'Historic' day for JT

Stripped of Olympic gold, Jim Thorpe did not live to see his hard-won medals returned to his family

At the junction of Joe Boyle Circle and Route 903, three flags stand silent sentry over the tomb of Jim Thorpe. On each side of a rectangular mausoleum hewn from 20 tonnes of granite, images echoing the cadences of his life are carved into relief. Amid the poses of an athlete running, hurdling, jumping and throwing, there is a baseball player at bat, an American footballer fending off a tackle and an Indian in feathered headdress astride a horse. Beneath them all runs the legend: "Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world - King Gustav V, Stockholm, Sweden, 1912 Olympics."

This rustic corner of north-eastern Pennsylvania is the final resting place of Thorpe, gold-medal winner in the decathlon and pentathlon at those Games, outfielder on the New York Giants team that lost the 1917 baseball World Series, storied contributor to what is now the National Football League and American Indian. When the Associated Press held a vote in 1950 to establish the athlete of the half-century, Thorpe polled nearly twice as heavily as his nearest challengers, Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. In the pantheon, this is the kind of company he keeps, but his legend has a lustre all its own.

The monument that hints at the range of his prowess can never capture the tumult of his existence. His response to the Swedish monarch's sweeping encomium had been a simple and charming: "Thanks, King", but six months later it emerged that Thorpe had flouted the Olympic amateur ideal and he was stripped of his medals. It would take his sons and daughters until 1982 to have his good name restored and, by then, 29 years had elapsed since their father's passing. He died an alcoholic, living in a California trailer park.

Even his posthumous 2,500-mile journey cross-country from the West Coast to this grave at the southern edge of the Pocono Mountains was besmirched by controversy. After a couple of failed negotiations, Thorpe's third wife, Patricia Askew, eventually sold his remains to the twin communities of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk for cash, and an assurance that they would commemorate him suitably. The towns amalgamated, rechristened their new conurbation Jim Thorpe and hoped their investment in a famous corpse and a resonant name would prove a tourist attraction.

This particular muggy Thursday afternoon in high summer, there are no other daytrippers to puncture the air of serenity and calm surrounding the plot, just the nagging, intrusive thought of Indian folklore. According to Sac and Fox tradition, Thorpe will never be at peace until his body is laid to rest, attended by appropriate ceremony, back in his native Oklahoma. Until then, his soul is doomed to wander, his spiritual dislocation one more metaphor for his troubled life. ON A May morning in 1887, moments after giving birth to the first of twin boys, Charlotte Vieux Thorpe watched the sun streak through her family's one-room hickory cabin and named her son Wa-Tho-Huck. A bright path lit up at night by a bolt of lightning, the lyrical translation of his Indian appellation, was a portentous sign about the child the rest of the world would come to know as James Francis Thorpe. His father Hiram, the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had married an Indian, peddled whiskey, traded horses and turned his hand to whatever else he could to keep his family. In the Oklahoma Territory of the time, theirs was a typical frontier subsistence.

From an early age, the precocious Jim mastered the lasso and, by the age of 15, it was said there was no wild horse he could not catch, saddle and ride. Reared on a diet of trapping and hunting, his preference for the outdoors over the classroom at the local Indian agency school brought him into constant conflict with his father. When his twin brother Charlie died of pneumonia in 1898, Jim attempted to eschew formal education altogether and throughout his teens he spent intermittent spells running away from home until his father eventually enrolled him at Carlisle Indian College in faraway Pennsylvania.

Under the stewardship of Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle was a strict institution, the expressed purpose of which was to teach Indian children the ways of the white man. In doing so, they sought to eradicate as much of the Indians' native heritage as they could. Yet it was here that Thorpe's athletic promise, which had first presented itself in impromptu games of prairie baseball back on the reservation, came to prominence.

His lithe frame and blinding speed made him an instant track and field star, the unorthodox way of his youth lending itself to his new career. Every Indian hunter developed the ability to mimic the movement of a prey and Thorpe reapplied this talent to his new pursuit, throwing a javelin to Olympic standard after a couple of hours studying others do it.

