Ike and another football playing cadet twice intentionally tried to injure Thorpe. In the first tackle they were partially successful—leaving Thorpe looking a bit dazed after the hardest hit of the day.
However, a few minutes later when Ike and his comrade on the field once again tried the same double hit on Thorpe, Thorpe simply juked them both. Juke stopped and then shifted. This led the two Army players to hit each other so hard that they both were immediately sidelined—Eisenhower for the rest of the game—while Thorpe continued running down field.
PICKING UP THE PIECES
Anderson called Eisenhower the “Huge Kansan” because Ike played like a giant and was considered the most hard-working player the Army coach had ever seen.
Unlike Thorpe, though, Ike got his life back on track a year later. Ike would never play football again but he became a greater leader after that. He volunteered in 1913 to lead Army fans in cheers. At the same time, Ike also learned to lead men as he became a coach for the junior varsity for the cadets of West Point’s Cullum Hall.
Lars Anderson, without stating so specifically in his narration, reveals that there were, in fact, a lot of similarities between Thorpe and Eisenhower. For example, they both came from large families and learned to fight and do various sports on the plains in Kansas. (Thorpe was attending Haskall Indian College in Lawrence, Kansas when he first learned to play football.) The two also both played minor league baseball before returning to their first loves: football
.
This fact concerning how they both major American figures of the 20th Century had had semi-professional baseball stints is where the key differences between the two men’s lives are also to be found.
The young Eisenhower cheated—as many players did in that era. Eisenhower played under the name “Wilson” while Thorpe played under his own name.
The point is Eisenhower had more adult counsel and American cultural information than Thorpe had about how to succeed in a white man’s world.
Eisenhower knew that if he wanted to play college football some day, he would have to protect his identity. Thorpe, who had grown up part of the time as either a ward for the state at Indian schools (in Oklahoma, Kansas and Pennsylvania), motherless, or simply dropping out of school before heading often out to rural Oklahoma again-and-again, never fully comprehending until after the scandal of his professional status hit the nation’s newspapers in the winter of 1912-1913 that he had done anything wrong by accepting money to play baseball (before running in the decathlon and the pentathlon at the Olympics in Europe).
In short, although Thorpe had not always demonstrated the best judgment in trying to make his own way in the world—i.e. leaving Carlisle for two years and playing baseball over the objections and the opinions of his coach, his teammates, the state, or the American cultural icons of his era. Nonetheless, Thorpe had never intended to break certain rules and bring dishonor to himself or his people while he played semi-professional baseball. He had seen it as simply a way of earning money at doing what he loved sport while trying to figure out what to do with his life in a fast changing America, which was never quite his home.
In any case, as anyone knows today (and it was already true for Pop Warner’s Carlisle sports squads) in America college athletes get paid either (a) under the table, (b) through scholarships, (c) aid from booster associations, or (d) indirectly in other ways to play sports.
This was already a very confusing fact about college sports life and boosterism at Carlisle in Thorpe’s time their under Pop Warner. For a young poor superstar Native American from the prairies to have comprehended in 1910 or 1911 that accepting any money for playing sports would bring disgrace to him, his teams, and his peoples would have taken tremendous insight.
In short, as Pop Warner would say about the American Press and politicians who closed down Carlisle Indian School less than four years after Jim Thorpe left the school, there were people in America who were out to get the Indians at every turn. The system was not set up to be fair too all.
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