Summary
If Jim Thorpe were at his athletic peak today he would be a multimillionaire - complete with a bevy of bimbos, an agent to handle endorsements, and his own TV program.
But Thorpe was the greatest athlete of an earlier generation, when professional sports other than baseball were virtually unknown. His inability to earn a livelihood in the sports in which he excelled was the root cause of Thorpe's downfall, as recounted by Texas journalist Bill Crawford All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe (John Wiley, $24.95, 250 pages, illus.).See the full content of this document
Extract
A Great Athlete and a Celebrated Cellist
Born on an Indian reservation in present-day Oklahoma in 1887, Thorpe was a "ward of the government" rather than a U.S. citizen for much of his life. In 1904 he was sent east for schooling at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of several technical schools designed to train young Indians in the ways of the...
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