Having made his name in athletics, Thorpe took up American football for the first time, soon conquering the discipline with such elan that his momentous impact turned Carlisle into something of a powerhouse. To underline his versatility, he began spending summers playing baseball in Rocky Mount, east Carolina, for $ 2 a game. It was normal practice for college athletes to dabble in semi-pro competitions, but most had the wherewithal to preserve their amateur status by doing so under assumed names. Even if the vast American continent had not yet been shrunk by technology, Thorpe's failure to adopt a pseudonym was to prove the mistake that defined his life.

The adulation he received in Rocky Mount during the baseball season persuaded him against returning to school in the autumn of 1909 and some of the personal problems that would dog his later years manifested themselves for the first time. During that winter back home in Oklahoma he began drinking to excess and, bereft of the regimen offered by Carlisle, he started to drift. Eventually, his coach, Pop Warner, lured him back with the prospect of more football campaigns, and his athletic career also gathered increased momentum. By the summer of 1912, he was part of the American team heading for the fifth Olympiad in Sweden.

IN UNDERSTANDING how just about every facet of Jim Thorpe's life comes suffused by myth and laced with contention, his passage to Stockholm is a cogent example. According to some eye-witness testimony, Thorpe was the most diligent athlete aboard the USS Finland during that journey, constantly pounding his way around the little cork track that had been laid out on the ship's deck. Yet, in the newspapers of the day, there are reports of him whiling away most of the trip asleep in his hammock, reluctant to let over-use dissipate his natural gifts.

Whatever the truth about his training methods, Thorpe arrived in Sweden in the condition of his life and put down a marker on his first day of competition. The modicum of fame afforded by his achievements with the Carlisle football team had burdened him with a favourite's tag that he was anxious to justify. The pentathlon began with the running broad (long) jump and Thorpe leapt 23ft to an easy victory. He recovered from a less impressive fourth place in the javelin to win the 200m dash by the narrowest of margins, and from that point on he was peerless. He hurled the discus over 116ft, three feet farther than his nearest challenger, before cantering to victory in the 1500m.

His appetite for competition was not sated by taking gold and he used his rest days before the start of the decathlon to participate in the high jump and long jump, finishing a creditable fourth and seventh in the respective events. Perhaps it was fatigue due to his overambition, or maybe the incessant rain that fell all through the first day of the decathlon, but Thorpe struggled in the opening two events. Third in the 100m, he was more disappointed by his second in his speciality running broad jump. It took a momentous shot putt of more than 42ft to re-establish his supremacy, and that first place meant he started the second day 245 points ahead of the field.

With the weather improving considerably, Thorpe reached new levels of consistency. First in the high jump, fourth in the 400m, no other Olympic decathlete would come close to matching his winning time of 15.6sec in the 110m hurdles until 1948. After finishing second in the discus, third in the javelin and third in the pole vault, the gold was his even before he shaved four seconds off his pentathlon time for the 1500m in the final discipline. He had scored 8,412 points out of a possible 10,000, 700 clear of Hugo Weislander, the second-placed Swede. Along with his second medal, he was garlanded with a bust of King Gustav, a silver chalice from the Czar of Russia and a worldwide reputation.

Upon his return to America, Thorpe received a letter of congratulation from the White House and, ignoring myriad offers from professional sports franchises to cash in on his new celebrity, he returned to school for the greatest football season of his college career. Bulwarking Carlisle on the way to victories over more established schools like Brown and Syracuse, it was after a triumph over West Point that The New York Times dubbed him "the athletic marvel of the age". One particularly deft Thorpe sidestep that December afternoon caused two Army players to collide and one of them, Dwight D Eisenhower, suffered a broken nose. The same year Thorpe died of a heart attack, Eisenhower became president.

A COUPLE of days after the Army game, Thorpe was spotted in training by a coach from the old Carolina League, who mentioned his semi-pro baseball past to a reporter named Roy Johnson. For weeks, Johnson sat on the story before finally breaking it in January 1913. That he was merely guilty of the same offence as hundreds of other amateur athletes did not prove sufficient defence for Thorpe, who was immediately ordered to hand back his medals and all the other gifts that had been lavished on him in Sweden.

