The Greatest Athlete in the World: Jim Thorpe

This week at Sunnyside, Troy retells the story of legendary Native American athlete - Jim Thorpe.

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SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome to Sunnyside. I'm so happy you stopped by the Sunnyside of Life this week. And what a week it was. Besides celebrating our son Tanner's 29th birthday, we also posted our first free newsletter to our friendly subscribers, which included a few private videos for them to enjoy about the happenings here at Sunnyside. We received the rest of our 900 wood fence posts to begin our fencing operations soon here at Sunnyside and Sunnyside Hollow. And I got to officiate the wedding of Riley and Shay. And man, what a great, sometimes hot, so hot that it might cause your iPad to shut off right in the middle of the officiating part of the deal. But no worries. Had my phone in my pocket. So there you go. It was a beautiful wedding in the beautiful Iowa outdoors and a wonderful reception afterwards, which was uh much cooler because it was indoors and air conditioned. So it was very good to gather together as a family with our friends as they watched their son Riley take his bride, Shay, and become part of the larger family that we've come to know and love these past couple of decades. So overall, I'd say a pretty darn good week. Now, by the way, if you'd like to join our newsletter, simply click on that link provided in the show notes, and each month we'll let you in on our projects here at Sunnyside, which will include links to previous newsletters and exclusive videos, of course. It's free, it's easy, and it's not annoying, I promise. Now, uh, if my voice sounds a little bit different, the reception, uh the wedding reception, uh, you know, there was some dancing and louder music and and a lot of talking, and so you're talking over the music, and I can't hear very well anyway, and so I've got a very, very, very deep voice right now, which I I'm kind of enjoying that. Well, anyway, I also had the uh chance last week to watch a documentary on Netflix, which uh has just recently been released on the life of legendary Native American athlete Jim Thorpe. It was actually on the History Channel uh in 2025, and uh but just recently came to Netflix. So the documentary is called Jim Thorpe Lit by Lightning, and I can recommend it if you like uh great American stories of athletic prowess, seasoned, of course, with the necessary apparently 21st century historical tendency to do a little preaching now and then as 30 somethings in most cases wax poetically on legitimate injustices from their contemporary well-lit and appointed perches in the now. Well, the documentary originally aired, like I said, on the History Channel last year, but we don't subscribe to cable, so you know, there's that. It was produced by an athlete-led platform called Uninterrupted, which includes people like LeBron James, Maverick Carter, Jamal Henderson, Philip Byron, and others, as well as Iani Entertainment Five and All in the Fifth, Motion Entertainment and the History Channel, of course, and it was directed by a guy named Chris Eyer. Just a short distance from Sunnyside is a county recreation area off the beaten path called Thorpe Park, where I have spent many hours fishing on the fifteen acre Lake Catherine, sometimes camping or attending church picnics when I was younger. You name it, we did it at Thorpe Park. My great-great great great great and my great granddads ran cattle over the area that is now Thorpe Park before it was donated to the Winnebago County Conservation Board many years ago. So it is a special place to me, but it's an odd corollary to be sure because Thorpe Park isn't named in honor of Jim Thorpe. Perhaps maybe after I finish my story today, you might understand or come to understand anyway, why that would be weird if it was. So childhood memories aside, let's begin our story, and since football season is next on the calendar, I can't wait, and we just watched the fun events of the World Cup, which brought together nations of the world here in the United States, sort of like the Olympics do, and in conjunction with Tanner's birthday, let's journey back one hundred and fourteen years, two years before our sunny side was even built to a football game where we're gonna start in nineteen twelve. The autumn wind of nineteen twelve carried a bite across the plains of West Point, New York. It rattled the dying leaves of the Hudson Valley, but on the afternoon of november ninth, the real thunder wasn't in the heavens. It was on the gridiron. Maybe you know the name Jim Thorpe. If so, you may know him as the greatest athlete in the world, the man who went to Stockholm Sweden earlier that summer and shattered Olympic records as easily as a boy skips stones across a pond. Upon bestowing his medals one hundred and fourteen years ago last Wednesday, on july fifteenth, nineteen twelve, Gustav V, the king, looked Jim in the eye and said, Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world. And Jim, with the quiet humility of his sack and fox heritage, reportedly replied, Thanks, King. But the history books often gloss over what happened after the gold medals were hung around his neck. They forget the battle lines that were drawn on a football field in upstate New York, where the sons of the dispossessed met the sons of the conquerors. This was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School