Jims: Thorpe and Kaat

By Ed Piper

I've been reading two books the last several nights, an autobiography and a biography, and they are quite a contrast.

In David Maraniss' recent biography of Jim Thorpe, called "the greatest athlete of all time" after he won the Olympic gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon in the same Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1912, we find a gritty picture of the way Indians/Native Americans (the author uses the term "Indians") have been treated. 

But, new to me, we gain a picture of the way an elite athlete like Jim Thorpe is paraded before the white American public as both an incredible achiever in sports, and an odd specimen who can't really be human and isn't presented as more than a strange novelty who doesn't put on his pants one leg at a time.

Thorpe said he used sports at the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, where he gained his fame, as a way to get back at his white teachers/administrators who couldn't accept people of his culture and who treated Indians differently than Blacks but in just as degrading a way.

He picked up on the ways of American football when it was at its most violent, after major rule changes in 1905 when 18 athletes in the U.S. died while playing football (that could have been a major undercount), many others were carried off with broken necks and skull fractures. His mentor: the famous Pop Warner, whose name now adorns youth football in the U.S. Warner was an innovator and inventor of equipment to protect his players. He also used Thorpe and his other Indian students at Carlisle (which, though an industrial school, played major colleges in football) to further his success and renown, already at quite a high after previously coaching at Carlisle, then Cornell Unversity, before returning to the Pennsylvania school after three years and major hassles at the New York institution.

The portrait of Pop Warner shows all the warts, and the innovations, of the man. No flattery here. Thorpe smiled and engaged with others, even though his father, who had multiple wives, common on the reservation, not infrequently beat him to a pulp and wasn't an angel in that arena.

Way at the other extreme of the cultural spectrum, Jim Kaat is quite a storyteller and calls everyone his "friend", which gets a little overdone at times. Watch out, because the people he doesn't call his friends get thrown under the bus, and it's bye-bye for them in his account.

I'm not a homer, but I'm also not a jock, so Kaat's portrayal of himself as an objective insider who analyzed Major League baseball games until recently is fun for the stories of my era watching baseball. But his inability to get outside baseball and look at it from that outsider perspective is not going to happen. He's got too many friends in the game, and he is too closely associated with MLB to take a position on bigger issues affecting the sport.

My connection with Kaat, nicknamed "Kitty" because of those who incorrectly pronounce his last name "Cat" instead of "Cot", goes back to the 1965 World Series when my father brought home a pennant of my favorite team, the Dodgers (we lived in Dodger territory, Los Angeles and Ventura counties), from the fifth game of the Series that Sandy Koufax pitched a complete-game victory in over Kaat's Twins. The pennant sits above my computer, where I write my sports articles, in our third bedroom/actually the workroom.