On this episode of Our American Stories, in honor of Jim Thrope, who passed away this week in history in 1953, Sally Jenkins, author of The Real All-Americans, and Steve Sheinkin, author of Undefeated: Jim Thrope and the Carisle Indian School Football, tell the story of the man who changed the sporting world forever.
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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 sportswriter for
The Washington Post. She wrote The Real All Americans, the
(00:52):
national bestseller about Jim Thorpe. Shankin is a three time
National Book Award finalist and the author of Undefeated, Jim
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.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
He ended up at.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Carl A 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 him 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):
Carlos's founded in eighteen seventy nine, just three years after
a little Big Horn. It was still a lot of
tension and unrest on a lot of the reservation, and
so one of the things that the US government and
the US Army decided to do was rather than fight Indians,
they decided to try to educate them. And so they
decided to fight a smaller, more subtle war against American
(02:12):
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. General Sherman called
Indian and he said, Indian fighting is the hardest kind
of war. It was a guerrilla war, as you know.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
It was an.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
He had a lot of faults, but he also believed
in total equality.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
He did not 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 Shirts, he
went to Eulisses s. Grant, and he said, let me
have a school, and let me take the children of
some of these combatants, and let me take them back east,
(03:41):
and let me show you what I can do with them.
Let me show you how I can turn I can
prove 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.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Is that he is a very American.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
He represents what this country was in the eighteen eighties,
and so you 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.
(04:23):
They rebel against this experience in a number of ways,
and one of the ways in which they rebelled was
to start playing football and to start proving that they
could whip white.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Boys on the football field.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And that's where this incredibly inventive Carlisle football program comes from.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
They began taking.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
This a distinctly new American game played by Harvard Princeton
and Yale and began 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 these Ivy League boys.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Had to have.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Football in the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties especially,
was a dull, brutal game.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
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 gets knocked down. 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. As
(05:49):
a result, was much more violent. 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
(06:09):
one year that colleges started banning football, 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
you guys, better make a plan or this game is
(06:31):
going to be gone. 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. And that was the
(06:52):
goal and it did work. 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 Shanenkin
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. Folks, if you love the great
(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 the University of
Pennsylvania has huge underdogs as always when you go into
a school like that, and they uncorked these passing plays right,
(08:44):
I mean right off the bat. It just blew everybody's mind.
I mean they crushed penn that day. And in those days,
when you set your sights on 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
(09:06):
college football, those four teams, the Big Four as they
were called, they have at least the first thirty. I
don't know what the exact number is, look it up.
So Carlisle'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
(09:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
They loved putting their own stamp on the game Carlisle football.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Every time now you watch a quarterback in a shotgun
formation in the NFL, every time you watch the ball
go airborne, anytime you watch the ball go around in
on a reverse, a debt is old 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 and
this is where the forward pass began. 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 knows
that years before that it was Carlisle, in fact, to
(10:27):
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 we would call a no huddle offense.
I mean, this is just it was devastating, but 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
(10:49):
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 eighteen 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
(11:17):
school that wasn't an Ivy League school. But 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
(11:38):
weren't allowed to call plays from the sidelines back in
those days.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Coaches could prepare teams for.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
The game, but then once they sent them onto 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
of the players who frustrated him. Thorpe literally said to
(12:05):
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. Thorpe arrives there early at nineteen oh six.
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
(12:28):
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 at
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, it's 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. So he just said. He just
kept saying, I'm going to play, I want to play,
give me a chance. And Pop EVENTU really said, all right,
here's what we'll do. Well, you can help us with
(15:05):
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. 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
(15:27):
Pop blows his whistle and they all charge at Jim,
and in that moment, that beautiful moment, Jim reveals this
combination of speed and agility and power that had never
existed in a football player all at once. Before he
fakes out some guys, he stiff arms some guys, he
sees a yard of daylight and he's just gone. He
(15:49):
turns onto 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
(16:55):
because he was oh he was their field goal kicker too.
I should point that out. He was there pun and
their placekicker. 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 no
There was never a player with that combination. You know,
you're either fast or you're really strong. You just don't
(17:17):
see that combination. Some people will remember Bo Jackson and
had that combination. We just 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. And when we come back more of
the remarkable story of Jim Thorpe here on our American stories.