"I was simply an Indian schoolboy and I did not know about such things," Thorpe wrote in a letter of appeal which Pop Warner is alleged to have dictated to him. "I did not know I was doing wrong because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done."

That missive was effectively an admission of guilt which absolved Thorpe's coach, his school and the Amateur Athletic Union of any blame in the affair. To some, the Indian was a convenient scapegoat precluding the sort of further investigation that might unearth a host of other transgressions. A lucrative professional baseball contract with the New York Giants broke Thorpe's initial fall from grace, but it was American football where he would make the biggest splash.

His influence as a player up until the age of 42 was such that, at the American Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, a statue of Thorpe is the first thing a visitor sees. Once that career had ended, however, he led an undulating existence. He went through three marriages and a succession of jobs, from being in charge of casting Indian characters in Western films to digging ditches. He sold the film rights to his life story for $ 1,500, and even did a stint as a merchant marine, seeking perhaps to replicate one last time the discipline he had enjoyed at school.

"My dad was never a great talker but it was obvious for sure the medals thing always hurt him. Sometimes you could just see the sadness in his eyes," Grace Thorpe says. "He had his problems with alcohol and, despite all the sporting glory, he did have a very unhappy personal life. Losing his twin brother affected him so badly that he always claimed he had inherited some of his energy and strength from Charlie. Then, both his parents died while he was still a teenager and his own first child, Jim Junior, died at the age of two. His life was something of a Greek tragedy."

The Thorpe family's campaign to get their father's Olympic medals back, and his records restored, was achieved in October 1982, culminating in a moving ceremony at a Los Angeles hotel in 1983. For decades, their cause had been hindered by the fact that Avery Brundage, the long-time president of the International Olympic Committee, was reckoned to hold a grudge against Thorpe since he had finished a disappointing sixth in the 1912 pentathlon. Having seen the power of concerted effort, Grace Thorpe has taken up the cudgels again. She now divides her time between working to keep nuclear waste off Indian land and endeavouring to have her father voted athlete of the century. She is nearly 80 and ill-health has forced her to cut back on travelling, so she has taken her electioneering to the Internet. Already, there have been resolutions moved on Thorpe's behalf in both the US Senate and House of Representatives.

"I just want people to remember him because he was a very special person," Grace Thorpe says. "Six months before he died, I left him at a bus-stop in New York City. He was standing there in front of the local cinema under a sign advertising the film Jim Thorpe, All-American, starring Burt Lancaster. Dad was wearing a cowboy hat, a suede jacket with tassles on, and he had an old, scarred leather satchel thrown over his shoulder. Everyone was staring at him, but then everyone was always staring at him for one reason or another."

FOOTBALL, BASEBALL, TRACK AND FIELD: Jim Thorpe, an American Indian born in a one-room house in 1888, excelled at more sports than any other competitor of the century. In 1919, Thorpe launched what later became the NFL. He died in 1953. Grace Thorpe, 78, is his daughter.

Dad got sent to Carlisle Indian School in 1904 — his dad signed him on for at least five years with no parental visits permitted. He stayed right through college, playing football. He was a great basketball player at Carlisle, too. There weren't any pro teams then to play for. Daddy was called "Big Jim," but he was just 5-11 and 185 pounds during the [1912] Olympics. It was his intensity, his fierceness that made him look so big.

He told me hunting and fishing were his favorite sports. I said, "Oh, Daddy, I mean the competitive ones." He said, "Track and field, because it was something I could do by myself, one-on-one, me against everybody else." He told me the Olympics were his biggest thrill. He was amazed by the fantastic machinery of the steamship during his trip to Europe. He climbed and crawled through every space on that ship.

Dad was always traveling. He once visited me at the Haskell Institute in Kansas when I was 6 years old. He'd promised me ice cream, but first he did an exhibition. He drop-kicked a football from the 50-yard line through the goal posts in one direction, then drop-kicked another 50-yarder in the opposite direction. Everybody went wild. Dad put me on his shoulders in the crowd. I kicked and kicked his chest and screamed for my ice-cream cone until he got me one.