February 6, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the story of Jim Thorpe, the Carlisle Indian football team, and the making of modern football.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on the show.
And one of our favorites, oh, one of your favorite
subject America's favorite subjects is sports. In the year two thousand,
a poll was conducted by ABC Sports recognizing the greatest
athlete of the twentieth century. The winner was not a
(00:30):
man named Ali or Ruth, Jesse Owens, Wayne Gretzky, Jack Nicholas,
or even Michael Jordan, but a man today we have
never heard of most of us, an Indian from Oklahoma
named Jim Thorpe. Here to tell the story is Sally
Jenkins and Steve Shankin. Sally is a veteran sports writer
for The Washington Post. She wrote The Real All Americans,
(00:52):
the national bestseller about Jim Thorpe. Shankin is a three
time National Book Award finalist and the author of Undefeated
Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team. Here's Sally
and Steve, beginning with Sally telling us why she wrote
a book about Jim Thorpe.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, he's the greatest athlete who ever lived. He's been
named the athlete of the century. I think he probably
is the greatest athlete ever. He was a two time
gold medalist at the nineteen twelve Olympics in Oslo, and
really his claim to fame is that he's greatest all
around athlete this country ever produced. He ended up at
(01:31):
Carlo all the way, so many of the kids ended
up at Carlisle. He was essentially sent away to boarding
school by his parents. His father was a bootlegger and
kind of a rowdy hiring thorpe. His mother died when
he was fairly young, so his father really shipped him off.
Carlisle is in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is right near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
(01:52):
Carlisle's founded in eighteen seventy nine, just three years after
a little Big Horn. There was still a lot of
tension and unrest on a lot of the Reserva, and
so one of the things that the US government and
the US Army decided to do was rather than fight Indians.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
They decided to try to educate them.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And so they decided to fight a smaller, more subtle
war against American Indians in the name of civilizing them
and absorbing them into American society. Carlisle was the brainchild
of Richard Henry Pratt, who was a tough, gallant US
cavalry officer who served in Indian Territory which is now
Oklahoma for about eight years.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
He actually fought in the Indian Wars.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
He fought in the Civil War quite gallantly, had two
horses shot out from underneath them at Chickamauga. He then
goes out to Indian Territory where he basically fights these
very difficult, very arduous series of campaigns.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
General Sherman called.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Indian and he said, Indian fighting is the hardest kind
of war. It was a guerrilla war, as you know,
It was an insurgency in some respects. It was in
difficult terrain. Pratt is affected by these campaigns in two ways.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It toughens him.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It also, however, it gave him an enormous amount of
compassion and sympathy for the tribes that he was fighting against.
He actually he was an abolitionist, and he was a
literalist who believed that the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence meant what it said. He had a lot of faults,
but he also believed in total equality. He did not
(03:20):
believe in racial inferiority in any shape or form. And
he really believed that Indians were every bit inch the
equal of white men, and so he went to the government.
He went to Carl Schurtz, he went to Ulysses S. Grant,
and he said, let me have a school, and let
me take the children of some of these combatants, and
(03:40):
let me take them back east, and let me show
you what I can do with them.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Let me show you how I can turn I can prove.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
That an Indian boy or girl is the equal of
a white boy or girl. There are moments when I
find him truly inspiring, and there are moments when I go,
hey was an unthinkably cruel All I can tell you
is that he is a very American. He represents what
this country was in the eighteen eighties, and so you
(04:06):
have to stare very hard at him and try to
understand who he was. And if you love your country,
you have to love your country for its faults and
its flaws. And Pratt, to me, sums up some of
the mixed feelings we can often have about the history
of this country and all of our legacies.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
They rebel against this experience in.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
A number of ways, and one of the ways in
which they rebelt was to start playing football and to
start proving that they could whip white boys on the
football field. And that's where this incredibly inventive Carlisle football
program comes from. They began taking this a distinctly new
American game played by Harvard Princeton and Yale and began
(04:45):
playing it in their own way. It was faster, fleeter,
more inventive. They tended to be smaller than these hulking,
chop fed Yale boys. They had to find a different
way to win because they couldn't take on.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
These Ivy League boys. Had to have.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Football in the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties especially,
was a dull, brutal game.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
The game was just unrecognizable and first there were twenty
five men on the field at once, and it was
whittled down eventually to eleven. But there weren't many rules
and there was no creativity at all. It was two
walls of humanity running into each other. Basically every play
was the same, so no passing is allowed, and every
play is a running play. The quarterback either keeps it
or hands it to somebody, and then the two sides
(05:29):
just ram into each other and eventually the guy with
the ball.
Speaker 5 (05:32):
Gets knocked down.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
But in those days that wasn't even the end of
the play, because the guy with the ball might be
squirming forward underneath the pile, and guys would just be
punching each other and gouging each other's eyes, and there
was no fifteen yard penalty for roughness or anything like
that in those days.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
As a result, just much more violent.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
The injuries were much more serious, head and neck injuries
and deaths. In nineteen oh seven, the big thing that
happened then passing was finally legalized. And the reason is
that people were dying. So many kids died playing football
up to eighteen in one year that colleges started banning football,
(06:13):
and there was a huge movement nationally to ban the game.
Teddy Roosevelt, as president, was a big football fan and
he wanted to save the game. This is how the
NCAA was formed. Actually, the colleges got together. He urged
the leaders of the elite universities to get together and said,
you guys, get.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
You guys, better make a plan or this game is
going to be gone.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
And so they got together and formed this organization and
rewrote the rules of football. And the big change that
they made was to allow the forward pass. And the
reason they did is because it would make the game
spread out a little bit and be a little more
creative and not these giant walls of humanity hopefully and
fewer injuries.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
And that was the goal and it did work.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
And Carlisle and Pop Warner where they were some of
the first people to realize the potential.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you've been listening to Sally Jenkins and Steve Shankin
tell the story of Jim Thorpe and in their own way,
tell the story of America and tell the story of
modern football and how it came to be. When we
come back more of the story of Jim Thorpe here
on our American Stories.
Speaker 5 (07:31):
Folks, if you love the great.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
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(07:53):
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our
American Stories and our storytellers, Steve Shenkin and Sally Jenkins
(08:15):
telling us the story of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle
Indian football team.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
And really the first high profile game where the forward
pass made a big difference and just so literally changed
the game of football forever was that year in nineteen
oh seven when Carlisle visits Philadelphia plays at the University
of Pennsylvania. Has huge underdogs as always when you go
into a school like that, and they uncourked these passing
(08:43):
plays right, I mean right off the bat, it just
blew everybody's mind.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
I mean, they crushed penn that day.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
And in those days, when you set your sights up
being the best team in the country, it didn't mean
playing Alabama and Clemson. It meant playing Harvard, Yale, Princeton
and the University of Pennsylvania. If you look at the
list of national champions in college football, those four teams,
the Big Four as they were called, they have at
(09:12):
least the first thirty. I don't know what the exact numbers.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
Look it up.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
So Carlile's goal was to start playing the Big Four,
of course on the road, and Pratt thought that was
at first absurd because how could they possibly compete, And
it was impossible. What they set out to do was
impossible to become the best team in the country, and
yet they did.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And so they began to play hide the football.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
They invented the reverse, they invented the forward pass, they
invented the trick play. They started running around teams instead
of through them. So they were very fleet, very agile,
and highly experimental, and they loved playing football that way.
They loved putting their own stamp on the game Carlisle football.