versus the United States Military Academy at West Point. To understand the collision of november ninth, nineteen twelve, you have to look at the masterminds on the sidelines. At Carlisle, you had Glen Scobie Warner. The world called him Pop. Pop Warner was a football pioneer, a man who looked at the rigid brutal game of early American football and saw canvas for deception. He invented the single wing formation. He put numbers on jerseys. He hid the ball. Glenn Scoby Pop Warner did not just coach football. He engineered its modern evolution. Before his arrival, football was a brutal, compact game of rugby style mass momentum plays. Facing an army team that heavily outweighed his roster, Warner weaponized speed and deception. He utilized a precursor to the modern shotgun formation. By snapping the ball directly to a deep back, often Jim Thorpe, it allowed runners to hit holes at full speed, rather than waiting for a handoff. Then came the forward pass. While it was legalized in nineteen oh six, most teams only used the pass as a desperate trick play. Warner used it strategically to stretch the Army defense horizontally, forcing their massive linemen to sprint side to side. Pop Warner coached his players to avoid direct collisions. He perfected open field evasion techniques, instructing Thorpe to use his hips and shoulders to mislead tacklers, which we'll discuss in greater detail shortly. And famously, Warner taught his kickers, like Thorpe, to make the ball rotate along its axis rather than end over end. This created unpredictable bounces and made the ball incredibly difficult for Army returners to catch in the biting wind. But Pop Warner wasn't just coaching a team, he was managing a living, breathing paradox. Carlisle was a government run boarding school founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, whose explicit motto was kill the Indian in him and save the man. The school was designed to strip these young men of their language, their hair, their culture, and their identities. Yet on the football field, Pop Warner gave them a weapon. He didn't want them to match the brute force of the white colleges. He wanted them to use speed, guile, and unmatched agility. You see, in those days, everyone played both ways, and taking a break, well, that was seen as a sign of weakness. Imagine that today. And then, looking across the field on that crisp November day, there stood the Army team. Among their ranks was a tough, gritty linebacker and halfback from Abilene, Kansas, a young cadet named Dwight David Eisenhower. Long before he was the supreme allied commander, long before he sat in the Oval Office, Ike was a fierce competitor who loved the violence of the football trenches. He and his teammate, Alex Babe Weyand, looked at the program before the game. They saw one name circled in heavy ink Jim Thorpe. The strategy in the Army locker room was simple, brutal and direct. Take Thorpe out of the game. The game began under a gray sky. The Army cadets, disciplined and massive, moved like a wall of olive drab. They expected to overpower the Carlisle Indians. After all, the U.S. Army had spent the last century overpowering their ancestors on the battlefield. The memories of wounded knee, of the trail of tears, of Geronimo's surrender. Well, they weren't just history to the Carlisle players. They were family stories. Dwight Eisenhower later admitted that he and Babe Weyand had formed a plan that day. On a sweeping play, Eisenhower hit Thorpe high, and Weyand hit him low. It was a collision that would have cracked a lesser man in two. Thorpe went down hard. He lay on the grass for a moment. The breath knocked from his lungs. Ike smirked, thinking the legendary Jim Thorpe was broken. Thorpe got up, shook his head, and walked back to the huddle. On the very next play, Pop Warner called Thorpe's number again. This time, Eisenhower braced for the impact. But Thorpe didn't run into the tackle. He utilized a magnificent stutter step body fake. Eisenhower hit nothing but the chill autumn air, falling face to first face first into the it's funny. Here's a president face first in the dirt. Thorpe glided past him. A future president, I should say. And Thorpe went down the sideline, leaving this future president of the United States, just grasping at ghosts. What happened next became the stuff of American myth. Thorpe caught a punt on his own five-yard line. He twisted, turned, broke three tackles, and ran 95 yards for a spectacular touchdown. But a whistle blew. A referee's flag lay on the field, a penalty against Carlisle. The touchdown was erased. Did Jim Thorpe complain? Did he argue? No. He merely handed the ball back to the official, walked back to his own 10-yard line, and waited for the next play. Army punted again. Thorpe caught it again. This time he didn't just run, he flew. He wove through the entire Army defense, a streak of unstoppable grace, and ran it back 97 yards for another touchdown. And this one counted. The final score that afternoon was Carlisle 27, Army six. Let's take a minute to look at the ledger here. Look at the raw, uncompromising numbers of Jim Thorpe's 1912 football season. In an era when touchdowns were worth only five points and games were shorter, brutal slugfests, Jim Thorpe was a one-man wrecking crew. That year, he led the Carlisle Indians to a record of twelve wins, one loss, and one tie. But it's his personal stat sheet that just defies gravity. In just 14 games, Jim Thorpe scored 