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He was at the dawn of American organized sports.
He set a record that lasted for 40 years.
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[cheers and applause]
I haven't seen anything since then
that approaches that level of greatness
in so many different sports.
One of the greatest athletes ever, ever, ever
in all American history.
Everybody will remember the names of Babe Ruth,
Muhammad Ali, and certainly Michael Jordan,
but their achievements don't match that
of the greatest athlete that ever lived.
And yet not many people remember his name.
[narrator] Destined to become the world's greatest athlete.
Jim Thorpe was good enough to dominate at multiple things,
and that's why he stands alone
when we talk about some of the greatest athletes
that we've ever had.
[man] It wasn't just track and field,
but it was football, basketball, baseball.
I heard he was a good ballroom dancer.
[man] There was nothing that Jim Thorpe couldn't do
as an athlete.
But beyond that, what he represents is the perseverance
of Native peoples in this country.
Jim Thorpe was living in a time
when most people around the globe
didn't see Indigenous peoples as human beings.
They would shout things at him like "dog soup,"
or they would do war whoops to taunt him.
There was a lot of anti-Indigenous racism
at that time.
[Thorpe] Some of the memories are bitter.
[man] The gold medals and trophies
were taken away from him.
It was an act of enormous injustice.
And though my records have been wiped
from the official books...
I mean, it was something that he never got over
and really loomed over him the rest of his life.
...I find some consolation in believing
they are still remembered by the American people.
People grabbed onto him almost like a folk hero
as the man wronged by the big guys.
They wanted some vindication for Jim.
♪
As a child,
I had tried to emulate the spirited abandon
of a running horse,
head up and feet coming down with a thundering certainty.
♪♪
I ran and jumped and fought and wrestled
and climbed trees as a youngster
because it was as natural
for an Indian child to do those things
as it was to eat and sleep.
Jim was born into poverty in Oklahoma
in a small cabin in 1887.
It's said that the night he was born,
there was lightning striking on the river nearby.
He was given the name Wa-tho-Huk,
which means "bright path" or "path lit by lightning."
And I mean, it's pretty fitting, right?
He went on to shock the world.
[woman] He was born on the Sac and Fox reservation.
Growing up on the reservation,
he liked challenging his own body,
even as a little boy,
whether it was swimming in the North Canadian River
or it was chasing rabbits and catching them.
It was catching wild horses. It was running over fences.
And later people would comment
that that was like a natural cross-training.
The open plains and the river bottoms
were my first track field.
It was on them that I learned to run as a child.
But the reservation existed really only for
two or three more years.
Before Europeans arrived in this country,
there were millions of Native peoples already here.
By the time of Jim Thorpe's birth,
there were fewer than 300,000 left.
[narrator] In the years leading up to Thorpe's birth,
the United States' relentless westward expansion
fueled the Lakota Sioux Wars,
as the nation encroached on Indigenous lands
and forced tribes onto reservations.
Indian reservations were really prison camps,
and they were only supposed to be around for 25 years,
And at the end of 25 years,
we would have all been assimilated or dead.
[man] In 1887,
Senator Henry Dawes introduced a bill
known as the Dawes Act,
also known as the Allotment Act.
It sought to take away what the government considered
excess Indian land.
There are old accounts and images
of "Indian land for sale" or "free Indian land."
And so in order to get that land,
they organized the famous Oklahoma land runs.
♪
[Buford] At the crack of a pistol,
all these wagons and people and horses
flooded into what had been their reservation.
People just, like, ran and put their stake in the ground
and claimed land -- stolen land, Native land.
[Buford] Imagine what that was like,
particularly for a three, four-year-old child
like Jim Thorpe.
You had this place that you were born into,
and overnight it's overrun by these strange white people.
[Proudfit] They were looking at Native people as savages
to be killed and forcibly removed through any means.
[Doyle] It's amazing that these communities survived.
Even more stunning is that an athlete could emerge from
those kind of circumstances.
[Maraniss] Indian Territory of Oklahoma
was the Wild West in every possible way.
Jim Thorpe's father, Hiram, represented that.
[Thorpe] My father was Hiram Phillip Thorpe,
one half Sac and Fox Indian and one half Irish.
He was a giant of a man.
[Buford] Hiram would take his sons out into the rural land
for days at a time and hunt and fish.
But Hiram was also incredibly rough on them.
When Jim was four, Hiram saw him dog-paddling
along the edge of the North Canadian River,
and threw the little guy out into the current
to see how his son made it back.
It was 40 yards to the bank,
and it looked like a mile to me.
But I made it under the watchful eye of my father.
He said, "Don't be afraid of the water, son,
and it won't be afraid of you."
It encapsulates what Hiram was like.
So Jim grew up with that kind of father.
His father taught him and instilled in him
at a very young age, to be a man,
you had to step up, you had to compete.
Native people, we love competition.
[Buford] So there would be running contests,
there would be swimming contests,
there would be jumping contests.
[Proudfit] You know, we invented so many sports
that people know in European culture or American culture,
whether it's soccer, lacrosse, or even the game of basketball.
Jim Thorpe's love of athletic endeavors
started in the Sac and Fox territory.
For Jim Thorpe, sports are in his blood.
My mother always looked upon me
as a reincarnation of Black Hawk,
the Indian chief for whom the Black Hawk War was named.
[Buford] Black Hawk was this larger-than-life,
heroic figure that every Indian boy in that tribe
wanted to model himself on.
[Proudfit] He fought against Andrew Jackson.
Everyone in America knew Black Hawk's name.
That's how impressive Black Hawk was.
So much so that his name was appropriated
for a World War I Army division,
the Black Hawk helicopter, and for the Chicago NHL team.
[narrator] The Dawes Act didn't just divide up Native land
to be given to white settlers.
The other portion of the Dawes Act
was meant to take Indian children
and put them in boarding schools far from their homes.
[Buford] Bureau of Indian Affairs mandated
that the children should go at a certain age
off to Indian boarding schools.
[Creek] Sometimes it was voluntary.
Parents would send their kids there thinking
it was the only way to ensure their survival.
Other times it was by force.
The United States, they would kidnap these kids
and they would force them into these establishments.
And the notion was to take the children of those warriors
from the Lakota Sioux and "tame them," quote, unquote.
The boarding school era was meant
to take children away from their Native communities
and teach them the Western way of life.
[woman] They were really all about assimilation.
Kids were stripped of their humanity and of their culture.
[Buford] They were put into uniforms.
If they didn't already have an Anglo name like Jim --
he was born with one -- they were assigned them.
[Proudfit] You can actually see pictures of students
who went in Native with long hair,
with their earrings, with Native dress.
And then you see another picture of them
with their short hair looking very somber.
[Buford] It was all a way to make them look white
and act white and eventually be white.
It was a full-on attempt to reshape an entire generation
of Native people.
[Maraniss] Jim Thorpe endured
three different boarding schools.
First, he went to
the Sac and Fox boarding school nearby,
which he hated and ran away from twice.
[Thorpe] I tired of the classroom routine
and ran away, walking back home 23 miles.
My father met me at the door and marched me back to school.
He kept doing that and doing that, running home.
And finally Hiram said, "I'm gonna send you so far away,
you will never be able to come back.
[train whistle blows]
Then he was sent to the Haskell Institute in Kansas.
It was at Haskell I saw my first football game
and developed a love for it,
a love I've had through the years.
[Maraniss] And finally ended up at the flagship
U.S. government boarding school.
On February 4th, 1904,
I entered the Carlisle Indian School
at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Well, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School is founded
right after the wars
of the Lakota Sioux out in the Plains.
Had the motto, "Kill the Indian, save the man."
And this is where he came of age in a lot of ways,
and where he began his career in sports.
[Maraniss] The football team in particular
was the reason that anybody knew Carlisle.
When the Carlisle Indians,
this exotic team of Native people, would go play,
they would draw a huge crowd.
The founder of Carlisle was Richard Pratt.
He had been an officer in the Far West
during the so-called Indian Wars.
[man] He's interested in assimilation
for the Indigenous people,
but he also believes they have to prove themselves.
And one of the ways they can prove to whites
that they're worthy is through sports.
[Maraniss] Jim loved football,
and by the time he got to Carlisle, he wanted to play.
As much as Jim wanted to play football,
he was too short and slight.
About three months after my arrival,
I weighed 116 pounds,
and I was five foot, three inches in height.
He was a scrawny young guy.
[cheers and applause]
[Buford] Football was played at the highest level
of collegiate hierarchy, which is Yale and Harvard.
Football was important to them.
