This consensus has since evaporated. In fact I wonder if most younger fans have even heard of Jim Thorpe, a situation that can only be chalked up to the status of history (defined as anything unexperienced) as a tabula rasa for the “now” generation. Yet as I contemplated this assignment to write about the greatest American athlete of the twentieth century and thought about my own heroes, from Louis and DiMaggio in childhood to Jordan and Ali today, I could only conclude that the old consensus cannot be seriously challenged (except, just perhaps, by Man o’ War—and he couldn’t hit a curve, among other disqualifying factors of a more directly zoological nature).
For the bare bones, Jim Thorpe (1888–1953), of predominantly Sauk and Fox descent, grew up in a region now called Oklahoma but formerly designated as Indian Territory. He attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he starred on football teams drawn from small numbers of impoverished students playing with poor equipment under terrible conditions—but coached by the legendary “Pop” Warner. The Carlisle team regularly defeated the best Ivy League, Big Ten, and military squads. Thorpe, who excelled in almost every sport he ever attempted, won both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. He played professional baseball, mostly with the New York Giants, for several years (1913–1919), and then became the greatest star in the early days of American professional football (1915–1929).
Despite my affection for statistics, I do not think that such assessments can be made “by the numbers.” Thorpe’s incomparable greatness must be viewed as a singular tapestry, woven from several disparate threads into a unity for one distinct time and one unrepeatable set of circumstances: the off-the-scale numbers, the intense dedication and unbounded enthusiasm, the crushing obstacles posed by racism and a sanctimonious sports establishment.
In a run for the title of greatest athlete—not best boxer (Ali, Louis, Dempsey, Robinson, or Marciano), basketball player (Jordan hands down, as much as I loved Bird), or home run hitter (Ruth, Maris, Aaron, McGwire, now don’t get me started on this one!)—Thorpe wins by several laps for two key reasons.
1. Versatility. Superlative athletes often perform well in several sports. No one but Thorpe has ever been the best of all in so many. He was America’s number one football player and general track-and-field man at the same time. He also played major league baseball for several seasons and excelled in lacrosse and swimming (while dabbling with success in boxing, basketball, and hockey). He won both of the most diverse and grueling Olympic competitions in 1912—the pentathlon (running broad jump, javelin throw, two-hundred-meter dash, discus throw, and fifteen-hundred-meter race) and the ten-event decathlon (these multiple events had been introduced into the 1912 Olympics at the behest of European athletes, who complained that American styles of training, based on intense specialization, failed to showcase European strength in general fitness). John McGraw, the feisty New York Giants manager, did not like Thorpe and branded him with an unfair epithet that stuck: the old charge that he couldn’t hit a curve ball. In fact, Thorpe performed competently (though not brilliantly) in professional baseball, compiling a lifetime batting average of .252 in six seasons as an outfielder.
2. Extent of excelling. In the same sense that Maris’s home run record is vulnerable (and will probably fall this season), while DiMaggio’s hitting streak may stand for generations, Thorpe not only won all these events but usually relegated the opposition to embarrassing relative incompetence, putting more distance between himself and the second-place finisher than the full range from the penultimate score to the very bottom.
The narratives of Thorpe’s collegiate football career frequently descend to near comedy (for the relative ineptitude of others), as Thorpe wins game after game, virtually all by himself (often scoring all the points by kicking field goals every time his team penetrates the opponent’s territory). Thorpe won the pentathlon with 7 points (on the basis of a scoring system of 1 for a first-place finish, 2 for second place, and so on). The next six competitors scored 21, 29, 29, 30, 31, and 32. He then won the decathlon with 8,413 out of 10,000 possible points. The runner-up scored 7,724, with five others above 7,000.
A heroic tale in a decent nation would end here, but if you know anything about Jim Thorpe, you recognize that I must now add the sad and final chapter. Like so many athletes, Thorpe knew no other life and could never adjust to other professions and realities once his bodily strengths faded. He tried the usual range of activities, from inspirational speeches before civic groups to bit parts in movies. But nothing worked for him, and Thorpe died in poverty, wrecked by alcohol and the early deaths of close family members.