Every time now you watch a quarterback in a shotgun
formation in the NFL, every time you watch the ball
(09:57):
go airborne, anytime you watch the ball go around in
on a reverse, a debt is olde to the Carlisle Indians.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yeah, somehow the history books got messed up where Notre
Dame had this game where they passed the ball.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
And this is where the forward pass began.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
I've seen this in books too, and I guess they
have such a big fan basis is what people want
to hear, but it's just completely wrong. Anyone who goes
back and looks at the box scores and the articles
about games, and there was that years before that. It
was Carlisle, in fact, to revolutionize the game with their
forward passing, especially in nineteen oh seven at the University
of Pennsylvania. And not only that, they would run what
(10:35):
we'd call a no huddle offense. I mean, this is
just it was devastating that it was also brand new.
They would call their plays at the line of scrimmage
and the defense just couldn't get set. They couldn't even
catch their breath between plays, and so everything that makes
the game exciting, these guys were doing it one hundred
plus years ago.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Pop Borner comes into the Carlisle story in eight teen
ninety eight, and he stays there until about nineteen thirteen.
So with one brief absence, he goes back to Cornell,
which was his alma mater for a couple of seasons.
He craved the approval of the IVS and was always
sort of chafing at the idea that he was coaching
at this school that wasn't an Ivy League school. But
(11:20):
Pop Warner was a meeting of minds with his carl
Out players. He had a very inventive mind and he
arrived at this school where these kids wanted to play
a different brand of football, and together they create the
game that we watched today. But even Pop Warner couldn't
really control his players to the degree that he wanted to.
Coaches weren't allowed to call plays from the sidelines back
(11:40):
in those days. Coaches could prepare teams for the game,
but then once they sent them on to the field,
the players called their own plays, and Warner, an account
after account in his own memoirs, talks about his frustration
standing there on the sideline and watching these Indian kids
run the plays that they wanted to play rather than
plays that he would tell them to play. He was
constantly fighting with his own players. Jim Thorpe was one
(12:03):
of the players who frustrated him. Thorpe literally said to
Pop Warner one day. Warner was trying to get Thorpe
to run up the middle of the field, and he said, Pop,
why should I run through them when I can run
around him.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Thorpe arrives there early at nineteen oh six.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
He comes in as a woebegone underweight boy of about
sixteen years old who has just lost his mother who
died in childbirth, and his father dies within his first
six months at the school, he's effectively orphaned by the
age of sixteen when he's at Carlisle.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Yeah, Thorpe is always just a natural athlete. He spent
his childhood outside running around at first with his young brother.
They would do these free form obstacle course marathons, or
they would run a few miles, climb trees, swim a river,
and Jim was just unbeatable at anything like that right
from a young age, even before he played any kind
(12:58):
of organized sports. And so when he showed up a
Carlisle and he was walking across campus one day and
saw the track team practicing the high jump and the
athletes couldn't jump over this bar which was about six
feet high, and Jim was in his overalls and work boots,
and he said, hey, let me give it a try.
And they kind of laughed at him because who was
(13:18):
this skinny kid who wasn't on any team. And Jim
wasn't the kind of guy who's going to trash talk you,
but he's also wasn't going to ever back away from
a challenge. But he just jumped over it like it
was nothing, picked up his stuff and walked away, and
it was the next day that the coach of the
track team happened to be this guy named Pop Warner
who he was also the coach of the football team too,
(13:40):
but he recruited Jim for the track team. But after
he joined the track team and did very well there
just basically every week he would set a new record
for the school in running and jumping. Probably my favorite
story from the early part of his rise as a
football player was the tryout scene. It's so cinematic. This
is how you would start a movie. Is that the
(14:03):
football team was practicing. This is nineteen oh seven now,
and Carlisle is already a really good team, a top
ten team, and there were top ten rankings in those days,
and they were and they would play the hardest schedule
by far, because they played everybody good, and they played
all their games. They're big games on the road. And
so Pop Warner and his team are gearing up for
(14:23):
another really tough, brutal season of games, and Jim walks
onto the football field and says, I want to play football.
Pop's got the cigarette dangling out of the corner of
his mouth, cursing up his storm. You know, just a
classic football coach image, and he gets Jim, get out
of here. We don't need you, we don't want you. Basically,
(14:43):
you'll die playing football. You're too skinny. He was still
really really thin. And Jim again, he's not going to
talk back to you, but he's not going to take
no for an answer.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
So he just said.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
He just kept saying, I'm going to play. I want
to play. Give me a chance. And Pop even truly said,
all right, here's what we'll do. Well, you can help
us with a drill. It's called tackling practice. You stand
at one goal line with the ball and everybody will
tackle you. And this just makes such a beautiful scene
because if you're a football fan, you could see it.
(15:17):
Here's this kid's standing there at one end. The rest
of the team is kind of laughing at him. They
like him, but he has no business being out there.
And the Pop blows his whistle and they all charge
it Jim, And in that moment, that beautiful moment, Jim
reveals this combination of speed and agility and power that
(15:40):
had never existed in a football player all at once.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Before he fakes.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Out some guys, he stiff arms some guys, he sees
a yard of daylight and he's just gone. He turns
on his sprinter speed and he's just gone. And of
course Pop said, all right, that was just you guys
weren't trying. Let's do that again, and Jim does the
exact same thing again, and so yeah, of course now
he's on the team.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
He played five different positions, I mean, the great One
of the reasons why Thorpe is the greatest football player
who ever lived is because he was the greatest halfback
on the field. He could throw the ball, he was
the best defender on the field. He played the equivalent
of the cornerback position today. He was a terrific blocker,
and he just was really far and away the greatest
(16:24):
drop kicker who ever lived. Also, and so you really
never knew where he was going to be on the field.
He could do anything and everything, and he did it
better than anybody else. And he played both ways, on
offense and defense.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Jim really came into his own in nineteen eleven and
nineteen twelve. Those two seasons were the high point of
his career, end of Carlisle's career, where they really became
just undoubtedly the best team in the country. Those two seasons,
he gained over two thousand yards rushing each of those years.
He personally scored more points than most teams because he
(16:56):
was oh he was their field goalkicker too.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
I should point that out. He was there and their
place kicker.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
So he was scoring more than just about every other
team in the country just by himself. There's just nobody
like him. Like I said, there was never a player
with that combination. You know, you're either fast or you're
really strong. You just don't see that combination. Some people
will remember Bo Jackson and had that combination. We just
(17:24):
don't see that combination of speed and agility and power
all in one player. And Jim was the original Bo Jackson.
He was the original guy who could do anything. And
he did like bow he played other sports. He ended
up being a professional baseball player, and he could do anything.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And you're listening to our American Stories and the story
of Jim Thorpe. When we come back more of the
remarkable story of Jim Thorpe here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American stories into our storytellers
(18:12):
Steve Shankin and Sally Jenkins, both telling us the story
of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian football team.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
YEI there are the stories are legend of how many
amazing plays that Jim did, Jim made, and they're credible
because you know, these were eyewitness accounts by sportswriters, not
stuff that someone said at a banquet fifty years later.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
And so I went.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
I spent a lot of time reading articles. It was
the closest there's no ESPN. You know, there's no highlight reel.
So you go back and look at articles from people
who were there when they would go to Georgetown, Pittsburgh, Syracuse,
all you know, just criss crossing they went. I played
a game against the University of California. They played anywhere,
they'll take out anyone. And there was a game that
(18:56):
was at Pittsburgh where and this was another rule change.
But in those days, punt was a live ball, you know,
like a kickoff, So it wasn't that someone had to
touch the ball. It was just anybody's ball as soon
as you punted. And Jim got this idea that he
was the punter.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
Of course, because why not.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
He did everything that if he kicked it high enough
he could catch it himself. And he did it in
this game in front of this the whole stadium of player.