It was the game that was going to teach the leaders of tomorrow
how to lead, how to be strategic, how to be smart.
[man] In lieu of a real war,
we're going to put them out on this field
to turn boys into men.
[narrator] I've always felt
that football was pretty closely related to warfare.
I mean, violence is certainly a part of man,
so why not admit it?
Use it. Let it out.
Football was a game of brute force.
Think of two semis just crashing straight into one another.
It's a collision sport. It's a violent sport.
Every play is an act of violence.
American football was dominated by the famous
so-called flying wedge.
The offense would mass behind a lead player,
and, based on models of warfare,
would charge through the opposing line.
It took steamroller tactics to move the pigskin
towards the opposing team's goalposts.
[Creek] In the 1904 college season alone,
there were 20 deaths in football and hundreds of injuries.
Guys had broken femurs. Guys were missing ears.
One guy even had his eye gouged out.
You could punch, you could bite, you could scratch.
And so a lot of times, these guys
were just running into each other,
trying to do whatever they could
to take the opposing player out of the game.
Helmets were definitely not required.
The helmets maybe they were wearing
were little leather helmets with very little padding.
[Maraniss] It was a free-for-all.
Football was a free-for-all. It was almost outlawed.
♪
The president of Harvard was calling for
football to be abolished.
[Eisenberg] There was definitely public pressure.
There were op-eds written.
[Maraniss] The Chicago Tribune did a series about the number
of deaths and injuries,
and it read like an after action report from Vietnam,
you know, listing all of these dead halfbacks and linemen.
[Eisenberg] And so this was not a tenable situation.
As popular as it was becoming, you couldn't have people dying.
[Buford] Teddy Roosevelt was president,
and he was a Harvard man, and he loved football.
So he called a conference in the White House
of the leaders of these top schools
and said, "You've got to make football safer."
You couldn't have our Ivy League leaders of tomorrow
getting killed on the football field.
It was this close to kind of being out of here,
which is wild to think of when you think about
how important it's become in our American sports culture.
♪
At the end of the 1904 term, Jim decided to leave Carlisle
and to work in their outing program,
which was a kind of placement program
where Indian kids would work as farmers or cooks or maids.
It was also seen as a form of introduction into white society.
[Thorpe] I was anxious to go for the experience.
I did all the housework and learned to sew and cook.
I longed to be out in the open again.
I felt smothered with the indoor work.
So he goes on to work as a farmhand for two years,
laboring in the field and breaking wild horses
just like his father taught him.
[Doyle] Breaking horses is incredibly physical work.
You know, you're using your arms.
You're using your hands.
You're using your legs to jump up
to corral the horses.
You're hanging on for dear life.
By the end of the summer,
Jim's body had changed dramatically.
When Jim returned to Carlisle, he was primed. He was ready.
And it was then that the origin story
of Jim Thorpe the athlete began.
[Hill] What is wonderful about reflecting
on Jim Thorpe's legacy is that you start to hear
all these stories that sound like,
"Did somebody make that up?
Did that really actually happen?"
And one of the more famous ones is the high jump story.
[Maraniss] At Carlisle, one day he was in overalls,
walking toward the athletic fields,
saw members of the track team at the high jump pit.
Jim had no idea what the high jump was.
He had never seen it before.
[Thorpe] For several minutes
they successfully went higher and higher.
Eventually, they placed the bar at a point they couldn't scale.
He watched boy after boy fail to make it over the bar.
Intrigued, Jim walks over,
and in his overalls Jim decided to give it a try.
If you know anything about Olympic sports
or if you've seen this,
it's an extraordinarily difficult
thing to do.
[man] Jim Thorpe had no experience, no training.
He certainly didn't have the proper attire or footwear.
In just one graceful move, he runs up,
leaps into the air, easily clears the bar.
The boys were stunned.
[Hill] Jim Thorpe made everything look effortless.
Things that take people years and years and years
of training, of coaching to do,
he could do just like that.
For the fun of it, I ran and jumped the bar,
turned around and laughed.
Jim just walked away as if it was no big deal.
When this story reaches Pop Warner, he said,
"Jim Thorpe just set the school record."
♪
[Maraniss] Pop Warner, who was the track coach,
brought Thorpe into his office the next day and said,
"Here's your uniform. You're on the track team."
[Buford] But Jim really wasn't interested in track and field.
He wanted to play football really badly.
And so when he introduced the idea
of wanting to play football to Pop Warner, he thought,
"Why would I ever let you do this?" [laughs]
"Because have you seen what happens on a football field?"
But Jim was persistent.
He would constantly, every day ask Pop,
"When is it gonna be my turn?
When am I gonna have a chance to play football?"
I kept after him until he finally threw a suit to me,
hoping to get rid of me, I guess.
There was this exercise
where Warner would set up players every 10 yards,
all the way down the field,
and have somebody try to run through
without getting tackled, and nobody could ever do it.
[Anderson] Jim is looking at 40 players,
and their sole objective is to tackle Thorpe.
The only experience I've ever had with a football
was at Haskell.
If that could be called experience.
My hand had never gripped a real football.
Warner figured these players were gonna show Jim
what football was all about.
Thorpe takes off.
He cuts, he weaves, he dodges, he stiff-arms.
Warner is watching it slack-jaw.
I heard him say to one of the trainers,
"He's certainly a wild Indian."
What he just saw, that moment,
was the birth of Jim Thorpe, of the football player.
[narrator] Jim Thorpe is now a member
of the Carlisle football team.
His dreams of playing collegiate football
are closer than ever,
but he's relegated to the backup squad.
[Petrzela] In October of 1907, Jim got his big break
when Carlisle played the University of Pennsylvania
at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.
Pop Warner put him in to replace an injured player,
but it didn't go exactly according to plan.
When I was given the ball to carry in my first big game,
I got excited and didn't follow my interference.
The result was I crashed into a stone wall of opposition
and was thrown for a loss.
Jim was not off to a great start.
But if Jim Thorpe was confident in anything,
it was that he wasn't gonna let one bad play stop him.
The next time the ball was passed to me,
I got away around end
and tore 75 yards to a touchdown.
And Pop Warner soon decided I was there to stay.
Along came Mr. Pop Warner,
one of football's most brilliant minds.
A lot of people have heard of Pop Warner football.
It is associated with youth football all across America.
But not many people know the man behind it.
All these Pop Warner leagues
that comes from Pop Warner the coach.
Pop Warner was not a pop.
He didn't have any kids. He played football at Cornell.
And he was older than some of the other players,
so they started calling him Pop.
But Pop Warner was a brilliant football coach.
Pop Warner's coaching style was that of an innovator.
[Schefter] He was known for trick plays.
He came up with trick plays before there were trick plays.
One of his plays, the hidden ball,
he sewed a pocket into a player's uniform
and had him stuff the ball in there
so he could run down the field without anyone knowing
he was actually carrying it.
The rules committee would slap it down and say,
"No, you can't do that anymore."
So then Warner would go back to the drawing board
and come up with another trick play or another innovation.
He was pushing, pushing, pushing the rules all the time.
Warner's imagination was constantly firing.
He developed a blocking sled.
He developed tackling dummies.
He developed the single wing offense,
the double wing offense, lightweight uniforms.
So much of what he developed we still see today
nearly a hundred years later.
[narrator] By 1908, under Pop's guidance,
Jim is beginning to make a name for himself.
By the time Carlisle was scheduled to play
University of Pennsylvania in October,
Jim Thorpe had created a identity of toughness.
So he came into that game with a target on his back.
[Thorpe] Word passed through the Penn Eleven to get Thorpe,
put him out of the game.
They did everything in the world to cripple me,
but they didn't take into consideration the tough hide
and the stubborn constitution of the prairie Indian.
Well, you think about it, you know,
you're an Indian kid in a boarding school.
You've been taken away from your parents violently.
For young Indian kids, you really don't have a chance
to express that anger in any other way
except through competitive sports.
[narrator] In a fiercely contested game,
Carlisle trails 6-0 in the final minutes,
but Jim Thorpe refuses to back down.
In the real world, he could never really compete
with white people.
Playing football, he got to compete with them
on an equal playing field.
[Thorpe] I got the ball on a fast pass and was on my way,
skirting the end, carrying the mail 65 yards
to a touchdown, tying the score.
Penn had been doped to win,
and our tie proved quite an upset.
[narrator] With Jim's help, Carlisle goes on
to a 10-2 record that year.
[Williams] At the same time Jim's establishing himself
as a football phenomenon,
he also has his eye on another sport.
When Jim arrived at Carlisle,
he hadn't done any track and field.
