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!