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.

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