Jim Thorpe in 1925. Credit: Bettmann/Corbis
To this sad generality, we must add Thorpe’s additional burden of an Indian heritage in a largely racist nation, a burden that destroyed him in both a general and a specific way. I cannot begin to measure, or even understand, the generality, but a man of Thorpe’s intense pride must have railed inwardly—with a galling bitterness that may have propelled him to self-destruction—against the stereotype of his people (gross enough as an abstraction) constantly applied to his own being. I read several biographies of Thorpe to prepare this piece, and nothing struck me more profoundly than the constant drumbeat of this deprecation, from the paternalism of Pop Warner, speaking of his good-hearted but naive braves (led by a great chief who would always need his white handler) to the caricatures of even the best-intentioned reporters, as in this characteristic newspaper account of a Carlisle victory over Georgetown in 1911: “Not since Custer made his last stand against Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn had a battle between redskins and palefaces been so ferociously fought as that which was waged on Georgetown field yesterday afternoon, when the husky tribe of chiefs from Carlisle savagely forced Georgetown’s weak, though gallant, cohorts to bite the dust 28 to 5.”
The specific story must rank among the saddest incidents in American history—for all its implications about ideals versus actualities and for all the personal pain thus inflicted upon the greatest athlete this country has ever produced. As an impoverished Indian college student, Thorpe received a few dollars for playing semiprofessional baseball in the summers of 1909 and 1910. He was following a common practice among athletes—just a more pleasant way than farm work to make some necessary and minimal cash during the summer break—but he didn’t know the accepted ruse of not using one’s real name and therefore not jeopardizing one’s amateur status. His “handlers,” including Pop Warner, must have known (for Thorpe hadn’t hidden his activities and didn’t recognize their consequences for amateur athletes), but these coaches couldn’t forgo such a grand opportunity as the Olympics, and they let Thorpe compete.
When the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) discovered this “transgression” of their sacred rules, Thorpe lost his medals, and the distant second-place finishers received both the titles and the objects. (To complete the humiliation, Thorpe not only lost his records but was also browbeaten into returning the medals themselves, even after humbling himself and begging forgiveness for his supposed sins, and despite support from most major sportsmen and the American public.)
The resulting humiliation marked and destroyed this wonderfully proud man. Thorpe’s name became inextricably linked with the incubus of this supposed misdeed. (I purposely left this topic for the end, and I’ll wager that most readers have been wondering throughout the piece, “Well, when is he going to discuss those Olympic medals?”) Chief Meyers, Thorpe’s roommate and a great catcher for the New York Giants, recalled (note also the paternalism reflected in the almost automatic decision to pair Indian players as roommates, and in the epithet “Chief” applied to nearly all Indian ballplayers at the time): “Jim was very proud of the great things he’d done. A very proud man…. Very late one night Jimcame in and woke me up…. He was crying, and tears were rolling down his cheeks. ‘You know, Chief,’ he said, ‘the King of Sweden gave me those trophies, he gave them to me. But they took them away from
me. They’re mine, Chief, I won them fair and square.’ It broke his heart and he never really recovered.”
Far too late to appease Thorpe’s wounds, and despite arguments and pleas that never abated, the U.S. Olympic Committee finally restored Thorpe’s amateur status in 1973, twenty years after his death. The Olympic medals were returned to his family in 1982. (Avery Brundage, a “gentleman” of wealth and breeding, had competed against Thorpe, and lost, in both the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912. He later became the aristocratic and sanctimonious head of the International Olympic Committee and never wavered on this issue, while hypocritically proclaiming his personal sympathy with Thorpe.)
Any further moralizing could only be tendentious. As Ethel Barrymore famously said, “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.” I would only close with this footnote: According to legend, the King of Sweden, in presenting the Olympic medals to Jim Thorpe, said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” To this basic factual judgment, Thorpe replied, in his own elegantly simple way, “Thanks, King.” And what can we say but “Thanks, Jim.”
