Thoughts of Jim Thorpe & Billy Mills...

DORREEN YELLOW BIRD COLUMN: Olympics Brings Thoughts of Thorpe, Mills


The Olympics always will mean Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills to most American Indians. And when Thorpe (1912) and Mills (1964) stepped up to the podium to get their gold, you almost could hear the ancient people trill in honor of these men.

Mills' win stands as one of the most stunning upsets in modern sports. He won the 1,000-meter race at the Olympics in Tokyo. He is Oglala from Pine Ridge, S.D.

Thorpe, who was Sac and Fox, was called the "greatest athlete in the world" by Sweden's King Gustav V at the Stockholm games and greatest all-around athlete for the first 50 years of this century by The Associated Press in 1950.

He, however, was stripped of his medals in 1913.

Thorpe's story is one of misunderstanding between two cultures. It is a story of a great athlete and man. I always have felt a loyalty to Thorpe. He stared out of a photograph above my grandmother's couch for many years. He and my grandfather attended Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. My grandfather, Louis Felix, also was a football player. My grandparents died many years ago, and I have not been able to trace the whereabouts of that photo. I do remember my grandmother referring to the photograph and Thorpe, but I was just a child, and the name Jim Thorpe meant nothing to me then.

I met Thorpe's daughter, Grace, when I lived in Phoenix years ago. She has the strength of her father and years of experience as an advocate.

But I'm getting ahead of my story.

Thorpe attended Carlisle Indian School in 1907 then again in 1911 and 1912. His most famous achievement is his Olympic win in the decathlon and pentathlon. Thorpe also excelled as a professional football and baseball player.

His coach was the famous Glenn "Pop" Warner, who had no interest in the young, 5-foot-tall Thorpe at first. Five years later, Thorpe came back to Carlisle from the Oklahoma reservation where he lived. He was 25 by then and had grown to about 6 feet and weighed about 190 pounds.

Sportswriters said it was Thorpe who led Carlisle Indian School in their win over the powerful Harvard Crimson. They beat the Ivy League school 18-13, and the Indian team won the National Collegiate Championship.

It must have been terrible blow for those alumni of Harvard and the sports fan to sit and watch the "Indians" defeat their elite teams.

That wasn't their only big win, either. Carlisle also defeated Army 27-6, probably leaving that military school wondering who these Indians were.

Thorpe also played for the New York Giants and for a short time in Cincinnati. In 1920, he became the first president of the American Football Association, now called the National Football League.

He was a natural athlete. Thorpe also was good at tennis, golf, billiards, rowing, gymnastics and bowling.

Unfortunately, Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals by the Olympic committee because the rules said no professionals were permitted to compete in those strictly amateur Olympic games.

A Worcester (Mass.) Telegram reporter wrote that Thorpe got $25 per week to play minor league baseball in North Carolina. Unlike the other players who played for money, Thorpe signed his real name.

"The modern-day Olympics started in 1896, and they had no hard and fast rules on mixing professional and amateur sports. They sort of made the rules on Dad," said Grace Thorpe, his daughter, in a 1995 Tulsa (Okla.) World interview. After five years of her own sort of Olympics, the International Olympic Committee returned replicas of Thorpe's gold medals to his family.

Those people who are my mother's age remember Thorpe well. Young people remember Mills because he advocates for drug-free living and is an excellent role model.

The Olympics in Greece started me thinking about some of the talented Indian people on reservations who could be the Thorpes or Mills of today. It got me thinking it is time for more men like Thorpe and Mills to reach for the gold, and it is time for Indian women to start looking toward the Olympics.

The talent is still there.
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Yellow Bird writes columns Tuesday and Saturday. Reach her by phone at 780-1228 or (800) 477-6572, extension. 228, or by e-mail at dyellowbird@gfherald.com.