In a 1950 poll of coaches and sportswriters Jim Thorpe was named the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century.  Of the 393 polled 252 named him the greatest.  Babe Ruth was a distant second with 86 votes.  Most kids today don’t know who he is.  When I was a kid I didn’t know much about him until I saw Burt Lancaster play him in a biopic on late night television.

 

           Perhaps the most versatile and natural athlete of modern times, Thorpe came to prominence playing football for “Pop” Warner at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.  He played professional baseball, mostly for the New York Giants (1913-1919), and achieved a lifetime batting average of .252.  At the same time he was becoming a dominant force in professional football, playing for several teams between 1915 and 1929.  He won both the pentathlon, and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics, held in Stockholm, Sweden.  These events require different skill sets.  Winning one is impressive but winning both has never been equaled.  This is why Stephen Jay Gould argued once in American Heritage magazine that Thorpe was not the most dominant athlete of the early 20th century, but of the entire 20th century.

            The great tragedy of his career was the rescinding of his Olympic medals.  His wins were impressive; he crushed the field of competitors.  There was no accusation of performance enhancement, or unfair play.  The Amateur Athletic Union discovered that while in college Thorpe had received a few dollars playing semi-professional baseball.  Many of the athletes that competed in the Olympics supplemented their incomes by playing professionally under assumed names.  Thorpe was not well-informed enough to know to use an alias.  And so the polished European athletes, still stinging from their crushing defeat by a native-American, announced a la Claude Rains, that they were “shocked, shocked!” such a thing had happened.  Thorpe’s world records were expunged and he was further humiliated by being ordered to return his medals.

            This humiliation and the mark that he had somehow cheated changed him forever, damaging his personal sense of pride, which was, for him, everything.

            For years different groups tried to have his medals restored.  In 1973, twenty years after his death, the USOC restored his amateur status.  But it was not until 1982 that his medals were restored.  It took the death of Avery Brundage, then head of the IOC, for history to be righted.  Brundage refused to entertain any idea of restoring Thorpe’s medals.  He said he had sympathy for the man but the high standards of the IOC had to be maintained.  Brundage tenaciously argued this point until his death in 1982.  What he failed to mention – ever – was that he was one of the competitors crushed by Thorpe in 1912.

            So now we know.  And we will always know just what the true standards of Avery Brundage were based upon.  70 years of feigning integrity doesn’t change the fact that he, as a competitor, should not have been the one to block Jim Thorpe’s medals.  He should have recused himself from that discussion.  That is what a man of integrity would do.

            But the truth will come out.  It always does, and our Rashomonesque ability to spin our own version of it will not keep it hidden for long

            The truth will come out.

For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.  Ecclesiastes12.14

And before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. Hebrews 4.13

            And so the thing for us to do is to live honestly.