Oh, Canada!

Goody, a book race! Click here -- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Summer Sports Showdown -- and vote, under Track & Field, for NATIVE AMERICAN SON. Vote every day, if you want, until the end of the 2012 Games on August 12. We're going for the gold. 
     If you want more Things Canadian, check out this fine piece on Thorpe and the book from Jeff Blair at the Toronto Globe & Mail.
     Canadians are smarter as well as funnier...

After London

Robert Frew LTD, Antiquarian Books, Maps & Prints

Well, the Thorpe (duplicate) medals never made it to London after all. Turns out they were classified as museum artifacts and, thus, were too complicated to ship across the ocean. 
     No problem. London was terrific, even in the rain. Maybe especially in the rain, because it forced us inside, into places like the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial War Museum (see John Singer Sargent's HUGE - 20 feet long - disturbing WWI painting "Gassed, 1919"), the tiny Finborough Theater (above a handy wine bar & you'll be the only tourists in the 30-person audience), the Bloomsbury Coffee House, Liberty's, St. Paul's and on and on. All I wanted to do was walk the streets of this city I have loved all my life and that's just about all I did.
     One rainy afternoon we exited the V&A and ducked out of the downpour into this tiny book and print shop across the street (see photo above). We didn't leave for at least an hour and only then because it was closing. 
     There was plenty of amazing and expensive stuff to marvel at. But there were also bins of affordable things, such as the charming print of a delicate little bird and another of a happy-looking lion that we took away with us. 
     So, if you're going to London for the 2012 Games and want a change of pace from sports, make your way to 8 Thurloe Place, SW7 and take away a real souvenir of English life and history.
     And, yes, I did watch 84 Charing Cross Road, which I'd never seen, as soon as I got back home. 

London Bound

A duplicate of the gold medals won by Thorpe at the 1912 Games

The 2012 London Olympics kick off July 27. It's going to be huge. The BBC has been all over me and anybody else connected with the history of the modern Olympic movement for at least the past twelve months. They are so psyched over there that I decided I would jump the gun and get a preview glimpse. 
     So I'm flying over the pond -- as old timers love to say, as if we're all camping out in a summer colony -- tomorrow. I'll be there from July 10-15. Just enough to have fun and check out the new stadium -- and to avoid the crowds.
     What interests me anyway is the history of sports -- how games started, why the mania, the passion. Thorpe astonished the world 100 years ago this summer and look at all that has happened since. Look where sports are now: the common passion of our time. We've come a long way. And, I argue in my biography of Thorpe, a certain intensity of feeling about athletes and their performance began with him, in Stockholm, that long century ago.
     Thorpe's two (duplicate) medals (see the biography for the full story) for the classic pentathlon and the decathlon are supposed to be on display at the USA House in London (aka the Royal College of Art in Kensington). I'm going to check that out and will report back...

Countdown to Thorpe Olympic Centennial

U.S. Olympic team onboard the S.S. Finland, bound for Stockholm, 1912

Don't they look sharp, dressed in blazers and boaters, waving their American flags? New York City saw the country's Olympic team off here in style on June 14, 1912 for the trip across the Atlantic to Stockholm. 

     The press dubbed the athletes "America's Argonauts," an homage to the Greek myth of Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece. Of course America was going to beat everybody at the Fifth Olympiad and bring home the most gold medals (real gold for the last time). Of course, said Jim Thorpe to himself, he was going to win the five-event pentathlon AND the ten-event decathlon. He knew it. He was ready.

     I can't pick him out in this crowd on the ship's deck, but he's there. He's already visualizing in his head each of the events he'll have to perform. He's already working out the point balance between the feats he knows he's really good at -- the hurdles and the 1,500-meter race, and the others he's barely done -- the pole vault, the javelin, the discus, the shot put. 

     People would later claim he never practiced, but he did. For real and in his head. He was in the best condition of his life and he didn't want to get stale, as he put it. He had to stay confident, secure within himself. He had to tune out the energies and egos of all these other athletes, clamoring on the deck of the S.S Finland. 

     Some of the other American athletes, college men mostly, would notice on this trip across the ocean that Thorpe didn't wear any rings or a watch. He didn't even carry a wallet. No extra baggage. Many of the other athletes were jumpy, nervous. Jim wasn't. He was strangely calm. 