(18:08):
And we returned to our American stories into our storytellers
Steve Shankin and Sally Jenkins, both telling us the story
of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian football team.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Either 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 3 (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
the game against the University of California. They played anywhere,
they'll take out anyone.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
And there was a game that.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
Was at Pittsburgh where and this was another rule change,
but in those days 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, of course, because why not he did
everything that if he kicked it high enough he could
(19:18):
catch it himself. And he did it in this game
in front of this the whole stadium of players. 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, and
this poor receiver is just kind of standing there making
his arms into a basket waiting for the ball to
(19:39):
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 was in
its very very early days, but there's no film at
all of the Carlisle team in action, which is such
(20:01):
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. I mean, 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.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
There was a great deal of coverage of.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Carlisle by the New York newspapers or the Philadelphia newspapers
and the Boston newspapers. Carlisle 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,
(20:51):
she's disappointed and she says, why they don't look any
different from our boys?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
And those first audiences would war whoop.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
When they ran onto the field and make tomahawking most
and it really really didn't view them as people or
as students.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
They viewed them as artifacts. Almost.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
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 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.
(21:27):
They scheduled Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Penn, the fourth Ivy
League power in succession.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
No one had ever tried to.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Play all four of those teams in the same year,
much less in a row in the space of four.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
To five weeks.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
All in a row.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
And here was this little plucky boarding school with just
a few hundred STU students between the ages of twelve
and twenty five, trying to take on these massive national
football powers. Well, Carlisle almost beats Princeton and then comes
and plays Yale at the Pologrounds in eighteen ninety six
(22:15):
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 Pilitzer's newspaper, which
had a really great sports section that I spent a
lot of time reading. They wrote that Carlisle could beat
eleven Yale men, but they couldn't beat eleven Yale men
(22:37):
in a Yale referee. Well, at that 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 and they 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 car Los praises
(23:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Pratt understood this.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Pratt was at the game and was as infuriated as
anybody by this referees' decision.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
His team is. He's watching the game.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
He sees that his team, Pratt sees they're about to
walk off the field.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
They're so outraged.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
You've got to come back onto the field.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
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 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
(23:58):
if when they cheapshot you were, if you retaliate, they'll say, see,
that's the savage in them, 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
(24:22):
game on, that eighteen ninety six y OL game on,
there's a whole different 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 Carlole becomes
a dominant football team, it made everybody incredibly nervous, and
(24:44):
Jim Thorpe really paid 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
(25:08):
ran away from Carlisle 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
(25:29):
he didn't make a 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. You can look at the records and decide
for yourself. 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
(25:58):
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, 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
(26:20):
decided by this point they'd seen enough of Jim Thorpe
and Carlisle and said, you know we're not going to schedule.
Don't come this year. You know we could, We'll play
other teams instead.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
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 Shankin and Sally Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
So 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 tripping 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 so
(28:20):
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 it 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. Omar
(28:41):
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, undersheeted 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 Carlisle was just just a much much better team
and had way too much offense. Dwight Eisenhower was looking
forward to playing against Thorpe. Eisenhewer was a good player.
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
(29:26):
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
was that Indian is the greatest player I have ever
stacked up against. He is superhuman, that's all. There's no
stopping him. He was so obviously the best athlete in
(29:46):
the country that Pop suggested that Jim join or try
out for the Olympic team. In nineteen twelve, 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
(30:11):
the ship itself is really interesting. Everyone is practicing 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
(30:32):
would say, what are you doing? He said, I'm doing
the high jump, I'm doing the long jump. People didn't
get it. They thought he was lazy or accused him
of it. 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
(30:53):
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 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.
(31:14):
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 by wide margins. Won gold medals in both of
those events, and as he did everywhere he went, he
(31:34):
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, and Jim simply said, thanks King, and that
(31:57):
was kind of That's the most that he would ever
say in 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. Some reporters who saw him at practice recognized
(32:21):
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 became a huge controversy and a completely needless and
(32:43):
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 the Olympics
after all. And this broke just at the end of
the nineteen twelve football season. He was really on top
(33:07):
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 3 (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 know that we
met an honest competition and he beat me fairly and decisively.
(34:04):
I didn't win the Olympic to cathlon, Jim 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 Krlole 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. Guys who come after him, really could
have cared less about any of about the students or
(35:04):
about the condition of the school. The school really deteriorates,
and so the school closes its doors finally in 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, and
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 never a great ballplayer. 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
(35:58):
it official and form a league. This is going back
to nineteen twenty two, and so Jim decided to get
in on that action. By that point though he's thirty
years old, so for a running back. 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
(36:21):
back then. No one really you know, baseball was a
big deal in track and boxing. No one really knew
about the NFL. And so they said, the owners of
these teams, mostly businessmen in Ohio, said we need a celebrity.
We need somebody who's going to be our first president.
This is a good trivia question if you want to
ask your friends who was the first president of the NFL.
