Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Who Was Jim Thorpe?

Transcript

Who Was Jim Thorpe? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of Dirt Nap City, a podcast about interesting dead people.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: What's going on, Kelly?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: Hey Alex.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I I feel like it's been too long since I've heard you say hello to everybody.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm glad I'm glad to be here.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: I'm glad you said it just like that.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: Never change, Alex.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: You keep doing you.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we post these every other week.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um we sometimes binge record these, and uh so while you guys get a uh nice diet of this every every week or every other week, sometimes Kelly and I go a minute with without seeing each other.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: So uh welcome, welcome, sir.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um I've um I've got an interesting guy for you today, and I don't want to go too far into the the riddles or anything because I kind of want to just jump right into it.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um that um so uh I think the biggest hint might be where he was born.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um oh, before I start here, before I get into that, we got a uh did you get the the message?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: We got a message oh yeah from Jay.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, from Jay.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Jay, what's going on?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: So Jay Jay's a big fan.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Jay Jay is actually a uh captain on United Airlines.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: So you might be flying with Captain Jay someday.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how are you doing, Captain Jay?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh hopefully we're uh intertaining you right now.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he so he he did the thing where if you go down below and you click something, uh in the description, there's a little thing that says message us now.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: And when you click it, it sends us a text right away.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: But because we pre-record these things, you might not hear back from us for a couple of weeks.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_03: So if you if you do it, please do it, but just don't expect an answer.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: But really, the best thing you can do is ask a question or something because um because then we can then we can respond to it a bit more quickly than uh then then and you'll know it was you.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: But we're gonna give Jay a shout out because Jay Jay's a Jay's a big fan.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: He's been a fan since day one.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciate that.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: It still won't be quick though if you if you send it.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, unless depends on your definition of quick.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be about as quick as mailing us a letter.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, maybe even slower than that.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember they used to have the the thing where you would mail something and it was always Pueblo, Colorado that you mail it to?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You remember that?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, oh yeah.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, that was where um there you'd be a pamphlet, you know, you'd get a pamphlet from Pueblo, Colorado to learn about um some sort of thing you could buy or some sort of conspiracy theory.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we should get a post office box in Pueblo, Colorado, and just have that as an address, as a throwback.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so the guy I want to talk about today, um, I don't know when you guys are listening to this, but um it pertains to something that's uh in in our time, um about to about to start here.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: This guy was born in 1887.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that puts him square into the um born in the 19th century, but really made his bones in the 20th century.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and he was born in Oklahoma, which actually didn't become a state for another 20 years.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oklahoma was named Betty Lou Thelma Liz.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I don't think so.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: He was born in Oklahoma.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: Up against the wall, redneck mother.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, right, right, right.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: No, he wasn't uh name.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, uh, not that.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: He died in 1953 in Lomita, California.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lomita, and he was the male equivalent of Babe Dieterson Zaharius.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some would call him the greatest athlete America has ever seen.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh well, I mean, I gotta say, the first person that popped into my head, although it's wrong on a lot of levels, is Bruce Jenner.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I don't think it's Bruce Jenner.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Not born in 1887.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, and and and again, I said wrong wrong argument.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: And he's not dead.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: She's not dead.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm thinking, I'm thinking, though, of um athletes that were more like Olympic athletes.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: Is that kind of the Yep?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: I've got Olympic fever right now.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay, yeah.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I got a fever of those Olympics.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Man, I I don't know that I'm gonna know this.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know the obscure at is it a pretty famous name?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh to me, yeah.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's the greatest athlete.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was he was named the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, okay.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it's kind of cool if you don't know because I'm I um like you like Babe Dietricherson to Harris, I think that he's got a compelling story.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: Did he ever play any pro sports?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, okay.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but he was also in the Olympics, Native American.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I don't know, man.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: Jim Thorpe.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: Jim Thorpe.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I know that name, but I would have never guessed that.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So Jim Thorpe, uh, when I was growing up, uh, he was somebody that I really was uh kind of obsessed with.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: There was a movie that came out in the 50s starring Bert Lancaster called Jim Thorpe All-American.