Hunger Games & the non-fiction writer

     Can learning how a movie script gets squeezed out of a book help the non-fiction writer?
     When the Media Arts Lab at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, offered a course in Film Adaptation this spring, I signed up. The teacher, Joy Goodwin, recently adapted William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (to be produced at HBO). She is really good at bending this literal, linear biographer's mind to think different (Too much exposition? Break it up!).
     For the first class Joy handed out copies of the first chapter of THE HUNGER GAMES. Those of us who had either read the book or seen the movie were to try to forget everything we knew and look at the chapter fresh. We analyzed and second-guessed the chapter's elements and Joy wrote them down on the dry erase blackboard. The characters (Katniss, Prim, the mother, Buttercup the cat, Gale, dead father, Effie Trinket, the mayor). The setting (the electric fence, the meadow, the bakery, the Hob, District 12). The tone (o-m-i-n-o-u-s). 
     OK, Joy said, from this list decide which elements are important. Which ones have to be in the movie.
     Now, write a quick scene, she said, right now, dramatizing one of those elements. I had Katniss wake up screaming from the recurring nightmare of her father's death in the mine explosion. We discussed how many other, better ways that memory + the fact of her father's death could be conveyed, got out of the way as backstory. And so on, around the table, each of us reading our scene, workshop format. Each scene totally different. Just like a Hollywood pitch meeting, said Joy. She was being kind. 
     Purpose of the exercise? To see that an entire first act of a movie version is in that first chapter. 
     Homework for next week: Take another element of that HUNGER GAMES chapter and write a 2-3 page scene. Fold in as much expository background (the history of Panem, the rules, the tesserae) as economically as possible. 
     Can't wait. So far, this non-fiction writer is indeed starting to think different. Mostly about what you don't need to include in a narrative...
     A quote from movie screenwriter and director Richard Brooks (ELMER GANTRY, THE PROFESSIONALS, IN COLD BLOOD, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF) popped into my brain: "The book is the orange, the movie is the juice." 

What's With Jim Thorpe, PA, Anyway?

Jim Thorpe, PA

     It's complicated. Jim Thorpe was never in this pretty little gateway-to-the Poconos town while he was actually alive from 1887 to 1953. He -- or his body --didn't get there until he was dead and had been dead for eleven months. And he didn't get buried there officially until three years after that, on Memorial Day, May 30, 1957.

     You can read the full story of this bizarre Life After Death in my new biography of Thorpe, Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe. 

     However, since the Knopf hardcover was published in October 2012, a whole new Thorpe controversy has erupted. The two surviving sons of Thorpe's original eight children have brought a federal lawsuit against the town of Jim Thorpe under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to have their father's remains exhumed and brought back to Oklahoma, where he was born and where, they say, he wanted to be buried. It was the Thorpe widow who cooked up the deal with the town, not them.

     Could be big. If the Thorpe sons, Bill and Dick, win this thing, it will be known as the Thorpe Case, an important legal precedent for NAGPRA and American Indian culture in general. Personally, as Thorpe's biographer, I can't think of a better legacy, a better end to the story of his life. The town faithfully honored their side of what was essentially a contract for a human body in 1953, but times and attitudes have changed in half a century. 

     Meanwhile, for the latest and thorough update on the case, read Neely Tucker's "Battle over athlete Jim Thorpe's burial site continues," the cover story of this Sunday's Washington Post magazine.

WHY JIM THORPE NOW

Why read a biography of Jim Thorpe now? Bunch of reasons, but let's start with a few cued to 2012.

     This year is the centennial of the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm when Thorpe, the American Indian out of nowhere, won gold medals in the pentathlon AND the decathlon. No other Olympian has ever done that in these multi-sport events made up of elemental feats that have been the foundation of all athletics since the ancient Greeks. Thorpe also won both by huge margins. Nobody would match them, either. Thorpe's Olympic time in the decathlon 1,500-meter race would hold until 1972. That's 60 years. Incredible. 

      However, Thorpe's Olympic time and distance records are not official. They were stricken from the record in 1913 when it was revealed that he had played minor league baseball in 1909 and 1910. As doping is now, professionalism -- taking money for playing sports -- was the threshold issue back then, especially for the Olympics. Amateurism was pretty much bogus, but it ruled the day (read Native American Son to learn more). The Thorpe affair was the mother of all sports scandals, still rated at the top by the 2011 WORLD ALMANAC.