He just knew how to jump and he knew how to run.
And he was this incredibly gifted athlete.
Now that Jim was on the track team,
he was introduced to all these other sports and competitions
that he'd never seen before.
He needed to be taught,
and there was a very gifted athlete on the team already
called Albert Exendine.
Warner said to Albert, "Take Jim under your wing,
and teach him what he needs to know."
The next thing you know,
Jim Thorpe is a track and field star.
[narrator] Jim excels at track and field,
but his true passion remains football.
Jim really comes into his own
as a football phenomenon in 1911,
Carlisle had a very good season,
and Pop signed up to play against Harvard.
Well, everyone around the country
who was following football was primed for this contest.
The little Indian school and Harvard.
[Creek] Harvard at the time was an absolute powerhouse.
Starting in the late 1800s, over the course of two decades,
they won nine national championships.
They were unstoppable.
One can only imagine that Jim Thorpe could recognize
who he was playing against.
These are the elites of this country.
These are the sons of the industrialists.
These are the sons of the landowners
that have taken his homelands away from his family,
away from his tribe.
And so a part of me has to think
that perhaps it was a little bit personal.
But with the most important game
of Thorpe's career looming, there's a problem.
[Buford] Jim had an injury,
so his leg was visibly bandaged from his ankle to his knee.
It was his kicking leg.
"Crippled Jimmy Thorpe," as the press named him.
[crowd cheering]
[Williams] From the opening drive
Jim plays every minute of the game,
offense and defense,
because that's the way the game was played back then.
[Schefter] He never got a break,
and he stayed out there the entire time.
So here he is running the football,
playing defense, kicking.
[Eisenberg] There were no substitutions.
There was no bench.
The whole idea was you don't come off the field.
It is a game of stamina.
If we look at the NFL today, there's nobody who does
what Jim Thorpe did back in the day.
We have to put ourselves in the DeLorean and go back
and think about what the game looked like
when Jim Thorpe was playing.
[Watson] What you would be seeing back
in the beginning of the 20th century
was a totally different game.
The rules are changing every year back then.
[Eisenberg] There was no passing in the beginning,
so that was considered borderline cheating.
They didn't wear uniforms. Very little padding.
They had what they called team sweaters.
You couldn't tell who was on what team.
Touchdowns for much of that period were five points.
Field goals were four points.
The yard markers were different.
The length of the field was different.
There was very little scoring,
and the vast majority of plays
were just taking the ball into the line.
It sounds like a made-up universe,
like some kind of bizarro version of football,
but that's very much how football was played.
Jim Thorpe was made for football
because he was great at everything
and he loved to hit people,
which was what football was all about.
[Thorpe] I gave little quarter when I played football,
and I never asked for any.
When I was hurt, I bit my lip,
bandaged the injury between quarters
and kept giving what I had just received.
Even with his injured leg,
Jim still managed to kick two field goals in the first half.
[crowd cheers]
[narrator] Along with a field goal,
Harvard scores a touchdown.
And going into the half, Carlisle is down 9-6.
In the second half Carlisle comes roaring back,
and Jim's fingerprints are all over the game.
He's running, he's kicking,
he's tackling, all on a busted leg.
It gives you an idea
of how great of an athlete he has to be.
Just from a physical-toll standpoint,
to do what Jim Thorpe was doing,
frankly, looking back on it, it's like, it's crazy.
[laughs] It is absolutely crazy.
[Williams] Carlisle scores a touchdown.
Then Jim connects for two field goals.
Suddenly, the unthinkable happens.
Carlisle beats Harvard.
Years later, Sports Illustrated
would point to this game and Jim's performance in it
that would have earned Jim the Heisman Trophy
had the Heisman Trophy existed.
There's something poetic
and there's some sense of justice
in the way that Jim played, because when he played
he played for all Native peoples.
[Thorpe] Harvard, the Crimson Tide,
was our big enemy that year.
Our victory proved a great upset.
Sturdy old John Harvard
being knocked over by the little Indian school
was a calamity no one had looked for.
There's the famous headline, "Thorpe Beat Harvard."
He was seen as this amazing football player.
[Maraniss] Jim Thorpe had probably the first
nationally recognized brilliant game of his career.
Harvard was such a big deal that all of
the newspapers from New York and Boston
and Philadelphia covered that game.
♪♪
[Hill] Jim Thorpe's performance against Harvard
you kind of have to rank right up there
with some of the greatest games and performances
that you've seen throughout history.
It's like Kobe Bryant dropping 81,
Tiger winning the Masters by 12 strokes,
Wayne Gretzky's Game 7 magic over Toronto.
All those ridiculous athletic accomplishments
that became the defining games for the defining athlete,
that's what that game was for him.
[narrator] Carlisle goes on to have only one loss
that entire season
as Thorpe's star continues to rise.
[narrator] Jim Thorpe makes gridiron history,
scores 25 touchdowns, 198 points in a single season,
a combined record never equaled.
[Jones] Jim gets named captain of the Carlisle football team,
and Walter Camp, who's the father of American football,
ends up naming Thorpe to his All-American list.
[Williams] Jim Thorpe is at the top of his game,
and yet he was about to level up again.
[Thorpe] The year 1912 came.
The magic year of the Olympiad.
I trained as I've never trained before or since.
In my heart, I had known since 1909
that I would compete in the game of games.
The modern Olympic Games were created by a French lord,
Baron Pierre de Coubertin, in 1896.
It was his vision
to build a festival of international sport
that would bring countries together
to sit higher than our political differences.
He was inspired after France had been crushed
in the Franco-Prussian War.
[Buford] He thought that if nations could fight
on a field of sports, they'd get it out of their system
and the world would be a better place.
So he decided to revive the ancient Greek Olympics
with the idea that sports would take the place
of armed conflict.
So he created what was known as the modern Olympics.
[cheers and applause]
♪
The first four Olympics were not particularly successful.
There was no guarantee that this idea of Coubertin's
was going to survive.
[Boykoff] Baron Pierre de Coubertin
revived the Olympics on a bed of contradictions.
The Olympics were supposed to be for everybody,
but the baron excluded women.
He thought it was unseemly
to have women involved in sport on any level.
And also he was classist.
I mean, he had a real class bias in favor of aristocrats,
trying to exclude working people from the Olympics
with a specialized definition of amateurism from the very start.
The Olympics were the ultimate example
of what amateurism and the amateur ideal was in that era.
The idea was that people should play sports
purely for their passion, not for a paycheck.
That was considered kind of lowbrow and unseemly.
No money could ever cross your palm in any way,
or else you were a professional.
Every athlete taking part in the 1912 Olympics
had to sign a form in which they had to promise
they had never accepted money of any kind
in any connection with sports.
It was formed and created by and for
wealthy aristocratic athletes.
They didn't need money.
This version of the Olympics is unrecognizable from today's.
[Wigglesworth] Today we are accustomed to seeing
professionals from their sport,
in basketball or in hockey compete at the Olympics.
Across just about every sport,
Olympic athletes are encouraged to go out
and get sponsors to help them underwrite their training
in their competition,
in effect getting paid to compete at that Olympic level.
That was not the case back in Jim Thorpe's competitive days.
So you roll around into 1912,
which is the fifth Olympiad, in Stockholm.
[Boykoff] The United States Olympic team's journey
to even participate in Stockholm
was quite the adventure in and of itself.
When Jim Thorpe got to the pier in Manhattan
and saw the SS Finland,
it was a sight unlike anything he had ever seen before.
It was this floating paradise of a sort,
the breadth of that ship, where it was going,
to a world that he'd never seen before.
And it's important to remember
that this was only a few months
after the sinking of the Titanic.
So going on a transatlantic journey was a little bit iffy.
♪
[Boykoff] They loaded on thousands of pounds of food
for both the humans as well as the horses
that were there for the equestrian events.
They built a special cork track.
There was a makeshift swimming pool down in the lower deck.
Athletes could practice the discus by throwing it overboard
and then pulling it back up with a rope.
So there are all these ingenious schemes
that allowed the athletes to stay fresh
as they get ready for the Olympic Games.
♪
There's a mythos around Jim Thorpe
that he didn't train on the boat going over to Sweden
and that he wasn't a person
who really dedicated himself to his excellence.
I think the media characterizations of Jim Thorpe
were very much that he didn't have to work at his success.
[Maraniss] Why would people say that Jim didn't train?
The same reason why do so many sportswriters,
when they're defining an African American athlete,
they'll just say that they have natural talent
as opposed to actually working at it, right?