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy, similar to Babe Dietrichson Zaharius, didn't just play a sport like uh like uh you know Mohammed Ali or I guess Michael Jordan technically played two sports, but you know, some of our great athletes or Babe Ruth, you know, were known for one sport, but this guy was kind of good at everything, and he um he everything he touched, kind of like um like our friend Babe.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but he was born on a reservation uh in uh in Oklahoma.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, uh he was part of the Sack and Fox tribe.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not gonna get into too much about how you know the there's another alternative version of this podcast where we could go into, you know, um Sack and Fox getting relocated and um, you know, the um the mistreatment of uh of Native Americans in this country, but I'm not gonna quite go there.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to keep this a little more uh lighthearted.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But he grew up in in Oklahoma.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: His father was actually not Native American, his father was actually Irish, and his mother was uh from the Sack and Fox uh tribe, and uh his native name was uh Watho Huck, which means and so the way that a lot of uh uh Native Americans would name their uh well I guess other cultures too is that they name you after whatever is going on while you're being born.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Did you know that?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, I've heard a very dirty joke about that before.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: So probably dirty and and unpolitically correct, so I won't repeat it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So um his name means path lit by great flash of lightning.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because I guess when he was being born, there was the path leading up to their house, which which typically in the dark, there was a big bolt of lightning and it lit up their um their area, their the the house.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um so bright path or path lit by great flash of lightning, Wathohuck was his uh native name, which is kind of cool because he became a really fast runner.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's just kind of cool.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, path of light.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: I guess though your mom was probably watching Jeopardy when you were born then.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what happened?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: Why why why would that be?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: Alec Trebek.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I get it.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, I thought there was an insult in there somewhere, but there wasn't.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you told me that your grandfather called you Alec, and I said, I'm gonna start calling you Trebek, and you said uh good luck with that.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I was trying to I was trying to work that back in.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it was Alex Trebek though.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: I know, I know, but for some reason Alec Trebek sounds it's like Alec Guinness.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: So back to Jim Thorpe.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, so Jim Thorpe, he actually had a twin brother, and they were like inseparable, but unfortunately he uh he died when they were nine years old of pneumonia, you know, back then on a reservation in the late 1800s, you know, there's a lot of things that could take you out.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he he wasn't super happy at home, he ran away from home a lot, and um his dad sent him to a boarding school in Kansas, and then when he was home for on the break, um his mother died uh actually in childbirth, and then he didn't get along super well with his father, so he left home to work on a ranch.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: You'd think all this would happen like in the course of somebody's adolescence, but at this point he's only still 16 years old.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, like all that happened before he was 16.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: He came home and then um he went to uh a school called Carlisle Indian School, and that if you're a fan of Jim Thorpe, Carlisle Indian School is kind of a famous place.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's in Pennsylvania.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was in Oklahoma, but this place is in Pennsylvania, and it was kind of like a college, it was a boarding school, but it was also uh um, so you spend five years there, and he went there when he was like 16.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um kind of like a preparatory school, maybe.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was, but it was for Native American kids, and it was meant to Americanize them.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was meant to, I think the word they used back then was civilize, you know.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, it's pretty pretty awful racist stuff going on with um education of natives, but the idea was to integrate them into a society where they uh weren't bound, they like unlearn all their native ways and learn the the ways of uh Western culture.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_03: What's really sad about that is probably the people who were doing that, who ran that school and who had the idea to to to deprogram you know people and make them more white, so to speak, uh they probably sincerely thought they were doing a good thing.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they call it even though even though they weren't.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think they call it de-tribalizing you.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no, you're right.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: They were they probably thought that um well, because the stereotype was that they they they were savages, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or that they were they were like wild animals that couldn't be tamed.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was terrible.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um so but and so they prided themselves on look what we can do to these native kids.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: We can turn them into respectable civilized people.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, terrible um message.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, the first thing they do is they'd go and cut your hair, you know, which hair in in native cultures means a lot, you know.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then they give you a uniform that was like, you know, made you look like you were, you know, in England or something, you know.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: And um but the guitarist for ACDC, yeah, exactly.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Probably, yeah.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the one thing that this school was really good at though was sports, and like I said, it was kind of like a uh not really a high school, but more like a college.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they played the Ivy League teams in sports, so they would play Harvard and Princeton and Yale, but also play like Army and Navy in West Point.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh while he was there, his uh in uh in his first year, so he was like 16, his dad actually died in a hunting accident.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think he got gangrene from an infection.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um so uh Jim dropped out of school, went home, raised some more, uh got some more money from working on ranches, but he came back to uh he came back to school in 1907.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So he was like 20 years old then and came back to Carlisle.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some great stories.