Jim Thorpe Quotes

Harvard coach Bill Reid would later credit Teddy Roosevelt with saving football. But words in a rule book are one thing. Someone had to show the nation a new way to play the game. The Carlisle Indians did that.

Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence," he writes. "People get destroyed on the field, lives end. It makes sense that its first star was someone who'd already lost everything, a ruined man, ill-treated, stripped to his essential qualities: speed, strength, power. Jim Thorpe is the spirit of the game. Every NFL hit still carries the fury of the disgraced Indian, prowling the field, seeking justice.

Lehigh caught on, but still couldn’t stop the drive. By the time Carlisle neared the Lehigh goal line, both teams were cracking up. As Carlisle bashed in for another score, lineman William Garlow entertained the defense with his running commentary. “Gentlemen, this hurts me as much as it does you, but I’m afraid the ball is over. We regret it, I am sure you regret it, and I hope nothing happening here will spoil what for us has been a very pleasant afternoon.” Fans in the stands, who couldn’t hear Garlow, had no idea why players who’d just surrendered a touchdown were doubled over with laughter.

Pastor Jim had both Michael J. Fox and Ned Flanders vibes, an ultimately likable combination.

To test that prediction, we needed empirical examples. They weren’t easy to find. Any candidate had to be fully characterized, its wiring diagram known down to the last detail, every node and link documented, or we couldn’t calculate the clustering and average path length. Then I remembered that Koeunyi Bae, a student in my chaos course the year before, had done a project about the Western States power grid, a collection of about 5,000 electric power plants tied together by high-voltage transmission lines across the states west of the Rocky Mountains and into the western provinces of Canada. Koeunyi and her adviser Jim Thorp provided the data to Duncan. It contained a great deal of detailed information that an engineer would find crucial—the voltage capacity of the transmission lines, the classification of the nodes as transformers, substations, or generators—but we ignored everything except the connectivity. The grid became an abstract pattern of dots connected by lines. To check whether it was a small-world network, we compared its clustering and average path length to the corresponding values for a random network with the same number of nodes and links. As predicted, the real network was almost as small as a random one, but much more highly clustered. Specifically, the path length was only 1.5 times larger than random, whereas the clustering was 16 times larger.

The Jim Thorpe story was lived anonymously thousands of times at the Carlisle Indian School. Of 12,000 eventually sent there, less than a tenth graduated while more than a fifth escaped. Escaped! That's what you do from jail or concentration camps.

This contest pushed Bum’s reputation to its zenith. The Popeye bout, as it was later known, seemed to grow and grow each time it was told. There were no coyotes or wolves in Union Township. Of course there were none; Bum had driven them out. The stories grew and grew and with each story Bum’s reputation grew. People began to say they felt safer because Bum lived in the boundaries of our township. Someone started a story that the New Castle Police Department wanted to buy Bum to patrol their streets and make the city safer. Of course, I couldn’t sell Bum. His popularity was too great and public opinion would never let me do it. His name was as well-known as Babe Ruth’s, Jack Dempsey’s or Jim Thorpe’s. Bum was more popular than anything that came out of Hollywood. Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were second-raters compared to him now. Stories about him continued to grow. He could swim faster than Johnny Weissmuller and could run faster than the great horse Man O’ War. Tales about him simply would not stop. Someone wanted Bum to run for public office, but I never thought he’d like it very much.