All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe - Hardcover

Crawford, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471557323 ISBN 13: 9780471557326

Publisher: Trade Paper Press, 2004

Synopsis

All American is riveting and grand-that rare pairing of exquisite writing and unassailable research. Crawford delivers you to an age when iconic titans like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner marched across the planet, and he is the perfect guide to their enormous triumphs and tragedies. This is epic American history at its page-turning finest.
-Bill Minutaglio, author of City on Fire and First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty

He was the greatest football running back of his era, leading his Carlisle Indian Industrial School team to victory over all the great college powerhouses. King Gustav of Sweden called him "the greatest athlete in the world" after he won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. Yet Jim Thorpe was also at the center of the greatest sports scandal of the twentieth century-a scandal that took away his Olympic medals and banned him forever from intercollegiate sports.

Now, in this revealing new biography, Bill Crawford captures Jim Thorpe's remarkable rise and fall. From his youth on Oklahoma's Sac and Fox Indian reservation to his astounding feats on the gridiron, from his Olympic triumphs to his complex relationship with coach "Pop" Warner, who mentored, exploited, and ultimately betrayed him, All American brings you up close and personal with the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Crawford is a journalist and media producer who has written for Texas Monthly, the Austin Chronicle, and other publications. He is the coauthor of Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire and the author or coauthor of several other books.

From the Back Cover

"All American is riveting and grand–that rare pairing of exquisite writing and unassailable research. Crawford delivers you to an age when iconic titans like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner marched across the planet, and he is the perfect guide to their enormous triumphs and tragedies. This is epic American history at its page-turning finest."
–Bill Minutaglio, author of City on Fire and First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty

He was the greatest football running back of his era, leading his Carlisle Indian Industrial School team to victory over all the great college powerhouses. King Gustav of Sweden called him "the greatest athlete in the world" after he won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. Yet Jim Thorpe was also at the center of the greatest sports scandal of the twentieth century–a scandal that took away his Olympic medals and banned him forever from intercollegiate sports.

Now, in this revealing new biography, Bill Crawford captures Jim Thorpe’s remarkable rise and fall. From his youth on Oklahoma’s Sac and Fox Indian reservation to his astounding feats on the gridiron, from his Olympic triumphs to his complex relationship with coach "Pop" Warner, who mentored, exploited, and ultimately betrayed him, All American brings you up close and personal with the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.

From the Inside Flap

This is a poignant and revealing biography of a pivotal figure in Olympic and American sports history.

In 1912, Jim Thorpe was the greatest sports celebrity in the world, a decathlon and pentathlon gold-medal winner at the Olympics as well as America’s highest-scoring football running back–a combination of Jim Brown, Jesse Owens, Emmitt Smith, and Deion Sanders. Yet the very next year Thorpe was betrayed by his longtime coach and mentor, stripped of his Olympic medals, and banned from intercollegiate track and football because he had violated his "amateur status." Though he would go on to play professional baseball and become president of what would later become the National Football League, Thorpe was never able to live down the scandal that cost him his medals.

Now, in the first new biography of Thorpe in nearly twenty years, Bill Crawford brings this Native American sports legend to life for a new generation. Drawing on newly uncovered information about Thorpe’s manager, Glenn "Pop" Warner, as well as the scandal that took away Thorpe’s Olympic medals, Crawford captures for the first time the full arc of Thorpe’s career. He tells the story of Thorpe’s rambunctious childhood on the Sac and Fox Indian reservation in Oklahoma and shows how he went from a boarding school runaway to a Texas bronco buster to a student at the famed Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He reveals how Thorpe beat the Carlisle high-jump record on a bet (in street clothes) and twice flew through a full field of tacklers on his way to the end zone in his impromptu tryout for the football team. And he recounts Thorpe’s astonishing triumphs of 1911—1912, when he led the Carlisle Indian football squad through two triumphant seasons–including victories over Harvard and West Point–and topped it all off with two gold medals at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden.

Crawford also brings to life Pop Warner, the pioneering Carlisle football coach and sports impresario who helped Thorpe achieve his greatest triumphs, then sided with the authorities when Thorpe lost his medals. Full of insights into the corrupt, rough-and-tumble world of athletics and the struggles of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, and illustrated with 33 rare photographs, All American is an indelible portrait of the greatest American athlete of the twentieth century.

Reviews

Crawford's terse, punchy biography of sports legend Thorpe (1888–1953) illuminates the current debate over the exploitation of unpaid college athletes by money-making, headline-grabbing educational institutions. Thorpe's own story is familiar: of mixed Caucasian and Native American background, Thorpe was raised on an Oklahoma reservation and was a somewhat obstinate kid before being sent to the Carlisle School, where educators sought to "detach Indians from their native 'savagery.' " Thorpe's awe-inspiring athletic prowess was harnessed for the football team by the school's bullying coach, "Pop" Warner. The young sport, a brutal endeavor still played without guards, was just beginning to catch on when, in 1911, Thorpe led Carlisle to a stunning upset over Harvard. The next year, Thorpe won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon at the Olympics and was arguably America's most lauded athlete. In 1913, though, true reports that Thorpe had played professional minor-league baseball (violating rules for Olympic amateurs) caused a scandal, marked by racist reporting and Thorpe's betrayal by the well-paid Warner, after which Thorpe was stripped of his medals. Texas journalist Crawford enlivens what is normally treated as a gauzy story of struggle against adversity with a no-nonsense approach, letting the racist attitudes against Thorpe speak for themselves and creating a resonant portrait of a champion in a hostile age. Photos.
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*Starred Review* A case can be made that Jim Thorpe was America's greatest all-around athlete. He won the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics--a feat never duplicated--and he played on both a World Series baseball team and a professional championship football team. Yet he was also a tragic figure. He was stripped of his Olympic medals and records--they were reinstated posthumously--and the financial benefits he reaped from his athleticism were siphoned away by "friends" and ill-chosen advisors. Crawford recounts Thorpe's tumultuous life from a hardscrabble youth on an Oklahoma Indian reservation (during the era when Indian schools sought to wean children away from their "savage" roots) to his emergence as a football All-American at the Carlisle Indian Academy to his Olympic triumph and on to his later years, when he was virtually ignored. Crawford also devotes considerable space to Glenn "Pop" Warner, Thorpe's coach at Carlisle and later his financial advisor and de facto agent. Warner always benefited from his association with Thorpe, but the same can't be said for Thorpe's relationship with Warner. Crawford also sheds considerable light on the stripping of Thorpe's Olympic medals, citing evidence to suggest that professional baseball executives fomented the scandal as a way of forcing Thorpe to play pro ball. This is a carefully researched, thoroughly readable work that will have broad appeal among those with an interest in sports history. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Trade Paper Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471557323
• ISBN 13: 9780471557326
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288