So it became another one of his incredible famous plays
where he kicked this high booming punt sprints down the
field because he's also the fastest guy in the sport,
(19:34):
and this poor receiver is just kind of standing there
making his arms into a basket waiting for the ball
to come down, and Jim just leaped over him, caught
the ball and just rambled at that point there's no
one in front of him into the end zone for
a touchdown. And it was the kind of thing that
he would do in every game there was some kind
of highlight reel play that it's of course it's film
(19:55):
was in its very very early days, but there's no
film at all of the Carlisle team in action, which
is such a shame because we could picture it. Any
football fan could picture these kind of plays, but it's
just priceless stuff. It would be so cool to see
some of these plays in action.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Audience responses to Carlisle are fascinating. Carlisle went to the
Polo Grounds in New York in eighteen ninety six to
play a YMCA team, and the first big crowd to
come out to watch Carlisle play football, really expects to
see something like a Wild West show. There was a
great deal of coverage of Carlisle by the New York
newspapers or the Philadelphia newspapers and the Boston newspapers. Carlisle
(20:34):
was a novelty to a lot of these early football audiences.
And the audience is somewhat disappointed when this team of
neatly shorn boys in sweaters runs out onto the field
and they look like In fact, there's a comment from
a young woman sitting in the grandstand at the Polo
Grounds in eighteen ninety five, she's disappointed and she says,
why they don't look any different from our boys? And
(20:56):
those first audiences would war whoop when they ran onto
the field and make tomahawking, and it really really didn't
view them as people or as students. They viewed them
as artifacts. Almost That changes very quickly by eighteen ninety six,
Carlo comes back to the Polo Grounds and by then
they've really kind of charmed the country with this innovative
brand of football that they're trying to play, and they
(21:17):
come back to the Polo Grounds in eighteen ninety six
to play Yale, and they play Yale an epic game.
In eighteen ninety six, Carlisle did something that no other
school had ever done. They scheduled Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Penn,
the fourth Ivy League power in succession. No one had
ever tried to play all four of those teams in
the same year, much less in a row in the
(21:39):
space of four to five weeks. Football was an absolutely
lethal game at the time. There were deaths on the
field all the time because of dangerous power formations called
the flying wedge. It was actually dangerous to try to
play these big, massive, hard hitting teams all in a row.
And here was this little plucky boarding school with just
(21:59):
a few hundreds students between the ages of twelve and
twenty five, trying to take on these massive national football powers.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Well, Carlisle almost.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Beats Princeton and then comes and plays Yale at the
Pologrounds in eighteen ninety six and scores a touchdown that
would have won the game against Yale, only it's called
back by an official who happened to have gone to Yale,
and the next day the New York World, which was
Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, which had a really great sports section
(22:30):
that I spent a lot.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Of time reading.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
They wrote that Carlisle could beat eleven Yale men, but
they couldn't beat eleven Yale men and a Yale referee.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Well, at that.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Game, the audience becomes really so enchanted by the Carlisle
team and what a great, courageous game they play, that
they are incensed when this touchdown is called back in
the boo for several minutes. It incensed the crowd. It
incensed every newspaper in New York, which then conducts a
long press campaign over the next few weeks, basically singing
(23:00):
car aloles praises and vaulting them into national prominence. So
even though they lost that game, they won something in
the larger context. It really humanized the Carlisle football teams.
Two American readers and American audiences. Pratt understood this. Pratt
was at the game and was as infuriated as anybody
by this referees' decision his team. He is, he's watching
(23:21):
the game. He sees that his team. Pratt sees they're
about to walk off the field. They're so outraged he runs,
He gets out of his seat and he runs through
the grandstanding across the field and he stops him, and
he says, don't leave the field. You've got to come
back onto the field. Don't you understand that if you
leave the field, they'll call you quitters, and you've got
to go back out there, and you've got to make
(23:43):
a record for your race. You're going to lose this game,
but you're going to win something greater if you'll go
back out there and play like gentlemen. And the team
goes back on the field and they do exactly that,
and the effect is exactly what Pratt predicted. Pratt said,
don't you understand that if when they cheapshot you were,
if you retaliate, they'll say, see, that's the savage in them,
(24:03):
that's the Indian in them. He said, you've got to
overturn all those stereotypes and prove them wrong. And so
Carlile Football, in some sense, was really an exercise in
eroding stereotypes. Pratt knew that, and so did the players.
They were always conscious, highly conscious of the racial stakes
in those games. From that game on, that eighteen ninety
six y e OL game on, there's a whole different
(24:25):
perception of Carlisle football. Now, when Carlisle starts to win
these games, which they do in about nineteen oh seven,
the press in the public turn against them, because, as
it turns out, the public loves Carlisle as a plucky
little underdog. But once Carlos becomes a dominant football team,
it made everybody incredibly nervous, and Jim Thorpe really paid
(24:45):
the price for that. Thorpe played baseball. Thorpe was a bolter.
He ran away from school on more than one occasion.
He'd get tired of the discipline and the bad meals,
and he ran away to play semi pro baseball. A
lot of IVY League athletes, to make some money in
the summer would go down south and play in the
Carolina League under assume names. Thorpe ran away from Carlisle
(25:09):
to do the same. He went down to play some
summer league baseball in which you basically made meal money.
You didn't get rich doing it. It was a way
to get out of farm work. He was sick and
tired of being farmed out to local farmers and for
slave wages, so he decided to run away and play
baseball in Carolina for a couple of summers. He tired
of that very quickly too, because he didn't make a
(25:30):
whole lot more money playing baseball than he had working
on farms. He returns to Carlisle and plays two more
seasons in nineteen eleven.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
In nineteen twelve, one of the top teams in nineteen eleven,
you could easily have argued, I would argue that they
should have been ranked number one at the end of
the year.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
You can look at the records and decide for yourself.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
I mean, I think it was one of those things
where they just played by far the hardest schedule, had
the most quality wins, and in nineteen twelve they're going
to come back and try one more time. So Jim
was on the Olympic team between those in the summer
of nineteen twelve. It came back for one more year
what would essentially be a senior year. You know, if
there had been an NFL and a draft in those days,
(26:08):
of course he would have probably left to join the NFL,
but goes back for one more year and has another
dominant two thousand yard year. Harvard had decided by this
point they'd seen enough of Jim Thorpe and Carlisle and said,
you know.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
We're not going to schedule. Don't come this year. You
know we could, We'll play other teams instead.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And you've been listening to the story of Jim Thorpe
and equally important, the Carlisle Indian School football team. When
we come back, more of this remarkable story, again a
piece of American history, but also well a piece of
college football. The NCAA, in the end is spawned because
of this, and my goodness, the beginning of the forward pass,
(26:53):
the option, the spread, and so much more. It all
happens way back in the beginning of the twentieth century.
When we return, more of this remarkable story, Jim Thorpe's
story and the story of the Carlisle Indian School football team.
Here on our American stories. And we returned to our
(27:38):
American stories. Let's return where we last left off. It
was Jim Thorpe's senior year on the Carlisle Indian football team.
The eight time national champion Harvard decided they'd seen enough
of Jim Thorpe and refused to schedule a game against
the Indians. Here's Steve Shankan and Sally Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
So the pop and the team. We're looking around for
for other really big games to play, and they ended
up scheduling a game at West Point against Army. And
that's just loaded dripping with symbolism. Obviously, you know some
of these guys, their parents, their grandparents would have fought
physically fought against the soldier's grandparents in the West and
(28:18):
so you could read a lot into the meaning of
the game. And the press certainly did. They made it
sound like this was basically another war. The players didn't
really see it that way. They of course wanted to win.
Was it was a big game for them because they
were undefeated going in and Army was a top team
they had. One of their big great players was Dwight Eisenhower.