Well, that was the way that they could disparage Jim Thorpe.
He was just natural. He didn't have to train.
But it's baloney.
When in reality Jim Thorpe
was actually playing it smart.
He was tapering off as the Olympic Games approached,
just like athletes do today.
[Thorpe] I was in the best condition of my life.
I didn't work out strenuously,
contenting myself with an occasional run
or trot about the deck, as I felt ready for action
and didn't want to become stale or overtrained.
I think the mythos around Jim Thorpe's not training
is tied up in a mythos around American Indians
in general, that we're not hardworking, that we're lazy.
They were sort of setting the stage
for his abilities to be both adulated
and disrespected at the same time.
[Watson] When you look at just how
minorities are described in the media
in the turn of the 20th century,
as much as their accomplishments were celebrated,
there was still that dehumanization.
Native American achievements never could stand on their own.
They were always portrayed through this lens of aggression.
[Watson] The words that were used to describe them
made it very clear that you are still deemed
as "less than" in society.
They were savages.
Violent.
[Watson] On a "warpath" or "scalping" their opponent.
Those were words that were used to describe
how they believed these individuals lived their lives.
[Proudfit] The sportswriters
and the journalists of the time
frame and control the narrative.
And for Native people,
other people have been representing us
and mischaracterizing us since time immemorial.
[Jones] It was a way of stripping Native Americans of
both their dignity and their humanity.
[Boykoff] At the time that Jim Thorpe
and the rest of the Olympic team traveled to Stockholm,
there was a practice in place on all ships of segregating,
in a lot of ways, by race.
The context is important politically at that time,
1912 was a year that Woodrow Wilson
was elected president,
and one of the first things he did
was he racially segregated the federal bureaucracy.
So African American people had to use different bathrooms,
eat in different lunchrooms, work in different spaces.
And that segregated culture made its way
on board the USS Finland.
Jim and another American athlete, Abel Kiviat,
who was Jewish,
were both put in steerage on the ship
rather than with the better quarters higher up.
Thorpe and his fellow Olympians
who weren't lily-white Olympians
who could stay in the top accommodation on the top floor
had to grapple with a lot of racism on the way to Stockholm,
but also more broadly in life.
[cheers and applause]
♪
[Wigglesworth] Jim Thorpe made the Olympic team to compete
in both the pentathlon and the decathlon,
two events that are really widely regarded
as being among the most difficult in the Games.
[narrator] Although Jim had earned recognition back home,
he is far from being the favorite.
Contenders like Sweden's Hugo Wieslander
and even his own American teammate Avery Brundage
are expected to dominate.
In the narrative of Jim Thorpe,
Avery Brundage appears a number of times as a nemesis.
Avery Brundage was a terrible man.
He was known from the 1940s through the 1960s and beyond
as "Slavery Avery" for his racist beliefs.
In his personal papers, he heaps praise on the Nazis,
calling them an "intelligent, beneficent dictatorship."
And he was convinced in his own mind
that he was going to win.
On July 7, 1912,
the competition begins with the pentathlon,
a single-day challenge
featuring five track and field events.
Jim comes out of the gates soaring at the pentathlon,
almost literally.
He finishes first in the long jump.
He then takes third in the javelin
behind Sweden's Hugo Wieslander.
One of Jim's most dominant wins was in the pentathlon 200.
He left the competition in the dust,
and he would finish in a time of 22.9.
The specificity of that number is significant
because 1912 marked the first Olympics ever
that used electronic timers.
He follows that up with another win,
coming in first in the discus, easily defeating
his second-place American rival, Avery Brundage.
[Jones] The final event of the pentathlon
is the 1,500 meter, the metric mile.
For the Sac and Fox people,
they had a traditional way of looking at running,
allowing the Earth to move you forward rather than your legs.
And that was the same kind of conceptual energy
that Jim brought to his running.
He was in his most comfortable, safest space
when he was running as fast as he could.
Jim Thorpe would win his fourth overall event
and finish five seconds ahead of his nearest competitor,
showing just how dominant he was in those 1912 Olympics.
[Williams] So let's be clear.
Typically in a multi-discipline event like the pentathlon,
the athlete who wins generally does fairly well
in some combination of the events.
[O'Brien] But Jim Thorpe just didn't do well
in all the events.
Jim Thorpe won four out of
the five events in the pentathlon.
That is absolutely unheard of.
[narrator] He outclasses both Sweden's Hugo Wieslander
and his own teammate, Avery Brundage,
who unexpectedly fails to win a medal.
Jim was not particularly aware of Avery Brundage,
but Avery Brundage became very aware of Jim Thorpe.
An American Indian was not supposed to beat Avery Brundage.
With the nation's eyes fixed on him,
Jim is about to embark on the grueling decathlon,
squaring off against Brundage in a showdown
that would reverberate through the rest of his life.
[narrator] With Jim Thorpe's outstanding performance
in the pentathlon having already secured a gold medal,
another soon-to-be famous American
also has high hopes in the 1912 Olympics.
Believe it or not, at the very same Olympic Games
where Thorpe was competing,
so was future General George S. Patton.
And his event was the modern pentathlon,
which is a military-themed event that focused on running,
shooting, swimming, fencing, and horseback riding.
When Baron Pierre de Coubertin created the Olympics,
he had people like George Patton in mind as participants.
Patton was the son of a wealthy family,
had all the training required at his fingertips to do well.
But George Patton didn't do well at all.
In fact, he placed fifth.
[Maraniss] In the swimming event,
he had to get pulled from the pool.
And he claimed that he would have won the sharpshooting,
except that his bullets the judges said missed the target
actually went so cleanly through the other bullets of his
that they couldn't see them.
[narrator] At the conclusion of the modern pentathlon,
a brand-new event is set to begin.
At the 1912 Olympics,
the decathlon was introduced for the very first time.
You have to master 10 different events.
[O'Brien] The 100 meters, the long jump,
the shot put, the high jump and the 400 meters,
110-meter hurdles, the discus,
the pole vault, the javelin,
and the metric mile -- the 1,500 meters.
The decathlon, in my opinion, is the most difficult event
in the sport of track and field.
[Jones] Jim is looking for his second gold medal.
Meanwhile, Avery Brundage is looking for redemption
after losing to Jim during the pentathlon.
On Saturday, July 13, 1912,
the decathlon begins with the 100-meter dash.
[Petrzela] On the first day of the decathlon,
Thorpe finished in the top three in all three events
and finished the day number one.
His rival, Avery Brundage, on the other hand,
was in a distant 14th place.
[cheers and applause]
[Jones] Day two begins with the high jump,
which Jim is heavily favored to win,
but there's a problem.
When he went to compete, his sneakers were missing.
There is some sense that Avery Brundage was involved,
that he took the shoes in an effort
to sabotage his performance.
Jim is then facing continuing the decathlon without his shoes.
Jim, needing to compete,
went out and found a pair of sneakers out of the trash.
So he and Pop Warner jerry-rigged two shoes
that were different sizes.
Thorpe had to wear two pairs of heavy socks on one shoe.
As an athlete, you train for this one moment,
and when that moment comes,
you want everything to be absolutely perfect.
Even in absolutely perfect conditions,
competing in the Olympic high jump
is a near impossible task.
And Jim did it with shoes he found in the trash.
[narrator] Thorpe jumps over six feet,
the only athlete to reach that threshold.
Over six feet with garbage shoes.
[Williams] Like most of
the high jump competitors of his day,
Jim utilized the straddle technique.
Decades later, in 1968,
Dick Fosbury revolutionizes the sport
by utilizing a different technique,
jumping backward over the bar.
This is the technique
that all Olympic high jumpers utilize today.
[Thorpe] The Europeans looked upon the red man
as a curiosity of some sort.
It seemed they were disappointed
that I didn't wear the warpaint or the head feathers.
I decided I would live up to their conception of the Indian,
so I broke out in a war dance
with accompaniment of full-tone yells.
I think it was part of his desire to really show that
even though the boarding schools
attempted to strip Jim of all of his culture
and turn him into a white man,
they didn't take his identity from him inside.
He was letting the world know that he was a Native American.
[narrator] The next three events see Jim extending his lead.
So the last great obstacle
between Jim Thorpe and the Olympic gold medal in 1912
is the eighth event, the pole vault.
[Thorpe] I considered myself rather heavy for vaulting.
Before I sailed for the Olympic Games,
my highest pole vault was nine feet, six inches.
I knew I could do better,
but I was afraid to attempt the higher mark
for fear the ash pole might break.
The pole vault is intimidating,
and it's one of the most difficult events
in the decathlon.
