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.”

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.