Triumph and tragedy marked Jim Thorpe’s life

King Gustav V of Sweden: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”

Jim Thorpe (reportedly): “Thanks, king.”

Ninety-three years after this singular exchange July15, 1912, at the closing ceremonies of the Stockholm Olympics, no athlete has emerged as Jim Thorpe’s equal. Though the word hadn’t been coined, he was a superstar in college football, a whiz at track and field, the NFL’s first marquee player and a respectable major league outfielder.

Thorpe, a full-blooded American Indian, was named the best male athlete of both the half-century and century. He is a member of the pro football and track and field halls of fame. A town was renamed for him (Jim Thorpe, Pa.) near where he starred in football for what then was known as the Carlisle Indian School. A movie starring Burt Lancaster was made of his life. The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp bearing his likeness in 1998. The following year, the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring him the greatest athlete of the century.

Could, say, Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders equal all that?

Forget it.

Tragically, however, what many remember about Thorpe is his tragic life away from the arena. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped him of his two Olympic gold medals in 1913 because he had unwittingly played pro baseball. They were restored and returned to his descendants in 1982, nearly 30 years after Thorpe’s death at 66 in 1953 following years of poverty and alcoholism.

If Thorpe was America’s greatest athlete, he also might have been its saddest.

Born in 1887 on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma. Thorpe had a twin brother named Charlie. Late in Thorpe’s life, famed sports columnist Grantland Rice wrote in his 1954 autobiography “The Tumult and the Shouting,” a publicist asked Thorpe whether there was anything about him that wasn’t already known.

“Yes, one thing,” Thorpe replied. “I’m a twin. My brother died when we were 5 or 6.”

“What happened?”

Said Jim, seriously: “We were raised on canned condensed milk — and we ran out of cans.”

Don’t laugh. Little about Thorpe’s life was funny.

Thorpe’s official athletic career began in 1907 at Carlisle, where he performed well in football, baseball, track and field, lacrosse and — honest to goodness — ballroom dancing. At 6-foot-1 and 190 pounds, he was considered a big man for his day.

Thorpe first gained national attention in 1911 as a running back, defensive back, punter and kicker for the Carlisle Indians, coached by legendary Glenn “Pop” Warner. Most notably, he scored all of his team’s points in an 18-13 upset of powerful Harvard.

The following season he led Carlisle to a national championship, scoring 25 touchdowns and accumulating 198 points in an 11-1 season. Included was a 27-6 victory over Army in which Thorpe had a 92-yard kickoff return nullified by a penalty. No problem. On the next play, he ran 97 yards for a score that counted. In both seasons, Thorpe was a first-team choice on football pioneer Walter Camp’s All-America team.

Yet his greatest fame was achieved between the two football seasons and far, far from home.

Two new multisport disciplines, pentathlon and decathlon, marked the Summer Games in Sweden. Both seemed perfect for Thorpe, who had been Carlisle’s only athlete at some college “team” meets. (Coincidentally, one of his U.S. teammates in the pentathlon was Avery Brundage, much later the rigid and righteous president of the International Olympic Committee.)

Representing the Sac and Fox Nation — he didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 1917 — Thorpe mopped up his international competition in the pentathlon July6, winning four events and placing third in the javelin toss — a relatively new event for him. He also finished fourth in the high jump the next day and seventh in the long jump July13.

Then came the decathlon, a three-day event from July13 to 15. He placed fourth or better in all 10 events and finished 700 points ahead of his nearest rival.

During the final ceremonies, Thorpe received a gold medal from Tsar Nicholas II of Russia for the pentathlon and another from King Gustav V of Sweden for the decathlon. The latter also bestowed praise Thorpe cherished the for rest of his life (“At least they can’t strip me of the king’s words.”)

But Thorpe’s glory was all too shortlived. A few months later, in January 1913, several U.S. newspapers published stories that he had played professional baseball in North Carolina in 1909. In a letter to James Sullivan, secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union, Thorpe admitted doing so and asked forgiveness.

“I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know I was doing wrong,” his letter read.

In those days, Olympic athletes were required to be pure, meaning strictly amateur. The AAU retroactively withdrew Thorpe’s amateur status. Later that year, the IOC declared him a professional and stripped him of his Olympic titles, medals and trophies. Thus began a fight by his family to restore them that lasted 69 years.

How unfair were the two governing bodies? Wrote the customarily gentle Rice more than 40 years later, “They merely robbed the Indian in cold-blooded fashion. … The treatment accorded Thorpe, in my opinion, is one of the cruel turns of all American sport.”

Later Thorpe signed with John McGraw’s New York Giants and played sporadically for them, the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Braves, batting just .252 over six seasons. The standard rap was that he couldn’t hit a curveball, but this seems unlikely considering his other athletic gifts. According to one story, the autocratic McGraw soured on Thorpe when he beat all his teammates in — no pun intended — Indian wrestling.

In football, however, Thorpe remained a potent force. Signed by the independent Canton Bulldogs in 1915, he was still active at 32 in 1919 when the Bulldogs and several other teams formed the American Professional Football Association. As its most prominent figure, he was named league president as well as his team’s coach. A year later, the APFA took a new name: National Football League.

Thorpe played for six pro teams before retiring in 1928 at 41, but none won a championship. After Stockholm, it seemed, everything was downhill.

Thorpe had four children with each of his first two wives, but his heavy drinking contributed to the breakup of both marriages. He went from job to job and during the Depression of the 1930s often played an Indian chief in the movies.

By the 1950s, Thorpe was virtually penniless. When he was admitted to a hospital in 1950 for treatment of lip cancer, it was as a charity case. Three years later, while eating dinner with his third wife, Patricia, at their trailer home in Lomita, Calif., he suffered his third heart attack. This one was fatal.

Thorpe’s family wanted to bury him in his native Oklahoma and erect a memorial there, but state officials refused permission. When Patricia heard the small Eastern Pennsylvania town of Mauch Chunk was seeking a different name to attract business, she struck a deal. The town bought Thorpe’s remains, renamed itself in his honor and put up a monument to him. And you can probably guess the words etched in stone:

“Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”