     Thorpe's records were never put back. Oh, yes, there was a sort of posthumous  "reinstatement" by the IOC in 1982. The supposed happy ending. Thorpe was re-entered by the IOC as a "competitor" in the 1912 Games and listed as a co-gold medal winner with the original second-place athletes who had been promoted to first place when Thorpe was erased. Duplicate medals were cast from the original mold and given to his children. But the "record" was not changed. 

     Result: two "official" gold medal winners of both complex, multi-sport events, an absurdity. Thorpe's individual performances in each event were kept off the record probably because if they were reinstated, the co-winner status would look even more bizarre. Sports Illustrated called the whole mess the ultimate asterisk in sports. The first international celebrity athlete, the first Olympic super-star, remains today, a century later, a phantom contender, there but not there. 

   Thorpe's demotion in 1913 reverberated around the world for months, years and decades. He was seen by just about everybody except the AAU and the IOC as the outsider made scapegoat to an elitist and exclusionary ideal.       

     But the Swedes had shown the world how to put on a proper Olympiad when the whole idea of an international multi-sports event was new. The four Olympiads prior to Stockholm had ranged from rudimentary to disastrous. It was by no means certain that this movement begun by Pierre de Coubertin in 1896 would survive (the 1916 Games were supposed to take place in Berlin). Without the beautifully organized and successful Stockholm Games 100 years ago, we might not be looking forward to London this summer. 

     Equally important to the survival of the modern Olympic movement in 1912 was Jim Thorpe. He glamorized the Games. He thrilled the world with a series of athletic performances that set a standard sports fans would anticipate every four years (except during World Wars) since. 

     2012 twist: Thorpe did those 15 events in Stockholm without the aid of any enhancement drug or even the level of training his competitors enjoyed. The machine of his own body, aided by his ability to observe and then mimic the best athletes around him, was enough. More than enough.

     

EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT! NAS OUT IN PAPERBACK!

When the Knopf hardcover of NATIVE AMERICAN SON rolled off the printing press in October 2010 I thought of the Ford Assembly line in 1927. Was my book like the last Model T chugging out of the plant in Highland Park, Michigan exactly 83 years before? The last of the old-style books, lovingly designed by the ace team at Knopf, then edited, copy edited, proof read, sent to a printer, and so on? Would I show this artifact of the early 21st century to my grandchildren one day as proof of how really old their grandmother is?

     Well, rumors of the traditional book's death, so far, have turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Of course, at the same time, nobody knows anything. Which means it's pretty good news -- let's agree to call it that -- to have a paperback edition of your hardcover coming out in 2012. Made it just under the wire! 

     The new paperback looks great (see cover image at the top of the blog page). Bison Books at the University of Nebraska did a fine job. The (few) errors that inevitably popped up in the hardcover have been corrected (I know. Thorpe did not play in the 1913 World Series). Snippets from some of the great reviews are on the front page, probably the best thing, to its author, about any paperback. More review excerpts on the back cover. And so on. 

     So far, so good in this crazy book biz. We can still hold the thing we built, and that we hope will last, in our hands. Yay.

That Famous Letter to the AAU

On January 27, 1913, 101 years ago today, Glenn S. "Pop" Warner delivered a letter from Jim Thorpe to James E. Sullivan, the secretary-treasurer of the American Amateur Union (AAU) at his office in New York. In the letter Thorpe admitted to having played professional baseball in the minor leagues during the summers of 1909 and 1910. "Professional" meant that he had been paid to play.
     This was explosive information. Six months before, at the Fifth Olympiad in Stockholm, Thorpe had won gold medals by huge margins in both the pentathlon and decathlon, astonishing the world as the first super-athlete as the modern Olympic movement was struggling to survive. In order to qualify to compete, he had had to sign a form that stated he was an "amateur" -- meaning that he had never accepted money for any kind of athletic endeavor. 
     So, when a newspaper headline on January 22, 1913, six months later, revealed that Thorpe was no amateur, the result was what is still considered the biggest sports scandal ever. After congratulating itself for the American team's generally spectacular performance in Stockholm, the American sports establishment, humiliated, rushed to find its scapegoat.
     Actually, Warner wrote the letter to Sullivan and persuaded his star athlete at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to sign it. Warner also insisted he had no idea that Thorpe had played baseball those two summers. In fact, he knew exactly where Thorpe had been and what he'd been doing. But Warner, ambitious, often unscrupulous, was not going to take the fall for his athlete in the scandal that had quickly assumed international proportions. 
    Here is the full text of what soon became a famous letter, scrutinized and debated about for the rest of the century -- and beyond:


