materialized. The Jim Thorpe Heart and Cancer Hospital never came close to being built. It was proposed as a $10 million facility, but by the time Bert Bell, the foundation chairman, died of a heart attack while watching the Eagles play the Steelers at Franklin Field in 1959, they had raised about a thousand dollars. So much for that. No stadium named for Jim Thorpe either, and no recreation center or industrial park or college. Patsy had told the townsfolk that she loved the place so much she might move there and run a tepee-themed hotel, but she never did, nor did she finish her book about Jim. The Pro Football Hall of Fame opened in 1963, but it was located in Canton, not the town renamed for the hall’s first iconic figure, though the fact that Jim played for the Canton Bulldogs and was there at the creation of the NFL was a key reason the Ohio site was chosen. (At the ceremonies in Canton that year, Thorpe was inducted into the inaugural Hall of Fame class, the brightest star of the first seventeen.)
What, if anything, did the river-split town in the hills of Pennsylvania end up with—besides the merger of the Chunks and the name change? A small park with a shrine to Jim Thorpe, including a twenty-ton gravestone made of Minnesota red granite, perched on a grassy slope on the east side of the Lehigh River just off State Road 903, a truck route wending through a neighborhood of ranch houses, pickup trucks, and a vocational school on the way out of town. The vault holding Jim’s bones was dedicated on May 30, 1957, surrounded by a finely crafted sculpture garden of Jim toting a football and throwing a discus with markers that outlined the story of his fabled career. Here one could read about the famous line from the king of Sweden calling Jim the greatest athlete in the world, as well as an account of his records in the pentathlon and decathlon and his All-American football days at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and his career in major league baseball. All waiting for a stream of visitors that never came in the numbers he deserved.
Jim was no Ozymandias. He never demanded attention as an arrogant king of kings. At the moment of his greatest acclaim, after his triumph in Stockholm, when he was placed at the head of a jubilant parade down Fifth Avenue in New York and was hailed by the multitudes and showered with confetti, he pulled his hat down low over his face and pinched his knees together as though he wanted nothing to do with fame. And now it came to this, a roadside shrine in the distant hills, not neglected but mostly forgotten as soon as it was built. It was not Shelley’s “colossal wreck, boundless and bare,” where “lone and level sands stretch far away,” but it stood as a misplaced if not melancholy reminder that all of life’s wonders diminish and decay.
The Scranton newspaper’s warning that the citizens of Jim Thorpe might come to regret the town’s name change proved prescient. By 1963, after it became obvious that none of Patsy’s grand plans were to be realized, a noisy faction of locals known as Chunkers started petitioning for reversion to the old name. Chunkers versus Thorpians. The question was put to a public vote two consecutive years, 1964 and 1965, and both times the Thorpians narrowly prevailed, though the Chunker sentiment persisted in a low grumble for years. In 1970, Detroit News columnist Pete Waldmeir came to town and interviewed a disgruntled retired police sergeant named Fred Kemmerle. “It was a confidence job that’s all it was,” said the old cop. “Thorpe’s wife came in here with a song and dance and we fell for it.”
Gene Kilroy, who was Muhammad Ali’s business manager, recalled the April day in 1974 when he and Ali hopped into Kilroy’s blue and white Cadillac after the champ’s morning road work and drove over to see the Thorpe memorial from nearby Deer Lake, where Ali was training for his heavyweight bout in Zaire with George Foreman, the “Rumble in the Jungle.” “We drive up and see the big pink monument on the side of the road and Ali gets out and looks at it against the mountains in the background and says, ‘Jim Thorpe can finally rest now.’ And as we’re standing there this couple pulls up and gets out of their car because they recognize Ali, the most recognizable person in the world, and they say, ‘Oh my God, it’s Muhammad Ali, thank you for coming,’ and he says, ‘Yeah, I just came to visit Jim Thorpe,’ and they say, ‘We paid thousands of dollars for this and no one comes here and all we got is a dead Indian.’ We get in the car and there is dead silence. Finally, Ali says, ‘Man, Poor Jim Thorpe. Even in death he can’t rest in peace. That’s how life is: yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery.’ ”
By the early 1980s, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, had undergone a revival as a quaint Poconos resort for mountain bikers, hikers, whitewater rafters, and weekend antiques browsers—and the script flipped. The debate was no longer so much about the name, but about the bones. Jim’s sons wanted to return him to Sac and Fox country and raised the issue more frequently. “Now if we can only bring my father’s body back to Oklahoma, his spirit will finally have peace,” Jack Thorpe said as he left the Biltmore Hotel on that January day in 1983 when he and his siblings received the replica Olympic medals. Jack visited Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, several times to make the case for repatriation, not as a demand but as a polite request. Nothing against the town, he said. He was just trying to respect his father’s wishes. No dice, responded civic leaders. When Olinka Hrdy, a well-known artist from Prague, Oklahoma, within a few miles of where Jim was born, sent the community a thousand dollars hoping to prompt the repatriation of Jim’s bones, the city council voted not to keep her check.
The Thorpe sisters, who never shared their brothers’ negative feelings about stepmother Patsy, came to accept the location of the gravestone, as did their descendants. Charlotte had been there from the beginning, accompanying Patsy to the Chunks when she first made the deal in the late winter of 1954. Gail and Grace, with their histories as American Indian activists, eventually accommodated conflicting impulses by conducting spiritual ceremonies at the site complete with dirt from the Sac and Fox reservation. Jim’s soul was rested, they said. The debate ebbed and flowed. At times the brothers seemed resigned to their father’s unlikely resting place, just as they had once felt resigned to the idea that the Olympic wrongs would never be righted. Then, in 2010, feeling the mortality of his generation of Thorpes, Jack decided that if action was not taken then it would never happen. He went to federal court and sued to bring his father home.