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like the thing about guys from you know the early 1900s and some of these great athletes that you hear, you hear these stories that are just like almost like superhero stories, you know, and and a lot of this is represented in that uh great movie from uh the 50s.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: But so the the one story about him's track and field uh um prowess is that he walked on his first day of school, he walked past the track like he was just passing it, and uh people were high jumping, and then he went over there in his street clothes and beat all the high jumpers.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and he was in his street clothes, he jumped five foot nine inches, and this was before the Fosbury flop where you would just basically jump as high as you could and kind of with a scissor kick and go over five foot nine is no joke, you know.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's like you know, jumping over a regular size person in uh in his street clothes, beat all the other guys on the team.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Dang.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: So he played football, and again, this is think of this not like a high school, think of it like a college.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He played football there, he played baseball, he played lacrosse, and he did ballroom dancing.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Not only did he do ballroom dancing, he won the national championship in ballroom dancing in 1912.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Little known fact about Jim Jim Thorpe.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: Dancing literally dancing with the stars.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know who the football and track coach was at Carlisle Indian School in the 1900s?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: No idea.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Guarantee you've heard of this guy.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Who was it?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Pop Warner.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Pop Warner, wow.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now Pop Warner is kind of synonymous with little league football, you know.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, put your kid in the Pop Warner League.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: You've ever heard of that, like Pop Warner League.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: You never heard of that?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever heard of Pop Warner?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So like sometimes if you go, oh uh, my kid plays football, and you go, Oh, how is it?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he's just in Pop Warner, like that's the little league of football.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Pop Warner was the actual coach.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was the coach, yeah.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: He was the track coach and the football coach.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you didn't want uh Jim to play football because he was so good at track, but didn't want him to get injured.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he insisted though.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he thought he would get crushed because he uh uh he just had never played football before.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, Why don't you let me run this one play?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so he went in there and just nobody could touch him, you know.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, I'll let him play because no one's gonna be able to tackle him.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was a running back, well, he played running back, defensive back, and then he also kicked and punted.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um in fact, today the award, the college award for best defensive back in the country is called the Jim Thorpe Award.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was also gonna just throw in there too.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you you probably know this, but uh, I thought it was interesting that lacrosse is actually a Native American sport.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like it was came came from uh obviously a modified um sport, but it came from uh Native Americans who would play it over, I think, miles and miles of land.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but they I'm actually surprised they let them play that at Carlisle.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would have thought that that would something they'd be something they'd banned.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well if they were trying to detribalize these guys.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1911, in one of the biggest upsets in college football history, Carlisle Indian School beat Harvard.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, back then, um, it's not like it was the the top college football teams in the country were like the Ivy League teams, like the Harvard.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So Harvard was like one of the best team in the country, and they beat Harvard 18 to 15, and Jim Thorpe had all the points for Carlisle.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: He had um he had a touchdown, he had an extra point, and he had four field goals.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so he was he was the man for sure.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: The next year they played Army and won the national championship.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: So like the college football national championship went to Carlisle Indian School in 1912.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the playing Army or West Point, you know, this was this was um a big game.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: The whole country was uh glued to kind of uh paying attention to this.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Pop Warner told them in the pregame speech, he said, um, he had this big speech.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Picture all these Native American guys, and they're about to play West Point, and this was in 1912.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it only been 22 years after the last army battle with uh at wounded knee, right?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like yeah, still the wounds were still fresh.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he said, Your fathers and grandfathers are the ones who fought their fathers.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: These men playing against you today are soldiers, they're the long knives, you are Indians.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Tonight we'll know if you are warriors.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And they went out and they just beat the crap out of Army 27 to 6.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there were not only was Jim Thorpe in that game, but there were nine future generals of the Army in that game, including a linebacker named Dwight D.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Eisenhower.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Who played who played for Army Army in that game.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was a linebacker.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they said it was kind of like that was the end of the Cowboys and Indians saga.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: That was kind of the next the next mark the next chapter.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: They got their revenge in that game, at least, you know.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that was 1912.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in the spring of 1912, he started training for the Olympics.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Olympics were in the summer of 1912, and they were in uh Stockholm, Sweden.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he was good at everything.