(28:41):
Omar Bradley was also on that team. And so it's
just a showdown, you know, a classic showdown. If you
were making up a movie, you would make this up
and the audience wouldn't believe it because it's just too perfect.
The Carlisle comes in late in the year, undefeated too
West Point in the fall, and the whole country is
watching to see what's going to happen in this game.
(29:03):
But Carlois was just just a much much better team
and had way too much offense. Dwight Eisenhower was looking
forward to playing against Thorpe.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Eisenhower was a good player.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
He was, you know, borderline all American kind of talent,
and he was really looking forward to it. In fact,
he says quote, he says, I was thoroughly enjoying the
challenge that Jim was presenting on the football field. There
was no one like him in the world. And after
the game, another of the Army stars, this guy named
Leland de Vore, was asked about Thorpe and his response
(29:36):
was that Indian is the greatest player I have ever
stacked up against.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
He is superhuman, that's all. There's no stopping him.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
He was so obviously the best athlete in the country
that Pop suggested that Jim join or try out for
the Olympic team.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
In nineteen twelve.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
The Olympics were in Stockholm, and remember Jim was a
track star first before a football start. So Jim went
to an Olympic trial event and did really well, made
the team and sailed across to Sweden to join the team.
And the ship itself is really interesting. Everyone is practicing
(30:14):
and running. There was a track on the deck. People
are running around the track, there was the rifle team,
including George Patten, was shooting guns, and Thorpe did something
that just was way ahead of its time. People didn't
get it. He would sit in a chair and visualize
the events. People would say, what are you doing. He said,
I'm doing the high jump, I'm doing the long jump,
(30:36):
and people didn't get it.
Speaker 5 (30:37):
They thought he was lazy or accused him of it.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
He was, you know, Michael Jordan wouldn't do this, and
no one thought it was weird. He was meditating, he
was visualizing exactly what he was going to do, and
when he got to the Olympics in Stockholm, he did
the events that were considered in those days the biggest
events at the Olympics. To cathalon especially was the biggest
one because it has ten events and it's how you
(31:06):
determine who's the best athlete in the world. And the
Europeans had this idea that they were really better at
those kind of multi sport events that the Americans. Sure
they were good at specializing in things, but the Europeans
had the best all around athletes, and Jim just went
there and completely dominated the pentathlon and decathlon and won
(31:29):
by wide Margins.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Won gold medals in both of those.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Events, and as he did everywhere he went, he won
over the crowd. He's always spent a lot of time
hanging out with kids, signing autographs, talking to people, super
down to earth about that kind of thing. There's even
a story that when the King of Sweden reached up
to you know, put the gold medal around about Thorpe's neck,
he said, sir, you're the greatest athlete in the world,
(31:54):
and Jim simply said, thanks King, and that was kind
of that's the most that he would ever say, and
that kind of a situation. Jim was kind of on
top of the sports world in nineteen twelve as he's
leading Carlisle to another great season, and it was near
the end of the season when this huge controversy exploded.
(32:17):
Some reporters who saw him at practice recognized him as
a baseball player, as a guy who had played semi
pro baseball over the summers in the South. But the
problem was that that made him a paid athlete, and
so was he therefore ineligible for the Olympics. And this
(32:38):
became a huge controversy and a completely needless and stupid
and frankly racist one because so many Ivy League kids
did this and then competed in so called amateur track
or Olympic events with no problem. But with Jim, all
of a sudden, it was a problem that, oh, he's
a professional, he shouldn't have been at Olympics after all.
(33:01):
And this broke just at the end of the nineteen
twelve football season. He was really on top of the world,
and now all of a sudden, there's this terrible controversy
that he was ineligible for the Olympics and should therefore
return his gold medals.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
And they did.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
They took the Olympic Committee, the American Olympic Committee took
back They physically stole, went into his room and stole
his gold medals and sent them back to Europe. And
the joke was that the people, the athletes that Jin
had competed against in Sweden, didn't want them. They acknowledged
that Jim had won them. There was an athlete named
(33:43):
Hugo Wecelander from Sweden who had won the silver medal
in the decathlon. So now all of a sudden, he's
eligible for the gold and his quote was, I don't
know what your rules are in regard to amateurism, and
apparently Thorpe didn't either, But I do you know that
we met an honest competition and he beat me fairly
and decisively. I didn't win the Olympic to Catholon, Jim
(34:06):
Thorpe did. It took until the nineteen eighties, but they
eventually did acknowledge that that they were wrong and couldn't
return the medals to Jim, who wasn't living anymore, but
did give replica gold medals to his daughters.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Thorpe leaves Carlisle to play Major League Baseball. Then he
finally leaves Carlisle after this final great season of nineteen twelve.
In the midst of this scandal, and it really leads
to the closing of Carlile's doors, a lot of people
had been gathering resentment against Carlisle. The student body had
turned against their teachers and against Pratt. The Carlisle experiment
(34:43):
is really fraying in every way. Pratt had been forced
to resign by Teddy Roosevelt. He's succeeded by some true incompetence. Pratt,
whatever you may think of him, ran a tight ship
and kept the students decently fed and kept the school
in decent condition. The guys who come after him really
could have cared less about any of the about the students,
(35:04):
or about the condition of the school. The school really deteriorates,
and so the school closes its doors finally in nineteen
e eighteen to become a hospital for returning wounded from
World War One.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
If there had been professional football, that would have been
the obvious choice, but it simply didn't exist at that point.
And he was such a good athlete that even though
he wasn't a great baseball player, he was good enough
still to make a major League team, and he got
signed by a lot of teams wanted to sign him.
He ended up signing with the New York Giants. He
did hit three twenty nine when in his last year
(35:37):
in nineteen nineteen, which is very respectable obviously, but he was.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
Never a great ballplayer.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
But at the same time, finally football kind of began
to form a professional league. It began with just kind
of these locally owned teams based mostly in Ohio. They
got together to eventually make it official and form a league.
This is going back to nineteen twenty two, and so
(36:05):
Jim decided to get get in on that action. By
that point, though, he's thirty years old, so for a
running back, that's that's an old man, you know, at
that point. But he was still good. He could still
hold his own out there. But the other way he
contributed was that the NFL was nothing back then. No
one really you know, baseball was a big deal in
track and boxing. No one really knew about the NFL.
(36:27):
And so they said, the owners of these teams, mostly
businessmen in Ohio, said we need a celebrity.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
We need somebody who's gonna be our first president. This
is a good trivia.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Question if you wanna ask your friends who was the
first president of the NFL. And they asked Jim Thorpe
to do it because they knew that that name carried
that meant everything. You know, he was the greatest athlete,
the most respected athlete in the country, and so he
may have been passed his prime as a player, but
he contributed off the field as well as the as
(36:58):
the president of the league to get them going and
give them a lot of credibility as they were starting out.
He eventually died of a heart attack at a fairly
fairly young age. I feel like in the years since
he's sort of been forgotten. I remember as a kid
hearing the name and associating it with being Native American
(37:19):
and a great athlete of some kind.
Speaker 5 (37:21):
But I didn't know anything more than just those two facts.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
And so part of the reason I really wanted to
write Undefeated was to just help tell this story again
to a new generation of fans to know, you know,
especially if they're football fans, to know the history of
who helped make the game what it is.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
And a special thanks to Steve Shankin. Also a special
thanks to Sally Jenkins, and thanks as always to Greg
Hangler for getting us this great story. And my goodness,
what a story about America, American history, about college football too.
Jim Thorpe's story, the world's greatest stathlete. Here on our
American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on the show.
