The Backstory: The G.O.A.T. Of All G.O.A.T.S

Who’s the all-time G.O.A.T. in the world of sports? There are a handful of obvious choices… but perhaps the G.O.A.T. of all G.O.A.T.s is a guy who, over a hundred years ago, won Olympic gold and then dominated three professional sports: baseball, football, and basketball. Sadly, Jim Thorpe died broke. But why is a town he never visited named after him? How’d all that happen?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, answer me this. How can one individual raised
on a Native American reservation, his twin brother and his
parents dead by the time he was sixteen go on
to win Olympic gold medals in track and field and
then play professional football, baseball, and basketball. He wound up
in more than a dozen Halls of Fame and was

(00:20):
repeatedly named the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. I'm
Patty Steele. Jim Thorpe's unprecedented talent and achievements, how he
got there and the sad ending to his life. That's
next on the backstory. The backstory is back, all right.
First off, I want to thank backstory listener Drendahba for

(00:44):
turning me on to this amazing story. Thank you so much.
I don't even know how you tell a story about
a guy like this because there's so many twists and turns,
so many sports in which he excelled. It is absolutely
mind boggling. Now not going to I'm the one who
got picked maybe not last, but pretty far down the

(01:05):
line when it came to any and I mean almost
any sports activities in school. Yes, I was on the
swim team as a diver, but trophies or ribbons. Yeah, no,
not so much. So I'm just always blown away by
people who are just great natural athletes. I love that
there are people like that. And when we talk about

(01:25):
the greatest athlete that ever lived, a lot of names
pop up. Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, Babe Ruth Muhammad, Ali,
Michael Phelps, Serena Williams, to name just a few. But
if you look at the accomplishments of one individual, Jim
Thorpe is pretty clearly the goat. Like me. You may
not know much about him because his heyday was over

(01:46):
one hundred years ago, but this guy dominated every sport
he played. That included Olympic track and field, pro baseball,
Pro football, and pro basketball. He was also a terrific
hockey player and believe it or not, a champion ballroom dancer,
but football was his favorite sport and arguably the one

(02:07):
that brought him the most glory. Thorpe was such a
phenom that researchers back then looked at his anatomy and
called him the perfect specimen for an athlete. But where
did he come from and how did he wind up
dying broke? Jim Thorpe was born on the sac and
Fox Indian Reservation in what is now Oklahoma. His childhood

(02:28):
wasn't well documented, and it sure wasn't easy. It's believed
he and his twin brother were born in eighteen eighty seven.
There were apparently around ten children in the family, but
many of them died as babies or young children. When
Jim was nine, his twin brother died of pneumonia, which
devastated him, and that same year his mother died in childbirth.

(02:50):
So he's left now with a father who was a
gambler and bootlegger as well as an alcoholic. Jim had
no support. He ran away from home a number of times,
until finally his dad sent him to the Carlisle Indian
Boarding School in Pennsylvania. Despite being thousands of miles from
home and being forced to assimilate into white culture, Jim

(03:12):
actually really thrived for one main reason. Sports football was
where he really began to shine. Under the leadership of
the legendary kids coach Pop Warner. He was All American
with the school's team three times. In his teams, he
started playing minor league baseball, but in nineteen twelve he

(03:32):
was named to the US Olympic Track and field team.
He won two gold medals in the decathlon and the pentathlon,
smashing world records. The King of Sweden, who presented the medals,
told Thorpe, you, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world. Now.
On the downside, just months after the nineteen twelve Summer
Olympic Games, a newspaper reported that Thorpe had gotten a

(03:56):
few minuscule payments for playing minor league baseball. At the time,
the Olympics did not allow pro athletes, and Jim was
stripped of his medals. Oddly, it didn't happen that everybody
who got paid, but he was Native American and that
might have been a problem. Replica medals were eventually given
to his family in nineteen eighty three, but the IOC

(04:19):
didn't reinstate his wins in the official record books until
July of twenty twenty two. But the public didn't seem
to care. They were obsessed with him. Historians say he
was the earliest international celebrity athlete. Those Olympic wins had
made him hugely famous, but that was just the beginning.

(04:39):
As much as he loved football, there was no NFL
in his early days and no real way to make
any money, and Jim wanted to be a pro athlete.
After all the publicity, he was offered contracts with baseball teams,
so he played Major League Baseball as an outfielder for
six teams, including the New York Giants, beginning in nineteen

(05:00):
teen thirteen. But get this, in baseball's off season, he
started playing pro football because he did love football, a
sport pretty much in its infancy. In nineteen fifteen, he
signed with the Canton Bulldogs for two hundred and fifty
bucks a game that was a huge payday in those days.
His football team normally had about twelve hundred fans in

(05:21):
the Stans per game, but when Thorpe debuted there were
over eight thousand. Between nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty eight,
he played for six football teams, and in nineteen twenty
two he was named the first ever president of the
brand new National Football League, which he had helped organize.
He was by far the biggest draw to the games

(05:42):
he played, and he coached his teams as well, and
in the late nineteen twenties he also played pro basketball
for several years. When he finally retired from playing in
any sports in nineteen twenty eight, he didn't have that
much money. Of course, there was no broadcasting to move into,
so he did the next best thing. He moved to

(06:02):
California and attempted to become an actor. He played mostly
minor roles in around seventy movies. There were lots of
Westerns in those days, and he actually formed a casting
company to pressure movie studios to cast real Native Americans
in those roles. But again it wasn't easy. In fact,
when his life story was made into a movie in

(06:24):
nineteen fifty one, which he helped with, Thorpe was played
by legendary actor Bert Lancaster, who was clearly not Native American.
His heritage was Irish or something. But Jim had a family.
He was married three times had a total of eight
children to support. He needed money, so later in life
he worked odd jobs as a construction worker, a doorman

(06:47):
and bouncer, a security guard, even a ditch digger. He
briefly joined the United States Merchant Marines in nineteen forty
five during World War Two, but through it all he
was a chronic alcoholic. After his playing years, finally, he
ran out of money sometime in the early nineteen fifties.
In fact, when he was hospitalized for lip cancer in

(07:09):
nineteen fifty, Thorpe was admitted as a charity case. At
a press conference, his third wife, Patricia, cried and asked
for help, saying, we're broke. Jim has nothing but his
name and his memories. He has spent money on his
own people and has given it away. He's been exploited.
She wasn't wrong there. Jim Thorpe went into heart failure

(07:32):
at home in a California trailer park and died on
March twenty eighth, nineteen fifty three, at the age of
sixty five. In the ensuing decades, he's been named the
greatest athlete in history by ABC Sports and by numerous publications.
But his story has an unusual ending. About a year
after his death, his widow Patricia, unbeknownst to the rest

(07:54):
of his family and all his kids, took Jim's body
and shipped it to Pennsylvania. She had heard that the
small towns of Maudchunk and East Mauchunk were trying to
attract business. She made a deal with town officials, apparently
for some cash. They agreed to bury him and create
a monument to him, as well as renamed the two

(08:14):
now United Towns Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Thorpe had never even
been there, but the monument site has his tomb, two
statues of him in different athletic poses, and historical markers
telling his life story, and it has continued to attract
tourists to the little town. Jim Thorpe's monument has engraved

(08:35):
on it the quote from Sweden's King Gustav as he
presented Jim with his Olympic medals. You, sir, are the
greatest athlete in the world. Again, I really want to
thank Drenda Heba for turning me on to this story.
I always knew who Jim Thorpe was, but I really
had no idea what an amazing athlete he was and

(08:56):
what his story was all about. I hope you like
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on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories

(09:24):
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(09:46):
Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history you didn't
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