When the news broke last month, it was not from a sports or mainstream news outlet, but from Indian Country Today, a nonprofit news site.
Jim Thorpe, America’s finest all-around athlete of the 20th century, was posthumously re-awarded two Olympic gold medals in track and field that he had first won in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1912.
Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, had been stripped of the medals in 1913 because he had accepted a few bucks to play low-level professional baseball in the Eastern Carolina League, technically disqualifying him from receiving Olympic medals, which at that time were reserved exclusively for amateur athletes. His race, however, was clearly a factor.
Madison native David Maraniss chronicles Thorpe’s life in a new book released this month, the latest in his epic and meticulously reported series of biographies. His previous sports subjects include baseball superstar Roberto Clemente and legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. Maraniss also has written definitive books about former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Maraniss takes the reader on a 574-page journey through Thorpe’s glorious yet tumultuous life, one marked by divorces, alcoholism, late-life obscurity and poverty. Born in 1887 in Indian territory that would later become Oklahoma, Thorpe died of heart failure in 1953, essentially destitute.
The book’s title, “Path Lit by Lightning,” is explained by Maraniss. Thorpe was named James and given a second Native name — “Wa-tho-Huk.” “Among the variations of how that name can be translated into English,” Maraniss writes, “the most poetic is Path Lit by Lightning. The name was intended not as prediction of future athletic greatness,” he writes, “but as description of the scene outside during the hours after his birth.”
What distinguishes any Maraniss book, biography or otherwise, is the depth of research and rich storytelling. That was certainly true of his two books that most touch on Madison. “They Marched Into Sunlight” about the Vietnam War extensively describes protests in Madison. The other, “A Good American Family,” focuses on McCarthy-era challenges faced by his father, Elliott, once editor of The Capital Times.
In painting his wrenching portrait of Thorpe, Maraniss draws on letters, diaries, oral histories, contemporaneous newspaper accounts and primary documents from 22 archives.
For those who don’t know his story, Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, author and associate editor of the Washington Post. He still summers in Madison with wife, Linda, and supports his father’s newspaper by playing a central role in our annual Cap Times Idea Fest.
Thorpe’s story of multi-sport athletic prowess is impossible to imagine today, when athletes specialize early. Thorpe won the recently restored gold medals in the decathlon and the now-discontinued pentathlon, both multi-sport competitions featuring running, swimming, throwing and jumping, among other skills.
Thorpe also excelled at professional football, and was a charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He is a member of college football’s hall of fame and played professional baseball and basketball. A poll by ABC Sports in 2000 voted Thorpe the greatest American athlete of the 20th century.
My reaction to the book runs on two tracks, one about Thorpe, the other about the country he lived in.
Everything about this humble and shy man, who experienced so much in his relatively short lifetime, was framed by his being a Native American. Maraniss succeeds mightily in telling Thorpe’s personal story, complete with all of the references to “The Big Indian” and similar, relentless racial stereotyping.
There are scores of examples. When Thorpe was divorced from his second wife over his drinking, the Los Angeles Times headline read: “Jim Thorpe divorced in firewater charges.” A wire service distributed a picture of Thorpe in a headdress with this caption: “Although he once was the sports idol of America, Jim Thorpe, Indian athlete, proved a neglectful husband, overly fond of the cup that cheers.”
Maraniss describes Thorpe athletically as “a seemingly indestructible force who ran like a wild horse thundering downhill yet was also a graceful ballroom dancer and gifted swimmer and ice skater.”
He also writes, “When people display such rare physical gifts, there is a tendency to lift them into the realm of the superhuman, as if human magnificence is insufficient. That was certainly true of Thorpe.”
He lived an incredible life filled with connections to famous people from former president Dwight Eisenhower, against whom he played college football, to actor Burt Lancaster, who portrayed Thorpe in the 1951 movie about his life — “Jim Thorpe — All American.”
At every step, Thorpe was always and foremost a Native American. In a Washington Post op-ed after the Olympic reversal last month, Maraniss quoted what Thorpe had said about the medals controversy: “I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint and consider the episode just another event in the red man’s life of ups and downs.”
The second track in my reaction to the book is learning how, once again, the United States was never the pristine and righteous country we were taught about as school children. Today’s culture warriors on the right want to prevent teaching about racial violence and oppression throughout our history, arguing that such instruction will somehow hurt their children’s feelings. They should read this book.
Maraniss describes in great detail how Thorpe, despite all he achieved in athletics, was manipulated, pigeonholed and brutally disrespected by a nation even as it applauded his gifts.
Maraniss writes: “Thorpe’s life spanned a 65-year period when the dominant society believed the best way to deal with Indians was to rid them of their Indian-ness and make them as white as possible. It was that mentality that shaped Thorpe’s life.”
His people were moved to communal properties when Oklahoma became a state, and he was sent as a teenager to a federal government-run boarding school for Native students where the goal was more assimilation than education. Thorpe’s life, Maraniss writes, was filled with powerful white men who sought to control him.
The book is a rich and powerful account of how Thorpe’s “Indian-ness,” as Maraniss puts it, caused him to be mistreated at seemingly every step. Maraniss delivers the definitive account of arguably the greatest athlete in American history while simultaneously opening a window into one of America’s greatest shames — its mistreatment of Native Americans.
Maraniss, a generational talent as a biographer, succeeds mightily on both fronts.
