Billy Mills wins the 10,000-meter race during the1964 Tokyo Olympics. Photo from U.S. Marine Corps via Wikipedia

Hare hiding inside the tortoise
Why Lakota youth need to embrace distance running
By James Giago Davies

Because there are so many gifted Indian basketball players, and because the game matters so much to Indian people, it is easy to lose sight of the sport in which Indians can and have excelled in, at a world class level—distance running.

Basketball was once a rigid, station-to-station passing game, but once rule changes transformed it into a fluid game of deception, speed and explosive athleticism, Indians took the game to heart. But this didn’t happen until the 1930’s.

Bfore that, Indians made their mark in baseball -- Chiefs Sockalexis, Meyers, Bender, and Hogsett, evidently every Indian baseball player had to be named Chief. Fortunately the Chief label did not catch on in football because “Chief Thorpe” would have looked ugly in the record books.

Thorpe was even better at another sport than he was football, though—Thorpe could run fast, and he could jump high, and he was bull strong, but he could do one other thing surprisingly well, given his size and strength, he could handle the quarter mile and the mile. There is a reason why Thorpe was a gifted all around athlete, and it doesn’t have to do with something heavy he lugged as a kid that built up his muscles, or some long errands he ran that built up his stamina.

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(James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com)

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