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So he did um the decathlon, and he did this thing called the that they used to have back then called the pentathlon.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, is that where you where you like um fire a weapon, you fire a rifle, and so that's the modern pentathlon that they have today.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: The pentathlon back then was just like half of a decathlon.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was just five events.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was the long jump, javelin, 200 meters, discus, and 1500 meters.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he won four out of those five events, came in third in the javelin, which he had was really new at.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: He know had only been thrown a javelin for a few months.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: He won the gold medal in that.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the modern pentathlon, which hap is happens today, is this random assortment of events.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like you said, it it involves fencing.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think the it's supposed to uh symbolize like uh uh the original military, a military general and all the things he might have to do in battle.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's right fencing, but then swimming and cross-country skiing, no cross-country running.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so it's fencing, swimming, equestrian, which is you know, horse, like show horses, pistol shooting, and cross-country.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's like 3k.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Dang.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're they've been talking about changing the equestrian to more of like an obstacle course, because what they do is they give you a horse that you've never seen before in this equestrian which might make it unfair because you don't really know the horse.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the idea is to make it well.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's unfair, I think it makes it fair because it's like how good of a horse person are you?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but what if you just get a really honory horse?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this has been the issue is that people get so fed up with the horses that in the last Olympics, and this is gonna sound funny, but it's kind of tragic.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: In the last Olympics, uh an athlete got so mad they punched the horse.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that that only sounds funny in the Mel Mel Brooks kind of way, right?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's awful.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they're talking about changing it to like a uh a more of an obstacle course, uh, and not just uh you know, show punch the sawhorse instead.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think horses, yeah, can be a little stubborn, and if they don't like you, they're gonna refuse to do what you're doing.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's exactly what I'm saying.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Is you could be like a really awesome athlete, and maybe you're even a pretty good horse person, horseman, horse woman.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Your horse can be a jerk.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, you get a jerk for a horse, and I mean you're or maybe you're the jerk and your horse is just pick picking up on the vibe.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: All the other so that's that that's not what he was doing.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was doing the the regular pentahlon back then.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have that anymore.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um he did the decathlon, which is the 100 meters long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 meters, discus, 110 hurdles, 110 meter hurdles, pole vault, javelin, and 1500 meters.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: They still do that today.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's the one that Bruce Jenner was really good at, right?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's done over two days.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, he came in the top four in all ten events and won the gold medal in that as well.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: He also, in that same stretch, he also competed in the regular high jump uh event and the regular long jump event.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: He came in fourth in the high jump.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he did it in his in his street clothes.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's what's funny is that somebody stole his shoes right before the decathlon.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And um, because he was a badass, everybody knew it.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was kind of the one to beat, and someone stole his shoes, and he was able to find mismatched shoes.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: He found one shoe and then he found one out of a trash can and socks.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't have somebody stole his shoes and socks.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: He found these mismatched shoes and still won the gold medal.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Still beat.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure whoever stole it was probably one of his competitors, you know?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's a story that after he won the decathlon, he was presented the gold medal by King, the king of Sweden, King Gustav V.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the story goes that uh the king said, Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Jim Thorpe said, Thanks, King.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the real serious Jim Thorpe biographists say that that never happened, but that story has been, you know, for the last 75 years, that story's been um been out there so if somebody says thanks, King, they might be referencing that.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: That might be a callback to King Thorpe.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks, King.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: Is that like yes, Queen?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I guess.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, Queen.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: So he he was just a humble dude.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, thanks, King.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: When he got back to the US, there was a ticker tape parade for him on or for all the athletes, but on on Broadway in New York.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he he said, I heard people yelling my name, and I couldn't realize how one fellow could have so many friends.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's just a sweet guy, right?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like just an earnest guy.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, there was a problem.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: So because he had been, you know, I'm sure uh so back then the rules for the Olympics were all about amateurism, right?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't be a professional athlete.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't be a professional athlete.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: You could not get paid for for being an athlete.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: So about six months after the Olympics, the uh Associated Press found, I think it was Associated Press, uh uh uh they had found that he had uh previously played semi pro baseball.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, in which he was receiving about two dollars a game, which would be about sixty-five bucks in today's dollars.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, pre-Satchel page.