The Historian's Perspective
Jim Thorpe at the Polo Grounds, NY, 1913. (Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-B2- 2853-15)
Amateurism and Jim Thorpe at the Fifth Olympiad
by Kate Buford
Thorpe’s deception and subsequent confession deals amateur sport in America the hardest blow it has ever had to take and disarranges the scheme of amateur athletics the world over.” The New York Times, January 28, 1913.
The early years of the twentieth century were a dynamic, often chaotic
time for the emerging phenomenon of sports in America. With the exception
of baseball, which had its modern form in place by 1900, rules and organizations
were formed and reformed year by year. Basketball was brand-new, invented
in 1891. Football was strictly a collegiate game dominated by the northeastern
Big Three—Yale, Harvard and Princeton. Professional football was
deemed the “reptile sport” because its few and mainly lower-class
players were paid. The ideal of the “pure amateur”—the
pervasive ethos ofthe new American industrial elite and the aristocracy
of Britain and Europe – was the athlete who played for the love
of sport and not money.
A misreading of ancient Greek history by Victorian scholars had created
the myth that the first Olympians competed for no financial gain or
prize. The word “amateur” does not, in fact, exist in ancient
Greek; it is a French word derived from the Latin amare, to
love. The myth justified the cautionary view that when the ancient Games
had “degenerated” into professional events, it had been
a key sign of the end of the great Greek civilization.
Amateurism was in fact a ruthless standard meant to keep the lower,
laboring classes out of sports. Only athletes with independent means
of support could afford to compete. But amateurism was also the means
to a bigger end for the wealthy class. It secured their control of the
play, prestige, and money from the emerging sports universe.
The revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games in 1896 was the most
organized and famous expression of this amateur ethos. A French baron,
Pierre Frédy de Coubertin, founded the modern Olympic movement
in part as a way to inject the authentic ancient Greek ideal of a sound
mind in a sound body into modern nations in danger, he believed, of
becoming physically unfit and thus morally soft. By 1912, for the Fifth
modern Olympiad in Stockholm, each competitor had to sign an entry form
affirming that he or she was an amateur—“one who has never”
competed for money or prize, competed against a professional, taught
in any branch of athletics for payment (i.e., been a coach) or “sold,
pawned, hired out, or exhibited for payment” any prize.
The most prestigious athletic events of the modern Olympics were the
classic track and field sports originated by the Greeks to showcase
the glory of the fit human body. The five-event pentathlon and the ten-event
decathlon were the supreme tests of the complete athlete. Running, pole
vaulting, hurdles, high and long jumps, javelin and discus throws, and
putting the shot were meant to “reconcile the irreconcilable:
speed and resistance, dynamism and statism, strength and lightness,
power and relaxation” according to French track expert Robert
Pariente.
When Jim Thorpe, an American Indian from Oklahoma, triumphed in the
pentathlon and decathlon by huge margins, the achievement surprised
all. Americans were generally derided as specialists who trained too
hard. They were not expected to win these multi-events in Stockholm.
Sweden’s King Gustav V, placing the traditional laurel crown on
Thorpe’s head for the decathlon gold medal victory, called him
“the most wonderful athlete in the world.”
Thorpe had already captured the imagination of Americans with his stellar
performance on the 1911 Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian Industrial School
football team, leading it to victories over powerhouses such as Harvard
and the University of Pennsylvania. Since the first game in 1869, American
collegiate football had developed into the athletic crucible of the
nation's elite. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson passionately extolled
its “moral qualities.” Four months after winning the two
Olympic gold medals, Thorpe was the star of Carlisle’s remarkable
upset win against the Army team at West Point, the most stunning in
the school’s 12-1-1 season of 1912. Barely more than two decades
after the massacre at Wounded Knee, the Indian School's football victories
inspired both admiration and animosity. Thorpe, the team captain and
the world’s most famous Olympian, seemed too good to be true.
The turning point in Thorpe’s life and, by extension, in American
and international sports, came fast on the heels of his athletic success.
In late January 1913, a scoop in the Worcester Telegram revealed
that Thorpe had played professional minor league baseball in North Carolina
during the summers of 1909 and 1910. He was thus not only a “professional,”
he had covered it up to compete as an amateur in Stockholm.
Newspapers across the country and around the world followed every
twist of the story. It was a bona fide international sports scandal—one
of the first and most notorious. After a series of snafu-ridden Olympiads,
the Swedish Olympics had been the first well-run Games of the modern
era. Thorpe’s remarkable performance had set a standard of achievement
and newsworthiness that put the Olympic movement on a much more solid
footing. The reaction and analysis went on for months. The International
Olympic Committee, based in Switzerland, let the American organizers
deal with the Thorpe “peccadillo,” as de Coubertin called
it. Though the baron’s private view of amateurism was more nuanced
than most, he needed the financial and organizational backing of his
aristocratic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure the
future of the Games.
