'Jim Thorpe' Gives Voice to Athlete
August 3, 2006By GARY BUDZAK
The Columbus Dispatch
BOOKS FOR KIDS
Sports scandals are nothing new: Just look at what happened to Jim Thorpe.
Thorpe, perhaps the greatest athlete of all time, won the decathlon and the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics.
He was an All-American college football player, and his pro football career included playing for teams such as the Canton Bulldogs.
His participation in another sport, baseball, led to the stripping of his gold medals.
Author Joseph Bruchac has the famed athlete recount his early years in Jim Thorpe: Original All-American (Dial, $16.99, age 8 and older). Although the book is fiction, it has been thoroughly researched (some facts are still in dispute).
Particularly interesting is how Bruchac delves into Thorpe's American Indian background. Born on an Oklahoma reservation in 1887, young Jim was forced to attend schools far from home that were meant to "civilize" Indians. He would tire of the strict rules and run home. His father would send him back to school.
At one school, Thorpe learned about the relatively young sport of football. He dreamed of playing for the Carlisle Indians, an all-Indian school in Pennsylvania.
The team was a college-football powerhouse coached by Pop Warner, an early innovator of the sport.
Thorpe wasn't an immediate star. Warner had him run track before letting him play football. A bench warmer, he played only when a starter got injured. But when Thorpe started to show his prodigious skills, Carlisle was hard to beat.
Of one tough win, Bruchac has an injured Thorpe recall: "They had to carry me off the field, but I didn't care. Even those Harvard fans were cheering for me and our little Indian team. It was one of the best days of my whole life."
While describing those longago games, Bruchac has Thorpe explain how football's rules were different. He recounts how racism played a part in society.
"The Carlisle Indian eleven grabbed Pennsylvania's football scalp and dragged their victim up and down Franklin Field," read one newspaper account of the time.
One summer, while attending college, Thorpe played minorleague baseball.
Because he got paid for playing, he was no longer considered an amateur athlete and thus violated Olympic rules.
Thorpe's narrative ends as he turns professional, and Bruchac adds an afterword that summarizes what happened in his later years.
Jim Thorpe: Original All-American is recommended to any young reader.
gbudzak@dispatch.com