It was the event that kept me
off the 1992 Olympic team.
[announcer] He's just coming to grips with the fact,
"I have no points in this particular event.
I'm now not going to the Olympic Games."
One misstep, one miscalculation, and it's all over.
♪
[Jones] Despite his concern,
Jim launched himself 10 feet, eight inches into the air,
smashing his personal best
and keeping him on track to win his second gold.
[narrator] It's at this point in the competition,
having dropped to 11th place, that Avery Brundage realizes
he has no chance of defeating Thorpe.
He did something that he would rue till his dying days,
and that was he dropped out of the competition.
[Maraniss] Thorpe was creaming Brundage by so much
that he quit after eight events.
He didn't even finish it himself.
And probably there was some measure of jealousy
for the rest of his life.
This would not be the last time
that Brundage runs afoul of an Olympic champion.
Brundage went on to a storied career.
He was a power broker in Olympic circles.
He was passionate about the spirit and ideals of amateurism.
[Jones] Brundage was the Olympic Committee chairman
for the 1936 Games in Berlin.
[narrator] The undisputed star of the competition
was Ohio State University track star Jesse Owens.
[Jones] Just days after Jesse Owens won gold,
Brundage came after him as a professional athlete
and banned him from amateur sports for life.
[narrator] Going into the final event, the 1500 meter,
Jim's lead is nearly insurmountable.
As soon as the race begins, Jim is off,
and no one can catch him.
When Jim crossed the finish line in the 1500,
he not only took a gold medal but cemented his legacy
as one of the premier athletes of his day.
Jim Thorpe would finish in the top three
in eight of the 10 events.
He would win four of those events outright.
And in the decathlon, that's total dominance.
For me, Jim Thorpe's achievement at the Stockholm Olympics
are a singular achievement.
I haven't seen anything since then
that approaches that level of greatness
in so many different sports.
"Citius, altius, fortius" was the motto
of the modern Olympics.
It meant "faster, higher, stronger."
And Jim Thorpe embodied all of these.
[Wigglesworth] His record stood for decades
and really set a new bar
for what we as athletes can accomplish.
[Thorpe] At the close, of the Olympic Games,
all the winners were marched before the royal box
before the applauding thousands.
[narrator] Jim Thorpe's two gold medals
are the last Olympic medals ever made from pure gold.
He's also awarded two ceremonial trophies,
presented by Czar Nicholas of Russia
and King Gustav of Sweden.
[Thorpe] King Gustav placed a laurel wreath on my head
and, in English, said,
"Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world."
And the story is that Jim responded, "Thanks, King."
Now, we don't know if that actually happened.
I don't think he said it. He says he didn't say it.
That was sort of representative of Jim Thorpe, "the Indian,"
not knowing how to deal with royalty.
It was all representative of the way that Thorpe was idealized,
romanticized, and diminished at the same time.
When Jim won the gold medals, he was a sensation,
the first international celebrity athlete.
He astonished the world:
this phenomenal performance, and by an American Indian.
[Wigglesworth] The whole point of the Olympics
is to compete and represent your country.
Jim accomplished so much representing the United States,
and he returned from the Games celebrated as an American hero.
[narrator] Jim even receives a letter
from President Howard Taft saying Thorpe's qualities
"characterize the best type of American citizen."
The irony is that at that time,
he was not even recognized as an American citizen
because Native Americans in this country
had not yet been granted citizenship.
[Buford] He returns home,
and Carlisle gives a welcoming reception for him.
[Thorpe] We were met by the leading citizens of the town.
There was hand-shaking, congratulations, and speeches.
Jim was the center of attention.
You couldn't open a paper without reading about him.
They were throwing parades. There was parties.
He was expected to make appearances all across America.
[Buford] New York gives him this ticker-tape parade,
with him at the front in the first car, by himself.
And Jim, as all the media said the next day, sat there,
scrunched down in the front seat
with a Panama hat over his face and chewing gum.
Obviously not the happy hero.
And really, that's true of most of his life:
that he was never searching for glory or for fame.
He just loved sports.
In a lot of ways, Thorpe was the first celebrity sports star.
[Hill] Back then, the idea of a celebrity athlete
was completely foreign.
He's known all around the world. There's no social media.
You think about how slow information passed at that time,
and yet still everybody knew about his athletic feats.
[Hill] He didn't have Gatorade or Nike behind him,
pushing him out there and making him a celebrity.
There's no media vehicle driving it
beyond what he is accomplishing at a time
where people who looked like him weren't supposed to be famous
and athletes in general
were not really supposed to be famous like that.
[narrator] Jim Thorpe has ushered in
a new era of celebrity athlete,
but his career is just getting started.
[narrator] After the fanfare of the Olympics faded,
Jim Thorpe returns to Carlisle,
ready for another season on the gridiron.
♪
[Buford] The West Point game of 1912
has to be seen in light of Jim's prior reputation:
the fantastic 1911 season that made him a football phenomenon
and then the Olympic Games of 1912.
So he comes to this game
between Carlisle, the little Indian school,
and West Point,
that trains the future officers of the American Army.
November 9, 1912: the Army against the Indians.
You can't imagine a football game
loaded with more meaning than that.
♪
[Doyle] The largest
and most famous battles of the Great Plains
happened just prior to the boarding-school era.
Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle players
were a generation after the warriors who were killed
at these famous battles, like Battle of the Little Bighorn.
And just 20 years before the Army-Carlisle game
was the massacre at Wounded Knee.
There were over 200 innocent women, men,
and children killed by the U.S. Army.
So going into the game with West Point,
the Carlisle players were highly motivated.
♪
[Thorpe] We traveled to West Point,
the academy on the Hudson, and met the Army,
rated the toughest, cleverest team of the season.
Our chances to win were held to be slight.
[Anderson] Before the game, Pop Warner delivers a speech
that was unlike any in the history of the sport
since or before.
Telling his players what it could represent:
all of the payback for all of the injustices and violence
that's been perpetrated on their people for so many decades.
He would literally tell his players,
"You are gonna be playing against the sons
of the men who killed your ancestors."
[Anderson] "Now is the time for revenge.
We are going to prove
that we can play the white man's game better than the white man.
Remember Wounded Knee."
I mean, if that's not a motivator,
I'm really not sure what is.
♪
[Buford] With the help of the media,
the public was primed for this contest.
The Army players, who were outfitted
in their black-and-gold uniforms,
on average weighed 40 pounds more and were four inches taller
than the Indian players, adorned in their red sweaters.
To the fans in the stands at West Point,
this game looked like it was gonna be a total mismatch.
The Army team that day was incredibly historic.
On the roster were four future legendary generals
who would go on to lead America in World War II.
In fact, it was called later "the class the stars fell on"
because so many generals were on that team,
including future president of the United States
Dwight David Eisenhower.
This was a delicious matchup:
Pop Warner's bag of tricks versus the Army kids
who had spent years studying military strategy.
For Pop, this game was particularly personal.
As a teen, he had applied to West Point, and he was rejected.
[Williams] From the opening kickoff,
this game is an absolute war.
Reports from the game talk about the violent collisions
and the intensity.
While Jim dominates the game in the first half,
Carlisle doesn't have a lot to show for his efforts.
At halftime, they only lead 7-6.
[Anderson] In the locker room at halftime,
Eisenhower huddled with Leland Hobbs,
who would go on to lead the 30th Infantry
in Western Europe in World War II.
The two of them conspired to deliver
what they called "the old one-two."
Their mission: send Thorpe to the sideline
if not the hospital.
[Maraniss] Eisenhower writes about this later,
acknowledging that their goal
was to knock Jim Thorpe unconscious.
Eisenhower would later recall he and his fellow teammate,
in trying to pursue Jim,
Jim stepped aside and let them collide with each other
and they were taken out of the game.
Thorpe was a locomotive, and they just couldn't stop him.
[Buford] Damon Runyon, who's a wonderful American humorist,
was in the stands watching, and he said,
"No one had to ask who had had the ball
or who had made the play.
They knew that it was Jim Thorpe."
[Anderson] Late in the game, Thorpe caught a punt
at Carlisle's 45-yard line.
And immediately, five Army defenders are on him.
In a blur of twists and turns and stiff-arms,
Thorpe gets through that first crush of defenders.
And over the next 50 yards
manages to repel every other Army defender on the field...
♪♪
...scoring for Carlisle.
It was the most magnificent football run that Pop Warner
and everyone else in attendance had ever seen.
And even the cadets on the sideline stand up
and applaud for Jim Thorpe.