Carlisle, Pa. Jan. 26, 1913
James E. Sullivan
Dear Sir:
    When the interview with Mr. Clancy stating that I had played baseball on the Winston-Salem team was shown to me I told Mr. Warner that it was not true and in fact I did not play on that team. But so much as been said in the papers since then that I went to the school authorities this morning and told them just what there was in the stories.
     I played baseball at Rocky Mount and at Fayetteville, N.C. in the summer ofd 1909 and 1910 under my own name. On the same teams I played with were several college men from the north who were earning money by ball playing during their vacations and who were regarded as amateurs at home. IO did not play for the money there was in it because my property brings me in enough money to live on, but because I liked to play ball. I was not wise inthe ways of theworls and did not realize this was wrong, and that it would make me a professional in track sports, although I learned from the other payers that it would be better for me not to let anyone know that I was playing and for that reason I never told anyone at the school about it until today.
     In the fall of 1911 I applied for readmission to this school and came back to continue muy studies and take par tin the school sports and of course I wanted to get on the Olympic team and take that trip to Stockholm. I had Mr. Warner send in my application for registering in the A.A>U., after I had answered the questions and signed it and I received my card allowing me to compete on the winter meets and other track sports. I never realized until now what a big mistake I made by keeping it a secret about my ball playing and I am sorry I did so. I hope I would be partly excused because of the fact that I was simply as Indian school boy [Thorpe would turn 26 in 1913] and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong because I was doing what I knew several other college men  had one, except that they did not use their own names.
     I have always liked sports and only played or run races for the fun of the things and never to earn money. I have received offers amounting to thousands of dollars since my victories last summer, but I have turned them all down because I did not care to makes money from my athletic skill. I am very sorry, Mr. Sullivan, to have it all spoiled in this way and I hop the Amateur Athletic Union and the people will not be too hard in judging me.
Yours truly,
James Thorpe

Same Old., Same Old ...

Joe Nocera wrote a terrific piece in today's Sunday New York Times Magazine on college athletes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/lets-start-paying-college-athletes.html?_r=1&hpw.
They should be paid, he says, and thereby end "the hypocrisy that permeates big-money college sports."


He is totally right and the only thing missing from the piece, at least to me, was a paragraph that traced the current mess right back to the beginnings of college football about a century ago. For some of that backstory, read my biography of Jim Thorpe, NATIVE AMERICAN SON: THE LIFE AND SPORTING LEGEND OF JIM THORPE (Knopf, 2010). 


Thorpe stepped onto the gridiron just as the rules of football finally settled into the form we would recognize as the modern game. His coach, Glenn S. "Pop" Warner, was a master manipulator of those rules. He also set up a football machine at Thorpe's Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania that is a precursor of today's collegiate football enterprise.

Not that he was the only one. The coaches at Yale, Harvard and other top-level football schools turned a blind eye to alumni payments "under the table," not to mention to other perks that made the financial situation of top collegiate athletes very comfortable indeed. 

Fascinating stuff. Let's see if Nocera's tough thinking produces concrete results in the NCAA...

My Best of 2011

A handful of my very favorite personal highlights of a great year -- 
Professional: Taking NATIVE AMERICAN SON on the road

• Charlottesville, VA: Speaking at the terrific Ragged Mountain Running Shop during the Virginia Festival of the Book
• Los Angeles, CA: Appearing on the "Beyond the Icon" panel with Richard Schickel, Yunte Huang and Leslie Brody at the Los Angeles Times Festival of the Book at USC 
• Oklahoma City, OK: Being keynote speaker at the Jim Thorpe Association's Leadership Luncheon -- and selling LOTS of books
• New York City: Speaking to the Actors' Fund in the venerable Milton Berle Room of the Friar's Club 
• Atlantic City, NJ: Speaking at the annual Pop Lloyd Negro League Celebration and having the privilege of meeting several former Negro League players and hearing their wonderful stories
• Feedback: Hearing, all year, from discerning readers such as Douglas Brinkley, how much they enjoyed NATIVE AMERICAN SON.
• Awards: Winning the annual research awards from both SABR (baseball) and PFRA (pro football) - the stat guys who know EVERYTHING about their respective sports.

Personal: Friends, Family and Community

• Deepening old friendships
• Making many new ones 
• Being with my son, my daughter, and my two-year-old grandson
• Living in and loving NYC, Westchester County, NY and Rockbridge County, VA = perfect trio.

On to 2012...

