Robert Lipsyte - Jim Thorpe: 20th-Century Jock

Young Adult Fiction

Center Field

Yellow Flag

Raiders Night

The Contender

The Brave

The Chief

Warrior Angel

One Fat Summer

Summer Rules

The Summerboy

The Chemo Kid

Jock and Jill

Young Adult Nonfiction

Jim Thorpe

Michael Jordan

Joe Louis

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Fiction

Liberty Two

Something Going (with Steve Cody)

Nonfiction

Nigger (with Dick Gregory)

The Masculine Mystique

Idols of the Game (with Peter Levine)

Assignment Sports

Free to Be Muhammad Ali

SportsWorld: An American Dreamland

Heroes of Baseball

In the Country of Illness: Comfort and Advice for the Journey

Memoir

An Accidental Sportswriter

SUPERSTAR LINEUP

JIM THORPE
20TH-CENTURY JOCK

ROBERT LIPSYTE

This page is for my team.

Robert Warren, my editor, and Theron Raines, my agent, were smart and steady coaches.

Kathy Sulkes, my wife, was the photo researcher who never quit.

Professor Peter Leuine of Michigan State Uniuersity checked the manuscript with his Captain History eye.

Benjamin Kabak, a student at the Horace MannBarnard School in New York, was a very helpful reader.

And without the editing, writing and research of Sam Lipsyte, there would be no pages after this one.

The first athletes of America were the Runners of the native Nations, the people who have come to be called Indians. These Runners were fast and dependable and smart. They memorized messages that might take hours to tell, and they remembered them for days at a time, while running through unfamiliar, sometimes hostile territory. Then, after delivering the long message, a Runner might even be expected to help negotiate a peace treaty, work out an alliance for war, offer advice in a sensitive political situation or take another long message back home.

The Runners were heroes, admired for their intelligence, their dedication and their athletic skills, which they kept at peak performance by regular training. It was a full-time job; they ran thousands of miles in preparation for their journeys, studied with their tribal wisdom keepers and ate vegetables, grains and the meat of swift creatures such as antelope and quail.

Sometimes they competed against each other in public races, betting clothes and jewelry. In their daily lives of exercise and careful nutrition and relaxation, of listening to older Runners and to the Chiefs, they were like modern athletes. Yet the importance of their duties made them similar to modern diplomats and journalists. They bound their world together with their savvy and their speed.

They ran the Iroquois Trail in what is now upstate New York. They found ways to ford the swollen spring rivers of the Midwest, and they made their own paths through dense southern forest. They clawed up the sheer rock cliffs of the Pacific Coast.

In 1680, in the cool of the Southwest night, pairs of Pueblo Indian Runners coursed over the high desert in what is now northern New Mexico, carrying messages coded into carved sticks and knotted strings. Their mission was to signal the Pueblo Indians to rise up against the Spanish colonists who had taken control of their villages, burned their sacred masks and flogged their religious leaders. For the Runners, discovery meant instant death. But timidity was worse; if they were late, if the attack wasnt precisely coordinated, the revolt would fail and thousands of Indians would be killed. The Runners were successful, and so was the Pueblo uprising; it was an American revolution a century before the American Revolution.

Sometimes Indian Runners carried heroic messages, and sometimes they tried to stop foolish slaughter. In 1790, the Creeks and the Choctaws, in an attempt to decide who had the rights to trap beaver on a pond of the Noxubee River in Mississippi, played winner-take-all bump hips, the game that became lacrosse. As the game was often played in those days, there were hundreds to a side, and the goals were miles apart. The brawling contest soon became a bloody riot; hundreds might have died except for the speed of couriers who brought the head Chiefs to settle the dispute.

In 1890, Runners made their way to Washington, D.C., to tell the Indian version of the massacre at Wounded Knee. More than a hundred Indians, including many women and children, were killed at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota when U.S. cavalry troopers began firing into the spiritual gathering called Ghost Dancing.

Indian athletes competed against whites, and because Indians had been hyped by newspaper reporters and cavalrymen as such powerful savages, it was big news when a white athlete beat an Indian. In 1844, in Hoboken, New Jersey, 30,000 whites cheered the New York carpenter who beat John Steeprock, a Seneca, in a $$ 1,000 long-distance run. The sportswriter who covered the story declared the victory a triumph of white superiority.

Tom Longboat, an Onondaga (known as The Bronze Mercury when he won the 1907 Boston Marathon), and Louis Tewanima, a Hopi, ran in the 1908 Olympics. Ellison (Tarzan) Brown won the Boston in 1936, and then went on to the Berlin Olympics as a member of the U.S. team. In 1964, Billy Mills, an Oglala Sioux, became the first American to win the 10,000-meter Olympic championship. There were fine major-league baseball players as Louis Sockalexis (it is said that the Cleveland Indians were named after him); Charles Bender, who was elected to the Hall of Fame; John Meyers; and Allie Reynolds.

But the most famous Indian athlete, and perhaps the greatest all-around male athlete in American history, was more than a sporting hero, and his victories were more than marks in a record book.

Jim Thorpe was a spirit of his time, a symbol of a country flexing its muscles in the world arena, a person who would not be beaten down; he was an athletic pioneer, but he also followed a path blazed by centuries of Runners for the Nation. The message he carried was his own story.

The graceful, restless boy Bright Path had hair as black and glistening as a ravens wing. His eyes were merry and bold. His jutting chin was square and strong. The old people watched him roam the reservation and reminded each other that this boy carried the blood of Black Hawk, their legendary warrior chief. The boy was half white, and his parents, the Thorpes, called him Jim more often than they called him Bright Path. But the old people filled the boys head with tales of his great-uncle, who had led them against United States soldiers in the most painful, the proudest time in their history.

The Black Hawk War was short and bloody, a disaster for the Sac and Fox Nation. The natives lost the land they farmed and hunted along the Mississippi River in what is now Illinois and Iowa.

The war began in 1832 after some members of the Nation sold land to the white American government without permission of the Sac and Fox council, which had ruled that land was not an individuals to sellall the land belonged to all the people together. There were reports that the sellers had been bribed with whiskey.