"Jim Thorpe and Kobe Bryant both won Olympic gold medals (Thorpe for the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912, Bryant for basketball in 2008). Both got paid for playing sports before competing in the Olympics (Bryant earned millions with the Los Angeles Lakers, Thorpe made $25 a week playing baseball for the Rocky Mount Railroaders). But Bryant's name is in the Olympic record books. Thorpe's is not.

After news accounts revealed that Thorpe had committed the unpardonable sin of playing baseball for money, Olympic officials summarily stripped him of his medals and expunged him from the record books. In 1982, 29 years after Thorpe's death, the International Olympic Committee tried to rectify that injustice by restoring his amateur status and minting new medals for his family. But the committee refused to repair the official record, a towering act of timidity. As Kate Buford writes in her new biography of Thorpe: "Without the public records, what did reinstatement mean? There was a whiff of frontier noblesse oblige: give the Indians the shiny trinkets but honor the dominant tradition and maintain the false but official record." (Just a few years later the Olympic committee allowed pros like Bryant to compete, but money still vexes college sports.)

Buford's first book was a biography of actor Burt Lancaster (who played Thorpe in the movies), so she knows about mythic heroes and draws a complex portrait: from his superhuman athletic talent to his all-too-human personal flaws. A member of the Sac and Fox tribe, Thorpe was raised in rural Oklahoma, where the tests of manhood started early. When the boy was 3, his father dropped him into a raging river and made him struggle to safety. He built up his stamina chasing and breaking wild horses. In Buford's telling, Oklahoma sounds like ancient Crete, and the animals could have been minotaurs.

Thorpe was sent off to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he started playing football, a game that perfectly utilized his superb combination of strength and speed (interestingly he lacked the "elastic freedom" of a natural baseball player and never succeeded at that sport). Carlisle played the top Ivy schools, and during the 1907 season the privileged preppies from Harvard were no match for a team that had both muscle and memory on their side. Wounded Knee, the last great battle of the Indian wars, had happened only 17 years before, and as Carlisle's famous coach, Pop Warner, put it: "The Indians . . . [had] a real race pride and a fierce determination. They believed the armed contests between red man and white had never been waged on equal terms." On the gridiron, the terms were equal, and the braves finally won."

Get the Story:
Kate Buford's biography of Jim Thorpe, reviewed by Steven V. Roberts (The New York Times 11/6)