25 touchdowns. He kicked 30 extra points. He booted 17 field goals. When the dust settled on the 1912 season, Jim Thorpe had single-handedly scored 198 points. To put that in perspective, he personally outscored almost every individual team in the country. He didn't just play offense. He punted, he kicked, he returned, and on defense, he hit like a runaway freight train. It remains one of the most statistically dominant seasons in the history of college football. The game against Army was a rout, but it was more than a football victory for the young men of Carlisle. It was a symbolic, bloodless redemption. On a field measured in yards using the white man's own game, the descendants of the warriors had conquered the United States Army. The press coverage of that 1912 game reflected the complex, often contradictory racial attitudes of early twentieth century America. The media framed the game not just as an athletic event, but as a literal reenactment of the Indian Wars. Newspapers across the country ran headlines using explicit battlefield language. Outlets wrote that the Indian invasion of West Point, and they described Thorpe's long runs as scalping the Army defense. Journalists were fascinated by how Carlisle outmaneuvered Army. The press frequently contrasted the brute force and discipline of the West Point cadets against the cunning and natural instinct and trickery of the Carlisle players, subtly reinforcing racial stereotypes while praising their execution. Following his Olympic triumphs, the media have elevated Thorpe to superhero status. Reports from the game focused heavily on his stoicism, noting that no matter how hard Army hit him, he rose without a word, a trait newspapers attributed to his native heritage. Many mainstream publications used Carlyle's victory to validate the boarding school system. They argued that by mastering the American game of football, Native Americans were proving they could be successfully integrated into modern white society. But there will be more to that part of the story in a little bit. Dwight Eisenhower would later recall that day in November with absolute reverence. He would say of Thorpe he could do everything better than any other football player I ever saw. A knee injury sustained later in that very season of 1912 would actually end Ike's football career, turning his path toward military command and ultimately the presidency. Jim Thorpe would go on to face hardships, poverty, and the stripping of his Olympic medals over a minor baseball contract. A historical injustice that took decades to correct. But on that November afternoon, he was untouchable. Two men on a field in 1912, one would go on to command the greatest military force in human history, the other would remain etched in time as the ultimate symbol of resilience, pride, and unmatched athletic genius. But football, you see, is a game of eleven men, and Jim and Ike, well, they weren't out there alone. The nineteen twelve Army roster at West Point was not just a football team, it was a gathering of future military leadership that would shape the geopolitical landscape of the mid-20th century. Of course, we already mentioned Dwight Eisenhower, that knee injury that he sustained against Tufts a week after the Carlisle game ended his playing career. He pivoted fully to military tactics, eventually becoming the supreme Allied commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in World War II, and the 34th President of the United States. Another classmate of Eisenhower who played on that 1912 squad was Omar Bradley, who rose to become a five-star general of the Army. He commanded the 12th United States Army Group in Europe, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a single commander. Then that tackle, who partnered with Eisenhower to try and neutralize Thorpe, Alexander Matthias Babe Weyand. Well, he served with distinction in World War I and later became a prominent military historian and wrote several authoritative books on the history of American football. History loves a lone hero, but Jim Thorpe had brothers in arms too. Enter Joe Guyon. Joe was a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. If Jim Thorpe was the lightning of the Carlisle offense, Joe Guyon was the absolute thunder. He was a bruising, punishing fullback and halfback who paved the way for Thorpe's legendary runs. When Army tried to key in on Jim, it was Joe Guyon who made them pay, leveling linebackers with block after block. But Joe's story didn't end with the Carlisle lights when they went out. After the school's football program began to fracture, which I'll tell you more about in a moment, Guyon transferred to Georgia Tech. There, under the legendary John Heisman, yes, that Heisman, Guyon led the Golden Tornado to a national championship in nineteen seventeen. He went on to play pro football, won an NFL championship with the New York Giants, and like his teammate Jim, Joe Guyon was ultimately enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Two kids from the reservations both immortalized in Canton. But while the players achieved immortality, the institution that brought them together was headed for a tragic final whistle. