Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe was a Native American athlete widely considered one of the most versatile sportsmen of the twentieth century, excelling in track and field, American football, baseball, and basketball. Born James Francis Thorpe on May 28, 1888, near Prague, Oklahoma, in Indian Territory, he was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and died on March 28, 1953.

Thorpe attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas before enrolling in 1904 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. There he was coached by Glenn "Pop" Warner, who developed him into a star halfback, sprinter, hurdler, jumper, and decathlete.

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics he won gold medals in both the pentathlon and the decathlon, scoring 8,412 points out of a possible 10,000 in the decathlon, a record that stood for two decades. King Gustav V of Sweden told him, "You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world." In 1913 the International Olympic Committee stripped his medals after newspapers revealed he had been paid for playing minor-league baseball in 1909 and 1910.

He played professional baseball with the New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Braves from 1913 to 1919, and professional football with the Canton Bulldogs, where he was named the first president of the American Professional Football Association in 1920, the precursor to the National Football League. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963 and the Olympic gold medals were restored to his record in 1982 by the IOC and fully reinstated as sole champion in 2022.

The name Jim is a short form of James, from the Hebrew Ya'akov meaning "supplanter" or "one who follows."