Jim Thorpe: The Greatest Athlete and the Fight for His Medals

Bright Path. That is what Wa-Tho-Huk means, the name given to a boy born in a small frame house on the Sac and Fox allotment south of Prague, Indian Territory, after a thunderstorm came up the Canadian River valley in the spring of 1887. That February, Congress had passed the Dawes Act and begun cutting the reservations into parcels. The boy grew up between the two: a Sac and Fox name, and a government certain it knew better.

The world would call him Jim Thorpe. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, under Pop Warner, he led the football team that beat Harvard in 1911, and at the Stockholm Olympics the next summer he won both the pentathlon and the decathlon. He came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. Then, in January 1913, a newspaper revealed that he had played two summers of minor-league baseball in North Carolina for a few dollars a game, and the medals were taken away.

He went on to play outfield for the New York Giants and to star in the professional football that became the NFL, and after his death in 1953 his family and supporters kept up the argument over amateurism and race. In October 1982 the International Olympic Committee put his name back in the record books as co-champion.

He had been dead for twenty-nine years.