Thorpe has received numerous accolades for his athletic accomplishments. He was married three times and had eight children, before suffering from heart failure and dying in 1953. He suffered from alcoholism, and lived his last years in failing health and poverty. He struggled to earn a living after that, working several odd jobs.
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He played professional sports until age 41, the end of his sports career coinciding with the start of the Great Depression. He played as part of several all-American Indian teams throughout his career, and barnstormed as a professional basketball player with a team composed entirely of American Indians.įrom 1920 to 1921, Thorpe was nominally the first president of the American Professional Football Association (APFA), which became the NFL in 1922.
He later played for six teams in the National Football League (NFL). Thorpe joined the Canton Bulldogs American football team in 1915, helping them win three professional championships. Later in 1913, Thorpe signed with the New York Giants, and he played six seasons in Major League Baseball between 19. In 1913, he played for the Pine Village Pros in Indiana. After his Olympic success in 1912, which included a record score in the decathlon, he added a victory in the All-Around Championship of the Amateur Athletic Union. As a youth, he attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was a two-time All-American for the school's football team under coach Pop Warner. Thorpe grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Indian Territory (what is now the U.S. Thorpe is to date listed as co-champion in both the decathlon and pentathlon events according to official IOC records.
In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored his Olympic medals with replicas, after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell outside of the required 30 days. He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the contemporary amateurism rules.
He also played American football (collegiate and professional), professional baseball, and basketball. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics (one in classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon). A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics. James Francis Thorpe ( Sac and Fox (Sauk): Wa-Tho-Huk, translated as "Bright Path" May 22 or 28, 1887 – March 28, 1953) was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist.
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