The Amazing Dummy
The society of males, especially when bonded by a shared physical activity, often promotes a distinctive and curious form of camaraderie, neatly balanced on a fulcrum between near cruelty and ferocious loyalty. The nicknames given to professional athletes stand as telling testimony to this important social phenomenon. The press, particularly in earlier times of more leisurely and flavorful prose, may have christened Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio, The Yankee Clipper; or Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat. But ballplayers themselves usually favored the pungent and the derogatory. Ruth, to his peers, was usually called “Niggerlips.”
From Forgotten Heroes: Inspiring American Portraits From Our Leading Historians, edited by Susan Ware. Copyright © 1998 by the Society of American Historians. Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Trade Publishing Group.
We should interpret this apparent harshness as a badge of acceptance into a special sort of guild, with membership strictly limited both by the skills needed to play, and the toughness required to brave the daily struggle. If you can’t take a nasty name without an eyeblink (“like a man,” as folks of my gender tend to say), how will you survive the fastball thrown at your head next time you crowd the plate, or the spikes aimed at your calf the next time you cover second base on a force play?
These derogatory names were often fixed upon the particular mishaps or weaknesses of individuals. Thus, Fred Merkle, the first baseman of the New York Giants during the early years of the century, remained “Bonehead” throughout his distinguished career, for a stupid mistake in a crucial contest of his sophomore season (1908), when he forgot to touch second base on his teammate’s supposedly game-winning single. But my greatest sympathy goes to H. S. Cuyler, Hall of Fame outfielder of the 1920s and 1930s—but known only as “Kiki” because he stuttered badly and frequently tripped over his own last name (pronounced Ki-ler).
Another and more common class of nicknames uses the tactic of the ethnic slur by labeling individuals with a pejorative name for their group—as in numerous short players called “Stump,” or “Specs” for players with eyeglasses. In the early days of baseball, all Indian players were “Chief” (with Philadelphia pitcher Chief Bender and New York catcher Chief Meyers as the leading stars), while naïfs from the farm became “Rube” (with Hall of Fame pitchers Rube Marquard and Rube Waddell as most notable bearers of the label).
Early baseball did dispense an odd form of rough justice based on the elite but democratic premise that all men who could stand the heat and hazing would be named for their weakness but judged only by their play. (Lest we descend into maudlin romantic reverie about these times, let us remember the restrictive covenant applied to such “democracy”: black men could not play, whatever their talent.) Several deaf men also played major league baseball during the game’s early years—and every last one of them bore the name “Dummy.” As another linguistic cruelty by extension, the etymology of “dumb” refers only to muteness, not stupidity—as in the old phrase “deaf and dumb” for people who could neither hear nor speak. These men played at a time when few deaf people learned to vocalize, and when signing was not yet regarded as true language. To the hearing world, therefore, they did not speak, and were consequently regarded as mute or dumb—hence “Dummy” in a world of derogatory nicknames.
Two deaf players of baseball’s early years stand out for excellence of performance—Luther Haden “Dummy” Taylor, a fine pitcher who won 112 games for the New York Giants between 1900 and 1908; and the subject of this essay, William Ellsworth “Dummy” Hoy, a superb center fielder with a lifetime .288 batting average for six teams in four major leagues between 1888 and 1902. The career of Dummy Hoy—Mr. Hoy bore that nickname with pride and dignity during his career and later life—also offers us great insight into the history of American sports by virtue of Hoy’s keen intelligence through such a long life, for he died in December 1961 at age ninety-nine, just five months shy of his one-hundredth birthday. He was, at the time, the longest lived of all major league players. Since then, one man has slipped past the century boundary by a mere eight days—an unknown pitcher named Ralph Miller, who compiled an undistinguished record of five wins and seventeen losses in a two-year career from 1898 to 1899. So Dummy Hoy remains the most longevitous major leaguer of note.