50 Years Ago Today - Disastrous Berlin Premiere of JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG

Within sight of the Reichstag ruins and 700 yards from the brand-new Berlin Wall dividing the city, Stanley Kramer’s JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG had its world premiere a half-century ago on December 14, 1961 before a stunned, silent audience of prominent Germans – and 300 reporters from 26 countries. “No applause, no sobs, no tentative laughs to relieve the tension,” reported the New York Herald Tribune. Few showed up for the lavish post-party.

In a century marked with unprecedented conflict and a year, 1961, that often felt like the edge of Armageddon, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG marks an important pivot after which popular feeling, at least in this country, began to face seriously the horrors of what would soon come to be generally called “the Holocaust.”

The sensational trial of Adolf Eichmann on 15 counts, including crimes against humanity, had concluded in Jerusalem a week before with a guilty verdict. The death sentence was read out the day after the movie’s premiere, December 15. By Christmas commentators were suggesting that the Nuremburg trials were the legal and moral precedent that “authorized brave little Israel” to hunt down and prosecute Eichmann. Hannah Arendt had reported on the trial for The New Yorker and the last four words of the subtitle of her subsequent book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, would become a catch phrase of history.

Preceding the film’s premiere had been a year of stunning Cold War brinksmanship. In April the Bay of Pigs debacle kicked off John Kennedy’s first year as U.S. president. Encouraged by this apparent incompetence of the American leader, Soviet leader Khrushchev bullied and harangued Kennedy at their June meeting in Vienna, threatening war if his demands to alter the status of Berlin were not met. All summer the world tensed itself for war. By August 17 the Berlin Wall was done, built in five days. September 1 U.S. seismographs discovered that the Soviets had resumed testing of major nuclear devices.

Meanwhile, director Kramer, screenwriter Abby Mann and United Artists were working on JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG. Shooting took place after two weeks in February of rehearsals at the Revue Studio in Hollywood and then moved to the site of the original trials in the Palace of Justice in Nuremburg and to the still-rubble-strewn streets of Berlin.

The meticulous Kramer was known for “message” pictures (THE DEFIANT ONES, ON THE BEACH, INHERIT THE WIND), but JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG was made with a particular passion and purpose. Since the end of World War II in 1945, a former U.S ally, the USSR, had become an enemy. And a former enemy, Germany – at least the Western part of the divided country -- was an essential Cold War ally in the fight against communism. As a result, it was considered "a breach of good manners in polite society,” as the film’s screenwriter Abby Mann recalled, to bring up the Nazi extermination of the Jews for fear of offending Germany.

The Nuremburg war crime trails had been a first in international jurisprudence, establishing the legal concept of crimes against humanity. The first and best known was the trial of key Nazi leaders, including Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, from 1945 to 1946. JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG was based on the third trial, in 1947, that prosecuted 16 functionaries in the German judicial system (the script condensed the number down to four). When Mann discovered in the late 1950s that none of the jurists convicted (most of them were found guilty, some given life sentences) were still in prison, he wondered if the same attitude that allowed the Nazis to come to power was somehow related to their release (Arendt would speculate along similar lines during the Eichmann trial). That question inspired Mann’s original 1959 Playhouse 90 teleplay.

The show was a sensation. Mann claimed to be the first, both in the TV and film versions, to show documentary footage of concentration camps to a broad audience. “Nobody wanted to remember the camps,” he recalled at the time. The American Gas Company, a sponsor of the teleplay, insisted that the word “gas” be deleted from the script with the result, cracked one reviewer, that “Six million Jews died in . . . chambers.”

Kramer figured the only way the movie version would fly at the box office was to load it up with stars. The New Yorker would call it “a judicial GRAND HOTEL.” Marlene Dietrich was the “good German,” Spencer Tracy the crusty American judge, Maximilian Schell would win an Oscar for his portrayal of the defense attorney. Judy Garland, fragile, was in her first film in five years (on April 23, 1962, she would give her great Carnegie Hall concert). Montgomery Clift, drinking heavily, worked for free, his face wrecked by a car crash. Other stars: Richard Widmark, a very young William Shatner, and Burt Lancaster as Emil Janning, the Nazi judge who gives the final indictment of his own culture (‘Where were we? ... Were we deaf, dumb and blind?”).

The movie “opened and closed” that night in Berlin and would not be released in Germany until after the mini-series HOLOCAUST was a hit on German television 20 years later. Former United Artists executive and biographer Steven Bach would call JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG “one of the last of its sort before the movie industry’s capitulation to television made such subject matter impossible except on television.”