[narrator] Thorpe and Carlisle go on to soundly defeat Army.
It wasn't even close.
Carlisle ended up beating Army that day, 27-6,
and Jim was by far the best player on the field.
[Thorpe] I can say for the men who made up the team,
of which I was proud to be the captain,
I've never known a team to function more perfectly.
The Indians in the crowd rejoiced
over the fact that their people, the Carlisle boys,
were thumping the white kids at a game created by whites.
[narrator] The 1913 Howitzer,
the West Point student yearbook, sums up the match.
"The Carlisle Indians gave us the worst defeat
we have had in years,
and the running of Thorpe was by far the most wonderful
and spectacular ever seen on our field."
[Thorpe] It was a mighty battle
we fought that day against the army.
Every loyal Red son of Carlisle did his duty.
And I call it the greatest act of athletic revenge
in American history.
[Buford] Jim Thorpe had the great football season in 1912.
Pop Warner said life was "juicy fat" for Jim Thorpe.
Like with so many stories of celebrity athletes
and their meteoric rises, it always seems
that when they're at the top of their game,
along comes something to just knock them off their perch.
In 1913, just a year after his Olympic victory,
a scandal broke out.
[Thorpe] This was the first rumble,
which was to attain a thunderous crescendo
and hurl my records and hopes from the heights into oblivion.
[Maraniss] 1912, for Jim Thorpe,
was the single greatest year that any athlete ever had.
He won his gold medals by the greatest margin ever
and then had this great All-American football season
where they defeated Army.
I don't think you can find any athlete
who did all of that in one year.
[narrator] But 1913 would prove to be very different.
It all started with an article in a small paper
in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Apparently, a journalist was visiting a baseball coach
and saw a photograph of Jim Thorpe behind him.
And the coach said, "Oh, yeah. That was Jim Thorpe.
He used to play baseball for me."
Even though it was just the minor leagues,
because Jim was paid,
it technically made him a professional.
And that violated the amateur status
that you had to have to compete in the Olympic Games.
Jim had signed that form for the Olympics,
saying he had never accepted any money,
that he was an amateur.
But he wasn't.
♪♪
[Maraniss] The story immediately spread all over the country,
to the big papers in New York, Philadelphia.
And so the question was, "What do we do?"
Jim was busted and agonized over what he was to do.
The only person that he could rely on in this mess
was Pop Warner.
[Creek] So when the scandal broke out,
Pop Warner acted like he knew nothing about it,
which is impossible considering he knew most of his players
played summer ball.
Pop sat down and crafted a letter with Jim
to send to the American Olympic Committee,
saying, in essence, "I was just an Indian schoolboy.
I didn't know any better,
and I'm so sorry that I have brought this on everyone."
[Thorpe] All my life,
I have laid my cards face up on the table.
I went to my room and wrote the letter.
I found it the hardest
and cruelest I have ever written in my life.
The letter that Jim Thorpe ultimately submitted
to the International Olympic Committee,
it put all the blame on Jim Thorpe
instead of the responsible adults that were around him,
including Pop Warner,
who gets off scot-free in the depiction of this letter.
After all these years, the only thing I wish to say now
is that I have reason to believe
that some of the authorities at Carlisle knew where I was
during 1909 and 1910 and what I was doing.
What they'd done essentially, is hang Jim out to dry.
Pop Warner certainly was not going to take the fall.
Nobody.
It was Jim who was at fault, and he was the scapegoat.
I mean, Pop Warner... It was such a deep betrayal.
I mean, after everything that Jim Thorpe had done
to really give Pop Warner his own separate legacy,
all the success and the attention
he was able to bring him as a coach,
for him to then just, at a crucial moment in his life,
just totally stab him in the back...
So they insisted that he send back his medals.
[Maraniss] The gold medals and trophies
were taken away from him.
It was an act of enormous injustice.
His records would be stripped from the Olympic record,
and the second- and third-place winners
would be bumped up to first and second,
and he would just be eliminated.
Hugo Wieslander,
the Swedish track star who placed second to Jim,
was offered his gold medal when Jim was stripped of the award.
But he said, "No. This belongs to Thorpe."
Jim was busted. It was over.
This incredible victory in Stockholm
that made him the idol of the whole world was over.
[O'Brien] As athletes, we win or lose on the track.
Our performance is out there on the field of play.
And it's the purest form of sport.
There's a start line and a finish line.
And they stole that from Jim Thorpe.
I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint
and considered the episode just another event
in the Red man's life of ups and downs.
Jim Thorpe losing his medals
was one of the great injustices in the sports world of all time.
This injustice happened on the firm foundation of hypocrisy.
It was actually not uncommon
for athletes to do exactly what Jim did.
Most of the time, athletes used a pseudonym
to protect their names and to protect their amateur status.
There were so many pseudonyms in the Eastern Carolina League
that they called it "the Pocahontas league"
'cause everybody was named John Smith.
Dwight Eisenhower, the future president,
played under the name Wilson in the Kansas State League.
Jim Thorpe played under the name Jim Thorpe.
He never tried to hide it.
And the final hypocrisy
is that even the bylaws of the Olympics in 1912
said that any challenge to someone's amateurism
had to come within 30 days of the Olympics.
The stories broke six months later.
[Boykoff] Because of the manner
in which the medals were taken away,
it was a ding to his integrity.
It wasn't just that people thought
he didn't deserve the metals.
It was that he supposedly cheated
en route to getting the medals.
One of the prevailing stereotypes of the day
was that Native Americans were deceitful and untrustworthy.
And so I think it was easy for American society
to label Jim that way.
[narrator] Regarding the journalist who broke the story,
Thorpe later reflected...
[Thorpe] He wrote the story that hurtled around the world
and toppled me from the heights of amateur athletics.
He must have been proud of his scoop.
I wonder if, in his happiness,
he ever thought what his story would cost me.
[O'Brien] It's every athlete's goal to win those major medals.
Those titles become part of you. That's part of your identity.
Having them take away my titles, having them take away my medals
would be like taking a piece of me away physically.
Jim would tell one of his friends,
"They took my medals away.
I won them fair and square, and now I don't have them.
Now I don't have anything."
[Williams] As soon as Jim loses his amateur status,
everyone assumes he's simply gonna pursue a career
playing professional football.
Instead, owners from a different sport
saw the value in Jim's celebrity,
and offers began to flow in from professional baseball.
[Eisenberg] Jim is a commodity.
He's the best known athlete in America,
and people are fascinated by him.
[Maraniss] He was signed by the New York Giants in 1913
because he was the most famous athlete in the world.
And the Giants, led by John McGraw,
knew that later that year, they'd be traveling
around the world with the Chicago White Sox,
bringing baseball to the rest of the world.
The rest of the world knew none of the famous baseball players.
They didn't know Christy Mathewson.
They didn't know Ty Cobb.
They knew one athlete from America: Jim Thorpe.
[Petrzela] When Thorpe signed with the New York Giants
and went around the world doing exhibition games,
he played baseball in places including Japan, Egypt,
and even in front of the king and queen in London.
On the voyage home, they traveled on the Lusitania,
the same ship that, just a few months later,
was sunk by a German U-boat in World War I.
[Williams] Prior to signing with the Giants,
Jim had played a couple of years of minor-league baseball,
but this was primarily with small, scrappy farm teams.
These were really sandlot games,
nothing compared to what he'd experience in the majors.
[Creek] The fact that he went
up to the professional league so quickly,
he just didn't have time to acquire the skills
needed to be a good ballplayer.
But folks in the front office wanted him on the team
because they knew they could bring the fans in
and sell tickets... [crowd cheering]
...even though he really wasn't ready for that experience.
Hitting is when you figure out who really can play baseball
and who cannot.
When something's coming at you 90 miles an hour,
100 miles an hour, that ain't easy to get around on.
And one of the biggest obstacles for Jim Thorpe
was that he couldn't hit a curveball.
[Eisenberg] In fact, his batting average
in his first year with the Giants was in the .160s.
Let me tell you. I'm the sportswriter.
So I know if I've got Jim Thorpe in front of me hitting .160,
I'm not being really nice.
The headlines are savage.
"Jim Thorpe is a joke. Why is he in the major leagues?"
[Hill] The criticism, the denigration
was there immediately
and I think really gave you a window of a racial dynamic
where you build people up, then,
when they get to the place that you built them up,
you start chopping away.
It wasn't just like Joe DiMaggio getting booed at a game.
No one was talking about his race.
No one was talking about his culture.
They would shout things at him like "Dog soup,"
or they would do war whoops to taunt him.