And one of our favorites, oh, one of your favorite
subject America's favorite subjects is sports. In the year two thousand,
a poll was conducted by ABC Sports recognizing the greatest
athlete of the twentieth century. The winner was not a
(00:30):
man named Ali or Ruth, Jesse Owens, Wayne Gretzky, Jack Nicholas,
or even Michael Jordan, but a man today we have
never heard of most of us, an Indian from Oklahoma
named Jim Thorpe. Here to tell the story is Sally
Jenkins and Steve Shankin. Sally is a veteran sports writer
for The Washington Post. She wrote The Real All Americans,
(00:52):
the national bestseller about Jim Thorpe. Shankin is a three
time National Book Award finalist and the author of Undefeated
Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team. Here's Sally
and Steve, beginning with Sally telling us why she wrote
a book about Jim Thorpe.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, he's the greatest athlete who ever lived. He's been
named the athlete of the century. I think he probably
is the greatest athlete ever. He was a two time
gold medalist at the nineteen twelve Olympics in Oslo, and
really his claim to fame is that he's greatest all
around athlete this country ever produced. He ended up at
(01:31):
Carlo all the way, so many of the kids ended
up at Carlisle. He was essentially sent away to boarding
school by his parents. His father was a bootlegger and
kind of a rowdy hiring thorpe. His mother died when
he was fairly young, so his father really shipped him off.
Carlisle is in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is right near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
(01:52):
Carlisle's founded in eighteen seventy nine, just three years after
a little Big Horn. There was still a lot of
tension and unrest on a lot of the Reserva, and
so one of the things that the US government and
the US Army decided to do was rather than fight Indians.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
They decided to try to educate them.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And so they decided to fight a smaller, more subtle
war against American Indians in the name of civilizing them
and absorbing them into American society. Carlisle was the brainchild
of Richard Henry Pratt, who was a tough, gallant US
cavalry officer who served in Indian Territory which is now
Oklahoma for about eight years.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
He actually fought in the Indian Wars.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
He fought in the Civil War quite gallantly, had two
horses shot out from underneath them at Chickamauga. He then
goes out to Indian Territory where he basically fights these
very difficult, very arduous series of campaigns.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
General Sherman called.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Indian and he said, Indian fighting is the hardest kind
of war. It was a guerrilla war, as you know,
It was an insurgency in some respects. It was in
difficult terrain. Pratt is affected by these campaigns in two ways.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It toughens him.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It also, however, it gave him an enormous amount of
compassion and sympathy for the tribes that he was fighting against.
He actually he was an abolitionist, and he was a
literalist who believed that the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence meant what it said. He had a lot of faults,
but he also believed in total equality. He did not
(03:20):
believe in racial inferiority in any shape or form. And
he really believed that Indians were every bit inch the
equal of white men, and so he went to the government.
He went to Carl Schurtz, he went to Ulysses S. Grant,
and he said, let me have a school, and let
me take the children of some of these combatants, and
(03:40):
let me take them back east, and let me show
you what I can do with them.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Let me show you how I can turn I can prove.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
That an Indian boy or girl is the equal of
a white boy or girl. There are moments when I
find him truly inspiring, and there are moments when I go,
hey was an unthinkably cruel All I can tell you
is that he is a very American. He represents what
this country was in the eighteen eighties, and so you
(04:06):
have to stare very hard at him and try to
understand who he was. And if you love your country,
you have to love your country for its faults and
its flaws. And Pratt, to me, sums up some of
the mixed feelings we can often have about the history
of this country and all of our legacies.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
They rebel against this experience in.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
A number of ways, and one of the ways in
which they rebelt was to start playing football and to
start proving that they could whip white boys on the
football field. And that's where this incredibly inventive Carlisle football
program comes from. They began taking this a distinctly new
American game played by Harvard Princeton and Yale and began
(04:45):
playing it in their own way. It was faster, fleeter,
more inventive. They tended to be smaller than these hulking,
chop fed Yale boys. They had to find a different
way to win because they couldn't take on.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
These Ivy League boys. Had to have.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Football in the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties especially,
was a dull, brutal game.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
The game was just unrecognizable and first there were twenty
five men on the field at once, and it was
whittled down eventually to eleven. But there weren't many rules
and there was no creativity at all. It was two
walls of humanity running into each other. Basically every play
was the same, so no passing is allowed, and every
play is a running play. The quarterback either keeps it
or hands it to somebody, and then the two sides
(05:29):
just ram into each other and eventually the guy with
the ball.
Speaker 5 (05:32):
Gets knocked down.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
But in those days that wasn't even the end of
the play, because the guy with the ball might be
squirming forward underneath the pile, and guys would just be
punching each other and gouging each other's eyes, and there
was no fifteen yard penalty for roughness or anything like
that in those days.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
As a result, just much more violent.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
The injuries were much more serious, head and neck injuries
and deaths. In nineteen oh seven, the big thing that
happened then passing was finally legalized. And the reason is
that people were dying. So many kids died playing football
up to eighteen in one year that colleges started banning football,
(06:13):
and there was a huge movement nationally to ban the game.
Teddy Roosevelt, as president, was a big football fan and
he wanted to save the game. This is how the
NCAA was formed. Actually, the colleges got together. He urged
the leaders of the elite universities to get together and said,
you guys, get.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
You guys, better make a plan or this game is
going to be gone.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
And so they got together and formed this organization and
rewrote the rules of football. And the big change that
they made was to allow the forward pass. And the
reason they did is because it would make the game
spread out a little bit and be a little more
creative and not these giant walls of humanity hopefully and
fewer injuries.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
And that was the goal and it did work.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
And Carlisle and Pop Warner where they were some of
the first people to realize the potential.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you've been listening to Sally Jenkins and Steve Shankin
tell the story of Jim Thorpe and in their own way,
tell the story of America and tell the story of
modern football and how it came to be. When we
come back more of the story of Jim Thorpe here
on our American Stories.
Speaker 5 (07:31):
Folks, if you love the great.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
American stories we tell and love America like we do,
we're asking you to become a part of the Our
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(07:53):
and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our
American Stories and our storytellers, Steve Shenkin and Sally Jenkins
(08:15):
telling us the story of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle
Indian football team.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
And really the first high profile game where the forward
pass made a big difference and just so literally changed
the game of football forever was that year in nineteen
oh seven when Carlisle visits Philadelphia plays at the University
of Pennsylvania. Has huge underdogs as always when you go
into a school like that, and they uncourked these passing
(08:43):
plays right, I mean right off the bat, it just
blew everybody's mind.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
I mean, they crushed penn that day.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
And in those days, when you set your sights up
being the best team in the country, it didn't mean
playing Alabama and Clemson. It meant playing Harvard, Yale, Princeton
and the University of Pennsylvania. If you look at the
list of national champions in college football, those four teams,
the Big Four as they were called, they have at
(09:12):
least the first thirty. I don't know what the exact numbers.
Speaker 5 (09:14):
Look it up.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
So Carlile's goal was to start playing the Big Four,
of course on the road, and Pratt thought that was
at first absurd because how could they possibly compete, And
it was impossible. What they set out to do was
impossible to become the best team in the country, and
yet they did.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
And so they began to play hide the football.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
They invented the reverse, they invented the forward pass, they
invented the trick play. They started running around teams instead
of through them. So they were very fleet, very agile,
and highly experimental, and they loved playing football that way.
They loved putting their own stamp on the game Carlisle football.
Every time now you watch a quarterback in a shotgun
formation in the NFL, every time you watch the ball
(09:57):
go airborne, anytime you watch the ball go around in
on a reverse, a debt is olde to the Carlisle Indians.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yeah, somehow the history books got messed up where Notre
Dame had this game where they passed the ball.
