Jim & Me (15 page)

EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS TRUE
,
EXCEPT FOR THE
stuff I made up. It's only fair to tell you which is which.

Jim Thorpe, John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Lord Byron, and all the players of 1913 were real people. After Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals were taken away from him in January 1913, a number of major-league baseball teams made him offers. It's too bad he chose the New York Giants; he and John McGraw could not get along, and Jim never got the chance to develop as a baseball player. Jim was fast and had a great arm, but had problems at the plate. He got just 35 at bats in 1913, and he only made five hits (for an average of .143). The Giants won the pennant easily, but lost their third World Series in a row. Jim never got a World Series at bat. The next season, McGraw let him bat just 31 times and he got
six hits. In 1915, Jim got twelve hits in 52 at bats.

The rap on Jim was that he couldn't hit a curveball, as seen in this short piece that appeared in
The New York Times
on March 15, 1916:

McGraw eventually did get rid of Jim.

Interestingly, after Jim was traded, he started to hit. In 1919—his final year in the majors and the only season he was given a real chance (159 at-bats)—Jim hit .327 for the Boston Braves. So he must have hit at least a few curveballs (maybe because Stosh taught him how?). Jim's lifetime major-league average was a respectable .252. We'll never know how good he could have been if he had signed with a team that was more supportive from the start.

In 1915, while still playing baseball, Jim began to play professional football for the Canton Bulldogs. He played for other pro teams too, and when the American Professional Football Association was formed in 1920, Jim was hired to be its president. The APFA later became the NFL. Football was Jim Thorpe's true love.

Jim suffered from bad timing. The Depression struck soon after he retired from sports in 1928. He took whatever work he could find to support his growing family (seven children with three wives). He was a house painter, security guard, bartender, and bouncer, and he managed an Indian wrestler named Sunny War Cloud. Jim even had some small roles in movies, such as
Klondike Annie
, with Mae West, and
Northwest Passage
, with Spencer Tracy. And yes, in 1931, he
was
one of the laborers who helped build Los Angeles County Hospital.

The story you just read took place just 23 years after the United States Army killed Sitting Bull and 153 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. That was the end of the Indian Wars. Many people still considered Native Americans to be “savages” even after Jim Thorpe stunned the world at the
1912 Olympics. Few people know that Native Americans—the
original
Americans—were not even granted American citizenship until 1924.

Jim Thorpe was proud of his Indian heritage. Toward the end of his life, he started a new career as a public speaker, traveling the country to give lectures on behalf of Indian education, citizenship, and equal rights. Health problems eventually slowed him down. He died on March 28, 1953, after his third heart attack, in Long Beach, California. He had been living there in a trailer park.

Jim Thorpe had a hard life—and a hard death too. He was buried in Shawnee, Oklahoma, but when the town refused to build a memorial for him, Jim's wife Patsy moved his body to Tulsa. Plans for a memorial didn't work out there, either.

Patsy heard that the Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were thinking about merging and changing their names. She agreed for Jim to be buried there if they named the town in his honor. They did, and that's where Jim is buried today. Jim Thorpe never set foot in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

After his death, Jim began to get some long overdue recognition for his accomplishments. He is now a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, Pro Football Hall of Fame, National Track and Field Hall of Fame, United States Olympic Hall of Fame, Pennsylvania Hall of Fame, and National Indian
Hall of Fame. In 2000, when
ABC's Wide World of Sports
set out to name the Athlete of the Century, they didn't choose Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, or Muhammad Ali. They chose Jim Thorpe over them all.

As a man, Jim was complicated. Having survived an abusive father, his twin brother's death, lifelong prejudice against Indians, the Olympic scandal, career failure, and the death of his own son from infantile paralysis, it's not surprising that he had problems with alcohol.

Jim was also a modest, generous, and kind man who actually would give money to strangers and lift up people's cars to help them change tires. When asked what was the greatest moment in his athletic career, he would invariably talk about a fish he once caught rather than his Olympic or football heroics.

Jim never fought to get his Olympic medals returned. But attitudes about professional athletes participating in the Olympics changed over the years, and there were many attempts by others to clear his name. In 1983, two of Jim's children were presented with reproductions of his gold medals. (The originals had been lost, stolen from museums.) In 1992, professional athletes were finally allowed to participate in the Olympics.

In 2001, Jim Thorpe was finally recognized as a true American hero: His picture was on a Wheaties box.

Much of what was described in 1913 really hap
pened. Christy Mathewson really did play six games of checkers simultaneously. Guys were constantly challenging Jim Thorpe to fights and wrestling matches. Newspapers really did create telegraphic simulations of baseball games. There are only two known copies of the Colgan's Jim Thorpe card, making it one of the rarest cards in the world.

The Polo Grounds was virtually the capital of baseball in the first half of the twentieth century. After the Giants moved to San Francisco, it became home to the Mets for their first two seasons. It was torn down in the mid-sixties and replaced with an apartment building.

There are also some minor fibs, stretchers, and outright lies in this book. While John McGraw
did
attempt to pass off an African American named Charley Grant as Chief Tokahoma, it happened back in 1901. Similarly, while McGraw's groundskeeper was famous for sculpting the foul lines and bending the rules in every possible way, that was when he was with the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s.

The 1931 Jim Thorpe baseball card is a fake that my wife, Nina, made. There was no 1931 Jim Thorpe baseball card.

That story about Jim hitting three homers in three states is a myth. But you'll see it over and over again in books about him.

There may very well have been a Trinity Hotel and an Eighth Avenue Saloon, but I don't know. I
just made them up.

Finally, Stosh, Bobby, Flip, and all the current-day characters are fictional. Time travel is impossible…or at least we haven't figured out how to do it yet.

WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT JIM THORPE
?
I GOT MOST OF
the information from reading books like Bill Crawford's biography of Jim Thorpe (
All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe
), Charles C. Alexander's biography of John McGraw (
John McGraw
), Ray Robinson's biography of Christy Mathewson (
Matty: An American Hero
), and Frank DeFord's
The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball
. Also, Noel Hynd's
The Giants of the Polo Grounds: The Glorious Times of Baseball's New York Giants
and
Land of the Giants: New York's Polo Grounds
by Stew Thornley were helpful.

There are books about Jim Thorpe for children of all ages. You should be able to find some of these in your local library:

Bruchac, Joseph.
Jim Thorpe's Bright Path
. New York: Lee & Low, 2004.

Fall, Thomas.
Jim Thorpe.
New York: Crowell, 1970.

Hahn, James and Lynn.
THORPE! The Sports Career of James Thorpe
. Mankato, Minn.: Crestwood House, 1981.

Lipsyte, Robert.
Jim Thorpe: 20th Century Jock.
New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Richards, Gregory B.
Jim Thorpe: World's Greatest Athlete.
Chicago: Children's Press, 1984.

Wheeler, Robert W.
Jim Thorpe: World's Greatest Athlete.
Norman, Okla: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.

The author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs: George Brace: 118; Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh: 117; Library of Congress: 21, 91, 98, 122; National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY: 85, 90, 119, 129; Zach Rice: 55; Nina Wallace: 21, 26, 75, 186; Howard Wolf: 197.