It wasn't a great movie, but it was an effective one. It was made to remind the world, as The New Yorker summed it up at the time, “of nothing less than the degree of our accountability as members of the human race, for the life and well-being of every other member of the race.” 

11-11-11: "Crippled Jimmy Thorpe" v. Harvard

One hundred years ago today Jim Thorpe was the star of one of collegiate football's most spectacular games: Carlisle Indian Industrial School v. Harvard. For the full story read my NATIVE AMERICAN SON: THE LIFE AND SPORTING LEGEND OF JIM THORPE (paperback due out in March 2012). 

     For a teaser, click on http://www.amazon.com/Native-American-Son-Sporting-Legend/dp/0375413243 and plug "Harvard" into the search box to read the section of the book that starts on page 101: 

The stage was now set, public interest “smoking hot,” for “the battle of the year," Carlisle versus Harvard. Harvard's coach, the tall, patrician, snobbish and belligerent Percy Haughton, wrote to Pop Warner [Carlisle's coach] before the game warning him that if Carlisle used a Warner trick -- sewing half-football patches on the front of the jerseys of the backs -- Harvard would cancel the game. Haughton told his second-string to suit up to start the game, conserving his varsity's strength for their next games against Dartmouth and Yale, and left for New Haven to scout the Yale-Brown game.  As one Carlisle player said,  “We pointed to this game because it meant more prestige than any other. On the other hand Harvard didn’t consider us much.” 

     At game time “Crippled Jimmy Thorpe,” as The Boston Sunday Globe described him, had his still-injured right leg heavily wrapped with “a basketweave of strapping adhesive plaster running almost from his toe to his knee.” The game would set him up as the enduring, punishing model of the iron man who plays on regardless of physical handicap. Injuries -- Jim suffered few of them -- only made him more focused. Revealing a superstitious side to his character, he pointed out that this was the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the new century and eleven was his lucky number. 

            The game was epic. “Probably,” claimed the Kansas Star, “the most spectacular playing ever witnessed.”

The World's "Most Wonderful Athlete" Goes Around the World

The Brits have an acute sense of history that we Americans can only envy. A year in advance of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the busy BBC has been all over the story of Jim Thorpe's incredible performance 100 years ago (almost) at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.  I've done two lengthy interviews, one in person (see my previous blog post on that) for a BBC Radio 2 series that will air next spring, the other by phone from London for BBC World Service. Impressive, both of them.


1912 was the Fifth Olympiad of the modern Games. The Olympic movement was barely off the ground and plagued with controversy and in-fighting. Read my NATIVE AMERICAN SON to get a nice summary of the whole thing. 


Here is the first of the two Thorpe-related radio shows to air, so far, from across the pond: BBC World Service is the 24/7 show that broadcasts in 27 languages to 180 million people around the planet.  It's a fitting audience size -- and recognition -- for the finest multi-sport athlete the world has ever seen or ever will see. You'll hear me talking about Thorpe. More importantly, you'll hear the pleasant, relaxed Thorpe himself, from a rare radio broadcast.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00jy6bw/Sporting_Witness_Jim_Thorpe_American_Indian_legend/

Oh, to be in Long Beach now that SABR's there...

Lawrence Ritter, standing, looks on as Lee Lowenfish, left, interviews Red Barber, circa 1985

This Thursday, July 7, my biography of Jim Thorpe --Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Knopf) -- was officially awarded the 2011 Larry Ritter Award for the best book about the Deadball Era by the Deadball Era Committee at the annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in Long Beach, California. 

I was unable to cross the continent to attend, but I sure wish I could have. This is a great honor, given by total experts in the history and statistics of our great American pastime. And, though I never met him, I understand that Larry Ritter was not only deeply respected for his knowledge of the game, but loved for his generous nature.

So, here are the remarks I prepared to be read out at the Deadball Era Committee meeting this week:

It is an honor to be the recipient of this year’s Larry Ritter Award from the SABR Deadball Era Committee. When I called my editor at Knopf, Jonathan Segal, to tell him about the award he was delighted. Jon knew Larry, thought the world of him and was thrilled at this wonderful connection. I wish I could be there to accept the award and to thank the Committee in person.