[crowd booing]
It was almost like all of Jim's acceptance in society
and as a player hinged on his performance.
If he wasn't winning, the crowds weren't with him.
[Maraniss] John McGraw, the manager,
doesn't let him play much.
He's a benchwarmer for most of that first year.
[Buford] Huge problem was that McGraw was a micromanager.
He liked to tell a player every single step
of what he was supposed to do when he was going up to bat.
Warner left Jim alone. He rarely got in his way.
McGraw was the polar opposite.
And he and Jim quickly developed an antipathy to each other.
[Petrzela] Jim struggled a lot with baseball,
which didn't come so naturally to him.
[Eisenberg] But playing baseball,
by far the most popular sport in America at the time,
that kept him in the spotlight.
As a football player, he's still the star that he was in college,
and that got the attention of the Ohio League.
[Creek] Jim's professional football career began in 1915
with the Canton Bulldogs in the Ohio League.
[Maraniss] The Ohio League was the precursor
to the National Football League, but it was nothing like it.
It wasn't even really a league.
Players could go from one team to another week by week,
depending on who would pay them more.
[Eisenberg] No rules about scheduling.
No rules about contracts.
It was very loosely structured.
[Williams] Most people at the time
were barely even aware that pro football existed.
This was years before the advent of the NFL.
Back then, college football was considered the real draw.
[Schefter] Boxing was more popular.
Horse racing was more popular. Tennis, golf, baseball.
Everything was more popular than football back in the day.
It may be shocking for people to understand this,
especially seeing what football has become today,
but, you know, it wasn't some billion-dollar industry.
It wasn't powered by shoe companies.
It wasn't supposed to be this thing
where people were supposed to get rich.
[Eisenberg] The Canton Bulldogs
had one of the better teams in the Ohio League,
and they offered Jim $250 a game,
which is $7,000 in today's dollars.
It was unheard of to pay anyone that amount of money.
It's the first time there's money in football.
The salary was a headline.
Really, you can point to that
as a birth moment of professional football.
It's Jim Thorpe signing with the Canton Bulldogs.
Jim Thorpe helped put that sport on the map.
[Eisenberg] Jim's best years as a pro football player
were with the Canton Bulldogs.
He's a dominant player.
He's the best player on every field.
Jim would go on to help them become a dynasty.
He won four national championships in five years.
This was the apex of Jim's professional football career.
And they have an incredible run until the early '20s
with him as coach and player.
People come to see him play.
He encourages other players, like Knute Rockne,
to come and play with him or against him.
They just wanted to be on the same field with him
because he was so revered.
A professional game at Massillon, Ohio.
I was with the Canton Bulldogs.
And Rockne, he slipped through and tackled me
for a couple-yard losses, and I said, "Well, Rock,
you're doing fine work."
But I said, "Listen.
All these people up here in the stands come to see old Jim run.
How about letting old Jim run?"
He says, "Well, you big rascal,
if you think you can do it, let's see you do it."
So the next time I carried the ball around,
I hit him in the side of the head with my knee
and my hip and my elbow and knocked him out.
So I run on down for a touchdown.
I walked up to him and I said, "Thataboy, Rock.
You let old Jim run, didn't you?"
[narrator] Even while playing for the Canton Bulldogs,
Jim Thorpe never gives up on baseball.
After marrying Iva Miller in 1913 and starting a family,
he dedicates himself to honing his baseball skills,
driven by his relentless competitive spirit.
[Buford] Other sports came easily to him.
But baseball didn't, and he had to work hard at it.
His journey takes him through stints
with the Milwaukee Brewers, the Cincinnati Reds,
and a return to the New York Giants,
until he's traded once more in 1919.
He's struggling for many years
until he finally gets his chance in Boston for the Boston Braves.
And for that one year,
he showed that he really did have baseball talent.
He led the National League in hitting for most of the year.
He was up there in the weekly scores of batting averages,
with Ty Cobb leading the American League.
[Williams] To put the last year of Jim's baseball career
in some context: Jim hit .327 that year.
Ken Griffey Jr., by contrast, who's considered to be
one of the greatest baseball players of all time,
the best batting average he had in any season: .327.
♪♪
So he becomes now known as the iron man of sports.
He can play anything.
All year long, he's playing both sports.
So now we give athletes a heck of a lot of praise
if they just play two sports.
Bo knows baseball. [rock music playing]
♪♪
Bo knows football.
Of course we remember Bo Jackson being
a hell of a football player, a hell of a baseball player.
Deion Sanders was really good at football and baseball.
I'm hard pressed to come up with too many more after that.
[Hill] And nine times out of ten,
if we're keeping it real,
they're not equally good at both of those sports.
[announcer] Here's Usain Bolt.
We'll get an early look at his speed.
It's usually one they're great at,
and the other one...all right.
But Jim, he excelled at football, baseball, and track.
He's not just a three-sport athlete.
You add up all the decathlon events,
Jim was a 12-sport athlete.
[Schefter] Jim Thorpe came as close
to mastering all his trades as anybody else ever has.
Literally we won't see a Jim Thorpe ever again.
There's never gonna be an athlete
who's gonna be good at that many things.
[narrator] Jim's talent and star power
make him the perfect figurehead to launch a new league.
Pro football in the early 1900s was the Wild West.
They knew that it's got to be regulated somehow.
So some of the owners get together in 1920 in Canton,
and they sit down in a Hupmobile auto showroom,
and they form a league
that will eventually be the National Football League.
And they unanimously elect Jim as the first president
of that brand-new league, knowing that his name means
that every newspaper in the country
will cover this new league
and thereby bring some respect and attention to this sport,
which is why the Pro Football Hall of Fame is in Canton.
[narrator] A shrine to the memory of the greats
of professional football is dedicated in Canton, Ohio.
It was here that the National Football League
was founded in 1920.
No man has ever touched the record of Jim Thorpe
as an all-around athlete.
[Eisenberg] It's a straight line from that meeting
to the multi-multibillion-dollar colossus that the NFL is today.
He really created that sport.
[crowd cheering]
[O'Brien] Jim Thorpe had spent a decade
performing at the highest levels of athletic achievement.
But that's a decade of no off days
and a decade of putting that punishment on your body.
[Eisenberg] He's in his 30s, and he has lost a step.
And he will continue to lose a step.
His decision to be a two-sport athlete
had a huge impact on his family life.
In baseball, you're gone for six months.
And then, his offseason, he's playing football.
Also gone.
He was rarely home.
Jim and Iva divorced,
and he then married Freeda Kirkpatrick,
and they had four boys.
It just gets harder and harder and harder.
[Proudfit] In an effort to provide for his family,
he started to be more and more absent.
[Eisenberg] He went from the Canton Bulldogs
to a team in Cleveland in 1921.
And then he coached an all-Indian team, Oorang Indians,
which was really an advertisement
for a guy that owned dogs.
[Thorpe] We traveled through Ohio,
picking up games at random without a schedule,
football gypsies.
I had traveled a long and windy road,
over hills and valleys.
It seemed in this era of my life,
I had slipped into the valley.
[Eisenberg] In 1925, the New York Giants brought him in.
They paid him by the half
because they weren't sure that he could finish a game.
And it didn't go well. They cut him after four games.
He was fading.
As Jim Thorpe's career was on the decline,
there was a star coming into the NFL.
[narrator] Red Grange ,
the fabulous Galloping Ghost of Illinois.
[Eisenberg] He was just an incredible, fast,
elusive runner, and it just fascinated the football public.
[Grange] Now, I played one game against Jim Thorpe.
He was 40 years old, and you could still see
that he had been a great football player.
He was big, and he was strong, and he loved it.
He loved that contact.
He loved to run into people, and that's what it takes.
[Proudfit] Not only did Jim continue to play football,
but in an effort to recapture his name
and his significance in the sports world,
he started playing basketball.
[Thorpe] I organized teams,
played itinerant games, and eked out a living
from those who paid their admissions to see Thorpe
and his unheralded farewell tour.
♪
Every athlete's sports life comes to an end,
and Jim Thorpe's came to an end in 1928.
I was now 41 years old.
The years had put weight on my frame
and taken fire from my feet.
Football was my love.
And now was I saying goodbye to the game
of which I felt I had become a part?
Later, many sportswriters and commentators
would say that Jim had played too early,
before agents, testimonials, and money,
big-time money, enter into the world of sports.
♪
You have Babe Ruth.
You have Red Grange.
Jack Dempsey is a fighter.
The bonanza came after Jim's time.
Athletes made a lot of money.
♪♪
Jim Thorpe struggled monetarily after retirement.