Thorpe’s role in the scandal was complicated. He had left the
Carlisle Indian School in 1909 to play minor league baseball for pay
and, he hoped, do well enough to move into the major leagues. The only
sport at the time with an organizational structure of leagues and teams,
and the relative financial security that came with it, was professional
baseball. Playing ball during the summer attracted many “college
boys.” Most of them changed their names to protect their amateur
status when they returned to school in the fall. Thorpe did not. In
his mind he had turned professional.
Thorpe returned to Carlisle in 1911 at the request of his football
and track and field coach, Glenn S. “Pop” Warner. Thorpe
had been an outstanding track and field athlete in 1909 and Warner wanted
to prepare him for the Stockholm Olympics. Thorpe trusted Warner to
figure out the amateurism issue. Warner knew about Thorpe’s professional
baseball summers, but denied any such knowledge when the scandal broke.
To do so would have risked his own rising stature in American sports,
largely earned as a result of Thorpe’s football and Olympic successes.
Warner wrote the famous letter to the Amateur Athletic Union in Thorpe’s
name. In the letter, the twenty-six-year-old athlete said he was “simply
an Indian schoolboy” who knew no better about the rules of amateurism
and hoped the AAU and “the people” would not be too hard
in judging him.
But the AAU was very hard indeed and rushed to repair the damage to
America’s new status as the world’s leader in sports. The
Swedish Olympic Committee’s 1912 rules stipulated that all challenges
to the Games had to be presented within three months of the event in
question. That time was long past. The AAU and the American Olympic
Committee (virtually the same organization at the time) ignored the
rule. There was no system of arbitration or redress in place. “Such
a case has not occurred before,” the Revue Olympique
commented in March 1913, “and a jurisprudence will have to be
established.”
Five days after the story broke Thorpe was stripped of his amateur
status and ordered to return his two gold medals and trophies to the
AAU for shipment back to Sweden. The gold, silver, and bronze medal
winners and records were adjusted accordingly. “In the history
of amateur athletics,” reported one newspaper, “there is
no case to parallel the rise to fame of the . . . Indian and his even
more meteoric descent to the ranks of the professionals.”
“The people,” however, embraced Thorpe’s story with
a fervor and tenacity that would persist for decades even as new sports
heroes surpassed him, their fame enhanced by the advent of radio in
the 1920s and television in the 1950s. Thorpe was seen as the outsider
wronged by a snobbish elite invested in preserving sports for the privileged
few. What did baseball have to do with track and field? A Harvard or
Yale college student would have been handled differently, protected.
At a time when immigrant Jews, Irish, Italians, and others were second-class
citizens and African Americans were barred from white sports almost
entirely, the summary disposal of this outstanding Native American athlete
was bitter proof that an equal playing field did not exist.
Thorpe’s identity as an American Indian, though with almost half-white
ancestry, was especially significant. He was not an American citizen,
but a ward of the nation. The white conquest of the continent had been
completed by 1890. Memories of the so-called Indian Wars were fresh.
Crude stereotypes of the ignorant, violent savage were encouraged by
the Wild West shows popular at the time, as well as by the dime novels
read by millions. With sports glorified as tests of superior mental
and physical worth and Indians generally considered to be in danger
of extinction, Thorpe’s astonishing performance against the best
white athletes upended many deeply held assumptions. The unique combination
of his extraordinary athletic skill, Indian identity, and the shabby
treatment of him by the guardians of amateurism created a kind of folk
hero mystique. In a century that would be marked by increasing political,
social, and sporting equality, he became a touchstone.
The more astute observers of the Thorpe scandal at the time derided
the sham of amateurism and predicted that professionalism would be the
athletic paradigm of the future. Yet it would take the better part of
the rest of the century for the idea of amateurism to die. The world
“amateur” would indeed become a more derogatory term, meaning
someone who is not good at what he does (e.g., “amateur hour,”
“a bunch of amateurs,” etc.) “Professional,”
on the other hand, would come to mean expert, the person who works and
practices until he masters a skill and is paid and rewarded for his
effort.
Thorpe turned professional in 1913. In 1920, he was elected president
of the organization that became, two years later, the National Football
League. By the time his athletic career ended in 1928 he had played
major league baseball and boosted the status of professional football
out of its sandlot beginnings. Thorpe died in 1953, but the popular
anger at the injustice of his Olympic story only grew. His amateur status
was reinstated by the AAU in 1973. In 1982, after a vigorous campaign
by his family, athletes, and U.S. political leaders, the International
Olympic Committee agreed to list him as a co-winner of the 1912 pentathlon
and decathlon. The adjusted medal allocations of 1913 were not changed.
The IOC refused to enter Thorpe’s remarkable scores in its official
record. There are, thus, two official gold medal winners of each multi-event,
a sports absurdity.
Jim Thorpe was perhaps the greatest all-around athlete of modern times.
His Olympic story, one of the earliest and most dramatic turning points
in sports history, remains unresolved.
Kate Buford is the author of Burt Lancaster:
An American Life (Knopf, 2000) and the upcoming Native American
Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Knopf, Oct. 2010).
