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...

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.”

Who Was Jim Thorpe?

OK. I'm deep into the last day of the so-called first pass of the Thorpe manuscript (it's actually the next-to-last proof). So, here's a really quickie summary of why Thorpe was so great in sports: 

An American Indian (Potawatomi; Sac and Fox) from Oklahoma who was arguably the greatest American athlete of modern times. 

He played sports in the early decades of the twentieth century, just as they were emerging as the activities that would become passions for millions. Thorpe was so good at so many games and athletic activities, he became the  the gold standard of athletic achievement.

In those early days, there was no emphasis on specializing in one sport, which freed Thorpe to excel in several.

• A remarkable All-America running back for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team who -- playing before official statistics and against teams such as Harvard, Penn, and Army -- may have been the game's first 2,000-yard rusher. Sports Illustrated said he would have won the Heisman in 1911 and 1912, if the award had existed back then.

• The first international celebrity athlete: the winner, by huge margins, of gold medals for both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm -- the only athlete to ever win both events.

• A major and minor league baseball player for twelve seasons who, by 1919 for the Boston Braves, hit as well (.327) as Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson. 

• The professional football icon who put the pro sport on the map -- and whose statue is the first thing you see today when you enter the Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. 

Approaching the finish line

Jim Thorpe (1887-1953) was perhaps the greatest all-around athlete of modern times. For a biographer, me, he was an irresistible subject.

He preceded radio and television, yet remains in the collective memory, however hazy, as the definitive athlete. When I would mention I was thinking of doing a book about him to just about any man, or group of men, the reaction was always the same. A couple of beats of silence and then, with a particular tone of awe, his name spoken slowly, emphatically, "Jim Thorpe!"

The reaction was the same whether it was at a tony cocktail party on Fishers Island or from a postal worker in the Appalachian town of Lexington, Virginia or a contractor in Southern California.

As you can guess from the stacks of corrected proof pages on my work tables pictured here in March 2010, figuring out why Thorpe's story had lingered for so long was not a short  -- seven years -- or easy task.

Unexpected discoveries emerged and will emerge. They always do.