All American

Bill Crawford

Description

"All American is riveting and grand-that rare pairing of exquisite writing and unassailable research. Crawford delivers you to an age when iconic titans like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner marched across the planet, and he is the perfect guide to their enormous triumphs and tragedies. This is epic American history at its page-turning finest."
-Bill Minutaglio, author of City on Fire and First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty

He was the greatest football running back of his era, leading his Carlisle Indian Industrial School team to victory over all the great college powerhouses. King Gustav of Sweden called him "the greatest athlete in the world" after he won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. Yet Jim Thorpe was also at the center of the greatest sports scandal of the twentieth century-a scandal that took away his Olympic medals and banned him forever from intercollegiate sports.

Now, in this revealing new biography, Bill Crawford captures Jim Thorpe's remarkable rise and fall. From his youth on Oklahoma's Sac and Fox Indian reservation to his astounding feats on the gridiron, from his Olympic triumphs to his complex relationship with coach "Pop" Warner, who mentored, exploited, and ultimately betrayed him, All American brings you up close and personal with the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.
Introduction.

1. American Airedale.

2. An Incorrigible Youngster.

3. Men Born Shaggy.

4. Oklahoma Buckaroo.

5. The “Hunchback” Play.

6. “White Man Bathed in Red”.

7. “Athletocracy”.

8. “Run Fast Good”.

9. A Perfect Football Machine.

10. Spreading the Wealth.

11. The Olympic Idea.

12. Starting Halfback.

13. Rocky Mount Railroader.

14. Marvel of the Age.

15. The Greatest Athlete in the World.

16. All-American.

17. The Swindle.

18. A Man with No Principle.

19. Masters of the White Man’s Game.

Afterword: The Continuing Evil of “Amateur” Athletics.

Acknowledgments.

Notes.

Selected Bibliography.

Index.

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Sports
• Lettres et linguistique
• All American
• Biography
• All-America
• Autobiography
• 1912

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780470322710
• Langue: English

Extrait

All American
THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM THORPE

Bill Crawford

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Dedicated to Diana, Amelia, Joe, and all other athletes, amateur and professional
Illustration credits: pages 145 , 147 (top), 149 , 150 (bottom), 152 (top), 153 (bottom), 154 , 155 , 156 (top), 157 (bottom), 158 , 159 , and 160 (top) from the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pa.; page 146 courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; pages 147 (bottom), 148 (top), and 151 (top) courtesy of Fred Wardecker and Wardecker’s Men’s Wear, Carlisle, Pa.; pages 148 (bottom), 152 (bottom), 153 (top), 156 (bottom), and 157 (top) courtesy of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, U.S. Army Military History Institute; page 150 (top) courtesy of the Concord Historical Society and the Warner Museum, Springville, N.Y.; page 151 (bottom) courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; and page 160 (bottom) from Photofest.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2005 by Bill Crawford. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Design and production by Navta Associates, Inc.
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Crawford, Bill.
All American : the rise and fall of Jim Thorpe / Bill Crawford.
     p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-55732-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Thorpe, Jim, 1887-1953. 2. Athletes—United States—Biography. 3. Indian athletes—United States—Biography. I. Title.
GV697.T5.C73 2004
796'.092—dc222
004014376
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
 
Introduction
1 American Airedale
2 An Incorrigible Youngster
3 Men Born Shaggy
4 Oklahoma Buckaroo
5 The “Hunchback” Play
6 “White Man Bathed in Red”
7 “Athletocracy”
8 “Run Fast Good”
9 A Perfect Football Machine
10 Spreading the Wealth
11 The Olympic Idea
12 Starting Halfback
13 Rocky Mount Railroader
14 Marvel of the Age
15 The Greatest Athlete in the World
16 All-American
17 The Swindle
18 A Man with No Principle
19 Masters of the White Man’s Game
Afterword: The Continuing Problem of “Amateur” Athletics
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
    Photographs follow page
Introduction