(36:42):
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 the president of the league
to get them and give them a lot of credibility
as they were starting out. He eventually died of a
(37:05):
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 and a great athlete of
some kind. But I didn't know anything more than just
those two facts, and so part of the reason I
(37:26):
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 athlete. 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 sportswriter for
The Washington Post. She wrote The Real All Americans, the
(00:52):
national bestseller about Jim Thorpe. Shankin is a three time
National Book Award finalist and the author of Undefeated, Jim
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.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
He ended up at.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Carl A 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 him 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):
Carlos's founded in eighteen seventy nine, just three years after
a little Big Horn. It was still a lot of
tension and unrest on a lot of the reservation, and
so one of the things that the US government and
the US Army decided to do was rather than fight Indians,
they decided to try to educate them. And so they
decided to fight a smaller, more subtle war against American
(02:12):
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. General Sherman called
Indian and he said, Indian fighting is the hardest kind
of war. It was a guerrilla war, as you know.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
It was an.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
He had a lot of faults, but he also believed
in total equality.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
He did not 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 Shirts, he
went to Eulisses s. Grant, and he said, let me
have a school, and let me take the children of
some of these combatants, and let me take them back east,
(03:41):
and let me show you what I can do with them.
Let me show you how I can turn I can
prove 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.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Is that he is a very American.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
He represents what this country was in the eighteen eighties,
and so you 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.
(04:23):
They rebel against this experience in a number of ways,
and one of the ways in which they rebelled was
to start playing football and to start proving that they
could whip white.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Boys on the football field.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And that's where this incredibly inventive Carlisle football program comes from.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
They began taking.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
This a distinctly new American game played by Harvard Princeton
and Yale and began 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 these Ivy League boys.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Had to have.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Football in the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties especially,
was a dull, brutal game.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
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 gets knocked down. 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. As
(05:49):
a result, was much more violent. 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
(06:09):
one year that colleges started banning football, 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
you guys, better make a plan or this game is
(06:31):
going to be gone. 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. And that was the
(06:52):
goal and it did work. 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 Shanenkin
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. Folks, if you love the great
(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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Stories dot com now and go to the donate button
(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 the University of
Pennsylvania has huge underdogs as always when you go into
a school like that, and they uncorked these passing plays right,
(08:44):
I mean right off the bat. It just blew everybody's mind.
I mean they crushed penn that day. And in those days,
when you set your sights on 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
(09:06):
college football, those four teams, the Big Four as they
were called, they have at least the first thirty. I
don't know what the exact number is, look it up.
So Carlisle'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
(09:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
They loved putting their own stamp on the game Carlisle football.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Every time now you watch a quarterback in a shotgun
formation in the NFL, every time you watch the ball
go airborne, anytime you watch the ball go around in
on a reverse, a debt is old 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 and
this is where the forward pass began. 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 knows
that years before that it was Carlisle, in fact, to
(10:27):
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 we would call a no huddle offense.
I mean, this is just it was devastating, but 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
(10:49):
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 eighteen 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
(11:17):
school that wasn't an Ivy League school. But 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
(11:38):
weren't allowed to call plays from the sidelines back in
those days.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Coaches could prepare teams for.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
The game, but then once they sent them onto 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
of the players who frustrated him. Thorpe literally said to
(12:05):
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. Thorpe arrives there early at nineteen oh six.
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
(12:28):
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 at
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, it's 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. So he just said. He just
kept saying, I'm going to play, I want to play,
give me a chance. And Pop EVENTU really said, all right,
here's what we'll do. Well, you can help us with
(15:05):
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. 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
(15:27):
Pop blows his whistle and they all charge at Jim,
and in that moment, that beautiful moment, Jim reveals this
combination of speed and agility and power that had never
existed in a football player all at once. Before he
fakes out some guys, he stiff arms some guys, he
sees a yard of daylight and he's just gone. He
(15:49):
turns onto 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
(16:55):
because he was oh he was their field goal kicker too.
I should point that out. He was there pun and
their placekicker. 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 no
There was never a player with that combination. You know,
you're either fast or you're really strong. You just don't
(17:17):
see that combination. Some people will remember Bo Jackson and
had that combination. We just 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. And when we come back more of
the remarkable story of Jim Thorpe here on our American stories.
(18:08):
And we returned to our American stories into our storytellers
Steve Shankin and Sally Jenkins, both telling us the story
of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian football team.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Either 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 3 (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
the game against the University of California. They played anywhere,
they'll take out anyone.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
And there was a game that.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
Was at Pittsburgh where and this was another rule change,
but in those days 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, of course, because why not he did
everything that if he kicked it high enough he could
(19:18):
catch it himself. And he did it in this game
in front of this the whole stadium of players. 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, and
this poor receiver is just kind of standing there making
his arms into a basket waiting for the ball to
(19:39):
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 was in
its very very early days, but there's no film at
all of the Carlisle team in action, which is such
(20:01):
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. I mean, 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.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
There was a great deal of coverage of.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Carlisle by the New York newspapers or the Philadelphia newspapers
and the Boston newspapers. Carlisle 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,
(20:51):
she's disappointed and she says, why they don't look any
different from our boys?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
And those first audiences would war whoop.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
When they ran onto the field and make tomahawking most
and it really really didn't view them as people or
as students.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
They viewed them as artifacts. Almost.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
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 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.