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was built on an old military barracks in Pennsylvania, designed to erase the Indian to save the man. For a time, the football team was the school's golden goose, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars and nationwide fame. But the paradox could not hold. By nineteen fourteen, federal investigators began looking into the school's finances and the treatment of its students. They found systemic corruption. They found that Pop Warner and the administration were taking massive cuts of the football gate receipts while the ordinary students lived in substandard conditions. Pop Warner saw the writing on the wall, and he packed his bags for the University of Pittsburgh. Then came the Great War. In nineteen eighteen, as young American men were shipped off to the trenches of Europe, the United States Army decided it needed those barracks back. The government quietly, unceremoniously, shut down the Carlisle Indian School. The printing presses stopped, the classrooms emptied. The gridiron, where Jim Thorpe once wreaked so much havoc upon his opponents, was converted into a rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers who had experienced a very different form of havoc overseas. The school that tried to erase the Indian was erased itself by the same government. But the legend of what those boys accomplished on the field? Well that could never be erased. During and after his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower homesteaded on a nice little farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A short jaunt down the road from Carlisle, just fifty minutes away, according to Google Maps. Jim Thorpe's medals were stolen away by bureaucracy, his school was shut down by the government, but the numbers and the spirit endured, and boy, does the Thorpe spirit endure. When King Gustav V of Sweden placed those two gold medals around the neck of a young sack and fox warrior named Jim Thorpe in July of 1912, Thorpe had just conquered the pentathlon and the decathlon, setting records that would stand like granite for generations. But less than six months later, Jim's crown was snatched away. In January of nineteen thirteen, a sports writer from the Providence Eagle discovered a tiny wrinkle in the fabric of Jim Thorpe's amateur status. A few years prior, Jim had played a couple of seasons of minor league baseball in North Carolina for room and board, roughly $25 a week. By the strict country club rules of the International Olympic Committee, Jim Thorpe was declared a professional. The amateur athletic union stripped him of his records. The IOC demanded his gold medals back. Jim, ever honorable, wrote a letter explaining that he was just an Indian schoolboy who didn't know the rules. He wasn't trying to cheat. He just loved to play. It didn't matter. They gave his medals to the second place finishers, though both men, to their eternal credit, refused to adeck accept them, and knowing who the true king was, that being Jim Thorpe. Well Thorpe spent the rest of his life in a quiet, dignified struggle, dying in 1953 with an empty trophy case and a heavy heart. But true greatness refuses to stay buried. In that spring of 1953, the heavy heart of the world's greatest athlete finally stopped beating. Jim Thorpe had passed away in a trailer home in California. His people, the Sack and Fox Nation, took his body back home to Oklahoma. They gathered under the open sky to lay their warrior to rest with the ancient, sacred traditional rites that would send his spirit on its final journey. But mid-ceremony, the drum beats stopped. Before the final prayers could be whispered, Jim Thorpe's third wife, Patricia, arrived at the funeral with a hearse and a contingency of state police. She seized the coffin. You see, Oklahoma officials had balked at funding a fitting monument for the legend. So Patricia set out to find a buyer who would. She found her answer over a thousand miles away, nestled right back in the coal country mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Two struggling, depression-hit boroughs named Maushchunk and East Maushchunk were looking for a miracle to bring in tourism. A deal was struck. The towns paid Patricia for the body, merged their borders, and renamed renamed their entire municipality the Borough of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. They built a beautiful red stone mausoleum, laid him in the soil of a town he had never once visited, and hoped for prosperity. But to the Sack and Fox Nation and to Jim's children, it wasn't a monument. It was a commercialized, stolen resting place. Enter the fighters. Enter Jim's children, especially his daughter Grace Thorpe, and a dedicated band of advocates who refused to let the fire go out. For decades they banged on the doors of the International Olympic Committee. They pointed to the IOC's own rule book, which stated that any protest regarding amateur status had to be filed within thirty days of the Games. The protest against Jim had taken six months. The committee had violated its own laws to strip him. Yet for nearly seventy years, the IOC led for a long time by a guy named Avery Brundage, a man who had actually competed against Thorpe in nineteen twelve, and some claim may have been the culprit of stealing Jim's shoes before competing in the high jump, which he won anyway, with a mismatched pair of shoes he and Pop Warner had hurriedly found in a trash can. Brundage stubbornly refused to budge. Then came nineteen eighty-two. After a relentless campaign by the Thorpe family, the IOC finally relented. They didn't return the original medals, those had been stolen from a museum, but they presented duplicate gold medals to Jim's children. The