A new biography of Jim Thorpe separates the man from the legend | Books






Jim Thorpe’s tribal name, Path Lit by Lightning, is a memory of the stormy night in 1887 when he and his twin brother Charlie were born. In retrospect, the name seems fitting for the multi-sport star who rose from obscurity to global fame as the world’s greatest athlete. But as David Maraniss points out in his new biography of Thorpe, “there was little natural light in Jim Thorpe’s life path.” Her brother Charlie died of typhoid fever at the age of 9; her mother died in childbirth several years later; his father, a gamer and bootlegger who showed little interest in fatherhood, died when Jim was 16. Whatever path Jim Thorpe took, he lit it all by himself.

Marani’ Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe comes 110 years after Thorpe’s resounding success, winning gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. His dazzling victories made him the toast of Sweden. Journalists all over the world hailed him as a hero, but even at the height of his fame he was treated as an exotic oddity. Raised in Oklahoma on the outskirts of Sac and Fox Nation — both his parents were of Native American and European descent — Thorpe learned to play his Indian side, delighting crowds with war songs and rain dances. In reality, he relishes the pleasures of hunting and fishing, and as an adult becomes an adept ballroom dancer.

Above all, Thorpe was born to compete. From his early days on the track team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he was sent in 1904, through his decades-long football and baseball career, Thorpe has thrived on the field and languishes . Photos of Thorpe attest to her well-proportioned body. Medical examiners, measuring every part of Thorpe’s body to account for his superiority, concluded that he was “the perfect physical man”. In a portrait of Thorpe, which meticulously recreates his muscular figure, “Thorpe’s body is smooth and symmetrical, a picture of athletic grace and perfection.”

Standing in his Olympic attire, as he does in a famous photo from 1912, Thorpe looks impressive. In action, he was formidable. “His teammates could sense he was different,” writes Maraniss. “They had seen… the resilience of his body and its resistance to pain, the rare combination of strength, speed, stubbornness, instinct and nimble grace, the hint of danger and the spark of electricity .” After Thorpe leads Carlisle to a football victory over Army, a New York Times the correspondent poetically captured Thorpe’s dominance: Thorpe “simply went wild, while the cadets tried in vain to arrest his progress.” It was like trying to catch a shadow.

Maraniss presents Thorpe as an exposition in the 20th century debate over whether Native Americans should retain their tribal identity or be assimilated into mainstream American culture. The Carlisle School was founded on the assimilationist principle, its first superintendent publicly welcoming “our brother in red” (although Carlisle was a student) into “our United States family”.







David Maranis




By the time Thorpe arrived on campus, the assimilation debate had been subsumed by the school’s obsession with sports. Instead of education, football became Carlisle’s primary focus, coach Pop Warner his most influential figure and Jim Thorpe his undeniable star. Maraniss describes how Thorpe’s relationship with Carlisle was mutually beneficial. Thorpe used the school as a platform for his Olympic run and as an entry into professional football and baseball. In return, Warner raised money for the school by playing away games where tens of thousands paid to watch Carlisle’s ‘fat Indian’ run, tackle and kick .

Maraniss deftly handles the central controversy of Thorpe’s career – his deprivation of his Olympic medals when newspapers revealed that Thorpe had played semi-professional baseball for two summers before the Stockholm Olympics. The vast majority of athletes and fans viewed the punishment as unfair and hypocritical, given that Thorpe earned only a pittance for playing a sport that had nothing to do with his Olympic events, and that other countries , including host Sweden, openly subsidized their athletes. The controversy did nothing to dampen Thorpe’s popularity. When he toured the world from 1913-14 as part of an exhibition for Major League Baseball, he was the main attraction at every stop, from Japan to Egypt to the Vatican.

Path lit by lightning acknowledges his subject’s imperfections – financial irresponsibility, excessive drinking, indifference as a parent – and how they contributed to his struggles to find a job once his playing days were over. In his heyday, however, Thorpe stunned crowds with performances that inspired “Homeric odes” to his “otherworldly prowess”. Maraniss reminds us that “sports myths” are inspired “by a desire to rise above the ordinary of life and associate with the transcendent”. Thorpe’s flaws don’t make him any less heroic; they transform an Olympic god into a recognizable man.

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