(21:27):
They scheduled Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Penn, the fourth Ivy
League power in succession.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
No one had ever tried to.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Play all four of those teams in the same year,
much less in a row in the space of four.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
To five weeks.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
All in a row.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
And here was this little plucky boarding school with just
a few hundred STU students between the ages of twelve
and twenty five, trying to take on these massive national
football powers. Well, Carlisle almost beats Princeton and then comes
and plays Yale at the Pologrounds in eighteen ninety six
(22:15):
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 Pilitzer's newspaper, which
had a really great sports section that I spent a
lot of time reading. They wrote that Carlisle could beat
eleven Yale men, but they couldn't beat eleven Yale men
(22:37):
in a Yale referee. Well, at that 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 and they 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 car Los praises
(23:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Pratt understood this.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Pratt was at the game and was as infuriated as
anybody by this referees' decision.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
His team is. He's watching the game.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
He sees that his team, Pratt sees they're about to
walk off the field.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
They're so outraged.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
You've got to come back onto the field.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
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 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
(23:58):
if when they cheapshot you were, if you retaliate, they'll say, see,
that's the savage in them, 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
(24:22):
game on, that eighteen ninety six y OL game on,
there's a whole different 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 Carlole becomes
a dominant football team, it made everybody incredibly nervous, and
(24:44):
Jim Thorpe really paid 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
(25:08):
ran away from Carlisle 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
(25:29):
he didn't make a 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. You can look at the records and decide
for yourself. 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
(25:58):
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, 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
(26:20):
decided by this point they'd seen enough of Jim Thorpe
and Carlisle and said, you know we're not going to schedule.
Don't come this year. You know we could, We'll play
other teams instead.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
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 Shankin and Sally Jenkins.
Speaker 4 (27:57):
So 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 tripping 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 so
(28:20):
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 it 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. Omar
(28:41):
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, undersheeted 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 Carlisle was just just a much much better team
and had way too much offense. Dwight Eisenhower was looking
forward to playing against Thorpe. Eisenhewer was a good player.
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
(29:26):
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
was that Indian is the greatest player I have ever
stacked up against. He is superhuman, that's all. There's no
stopping him. He was so obviously the best athlete in
(29:46):
the country that Pop suggested that Jim join or try
out for the Olympic team. In nineteen twelve, 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
(30:11):
the ship itself is really interesting. Everyone is practicing 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
(30:32):
would say, what are you doing? He said, I'm doing
the high jump, I'm doing the long jump. People didn't
get it. They thought he was lazy or accused him
of it. 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
(30:53):
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 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.
(31:14):
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 by wide margins. Won gold medals in both of
those events, and as he did everywhere he went, he
(31:34):
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, and Jim simply said, thanks King, and that
(31:57):
was kind of That's the most that he would ever
say in 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. Some reporters who saw him at practice recognized
(32:21):
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 became a huge controversy and a completely needless and
(32:43):
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 the Olympics
after all. And this broke just at the end of
the nineteen twelve football season. He was really on top
(33:07):
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 3 (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 know that we
met an honest competition and he beat me fairly and decisively.
(34:04):
I didn't win the Olympic to cathlon, Jim 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 Krlole 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. Guys who come after him, really could
have cared less about any of about the students or
(35:04):
about the condition of the school. The school really deteriorates,
and so the school closes its doors finally in 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, and
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 never a great ballplayer. 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
(35:58):
it official and form a league. This is going back
to nineteen twenty two, and so Jim decided to get
in on that action. By that point though he's thirty
years old, so for a running back. 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
(36:21):
back then. No one really you know, baseball was a
big deal in track and boxing. No one really knew
about the NFL. And so they said, the owners of
these teams, mostly businessmen in Ohio, said we need a celebrity.
We need somebody who's going to be our first president.
This is a good trivia question if you want to
ask your friends who was the first president of the NFL.
(36:42):
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 the president of the league
to get them and give them a lot of credibility
as they were starting out. He eventually died of a
(37:05):
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 and a great athlete of
some kind. But I didn't know anything more than just
those two facts, and so part of the reason I
(37:26):
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 athlete. Here on our
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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