world cheered. The family wept. It seemed the battle was won. But there was a catch. The IOC, in its bureaucratic compromise, put Jim Thorpe back in the history books, but only as a co-champion. The official records still listed the runners up as sharing the gold. For forty more years, Jim Thorpe's name carried an asterisk. The final yards of Jim's greatest race weren't run until just a few years ago. An organization called Bright Path Strong, backed by Native American groups, athletes, and historians, launched a massive petition. They went back to the Swedish and American Olympic committees. They proved unequivocally that the 1912 runners up had never wanted the title of champion. And on July 15th, 2022, which happened to be my son Tanner's twenty fifth birthday, and exactly one hundred ten years to the day after Jim won the decathlon, the International Olympic Committee officially tore down the asterisk. They restored Jim Thorpe as the sole undisputed champion of the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon. It took more than a century. The Carlisle School was gone. The generals he faced were gone. Jim himself was long gone, by nearly seventy years, but the truth finally caught up to the legend. But wait, what about Jim's resting place in eastern Pennsylvania? His family and friends had succeeded in finally restoring his Olympic medals after eleven decades, but what about Jim's bones? For decades, the family pleaded quietly. Then, in nineteen ninety, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. The law explicitly stated that museums and institutions holding native remains must return them to their tribes upon request. Armed with federal law, Jim's surviving sons and the Sack and Fox Nation filed a lawsuit. They argued that the borough of Jim Thorpe was essentially operating as a museum by using his body as a tourist attraction. A federal district judge looked at the law and agreed. He ordered the borough to return Jim Thorpe to Oklahoma. The family wept with relief. But the town appealed. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals took up the case and threw a bucket of ice water on the ruling. They admitted the town fit the literal definition of a museum under the law, but ruled that applying AGPRA to this specific case would lead to an absurd outcome. They decreed that a wife's contract superseded tribal repatriatation, repatriation rights. That's a big word. Well, the family took the fight all the way to the steps of the United States Supreme Court, but the High Court refused to hear the case, letting the Pennsylvania ruling stand. Legally, the courtroom doors have slammed shut. Jim Thorpe's physical remains rest beside a Pennsylvania highway, a tourist anchor for a mountain town he never knew. But the spirit doesn't obey a gavel. The ongoing efforts to bring Jim home have shifted from the legal battleground to a cultural and legislative marathon. Every year at the Sack and Fox Nation's annual powwow, prayers are still sent up for his return. Tribal leaders and advocacy groups continue to pressure lawmakers for custom federal legislation that would bypass the court's loophole. They argue that true justice isn't a legal technicality. It's a son being allowed to bury his father where his ancestors sleep. The town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania keeps its name, and they keep his vault. They maintain it with genuine pride and respect. But to the people who carry his blood, the greatest athlete in the world remains a displaced person, waiting for the final whistle that lets him go home. The Netflix documentary Jim Thorpe Lit by Lightning does not spend much, if any time, talking about this last part of the ongoing Jim Thorpe saga. It prefers to focus on his life, athletic achievements, and of course his fight against systemic racism and prejudice, which is more in line with their style. It gives a lot of airtime to pontificating Gen X and millennial sports pundits and historians with a heavy focus on their own native diversity. That's fine. Unlike their usual brand of never ending episodic documentaries, this one was just a little over an hour, and it inspired me to do some digging of my own. Which, one could argue, is the positive point of this program. Jim Thorpe, who surely can be called the greatest American athlete, or the greatest athlete in the world, he died in a trailer home in California without medals or much money. He brought so much pride and sunshine to our American story. Well, to be apparently forever stuck on the res of a Pennsylvania tourist trap for all time. Well, that, in my humble opinion, is wrong. But perhaps it's the most telling piece of the puzzle. Echoes of the cheering crowds and those shifty sports riders still shouting, Run, Jim! Jump, Jim! Entertain us, Jim. To which Jim, if he could, might once again reply, Thanks, King.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

When the shadows fall and doubts begin to creep, remember together we're strong never weak. Lift your neighbor up with kindness every day. Let your actions speak the words you want to say.

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The Stunny Side of Life is a weekly production about our life on the family farmstead here in Iowa, the liberties we prize, and the pursuits which make us happy. None of this is possible, of course, without Christ in our lives. For the Lord God is our stun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory.