Opinion | Sports

James Giago Davies: History of Lakota sports heroes lost forever

Thursday, December 3, 2015

James Giago Davies. Photo from Native Sun News

Better too much history preserved than too little
By James Giago Davies

Last week I received e-mail from a couple of people who played basketball back during the years of the great Cobbler dynasty Coach Dave Strain built at Rapid City Central. I was informed of players who had died, players integral to that success, like center Bob Hultgren of the 1975 Cobblers, an overachieving squad who finished second in state, losing in the final to Aberdeen Roncalli, who boasted one of the outstanding Indian athletes of the past half century, Harley Zephier.

Much has been written about the great Indian athletes of the last century, Jim Thorpe, Chief Bender, Joe Guyon, and Fait Elkins, most of it true, much of it hogwash, and there is no person left alive who knows any person who lived during the time these men were in their competitive prime, and the people who have written about who they were, what they said, what they did, were all Wasicu storytellers intent on dressing up reality to entertain their readership.

The first 70 years of Lakota sports heroes are lost forever. The coaches are dead, the players are dead, almost every single person who knew any of the players, let alone watched them play, are dead. The compelling prose written about who these people were, and what their world was like, could fill a single volume, and would take years of painstaking research to compile.