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now lots of guys did this, like lots of people that were going were amateur athletes.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is how they paid the bills, they were good athletes, and that's how they they made ends meet.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: But those other guys would use aliases.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the league that he played in was called the Pocahontas League, and that has nothing to do with Native Americans.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was because everyone in the league was called John Smith.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, okay.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because everybody was just putting down their name as John Smith because they didn't want to get in trouble with the AAU with with you know people that that govern to that kind of stuff.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess back then there there weren't really photos or video or film or you know, that wasn't as common.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't like they'd see you playing, like you'd have to go to the ballgame to see this guy.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Except he was kind of famous, but he never used an alias.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: He always used his regular name, I think, because he was a stand-up guy and he didn't want to do anything wrong.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so the rules, the Olympic rules, said that any protests about anything like amateurism or anything had to be made within 30 days of the games.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this was six months later, but didn't matter.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um he was stripped of his medals, they took away his gold medals, they took away any references to him in the in the history books that were like official Olympic records.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um it kind of sucked that one of the guys, the the guy who was um kind of in charge at the time, this guy Avery Brundage, who became famous later on by not standing up to Hitler and going and kind of going along with the Olympics in 1936, he actually competed against Jim Thorpe in the decathlon, but he was like, you know, ignorance is no excuse.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're gonna strip you of your medals.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this poor guy, you know, like I say, he got two dollars a game and um he got stripped of his of his medals.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think it would be uh naive to say that racism didn't have anything to do with this.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you know, they they they they wanted this guy, they had him up here and then they kicked him when he was down.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: He actually after the Olympics, he played in Major League Baseball.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: He played for the New York Giants, he played for the Reds, he played for the he played for about six years, he played Major League Baseball, just professional.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is the early days of baseball, but you know, he was playing like big time baseball for major league teams.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then in 1915, so while he was playing baseball, he signed with the Canton Bulldogs to play professional football in what later became the NFL.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he was actually the first president of the NFL.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so he was playing, he actually played baseball for the New York Giants and football for the New York Giants.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: He played football from 1915 until 1928.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: He played till he was 41 years old.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: He played professional football.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he's a really good football player.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, not a great baseball player.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: He said he could never hit the curveball.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he played he was good enough to you know be a major leaguer.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then in 2005, so some 50 years after he died, somebody found a book that indicated that he played pro basketball in 1926 for a team called the world famous Indians.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of like the Harlem Globetrotters that would go around and do little shows.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that was 2005 that they're fine, they're found this.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like that book had been hidden all that time.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And and he died in the 50s?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_03: He died in uh 1953.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: Was was he admired by the general public, like of the United States?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: Or or was he, you know, uh you know, we talked about a little bit of racism going on, uh not a little bit, race, some racism going on at some point, but did people generally you know look up to him as as they did?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes you could sometimes I think people who were more racist at the time could look beyond race with athletics.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was easier for them to see the person for who they were if they were a good athlete.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in like I mentioned in 1936, you know, we had the the uh Olympics in in Berlin and Jesse Owens.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah I think he was probably in that category where you know people praised him as an American hero, but then he still couldn't get a bite to eat, you know.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um still couldn't capitalize on his fame.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: He was somebody that everybody knew, but he probably also still couldn't get a job anywhere, you know?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think there was this weird thing going on in this country in the in the 20th century where um you could be famous but not rich if you were a minority, right?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, which really isn't the case today, other than like I guess reality people maybe famous but not rich.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um look at Hawk Tui girl.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: But she'd probably be rich someday.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think she's already got contracts for stuff.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: But today any old person can get a podcast, I suppose.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think we're famous or rich, but so he we're working on it though.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: So he was in the Olympics, he played baseball, he played in the NFL, played pro basketball.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: In 1913, they say he was considering playing pro hockey in Toronto, also.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he had ever played hockey, but it was right when you're that walk on.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: He could probably just go teach me how to skate, and tomorrow I'll be the best player in the league.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: So he didn't make a lot of money.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know how he made um after his sports career was over, though, he would or and during too, because he wasn't making a lot of money doing that.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: He uh was an extra in a lot of movies, you know.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Westerns were big in the in the uh late forties and early 50s, and he would appear as an extra in a lot of westerns.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then during the depression he sold his rights to his life.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: I guess you can do that.