Speaker 5 (10:10):
And this is where the forward pass began.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
I've seen this in books too, and I guess they
have such a big fan basis is what people want
to hear, but it's just completely wrong. Anyone who goes
back and looks at the box scores and the articles
about games, and there was that years before that. It
was Carlisle, in fact, to revolutionize the game with their
forward passing, especially in nineteen oh seven at the University
of Pennsylvania. And not only that, they would run what
(10:35):
we'd call a no huddle offense. I mean, this is
just it was devastating that it was also brand new.
They would call their plays at the line of scrimmage
and the defense just couldn't get set. They couldn't even
catch their breath between plays, and so everything that makes
the game exciting, these guys were doing it one hundred
plus years ago.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Pop Borner comes into the Carlisle story in eight teen
ninety eight, and he stays there until about nineteen thirteen.
So with one brief absence, he goes back to Cornell,
which was his alma mater for a couple of seasons.
He craved the approval of the IVS and was always
sort of chafing at the idea that he was coaching
at this school that wasn't an Ivy League school. But
(11:20):
Pop Warner was a meeting of minds with his carl
Out players. He had a very inventive mind and he
arrived at this school where these kids wanted to play
a different brand of football, and together they create the
game that we watched today. But even Pop Warner couldn't
really control his players to the degree that he wanted to.
Coaches weren't allowed to call plays from the sidelines back
(11:40):
in those days. Coaches could prepare teams for the game,
but then once they sent them on to the field,
the players called their own plays, and Warner, an account
after account in his own memoirs, talks about his frustration
standing there on the sideline and watching these Indian kids
run the plays that they wanted to play rather than
plays that he would tell them to play. He was
constantly fighting with his own players. Jim Thorpe was one
(12:03):
of the players who frustrated him. Thorpe literally said to
Pop Warner one day. Warner was trying to get Thorpe
to run up the middle of the field, and he said, Pop,
why should I run through them when I can run
around him.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Thorpe arrives there early at nineteen oh six.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
He comes in as a woebegone underweight boy of about
sixteen years old who has just lost his mother who
died in childbirth, and his father dies within his first
six months at the school, he's effectively orphaned by the
age of sixteen when he's at Carlisle.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Yeah, Thorpe is always just a natural athlete. He spent
his childhood outside running around at first with his young brother.
They would do these free form obstacle course marathons, or
they would run a few miles, climb trees, swim a river,
and Jim was just unbeatable at anything like that right
from a young age, even before he played any kind
(12:58):
of organized sports. And so when he showed up a
Carlisle and he was walking across campus one day and
saw the track team practicing the high jump and the
athletes couldn't jump over this bar which was about six
feet high, and Jim was in his overalls and work boots,
and he said, hey, let me give it a try.
And they kind of laughed at him because who was
(13:18):
this skinny kid who wasn't on any team. And Jim
wasn't the kind of guy who's going to trash talk you,
but he's also wasn't going to ever back away from
a challenge. But he just jumped over it like it
was nothing, picked up his stuff and walked away, and
it was the next day that the coach of the
track team happened to be this guy named Pop Warner
who he was also the coach of the football team too,
(13:40):
but he recruited Jim for the track team. But after
he joined the track team and did very well there
just basically every week he would set a new record
for the school in running and jumping. Probably my favorite
story from the early part of his rise as a
football player was the tryout scene. It's so cinematic. This
is how you would start a movie. Is that the
(14:03):
football team was practicing. This is nineteen oh seven now,
and Carlisle is already a really good team, a top
ten team, and there were top ten rankings in those days,
and they were and they would play the hardest schedule
by far, because they played everybody good, and they played
all their games. They're big games on the road. And
so Pop Warner and his team are gearing up for
(14:23):
another really tough, brutal season of games, and Jim walks
onto the football field and says, I want to play football.
Pop's got the cigarette dangling out of the corner of
his mouth, cursing up his storm. You know, just a
classic football coach image, and he gets Jim, get out
of here. We don't need you, we don't want you. Basically,
(14:43):
you'll die playing football. You're too skinny. He was still
really really thin. And Jim again, he's not going to
talk back to you, but he's not going to take
no for an answer.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
So he just said.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
He just kept saying, I'm going to play. I want
to play. Give me a chance. And Pop even truly said,
all right, here's what we'll do. Well, you can help
us with a drill. It's called tackling practice. You stand
at one goal line with the ball and everybody will
tackle you. And this just makes such a beautiful scene
because if you're a football fan, you could see it.
(15:17):
Here's this kid's standing there at one end. The rest
of the team is kind of laughing at him. They
like him, but he has no business being out there.
And the Pop blows his whistle and they all charge
it Jim, And in that moment, that beautiful moment, Jim
reveals this combination of speed and agility and power that
(15:40):
had never existed in a football player all at once.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Before he fakes.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Out some guys, he stiff arms some guys, he sees
a yard of daylight and he's just gone. He turns
on his sprinter speed and he's just gone. And of
course Pop said, all right, that was just you guys
weren't trying. Let's do that again, and Jim does the
exact same thing again, and so yeah, of course now
he's on the team.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
He played five different positions, I mean, the great One
of the reasons why Thorpe is the greatest football player
who ever lived is because he was the greatest halfback
on the field. He could throw the ball, he was
the best defender on the field. He played the equivalent
of the cornerback position today. He was a terrific blocker,
and he just was really far and away the greatest
(16:24):
drop kicker who ever lived. Also, and so you really
never knew where he was going to be on the field.
He could do anything and everything, and he did it
better than anybody else. And he played both ways, on
offense and defense.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
Jim really came into his own in nineteen eleven and
nineteen twelve. Those two seasons were the high point of
his career, end of Carlisle's career, where they really became
just undoubtedly the best team in the country. Those two seasons,
he gained over two thousand yards rushing each of those years.
He personally scored more points than most teams because he
(16:56):
was oh he was their field goalkicker too.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
I should point that out. He was there and their
place kicker.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
So he was scoring more than just about every other
team in the country just by himself. There's just nobody
like him. Like I said, there was never a player
with that combination. You know, you're either fast or you're
really strong. You just don't see that combination. Some people
will remember Bo Jackson and had that combination. We just
(17:24):
don't see that combination of speed and agility and power
all in one player. And Jim was the original Bo Jackson.
He was the original guy who could do anything. And
he did like bow he played other sports. He ended
up being a professional baseball player, and he could do anything.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And you're listening to our American Stories and the story
of Jim Thorpe. When we come back more of the
remarkable story of Jim Thorpe here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American stories into our storytellers
(18:12):
Steve Shankin and Sally Jenkins, both telling us the story
of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian football team.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
YEI there are the stories are legend of how many
amazing plays that Jim did, Jim made, and they're credible
because you know, these were eyewitness accounts by sportswriters, not
stuff that someone said at a banquet fifty years later.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
And so I went.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
I spent a lot of time reading articles. It was
the closest there's no ESPN. You know, there's no highlight reel.
So you go back and look at articles from people
who were there when they would go to Georgetown, Pittsburgh, Syracuse,
all you know, just criss crossing they went. I played
a game against the University of California. They played anywhere,
they'll take out anyone. And there was a game that
(18:56):
was at Pittsburgh where and this was another rule change.
But in those days, punt was a live ball, you know,
like a kickoff, So it wasn't that someone had to
touch the ball. It was just anybody's ball as soon
as you punted. And Jim got this idea that he
was the punter.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
Of course, because why not.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
He did everything that if he kicked it high enough
he could catch it himself. And he did it in
this game in front of this the whole stadium of player.