This is a story of blood and honor. Blood as the term was used at the dawn of the twentieth century, the time of Jim Thorpe’s emergence as America’s first international sports megastar. Blood as race. For it was blood and percentage of blood that determined Jim Thorpe’s place of birth, his educational path, and his position in the rigid, blood-soaked hierarchy of American society.
This is also a story of honor. Honor won on the athletic field, and honor tested in the corporate conference room. Jim Thorpe brought unprecedented honor to himself and those around him. In 1912, Thorpe was the greatest sports celebrity in the world. He was a combination Jim Brown, Jesse Owens, Emmitt Smith, and Deion Sanders, the highest-scoring American football running back, and the world’s most celebrated Olympic hero.
In the days before pro football, Thorpe filled America’s largest stadiums with tens of thousands of cheering fans who watched him run for touchdowns, hurl passes, flatten ball carriers, boot field goals, and almost single-handedly drop-kick football into the modern era.
“Watching him turn the ends, slash off tackle, kick and pass and tackle,” Harvard’s coach Percy Haughton recalled, “I realized that here was the theoretical superplayer in flesh and blood.”
Thorpe’s mastery of the gridiron brought honor to himself and to his teammates at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Indians, as they called themselves, defeated Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the other mighty elite white sports powerhouses of the time. Fewer than twenty-five years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, Thorpe and his teammates proved that they could beat the white man at his own game and honored the blood of all Indians across the country.
In addition to being America’s number one football hero, Thorpe was a dazzling international track superstar, the only athlete ever to win Olympic gold medals in the pentathlon and the decathlon. The veteran sports scribe Al Stump described Thorpe as “the most formidable running, jumping, smashing, heaving, plunging, and all-around bedazzling sports superhuman of them all.” Sweden’s king, Gustav V, host of the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm, described Thorpe simply as “the world’s greatest athlete.”
Born in 1887 to an Indian ranching family on the Sac and Fox Reservation in Indian Territory, Jim Thorpe would never have realized his athletic potential if not for the efforts of his coach and mentor, Glenn Scobey Warner. Warner, the first modern king-coach, rose to prominence along with Thorpe at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Pop, as he was called, was one of the most successful and innovative football coaches in history, and one of the most contradictory characters in American sports. He was a burly amateur boxer, a penny-pincher, and a compulsive gambler. He was a brutal football lineman who enjoyed painting watercolors and writing poetry. He was a drinker, a smoker, a blasphemer, and a jokester who once nailed the shoes of his assistant coach to the floor of the locker room. He was a caring, sensitive coach who was not afraid of kicking, punching, or beating his players when he felt they deserved it.
If Jim Thorpe was the Elvis Presley of twentieth-century American sports, Pop Warner was his Colonel Parker. It was Warner who provided the money, the publicity, and the managerial acumen that molded Jim Thorpe into an athletic superstar. Under Warner’s tobacco-stained hands, Thorpe became the biggest name in sports. Media outlets around the world celebrated his whalebone toughness; his quiet self-confidence; his calm, brown-eyed gaze; and the strength of his rock-hard jaw, raised slightly with the pride of his blood. According to Warner, Thorpe was “the most remarkable physical machine in the annals of athletics.”
Along with the honor that Thorpe won on the athletic field came money, big money. Not for Thorpe, but for Warner and the sports establishment that emerged in the wake of Thorpe’s phenomenal triumphs, for Thorpe’s rise to glory came at the moment when the business of American sports took its modern form. As Thorpe struggled on the athletic field, businessmen, politicians, and educators struggled to control the flow of money though American sports. During Thorpe’s rise to glory, professional baseball came of age. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) emerged as America’s preeminent collegiate sports business management organization. College football expanded from the rugby scrum of its early years into the fast-moving, crowd-pleasing, open-field game we know today. The U.S. Olympic Committee helped transform the Olympic Games into one of the world’s most lucrative sporting events. At the same time, American sports bureaucrats institutionalized the concept of the “amateur” athlete to tighten their control over young athletes and the money they generated.
The toughest test of Jim Thorpe’s honor came not on the athletic field, but in the conference rooms of the American sports establishment, for it was here that Pop Warner and others dealt with the issue of Jim Thorpe’s status as an “amateur” and first struggled with the questions of honor and money that continue to bedevil American collegiate and Olympic sports.
How was Pop Warner able to take a young Oklahoman of mixed Indian blood and mold him into one of the first international sports celebrities? What forces colluded to dishonor Thorpe and transform him from an American hero into an American disgrace? How did Thorpe’s teammates defend his honor and the honor of all Indians? During the course of the controversy, who lied and who acted honorably?
Newly uncovered information and the redefinition of “amateur” sports have made it possible to reveal the real story of Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. In this tale of blood and honor, we can see man