Of course I also immediately thought of THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES: THE STORY OF BASEBALL TOLD BY THE MEN WHO PLAYED IT. Fred Snodgrass, Sam Crawford, Hans Lobert, Chief Meyers, Rube Marquard – each of those names figures in Jim Thorpe’s story when he was with the New York Giants and in the major – and high minor – leagues.

Part of the pleasure in researching and writing NATIVE AMERICAN SON was going back in time to those days when organized sports were new and fresh. Though baseball was the most organized of the team sports – football had a very long way to go, as Thorpe knew well – the sport was still in its comparative childhood, if not infancy.

One of the most satisfying discoveries about Thorpe – and there were many – was coming across 1919 newspaper coverage that demolished the old John McGraw taunt that Thorpe couldn’t hit a curve ball. As you can read in the book, Thorpe’s relationship with the redoubtable Muggsy was complicated. The root of the problem in my opinion? Thorpe was already a star when he started with the Giants in 1913. The greatest athlete in the world. He didn’t need McGraw to make him one.

However, he did need the manager to make him into a great baseball player. Thorpe had played mediocre, at best, baseball with the Eastern Carolina League in 1909 and 1910. An operation for trachoma, a debilitating eye condition rampant in Indian boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, may have left him with impaired eyesight. As Frank Deford told me, no matter how good an athlete is in basketball, football, track and field – baseball is just different. It requires different skills, a different mindset. Thorpe’s strategic appetite was best satisfied on the football field.

What is important for Thorpe’s Deadball Era baseball career is that he had to learn how to hit that curve ball. Baseball did not, as other sports did, come easily to him. It took him six years, but he did it. By 1919, sold to the Boston Braves by McGraw, he retaliated by leading the National League throughout most of the summer in batting. On July 16 the Los Angeles Times reported that Thorpe was hitting .411 in 22 games. Before a leg injury took him out of the running in early August, he was hitting .375 to the American League’s Ty Cobb’s .350. He ended the season at .327 and would always point to that statistic and say, with typical dry humor, “I must have hit a few curves.”

To this group of SABR experts I feel duty bound to point out that, contrary to what is printed on page 180 of NATIVE AMERICAN SON, Jim Thorpe did NOT play in the 1913 World Series. McGraw barely let him leave the bench that rookie season. When asked which position he was playing that year, Thorpe replied, “Sitting hen.” I pointed out that editing error to SABR when I was told the book was under consideration for the Ritter award and I thank them for their understanding.

Sports statistics are otherwise unforgiving and rigorous. That is both the creative control and the challenge of writing about sports. One of the big ironies of Jim Thorpe’s stellar athletic career is that, except for baseball, there are no official statistics for his performances in football or track and field. He was just too early.

Painstaking research by an NCAA archivist that can be appreciated by everybody listening to these remarks established that, even with no record at all of some of his 1912 football yardage for Carlisle, Thorpe was probably the game’s first 2,000-yard rusher. His remarkable records in the 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon were annulled in 1913 and have never been re-instated, in spite of the popular perception. Too bad, because his Olympic decathlon time in the 1500-meter race stood until 1972.

And that’s one of the statistics I bring up when people ask: Was Jim Thorpe really that great? The other one is the 1919 batting record.

Thank you all very much. And I hope you’re all having a great time out there in Long Beach!

Thorpe's Big Centennial & London 2012

Opening Day: July 27, 2012. The Brits are getting pumped for the 2012 Olympic Games. It's the third London Olympiad after 1908 and 1948 and they've built a brand-new stadium (see photo above), of course. And, with a sense of history more acute than most of us, they've got the largest BBC radio network, Radio 2, already busy at work on an ambitious series of six Olympic-themed documentaries called Radio Ballads, to be broadcast during the Games a year from now. 

The segments will, according to Manchester-based interviewer Vince Hunt, tell the story of the Olympics, ancient and modern, from 776 B.C. through to London 2012, via the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 1972 Munich tragedy and the 1976, '80 and '84 boycotts as well as the 1908 marathon fiasco. They will also, by the way, coincide with the centennial of Jim Thorpe's 1912 triumph in Stockholm when he won the pentathlon and decathlon by huge margins. When the King of Sweden lauded him as "the most wonderful athlete in the world" -- the first international celebrity athlete super-star.

The project strikes this American as a (good) throwback to FDR's 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA), when artists, acrobats, writers, and more were sent out (by the government) across the U.S. to create new work, everything from plays to national park structures. Hunt was dispatched (by his government-funded BBC) to the U.S. to talk to and record -- phone call audio not good enough -- Olympic athletes and me. 

