NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Jim Thorpe had never run a competitive race in his life. Nor had he participated in any other track and field events. But that didn’t stop him from attempting the high jump one afternoon in 1907 and beating everyone on his school’s team.
Thorpe jumped on a whim. He was walking past the team as they practiced and thought he could do better. When he proved himself right, the team’s coach, Glenn “Pop” Warner, recruited him on the spot. Soon, Warner also recruited Thorpe for just about every other sports team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Thorpe, who was born on May 28, 1888, to Catholic parents of mixed European and Native American ancestry, excelled at every sport he tried. Years later, his old football rival President Dwight Eisenhower said of Thorpe, “He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.”
That didn’t just apply to football. At the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe received the gold medal in both the pentathlon and decathlon.
Prior to his Olympic trials, he’d never competed in over half the individual events of which the pentathlon and decathlon comprised.After the Olympics, Thorpe turned pro and spent the next 20 years playing football, baseball, and basketball. He also married three times and divorced twice.
With the Great Depression came Thorpe’s retirement from professional athletics and then his second divorce. Outside of the arena, Thorpe was less adept, and for the rest of his life bounced between jobs, always broke and drinking heavily.
Jim Thorpe died in 1953. Despite his checkered past, he received a Catholic funeral and was buried in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania (a town renamed in his honor). Near his tomb stands a memorial bearing the words allegedly spoken to him by King Gustav of Sweden at the 1912 Olympics, “You sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.”