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it doesn't have to be a book about you.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can just sell the rights to your life, and then somebody can make a movie about you, and you can't do anything.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: He sold the rights to his life to MGM for 1,500 bucks.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, that you know, that's about 30 grand today.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: $30,000, which still is criminal.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's the that's the classic.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it sounds like the classic white man taking taking things, taking land and other resources from the Native Americans, you know.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: He was definitely exploited throughout his life.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh in 1951, that movie that I was talking about, and I love the movie.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I used to watch that movie all the time when I was a kid, Jim Thorpe, All American, starring Burt Lancaster.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he was paid fifteen thousand dollars for that um movie, and then they gave him uh twenty five hundred dollar annuity also.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: So but he only lived two more years, so right, right.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: He that didn't pay great.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he ran out of money, he was exploited, he died broke.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um but in 1982, um his medals were reinstated, um you know, about 30 years after he died.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And but the Olympic committee.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they decided that yeah, you know, what he did maybe wasn't so bad, but they said he would be co-champs with the people that actually that that got the medals.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he beat all those people, you know, right, right.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: And those people, it was um, it was somebody from Norway and somebody from um Sweden, I believe.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they both said we were nothing compared to Jim Thorpe.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: We were, you know, a distant second and third, right?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the best they could do in 1982 is to give the medals, restore the medals back to his family.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now the actual medals weren't really stripped, they didn't really take them.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um he still had those, but the sad part is by 1982 those medals had been stolen.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: So when he when he got the medals back, he still didn't have the medals.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't have the medals physically.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: But in 2022, so just a couple years ago, the International Olympic Committee finally declared him the sole winner of the 1912 Olympics.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: It only came 110 years late.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Dang.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: But but he finally, they finally, you know, recognized him as the true gold medalist like two years ago.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that crazy?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_03: You kind of wonder, like, well, yeah, after all that time, I guess it's important to to write the wrong no matter how long it takes.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: I it's true, and and he still has descendants who are very proud descendants of him, you know, and they're you know, I wouldn't if I knew that happened to my grandfather or my great-grandfather, I would devote my life to making sure that wrong was righted because that's just wrong, man.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: Especially, especially for the fact that um I think you're right that you know racism played a role in it.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't wasn't like that was happening to white athletes at the time, as often.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: You could you could almost make the case that calling him a co-champion is more disrespectful than stripping his medal in the first place, because technically he did break a rule, it's a stupid rule, and there were other people that didn't get stripped of their medals when breaking the same rule, but that at least was a rule that he broke.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Calling him a co-champ is just historically wrong.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they didn't he didn't tie with anybody, he beat them fair and square.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, that was more of a slap in the face than the first, you know, slight.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I agree.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So they made it right, even though it was, like I said, generations later.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a town in Pennsylvania called Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and it's about a hundred miles from the Carlisle Indian School.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he had never actually been to this town, it was named after him.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in 1954, so like a year after he died, there were two towns in Pennsylvania, one called uh the uh West Mauchchunk and East Mokchunk.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they were they had decided to merge and they decided they were gonna merge, and in order to get a little publicity, they were gonna call themselves with permission from the family, they were gonna call themselves Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was a year after he died.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you ask about respect.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was, you know, the movie came out in you know 1951.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was actually in uh I think he was in the movie, like as a as a back in the background, he was like played a ref or something in the background.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but this town was all in on on calling themselves Jim Thorpe.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: They uh in kind of a creepy move, they bought his remains from the family, had his remains relocated to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania from Oklahoma, and there's a s nice statue of him, and then he's buried under there, even though he had never been there.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then in a in a pretty cool touch, they took soil from where he was first buried in Oklahoma, and they took soil from the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, and it's at the base of his um statue.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: They have soil from both of those places.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of a cool little tribute to uh to Jim Thorpe.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: In um in 1950, so halfway through the 20th century, the Associated Press named him the greatest athlete of the first half of the century.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um so he beat out like Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey and those kinds of things.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: But like you said, he was a person that did all kinds of sports and was kind of good at everything.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: I I totally agree that somebody like that should be, if you're gonna name an all-around greatest athlete, even any somebody like that who is um good at so many things and won at so many levels, you know, in different sports, would to me be a better choice than somebody who just played one sport.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like a Michael Phelps is a great athlete.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I've never seen him run, right?