No question about it.
[Buford] Ironically, the greatest athlete of all
couldn't benefit in the way that other athletes could benefit.
[Boykoff] There was a lot of anti-Indigenous racism
at that time.
It was difficult to find lucrative employment.
So there are 25 years
where he was constantly looking for a job.
He was a bar owner, a greeter at bars.
Jobs were scarce,
and I had made the mistake in my life
of devoting all my time to athletics, overlooking the fact
that someday I might need a business calling
upon which to lean in days such as these.
[Buford] In the 1930s -- this is the Depression --
thousands of has-been athletes went out to Hollywood.
♪
It was seen as a place where they might work.
With the advent of the sound pictures, talkies,
the Western had come back into favor.
You could have the horses galloping
and the rifles crackling.
And so Jim, as well as hundreds if not thousands of Indians,
also went out to Hollywood.
He thought he could make his way as an actor.
♪♪
[Buford] When he first arrived in Hollywood,
he couldn't find any work, and he was just doing odd jobs.
I took a shovel and worked on the site
of the new county hospital, loading dirt into trucks.
I was paid $4 a day.
I had worked there only a few weeks
when newspaper reporters found me.
They posed me with a pick and shovel,
and the papers carried the picture.
You know, the famous Jim Thorpe is now digging ditches.
A far cry from the day
when I stood beside King Gustav of Sweden
with my arms loaded with trophies.
As soon as the word spread that Jim Thorpe was digging ditches,
it became this enormous symbolic event.
Photos went out to every newspaper in the country.
[Doyle] The sense was this man had fallen so far.
And I think it's easy to perceive it that way,
but I don't think that he saw it that way.
Jim Thorpe was not a person who felt sorry for himself.
He was a hardworking man,
and he saw work like that as an opportunity.
[Buford] And the studios heard about him,
and that's what started the studio career.
And he realized that his name had a certain currency
in the movies.
People could put "and also starring Jim Thorpe"
or "Jim Thorpe appearing."
He found that jobs came to him because of that.
♪
Jim's big-screen debut was in Battling Buffalo Bill,
where he played a Cheyenne warrior.
He was also a pirate in Captain Blood.
He played a native in King Kong,
and he was in Always Kickin', where he played himself.
Listen, boys.
If the laces are not up on receiving the ball
from the center, don't take too much time.
Adjust the ball on a step forward and kick.
But you had very limited roles for Native Americans who spoke,
so he was relegated to play generic characters
who had few lines, if any.
-No. More. -That's all you get.
Hudson Bay pay more.
[gunshot echoes]
[Proudfit] He was asked to wear a headdress,
speak in generic, stereotypical Hollywood Native speak.
In spring, Big Jim Foster's cabin burn.
Furs gone.
But he was also really frustrated
that most of the roles during this period of time
were going to non-Indians playing Indians.
These are non-Indigenous actors in war paint,
doing buffoonish characterizations
of what they thought Native Americans behaved like.
In 1926, a group called the War Paint Club was formed,
and its goal was to ensure that Hollywood would hire
Native actors to play Native people in films.
Jim lent his voice and celebrity to this cause.
Jim's advocacy for his fellow Indians was so strong and moving
that they called him ahkapanata, which was a Sac and Fox term
which essentially meant "caretaker."
[narrator] After years of advocating
on behalf of all Native Americans,
the final act of Jim Thorpe's life
finds him advocating for himself
as he fights to win back his Olympic medals.
[narrator] In Oklahoma,
members of 15 Indian tribes stage a colorful celebration
in honor of a famous Indian athlete, Jim Thorpe,
who joins the dances himself.
In 1950, The Associated Press took a poll of sportswriters
of the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century.
Jim Thorpe won by a mile over Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens
and Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and Jack Dempsey.
It was Jim Thorpe.
So he was back in the limelight again,
and it prompted the making of the Warner Bros. biopic in 1951,
Jim Thorpe: All-American.
[narrator] Jim Thorpe Week then reaches its climax in a parade.
Celebration lasts far into the night,
as Oklahoma hails the motion-picture life story
of the man recently voted the outstanding athlete
of the last half-century, Jim Thorpe: All-American.
The director was Michael Curtiz, who had directed Casablanca.
The star was Burt Lancaster,
a great movie star, a good athlete.
Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.
Thank you, Your Majesty.
[Maraniss] Very popular. It was on all the big screens
and the outdoor theaters around the country.
[Buford] Jim Thorpe was sort of plaintive, you know?
He said, "I get a funny feeling watching Burt play me."
He said, "I don't think I was ever as handsome
as Burt Lancaster."
[Jones] Even though Jim was back in the public eye,
the recognition that he really wanted was from the Olympics.
[narrator] In the later years of his life,
Jim works tirelessly,
petitioning to have his Olympic medals restored.
Contemporary account after contemporary account
talked about how Thorpe was totally disconsolate
by losing those medals.
He wanted them back more than anything.
In one plea to the president of the Amateur Athletic Union,
he writes...
[Thorpe] You will have the knowledge
that you made an old American Indian a happy man.
And when I go to the happy hunting ground,
my blessings will be upon you.
[narrator] However, he is rejected time and again.
[Hill] I mean, it was something that he never got over
and really loomed over him the rest of his life.
[Buford] Jim Thorpe did not have a good heart,
and he'd had heart attacks.
In 1953, Jim Thorpe had one last heart attack and died.
♪♪
His passing prompts an outpouring of support
from many, including former collegiate adversary
and newly elected president of the United States
Dwight Eisenhower.
"I learned with sorrow of the death of my old friend.
I personally feel that no other athlete
has possessed his all-round abilities in games and sports."
[Watson] In his death, there's a groundswell of support
from the public to return his medals.
People grabbed on to him almost like a folk hero
as the man wronged by the big guys.
They wanted some vindication for Jim.
[Maraniss] His family had fought for them over the years.
Various other athletes were pushing for it.
The campaign, which went on for decades and decades and decades,
was thwarted over and over again by Avery Brundage,
the competitor who had lost to Jim in the Olympics.
Over the years, Brundage had risen through the ranks
to become president
of the International Olympic Committee.
Throughout Brundage's tenure as a leader
within the Olympic movement,
he continued to not reinstate the honors
that Thorpe had earned.
As long as Avery Brundage was alive, it would not happen.
It chugs along like that until Avery Brundage is out.
He retires. He's gone.
With Thorpe's nemesis out of the way
and continued support for his cause,
including from President Gerald Ford,
justice ultimately prevails.
Jim's medals were restored to him 30 years after his death,
in 1982.
But Jim Thorpe is listed as co-winner
with the second-place finishers
in the pentathlon and decathlon,
an injustice that stands until 2022.
[Muir] Long considered one of the most
controversial decisions in sports...
A resolution in what some are calling
the first international sports scandal.
After more than 100 years,
Jim Thorpe has been reinstated as the sole winner
of the 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon in Sweden.
This day has certainly been a long time coming for Jim Thorpe.
It took 110 years for justice to finally be done.
In 2024, nearly 80 years after his death,
Jim Thorpe is posthumously awarded
the Presidential Medal of Freedom...
Jim Thorpe, a one-of-a-kind champion.
Not just the greatest ballplayer.
The greatest athlete of all time.
...the nation's highest civilian honor.
Jim Thorpe's legacy is astounding
when you look back on it.
No one has carved the path that he carved.
To be a dominant football player,
to be a Major League Baseball player,
to be an Olympic gold medalist:
To do all those things in one athlete's life,
he is in a category by himself.
No one has replicated that,
and I daresay we'll never see another.
[O'Brien] Jim Thorpe is a giant in the sport of track and field.
I was in the Olympics 80 years after Jim Thorpe,
and even though almost a century of history separates us,
he had a big impact on me.
[Doyle] This is an athlete that really dominated
the first half of the 20th century,
but also he represents so much more than just an athlete.
[Buford] He became an inspiration for any outsider.
Anyone who felt excluded from the American mainstream,
the American elite was keeping them out of sports,
Jim Thorpe became their man.
[Maraniss] Jim Thorpe was a survivor.
He endured all of the difficulties
that Native Americans endured
during the 19th and early 20th century.
What he represents is the perseverance
of Native peoples in this country.
He represents the very height,
the very top a person could achieve.
His legacy is that other Native people want their children
and future generations and even themselves,
their own generations, to match that.
[Proudfit] Perseverance was in everything that he did.
If you think about Jim Thorpe's life,
he's not just a tragic figure of American history.
He's not just another sad Indian.
He was the greatest athlete of all time
and one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.
♪