So it became another one of his incredible famous plays
where he kicked this high booming punt sprints down the
field because he's also the fastest guy in the sport,
(19:34):
and this poor receiver is just kind of standing there
making his arms into a basket waiting for the ball
to come down, and Jim just leaped over him, caught
the ball and just rambled at that point there's no
one in front of him into the end zone for
a touchdown. And it was the kind of thing that
he would do in every game there was some kind
of highlight reel play that it's of course it's film
(19:55):
was in its very very early days, but there's no
film at all of the Carlisle team in action, which
is such a shame because we could picture it. Any
football fan could picture these kind of plays, but it's
just priceless stuff. It would be so cool to see
some of these plays in action.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Audience responses to Carlisle are fascinating. Carlisle went to the
Polo Grounds in New York in eighteen ninety six to
play a YMCA team, and the first big crowd to
come out to watch Carlisle play football, really expects to
see something like a Wild West show. There was a
great deal of coverage of Carlisle by the New York
newspapers or the Philadelphia newspapers and the Boston newspapers. Carlisle
(20:34):
was a novelty to a lot of these early football audiences.
And the audience is somewhat disappointed when this team of
neatly shorn boys in sweaters runs out onto the field
and they look like In fact, there's a comment from
a young woman sitting in the grandstand at the Polo
Grounds in eighteen ninety five, she's disappointed and she says,
why they don't look any different from our boys? And
(20:56):
those first audiences would war whoop when they ran onto
the field and make tomahawking, and it really really didn't
view them as people or as students. They viewed them
as artifacts. Almost That changes very quickly by eighteen ninety six,
Carlo comes back to the Polo Grounds and by then
they've really kind of charmed the country with this innovative
brand of football that they're trying to play, and they
(21:17):
come back to the Polo Grounds in eighteen ninety six
to play Yale, and they play Yale an epic game.
In eighteen ninety six, Carlisle did something that no other
school had ever done. They scheduled Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Penn,
the fourth Ivy League power in succession. No one had
ever tried to play all four of those teams in
the same year, much less in a row in the
(21:39):
space of four to five weeks. Football was an absolutely
lethal game at the time. There were deaths on the
field all the time because of dangerous power formations called
the flying wedge. It was actually dangerous to try to
play these big, massive, hard hitting teams all in a row.
And here was this little plucky boarding school with just
(21:59):
a few hundreds students between the ages of twelve and
twenty five, trying to take on these massive national football powers.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Well, Carlisle almost.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Beats Princeton and then comes and plays Yale at the
Pologrounds in eighteen ninety six and scores a touchdown that
would have won the game against Yale, only it's called
back by an official who happened to have gone to Yale,
and the next day the New York World, which was
Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, which had a really great sports section
(22:30):
that I spent a lot.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Of time reading.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
They wrote that Carlisle could beat eleven Yale men, but
they couldn't beat eleven Yale men and a Yale referee.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Well, at that.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Game, the audience becomes really so enchanted by the Carlisle
team and what a great, courageous game they play, that
they are incensed when this touchdown is called back in
the boo for several minutes. It incensed the crowd. It
incensed every newspaper in New York, which then conducts a
long press campaign over the next few weeks, basically singing
(23:00):
car aloles praises and vaulting them into national prominence. So
even though they lost that game, they won something in
the larger context. It really humanized the Carlisle football teams.
Two American readers and American audiences. Pratt understood this. Pratt
was at the game and was as infuriated as anybody
by this referees' decision his team. He is, he's watching
(23:21):
the game. He sees that his team. Pratt sees they're
about to walk off the field. They're so outraged he runs,
He gets out of his seat and he runs through
the grandstanding across the field and he stops him, and
he says, don't leave the field. You've got to come
back onto the field. Don't you understand that if you
leave the field, they'll call you quitters, and you've got
to go back out there, and you've got to make
(23:43):
a record for your race. You're going to lose this game,
but you're going to win something greater if you'll go
back out there and play like gentlemen. And the team
goes back on the field and they do exactly that,
and the effect is exactly what Pratt predicted. Pratt said,
don't you understand that if when they cheapshot you were,
if you retaliate, they'll say, see, that's the savage in them,
(24:03):
that's the Indian in them. He said, you've got to
overturn all those stereotypes and prove them wrong. And so
Carlile Football, in some sense, was really an exercise in
eroding stereotypes. Pratt knew that, and so did the players.
They were always conscious, highly conscious of the racial stakes
in those games. From that game on, that eighteen ninety
six y e OL game on, there's a whole different
(24:25):
perception of Carlisle football. Now, when Carlisle starts to win
these games, which they do in about nineteen oh seven,
the press in the public turn against them, because, as
it turns out, the public loves Carlisle as a plucky
little underdog. But once Carlos becomes a dominant football team,
it made everybody incredibly nervous, and Jim Thorpe really paid
(24:45):
the price for that. Thorpe played baseball. Thorpe was a bolter.
He ran away from school on more than one occasion.
He'd get tired of the discipline and the bad meals,
and he ran away to play semi pro baseball. A
lot of IVY League athletes, to make some money in
the summer would go down south and play in the
Carolina League under assume names. Thorpe ran away from Carlisle
(25:09):
to do the same. He went down to play some
summer league baseball in which you basically made meal money.
You didn't get rich doing it. It was a way
to get out of farm work. He was sick and
tired of being farmed out to local farmers and for
slave wages, so he decided to run away and play
baseball in Carolina for a couple of summers. He tired
of that very quickly too, because he didn't make a
(25:30):
whole lot more money playing baseball than he had working
on farms. He returns to Carlisle and plays two more
seasons in nineteen eleven.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
In nineteen twelve, one of the top teams in nineteen eleven,
you could easily have argued, I would argue that they
should have been ranked number one at the end of
the year.
Speaker 5 (25:46):
You can look at the records and decide for yourself.
Speaker 4 (25:48):
I mean, I think it was one of those things
where they just played by far the hardest schedule, had
the most quality wins, and in nineteen twelve they're going
to come back and try one more time. So Jim
was on the Olympic team between those in the summer
of nineteen twelve. It came back for one more year
what would essentially be a senior year. You know, if
there had been an NFL and a draft in those days,
(26:08):
of course he would have probably left to join the NFL,
but goes back for one more year and has another
dominant two thousand yard year. Harvard had decided by this
point they'd seen enough of Jim Thorpe and Carlisle and said,
you know.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
We're not going to schedule. Don't come this year. You
know we could, We'll play other teams instead.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And you've been listening to the story of Jim Thorpe
and equally important, the Carlisle Indian School football team. When
we come back, more of this remarkable story, again a
piece of American history, but also well a piece of
college football. The NCAA, in the end is spawned because
of this, and my goodness, the beginning of the forward pass,
(26:53):
the option, the spread, and so much more. It all
happens way back in the beginning of the twentieth century.
When we return, more of this remarkable story, Jim Thorpe's
story and the story of the Carlisle Indian School football team.
Here on our American stories. And we returned to our
(27:38):
American stories. Let's return where we last left off. It
was Jim Thorpe's senior year on the Carlisle Indian football team.
The eight time national champion Harvard decided they'd seen enough
of Jim Thorpe and refused to schedule a game against
the Indians. Here's Steve Shankan and Sally Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
So the pop and the team. We're looking around for
for other really big games to play, and they ended
up scheduling a game at West Point against Army. And
that's just loaded dripping with symbolism. Obviously, you know some
of these guys, their parents, their grandparents would have fought
physically fought against the soldier's grandparents in the West and
(28:18):
so you could read a lot into the meaning of
the game. And the press certainly did. They made it
sound like this was basically another war. The players didn't
really see it that way. They of course wanted to win.
