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- James Francis Thorpe accomplished arguably what no other athlete
in history has. The Sac and Fox Indian won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in
the 1912 Olympic games in Sweden and played both professional football and professional
baseball. His feats on the football field put him on the 1911 and 1912 All-American
football teams. In 1920 he became the first president of the American Professional
Football Association (later to become the NFL).
- Jim Thorpe, the football star and Olympic legend whom Sweden's King Gustav V called
"the greatest athlete in the world." was named, in 1950, by the Associated Press
the greatest football player and greatest all-round athlete for the first 50 years of this
century. Grace Thorpe believes that there will be a naming of the greatest athlete of the
century.
- When others fail to give her father his due, Grace Thorpe doesn't hesitate to take them
on. In 1982, Grace won her five-year battle to get the International Olympic Committee to
return the two gold medals - for the decathlon and pentathlon - that her father had won in
Stockholm in 1912. The medals were stripped from him after it was discovered that he had
played semiprofessional baseball as a student at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
- "The modern day Olympics started in 1896, and they had no hard and fast rules on
mixing professional and amateur sports. They sort of made the rules on Dad," said
Grace.
- With four years to go until the year 2000, Grace Thorpe doesn't think she started the
athlete-of-the-century drive too soon.
- "Things take a long time." she said, "I don't want any mix-ups
like the one where they've proposed having the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay-Run coming through
Yale, which they had been calling Dad's birthplace. Dad's birthplace was near the town of
Prague (Oklahoma)."
- As she travels around the country to Indian ceremonies and environmental gatherings, she
frequently sets up booths and asks people to sign two petitions - one declaring her father
athlete of the century and another for a ban on nuclear activities. Grace, whose Indian
name is No Ten O Quah (Wind Woman), is president of the National Environmental Coalition
of Native Americans (NECONA) which fights efforts for the burial of nuclear wastes on
Indian Lands.
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Overview
