V 10 No. 66 Ira Berkow's Reporting on Some Track Subjects Jim Thorpe

A few years ago I picked up a book in some forgotten stall here on Vancouver Island.  It is titled  Beyond the Dream, Occasional Heroes of Sports by Ira Berkow.  Only in the last few months have I begun reading it and find myself enthralled by the series of brief interviews with a wide variety of well known and  not so well known, and totally unknown figures in sport.  Ira Berkow is a celebrated Pulitzer Prize winner, a native Chicagoan, a grad of Miami (of Ohio) University, writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, then the New York Times and sports editor for Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA).  Based in New York, a lot of his work covers the New York teams, boxing and other sports, but occasionally he drifts into track and field, and I will put some of his pieces in this blog.   The first piece I'm putting in here is about Jim Thorpe.

                                                       Jim Thorpe and the "Scoop"
                                                          written February, 1973
                                                               by Ira Berkow

     It is not widely known that Roy Ruggles Johnson wrote what is considered the greatest sports "scoop" of the first half of the 20th Century.  But the impact was world-wide and tragic and is still in the news.
 
      Obituaries across the country carried the fact that Johns, who died at age 89, wrote the story disclosing Jim Thorpe's professionalism.

     Johnson was the county editor of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram, when he wrote teh copyrighted story that broke on January 22, 1913.  He was tipped off that a man visiting relatives nearby was bragging that he managed Jim Thorpe on the Rocky Mount, North Carolina, baseball team in the Piedmont League.  Johnson found the manager, who told him that Thorpe, an outfielder, had been paid $15 a week.  Johnson returned to his office, flipped through his Reach Baseball Guide and saw Thorpe posing with a smile in the Rocky Mount team picture.

     The story resulted in the Amateur Athletic Union stripping Thorpe of medals and trophies he had won in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics  (where he had won, incredibly both the decathlon and the pentathlon).

     Thorpe tried to explain:  "I did not play for the money.  I was not very wise to the ways of the world and did not realize this was wrong.  I hope I will be partly excused by the fact I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know I was doing wrong, because I was doing what many other college men had done, except they did not use their own names."

     His medals were never returned and his name has not been restored in the Olympic record book despite various efforts through the years.  Today, a group headed by former Yankee pitcher Allie Reynolds, also an Oklahoma Indian, plans to petition the President to plead the case to the International Olympic Committee.  Don Johnson, son of Roy Ruggles Johnson, says that his father supported the idea that Thorpe's name and medals be restored.

     "My father felt that the AAU was too strict," said Don Johnson, now an executive with the Worcester Telegram.   "There were other athletes playing for money under assumed names in those days, and Thorpe was simply guileless to that."

     Did Roy Ruggles Johnson ever regret writing that story?
     "I'm sure he didn't, " said Johnson.  "The old gent--that's what my brother and I called my father --was a man of rectitude and high moral principle.  He felt it was his job as a newspaperman to write the story.
      "He never boasted about the scoop.  He rarely talked about it.  In fact, I didn't know he had written it until I was in college.
      "And he never explained it.  He never wrote magazine stories about it.  A year after the story broke he did get a job with the Boston Globe, but he didn't even get a writing job.  He got a desk job, and I'm sure it had nothing to do with the Thorpe story."

     It was the lone scoop in Johnson's life.  He went on to write some 3,000 columns for the Globe on Yankee folklore.  Meanwhile, he followed Thorpe's career, which went from pro football and major league baseball to drunkenness, destitution, three marriages, and finally, death in an obscure trailer at age 64.

     Johnson himself a teetotaler, continued to believe in the sanctity of the free press, according to his son.

     "I was always glad about one thing for my father.  That was what happened when he met Thorpe in 1952, forty years after the Stockholm Olympics.  The Boston Globe sponsored a Sportsmen's Show.  Thorpe came, since he was a great fly caster.  Someone got the idea to bring him up to the office to meet my father.  They had never been face-to-face before.

     "My father said, 'Jim, I'm proud to shake your hand. I always thought you were the greatest athlete that ever lived.'  Thorpe bore no rancor to my father. 'You were only doing your job,' said Thorpe."

      Thorpe died one year later.
 
      In Washington, Grace Thorpe, a daughter of Jim's, said, "No, I don't think th e loss of the medals or the fact that his name was taken off the record books made much difference to Dad.  He felt that his achievements were proof enough of his abilities.

     "But I would like to get the medals back to put in the Indian Hall of Fame in Kansas.  And I'd like Dad's name restored in the official books.  It would be for Indian kids, something for them to try to emulate."

Editor's Note:  Doing a little fact checking I found that the medals were restored to Thorpe's family on October 14, 1982 and are on display at the Native American Museum of the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Then: I found the following in the July 2012 issue of The Smithsonian.  "Why are Jim Thorpe's Olympic Records Still Not Recognized?" written by Sally Jenkins.

It’s commonly believed that Thorpe at last received Olympic justice in October of 1982 when the IOC bowed to years of public pressure and delivered two replica medals to his family, announcing, “The name of James Thorpe will be added to the list of athletes who were crowned Olympic champions at the 1912 Games.” What’s less commonly known is that the IOC appended this small, mean sentence: “However, the official report for these Games will not be modified.”

In other words, the IOC refused even to acknowledge Thorpe’s results in the 15 events he competed in. To this day the Olympic record does not mention them. The IOC also refused to demote Hugo  Wieslander of Sweden and the other runners-up from their elevated medal status. Wieslander’s results stand as the official winning tally. Thorpe was merely a co-champion, with no numerical evidence of his overwhelming superiority. This is no small thing. It made Thorpe an asterisk, not a champion. It was lip service, not restitution.

A further search on the IOC website has turned up the following:

Today on the Olympic website  Jim Thorpe is listed as a co-champion in the Decathlon with Hugo Wieslander of Sweden.   However their respective scores are also listed with Thorpe's distinct superiority evident:       Jim Thorpe           Gold       8412.955 points

                                                         Hugo Wieslander Gold      7724.495 points.

The pentathlon result is not listed on the IOC site, but on wikipedia Thorpe is credited again as a co-winner even though he was considerably ahead of the co-champ  Ferdinand Ble of Norway.    The event was scored by the place you finished against the other competitors in each event, much like a cross country meet.   At the end of the five events, Thorpe had 7 points and Ble had 21. 

Interestingly  Avery Brundage, no fan of professionalism, competed in that pentathlon and with 4 events completed he was tied for 3rd place, but he DNF'd in the 1500 meters.  However for some unexplained reason,  he was credited with a 7th place finish and dropped from 3rd to 6th place.   Is it possible Brundage may have in later years resented Thorpe's superiority and put the kabosh on restoration of Thorpe's medals?  We'll probably never know.

Comments:
Bright Path Strong is an organization that is trying to get a 50,000 signature petition to restore Jim Thorpe to the original results of his Olympic victories rather than the shared results that are currently posted.