JIM THORPE: BIOGRAPHY OF AN INDIGENOUS ICON

Jim Thorpe’s athletic career was a marvel. As a two-time Olympic gold medal winner, as well as a professional football, baseball, and basketball player, Thorpe left his mark across a wide array of sports disciplines. A new biography from David Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, offers us a deeper look into Thorpe’s life. Raised as a member of the Sac and Fox nation, the young Thorpe was shuttled between Indian boarding schools as a child, where he was subjected to the genocidal assimilation policies of such institutions. He lost his brother to pneumonia at an Indian Agency school, and his mother later passed away from childbirth in Thorpe’s teenage years. Although he would later achieve monumental athletic acclaim, Thorpe’s career was also marked by setbacks. His Olympic medals were stripped from him (and only posthumously restored) after it was discovered that he had played minor league baseball earlier in his life. Thorpe further struggled with alcoholism, financial difficulties, and broken marriages towards the end of his life. Author David Maraniss joins The Marc Steiner Show to examine Thorpe’s life, and what it can teach us about US history.

American multi-sport athlete and Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe (1888-1953), here of the New York Giants baseball team, waits for a pitch during a game at the Polo Grounds, New York, New York, 1913. Bain News Service/Interim Archives/Getty Images

TRANSCRIPT

Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s good to have you all with us. We’re about to have a conversation with David Maraniss, one of America’s great writers, who’s explored our nation’s history, culture, and life through the lives of well-known figures. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, wrote about Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, Vince Lombardi, along with a trilogy about the ’60s.

He’s also an associate editor at The Washington Post and professor at Vanderbilt. Now he’s outdone himself, I think, with his 13th book called Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. The title is Thorpe — Sac and Fox is his real name, and this book weaves a tale of the United States and Indigenous people through the life and lens of one of the greatest, if not the greatest athlete in our history, Jim Thorpe.

Dave Maraniss: I have to be obsessed to write a book. I consider Path Lit by Lightning the third biography in a trilogy of sports figures who transcend sports. I’m looking for two things in those books. The first is just that it has to be a heck of a story, and a lot of great athletic achievement in it, and drama. But beyond that, I wanted to illuminate American history and sociology through the story of that human being, of that athlete. The first of those books was about Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, was the book.

I saw it not just as a means of writing about a winning football coach, for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named. But also a way to explore the mythology of competition and success in American life, what it takes and what it costs. The second book about Roberto Clemente, the beautiful ball player. It’s not just about baseball, but also about the experience of Latinos on the American mainland. Even more than that, a story about so many sports figures are called heroes and almost none really are. But Clemente was in the way he lived his life and the way he died, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after an earthquake.

Then there’s Jim Thorpe, not just an athlete of unparalleled achievement, but also through his life and the obstacles he faced, I could write about the entire Native American experience.

Marc Steiner: Let’s talk about Jim Thorpe and those boarding schools for a moment. I know we all knew about them, many of us know about them, and knew the name Jim Thorpe, but I’m really interested in all that I read about in the book. What really grabbed you about those boarding schools that you didn’t expect, and how they affected the lives of people like Jim Thorpe? How they turned them around, but it affected those lives. Because we can know about it, that they existed. But what you did, you took a huge deep dive into those schools and into three superintendents and their attitudes. Tell me what really hit you the most, in terms of what you discovered?read more