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Never seen him jump, only seen the guy swim, right?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's all he does.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you put him still high up on the list, but you know, not as high as somebody who does everything, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: They also named him the greatest American football player of the first half of the century, right?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he was named to the NFL's 50th anniversary team in 1967.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um at the end of the century, they had all those, you know, best athletes of the century.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Associated Press named him the number three greatest athlete of the whole century behind for the 20th century.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, behind Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh ABC uh sports named him the greatest athlete of the century.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: So he's up there, top three, top five.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they said Babe Ruth was a better athlete than Michael Jordan.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Babe Ruth was number one, Michael Jordan number two.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think when you do that, you're not saying who could beat who in a in a race.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're saying who had the biggest impact on the game and the sport.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Babe Ruth hit more homers than every other team.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, right, right.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was just astronomically more statistically better.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: Dominated his sport.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I think if you talk about dominating your sport, Satchel Page, we talked about the same kind of stuff.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: He was just so much better than everybody else, right?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's in the Pro Hall Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Olympic Hall of Fame, and the USA track and field hall of fame.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we should work on getting him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think that uh there's people that are less rock and roll that uh than Jim Thorpe for sure.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and and he fits right into perfectly of what this show is all about, for me at least, because I had heard the name, but if you had asked me to say anything about him uh other than he was an athlete, I couldn't have told you anything.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_03: So now I know a lot about this guy that I didn't know before.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: He was in the he's in the National Native American Hall of Fame.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: He I I mentioned the the uh Jim Thorpe Award is named.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the MVP award in the NFL is called the Thorpe Award.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they put him on a postage stamp in 1998.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I guess pretty much though, these days is that that big of an honor?
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think pretty much.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jeff Propes is probably on a postage stamp.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's it's it's it's a it's a it's a dead end honor.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's an old school honor that that we don't, you know, that used to mean a lot, but maybe not so much anymore.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Having said that, if you're listening and you're in the US Postal Service and you want to put a make a dirt nap city postage stamp, we're down.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a hundred percent.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: We we like the mail.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: We'll even show up and get our picture taken for it.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll dress up.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: Rib ribbon cutting, uh envelope licking, you tell us what you want us to do, and we'll do it.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, his his I think maybe his um final honor um came in May of this year, just a few months ago.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: 2024.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was announced uh that he would be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest uh civilian honor that an American can get.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, so you know, his family, this generation of his family is finally seeing some of the wrongs get righted.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it would have been great uh if it happened in his lifetime.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he died a pretty young guy.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: He died uh 60, uh he wasn't 70 years old, he was like in his mid-60s.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was kind of a contemporary of Babe Dietrichson's Aharius.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: He was a little bit younger, but they died, I think, the same year.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, around the 50s, yeah.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I saw a great picture today of the two of them, just a really cool picture.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he won the best athlete of the first half of the 20th century.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: She won the best female athlete of and so they were at the award ceremony, and he has his arm around her, and um, it's just a really cool.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's the only time they ever met or if they were friends.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a real and you know, they were both old by then, but not they weren't, they never neither one of them got to be that old, you know.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: And she challenged him to a goldfish swallowing contest.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, they were both only three years away from from their um you know hitting hitting it dirting up city, but yeah, uh, it's really cool that they got to have that that picture together.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: The picture's great.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so those are our two uh our resident athletes.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you you almost can't talk about one without the other because they were very similar and that uh they kind of came out of obscurity um and wouldn't be denied.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and they were it wasn't just an opinion that they were the best athletes.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: They would they beat everybody and everything anytime they strapped on their shoes, you know.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, if they or or somebody else's shoes.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Jim Thorpe for you, man.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like I said, right up right up the middle as far as uh what we do on Dirt and Ep City, and that is um tell the stories of people you might have heard of, but you don't know much about.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh when we first made our list, uh when I first made my list when we knew we were doing this show, I made a list of about 10 people, and he was on my list, but I wanted to wait until the Olympics to do them.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: Nice, nice, yeah.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_03: All right, well, let's uh let's hope that the Olympics bring the world together as it should, and uh that we find the next Jim Thorpe in this uh Olympics, somebody else who's doing amazing stuff and is a humble person about it.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.