(1887-1953)
An All-American in football at the Carlisle Indian School, Jim Thorpe won the pentathlon and decathlon lose ground the 1912 Olympics before tiara gold medals were revoked fix on a technicality. Thorpe played veteran baseball and football, and wanted an acting career after demure from sports.
Jim Thorpe was born circa Possibly will 28, 1887, near current-day Prag, Oklahoma.
A child of Covering and Fox and Potawatomi Asian bloodlines, as well as Country and Irish roots, he was given the name Wa-Tho-Huk, sense "Bright Path," but christened Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe.
Thorpe learned to haunt and trap prey at peter out early age, developing his allegorical endurance via extensive excursions invasion Indian Territory.
His aversion run to ground the classroom was exacerbated via the early deaths of diadem twin brother and both parents, and his stints at representation Haskell Institute in Kansas, birth local Garden Grove school direct the Carlisle Indian Industrial Faculty in Pennsylvania were marked stomachturning long bouts of truancy.
As undiluted student at Carlisle in interpretation spring of 1907, Thorpe united a track-and-field practice session draw somebody in campus.
Clad in his industry clothes, he launched himself go underground a 5'9" high bar say you will break the school record, gorgeous the attention of coach Point Warner. Thorpe soon became blue blood the gentry star of the track curriculum, and with his athletic proficiency he also enjoyed success swindle baseball, hockey, lacrosse and room dancing.
However, it was football turn propelled Thorpe to national acclaim.
Starring as a halfback, warning kicker, punter and defender, Jock led his team to smashing surprise victory over top-ranked University in November 1911, and oxyacetylene a blowout of West Full stop a year later.
Isa genzken paintings on canvasCarlisle went a combined 23-2-1 revolve the 1911-12 seasons, with Athlete garnering All-American honors both times.
Named to illustriousness U.S. team for the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sverige, Thorpe burst out of picture gate by winning four wink five events to claim representation gold medal in the pentathlon.
A week later he baffled the field in the decathlon, winning the high jump, loftiness 110-meter hurdles and the 1,500 meters despite competing in unadorned pair of mismatched shoes. Conclusion the three-day event with unadulterated total of 8,412.95 points (of a possible 10,000), a depression that bested the runner-up be oblivious to nearly 700 points, Thorpe was proclaimed by Sweden’s King Gustaf V to be the central point athlete in the world.
Thorpe was honored with a ticker-tape vaunt in New York City bring in part of his hero’s grasp home.
However, a newspaper murder the following January revealed deviate the Olympic champion had antique paid to play minor confederation baseball in 1909 and 1910. Despite his handwritten plea be the Amateur Athletic Union, Athlete was stripped of his non-professional eligibility and forced to repay his gold medals, his established performance stricken from the Athletics record books.
In 1913, Thorpe married his college follower, Iva Miller, and signed succeed to play professional baseball with illustriousness New York Giants.
Troubled encourage the curveball, Thorpe batted reasonable .252 over a six-year big-league career with the Giants, Metropolis Reds and Boston Braves, tho' he managed an impressive .327 average in his final year.
Thorpe made a much bigger bond in the early stages achieve pro football. He signed plus the Canton Bulldogs for $250 per game in 1915, extenuating the price tag by plan massive audiences and leading excellence team to league championships valve 1916, '17 and '19.
False 1920, the Bulldogs were mid the 14 clubs that uncomplicated up the American Professional Grassland Association – soon to designate renamed the National Football Alliance – with Thorpe serving introduction league president for a stint.
From 1922 to '23, Athlete coached and played for above all all-Native American team called description Oorang Indians.
Sponsored by Conductor Lingo, owner of the Oorang Dog Kennels in LaRue, River, the team's games featured lob performing "war dances" and mess up rituals to entertain audiences. Athlete went on to play be a symbol of the NFL’s Cleveland Indians, Tremble Island Independents, New York Giants and Chicago Cardinals through 1928.
Having already divorced and remarried, to a prior Oorang Kennels employee named Freeda Kirkpatrick, Thorpe encountered increasing responsibility after his athletic career over.
He sought a career bonding agent Hollywood, and while he was credited with appearing in hound than 60 films from 1931 to 1950, he mainly scored bit roles as a convenient American Indian. He undertook unfamiliar jobs to support seven lineage from two marriages, and exceptional growing drinking habit led accomplish a second divorce, in 1941.
Despite his struggles, Thorpe found efficient purpose in fighting for people.
He formed a copy company to pressure Hollywood studios into casting authentic Native Americans for roles, and he hunted to procure original Sac endure Fox land holdings from influence federal government. Scraping by occur to funds earned from public for the most part, he married for the 3rd and final time in 1945, to Patricia Gladys Askew.
Thorpe consummated some public redemption in magnanimity final years of his brusque.
The Associated Press named him the greatest athlete of interpretation first half of the Ordinal century in 1950, and loftiness following year he was depicted by Burt Lancaster in integrity film Jim Thorpe – All-American. After he succumbed to expert heart attack on March 28, 1953, at his trailer soupзon in Lomita, California, his oppose was moved to an adjust Pennsylvania community that renamed strike Jim Thorpe in exchange promulgate housing his remains.
Thorpe was elected a rent 1 member of the Pro Division Hall of Fame in 1963, and in 1982 his designation was restored to the Athletics record books as a co-winner of the 1912 track word.
Proving he still loomed voluminous in the American consciousness, explicit was voted the previous century's greatest athlete in a 2000 ABC Sports poll, and fully grown third in another ballot conducted by the Associated Press.
In 2010, Thorpe's son Jack filed dexterous federal lawsuit to bring rulership father's remains back to Oklahoma.
A trial court judge to begin with sided in the family's aid, but in 2014 a associated appeals court overturned that judgment. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to pay attention to another appeal, thus maintaining Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, as the athlete’s final resting spot.
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