Was it was a big game for them because they
were undefeated going in and Army was a top team
they had. One of their big great players was Dwight Eisenhower.
(28:41):
Omar Bradley was also on that team. And so it's
just a showdown, you know, a classic showdown. If you
were making up a movie, you would make this up
and the audience wouldn't believe it because it's just too perfect.
The Carlisle comes in late in the year, undefeated too
West Point in the fall, and the whole country is
watching to see what's going to happen in this game.
(29:03):
But Carlois was just just a much much better team
and had way too much offense. Dwight Eisenhower was looking
forward to playing against Thorpe.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Eisenhower was a good player.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
He was, you know, borderline all American kind of talent,
and he was really looking forward to it. In fact,
he says quote, he says, I was thoroughly enjoying the
challenge that Jim was presenting on the football field. There
was no one like him in the world. And after
the game, another of the Army stars, this guy named
Leland de Vore, was asked about Thorpe and his response
(29:36):
was that Indian is the greatest player I have ever
stacked up against.
Speaker 5 (29:40):
He is superhuman, that's all. There's no stopping him.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
He was so obviously the best athlete in the country
that Pop suggested that Jim join or try out for
the Olympic team.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
In nineteen twelve.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
The Olympics were in Stockholm, and remember Jim was a
track star first before a football start. So Jim went
to an Olympic trial event and did really well, made
the team and sailed across to Sweden to join the team.
And the ship itself is really interesting. Everyone is practicing
(30:14):
and running. There was a track on the deck. People
are running around the track, there was the rifle team,
including George Patten, was shooting guns, and Thorpe did something
that just was way ahead of its time. People didn't
get it. He would sit in a chair and visualize
the events. People would say, what are you doing. He said,
I'm doing the high jump, I'm doing the long jump,
(30:36):
and people didn't get it.
Speaker 5 (30:37):
They thought he was lazy or accused him of it.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
He was, you know, Michael Jordan wouldn't do this, and
no one thought it was weird. He was meditating, he
was visualizing exactly what he was going to do, and
when he got to the Olympics in Stockholm, he did
the events that were considered in those days the biggest
events at the Olympics. To cathalon especially was the biggest
one because it has ten events and it's how you
(31:06):
determine who's the best athlete in the world. And the
Europeans had this idea that they were really better at
those kind of multi sport events that the Americans. Sure
they were good at specializing in things, but the Europeans
had the best all around athletes, and Jim just went
there and completely dominated the pentathlon and decathlon and won
(31:29):
by wide Margins.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Won gold medals in both of those.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Events, and as he did everywhere he went, he won
over the crowd. He's always spent a lot of time
hanging out with kids, signing autographs, talking to people, super
down to earth about that kind of thing. There's even
a story that when the King of Sweden reached up
to you know, put the gold medal around about Thorpe's neck,
he said, sir, you're the greatest athlete in the world,
(31:54):
and Jim simply said, thanks King, and that was kind
of that's the most that he would ever say, and
that kind of a situation. Jim was kind of on
top of the sports world in nineteen twelve as he's
leading Carlisle to another great season, and it was near
the end of the season when this huge controversy exploded.
(32:17):
Some reporters who saw him at practice recognized him as
a baseball player, as a guy who had played semi
pro baseball over the summers in the South. But the
problem was that that made him a paid athlete, and
so was he therefore ineligible for the Olympics. And this
(32:38):
became a huge controversy and a completely needless and stupid
and frankly racist one because so many Ivy League kids
did this and then competed in so called amateur track
or Olympic events with no problem. But with Jim, all
of a sudden, it was a problem that, oh, he's
a professional, he shouldn't have been at Olympics after all.
(33:01):
And this broke just at the end of the nineteen
twelve football season. He was really on top of the world,
and now all of a sudden, there's this terrible controversy
that he was ineligible for the Olympics and should therefore
return his gold medals.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
And they did.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
They took the Olympic Committee, the American Olympic Committee took
back They physically stole, went into his room and stole
his gold medals and sent them back to Europe. And
the joke was that the people, the athletes that Jin
had competed against in Sweden, didn't want them. They acknowledged
that Jim had won them. There was an athlete named
(33:43):
Hugo Wecelander from Sweden who had won the silver medal
in the decathlon. So now all of a sudden, he's
eligible for the gold and his quote was, I don't
know what your rules are in regard to amateurism, and
apparently Thorpe didn't either, But I do you know that
we met an honest competition and he beat me fairly
and decisively. I didn't win the Olympic to Catholon, Jim
(34:06):
Thorpe did. It took until the nineteen eighties, but they
eventually did acknowledge that that they were wrong and couldn't
return the medals to Jim, who wasn't living anymore, but
did give replica gold medals to his daughters.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Thorpe leaves Carlisle to play Major League Baseball. Then he
finally leaves Carlisle after this final great season of nineteen twelve.
In the midst of this scandal, and it really leads
to the closing of Carlile's doors, a lot of people
had been gathering resentment against Carlisle. The student body had
turned against their teachers and against Pratt. The Carlisle experiment
(34:43):
is really fraying in every way. Pratt had been forced
to resign by Teddy Roosevelt. He's succeeded by some true incompetence. Pratt,
whatever you may think of him, ran a tight ship
and kept the students decently fed and kept the school
in decent condition. The guys who come after him really
could have cared less about any of the about the students,
(35:04):
or about the condition of the school. The school really deteriorates,
and so the school closes its doors finally in nineteen
e eighteen to become a hospital for returning wounded from
World War One.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
If there had been professional football, that would have been
the obvious choice, but it simply didn't exist at that point.
And he was such a good athlete that even though
he wasn't a great baseball player, he was good enough
still to make a major League team, and he got
signed by a lot of teams wanted to sign him.
He ended up signing with the New York Giants. He
did hit three twenty nine when in his last year
(35:37):
in nineteen nineteen, which is very respectable obviously, but he was.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
Never a great ballplayer.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
But at the same time, finally football kind of began
to form a professional league. It began with just kind
of these locally owned teams based mostly in Ohio. They
got together to eventually make it official and form a league.
This is going back to nineteen twenty two, and so
(36:05):
Jim decided to get get in on that action. By
that point, though, he's thirty years old, so for a
running back, that's that's an old man, you know, at
that point. But he was still good. He could still
hold his own out there. But the other way he
contributed was that the NFL was nothing back then. No
one really you know, baseball was a big deal in
track and boxing. No one really knew about the NFL.
(36:27):
And so they said, the owners of these teams, mostly
businessmen in Ohio, said we need a celebrity.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
We need somebody who's gonna be our first president. This
is a good trivia.
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Question if you wanna ask your friends who was the
first president of the NFL. And they asked Jim Thorpe
to do it because they knew that that name carried
that meant everything. You know, he was the greatest athlete,
the most respected athlete in the country, and so he
may have been passed his prime as a player, but
he contributed off the field as well as the as
(36:58):
the president of the league to get them going and
give them a lot of credibility as they were starting out.
He eventually died of a heart attack at a fairly
fairly young age. I feel like in the years since
he's sort of been forgotten. I remember as a kid
hearing the name and associating it with being Native American
(37:19):
and a great athlete of some kind.
Speaker 5 (37:21):
But I didn't know anything more than just those two facts.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
And so part of the reason I really wanted to
write Undefeated was to just help tell this story again
to a new generation of fans to know, you know,
especially if they're football fans, to know the history of
who helped make the game what it is.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
And a special thanks to Steve Shankin. Also a special
thanks to Sally Jenkins, and thanks as always to Greg
Hangler for getting us this great story. And my goodness,
what a story about America, American history, about college football too.
Jim Thorpe's story, the world's greatest stathlete. Here on our
American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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