Note a central paradox and irony in the career of Dummy Hoy, a peculiarity that would have appealed to his wry sense of humor. We are drawn to this man because his disability, as recorded in a nickname now regarded as cruel, attracts our attention in an age of greater sensitivity toward human diversity. But when we study his career, we discover that he stands out not for his unusual deafness (which he regarded as largely irrelevant to his profession and, at most, a nuisance), but rather because he was such an exemplary performer and human being.
Dummy Hoy’s biography typifies baseball’s early history, when the game reigned supreme as a national pastime, but drew professional players almost entirely from the proletarian population of agricultural and industrial workers. Knowledge of this background remains essential for understanding many key features of baseball’s social and organizational ways. Consider the paternalism of wealthy owners and their horror and confusion at the successful unionization of players during our generation, or the structure of advance that leads from minor to major leagues, rather than from college teams to professional leagues, as in sports that rose later, including basketball and especially football (which began as an elite college sport).
Dummy Hoy was a farmboy from the tiny rural hamlet of Houckstown, Ohio. He was born on May 23, 1862, and became deaf at age three following an attack of meningitis. He did not attend school until his parents learned about the Ohio School for the Deaf in Columbus. Beginning at age ten, but advancing rapidly, he finished both primary and high school, learned the trade of a cobbler, and graduated as valedictorian of his class at age eighteen. Hoy recalled that his father gave his sister a cow and a piano for a legacy when she turned eighteen, and then provided a suit of clothes, buggy, harness, and saddle to each of his brothers at age twenty-one. When Dummy Hoy reached majority, however, his father give him just the suit, and free board until age twenty-four, for the family had decided that, due to his deafness, Hoy should remain at home and become a cobbler.
He began as an assistant to the local Houckstown shoemaker, but eventually saved enough money to buy his boss out. Hoy recalled: “I got the good will for nothing, but the leather, lasts, tools, and sewing machine cost me about $100.” The rest of the recorded story smacks a bit of bucolic mythology and was, no doubt, more complicated; but as Hoy told the tale: Rural people went barefoot in the summer and business became slow. Hoy therefore encouraged the local kids to gather around his shop and play ball. Hoy recalled in a 1947 interview:
This went on for years until one day a citizen from Findlay, Ohio, nine miles away passed through the town. He
paused to watch the fungo hitting for a while, then accosted me. Disappointed at finding I was a deafmute he continued on his way. The next day he passed through the town and again stopped to watch players, me in particular. Taking out a pad and pencil he wrote me asking me if I would accompany him to Kenton, Ohio, a town some twelve miles further on and play for its team against its bitter rival from Urban…. I hit so well against them that it gave me an idea. The following spring I set out for the great Northwest and caught on with Oshkosh, Wis. That was in 1886. I stuck to baseball for 18 years, retiring at the end of 1903.
Hoy signed his first contract (with Oshkosh of the minor Northwest League) for $75 a month, with a stipulation that he could leave at the beginning of August because work was piling up at his cobbler’s shop. But Oshkosh offered him $300 to finish the remaining two months of the season, and Hoy never looked back again. He starred in his sophomore season at Oshkosh (following an indifferent rookie year), hitting .367, stealing sixty-seven bases, and leading his team to a pennant. He was then promoted to Washington in the major National League, where he enjoyed a fine rookie season in 1888, batting .274 and stealing a league leading eighty-two bases. (Steals were defined differently and more generously in baseball’s early years, so we cannot compare this figure with modern records. For example, a player was awarded a stolen base when he reached third from first on a single that, in the scorer’s judgment, would usually advance a man only one base).
Dummy Hoy followed a peripatetic career thereafter, although his play remained consistently excellent. After two seasons with Washington, he cast his lot with baseball’s first prominent revolt and joined the Players’ League, organized by New York Giants’ captain John Montgomery Ward in hopes of winning fairer pay and working conditions, especially freedom from the peonage of the reserve clause that bound players to their owning teams and did not fall until the legal battles of our current generation. But Hoy landed with the particularly inept Buffalo team in 1890, and the league failed in any case. In a letter written at age ninety-three, Hoy recalled this season in writing to thank a journalist for sending him a photograph of the 1890 Buffalo Club:
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Page 9