A pretty remarkable musician himself, Hunt is a deceptively low-key interviewer. By the time we got to the symbiotic link between the early modern Olympics (1912) and nationalism, we were deep into the Big Muddy of World War I, fame, and the end of the American frontier.

Back in the U.K., said Hunt, "for our programmes to become Ballads, we play our interviews to songwriters who are then inspired by the stories they hear to write songs. We have revived a technique from the 1950s devised by the songwriter and theatre producer Ewan MacColl [and our own Peggy Seeger, MacColl's wife at the time] Our first series for the BBC in 2006 can be found here: www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/radioballads." The end result will be what one reviewer has called a "radio kaleidoscope" of interview clips, sound effects, and the ballads. 

Original songs commissioned to mark an important event? What a concept! Alan Lomax in reverse. I'll be interested to see what the Brits make of Thorpe's story. His life is an American opera: high peaks of ecstatic triumph alternating with abrupt plunges into despair and sorrow. Rich material for a song marking the centennial of the first sports performance to thrill the entire world.

Fun & Inspiration at the National Press Club

7 p.m. Saturday, May 21, 2011: Leaving BIO conference

Last weekend the little org that could -- Biographers International Organization (BIO) -- held its second annual convention at the National Press Club in the downtown heart of our nation's capital.

I went to the first annual meeting last year at UMass-Boston and thought the unusually good vibe was just start-up euphoria. Couldn't last. Competition, hierarchy, and back-biting would take over soon enough.

I was wrong. This year the ambience was, if anything, even better. Amicable, productive, generous, energetic. FUN. One attendee said it felt more like a reunion than a conference.

Somebody else wondered if writing about people's lives for a living made biographers nicer people. More empathetic. That might be a stretch, but he had a point. If you're any good as the chronicler of a life, you have to put yourself in your subject's shoes and walk. And walk. And walk.

Who better, then, to be the BIO keynote speaker than Robert Caro? The Manhattan-born man who went to the Texas hill country to live for three years so as to understand where Lyndon Johnson came from. The theme of his address was the importance to a biographer of a sense of place Robert Caro: Power of Place. I was reminded of Iris Origo's statement that for a biographer to see the places her subject has lived is like running a hand over a dead man's face.

Caro began by suggesting that the descriptive tool of fiction -- as with the deck of the Pequod, Napoleon on the battlefield at Borodino, Miss Havisham's room -- can be used by the writer of nonfiction to engage the reader in the dynamic process of discovery. With wit, passion, and elegant chronology he brought us along from LBJ's dirt-poor Texas to the triumphant architecture of Washington.

In a bravura conclusion that stunned the audience Caro showed (not told) how a meticulous understanding of a place can expose a real, historical person's essential motivation: Why he does what he does. Why LBJ was running early every morning as he approached the gleaming marble of the capitol building.

The concrete visual details, if acutely observed, reveal the human story.

Jim Thorpe Goes to Hollywood

The so-called Golden Age of American Sports? The 1920s. The new media of radio and movie newsreels pumped up the reputations of sports stars such as Big Bill Tilden (tennis), Jack Dempsey (boxing), Babe Ruth (baseball), Red Grange (football), and many more. 


When they grew too old for sports where did many of these athletes go? West, to Hollywood. The climate was great and their names were useful publicity, even if they only appeared in a movie as an extra. By 1935 it was suggested that there were more former athletes in Los Angeles than in any other American city.                                     


Jim Thorpe also made his way out to California when his game playing days were over and made a second career of bit parts, largely in westerns and adventure movies. Read more in my piece in Random House's WORD AND FILM website (and check out the YouTube video on the right of this blog page):

Jim Thorpe Goes to Hollywood 1931 - 1950

Going to the dogs

My Yorkie, Bubba, was one of the stars at "Pet Tales," a recent Marmaduke Writing Factory author event.

       

The Book Promotion That Keeps on Promoting, Forever...

Charlottesville, Downtown Mall

C-SPAN Book TV interview Mar. 18, 2011 VA Festival of the Book

Sunny, early spring day in the Southland. C-SPAN sets up a command post in the Charlottesville-Albemarle Visitor Center at the far eastern end of the Downtown Mall. Hand-held camera, interviewer, producer, author. Visitors strolling back and forth in the background. The antithesis of the studio cave.
It's a wrap, and these 15 minutes will get plugged into time gaps on C-SPAN again and again, forever.