Native Sun News Today: Indian athletes once dominated the world of sports

Monday, December 3, 2018  

Legendary players dominated both college and professional sports
By James Giago Davies
nativesunnews.today

RAPID CITY— Historians believe the sport of lacrosse was invented a thousand years ago by some North American tribe. If so, organized sport has a deep tradition among Indian people. At some point, tribes stopped playing lacrosse and the Europeans took it over.

But the Indian athlete did not go away. By the close of the 19th Century Indian athletes started to make their mark in two sports, baseball and football.

Frank Mount Pleasant was the first great Indian athlete. He played for the early Carlisle Indian School teams and made the 1904 and 1908 Olympic teams in the triple and long jump, placing sixth in both events. Lou Sockalexis was the first great Indian professional athlete. He was the starting leftfielder for the 1897 Cleveland Spiders, but played too many games drunk and eventually washed out of baseball.

The sports landscape was much different a century ago. Baseball was king, and these were the best paid athletes, although even factoring in inflation, they were paid a pittance compared to today’s players. Chief Bender, Chief Meyers, Zack Wheat, were great Indian baseball players, and Jim Thorpe, considered the greatest Indian athlete of all time, also played major league baseball. His stats look respectable, but they hide the fact he couldn’t hit major league pitching when it counted. This was a lucky thing for football fans.

College football was popular, although the option to go pro afterwards was not for the faint of heart. The nation would not accept pro football as a respected sport until the 1950’s, and before WWI, pro football players played before sparse crowds under bad conditions for a few measly bucks. The local media, more often than not, took no notice.

Thorpe first drew national attention as a college football player at Carlisle Indian School in 1909. He was kind of skinny then, but by 1911 he had beefed up considerably, six feet of solid muscle backed by a rocket engine, and by 1912 he was the best college football player in the land, probably the best that had ever played. At this time, little Carlisle could play the best college teams in the country, and more often than not, win.

Thorpe was also pretty good at track and field, and that would mean every single event. Ideal, then, for the ten event decathlon, and he won a gold medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Baseball was a sport with which Thorpe should have never bothered, but such a great athlete was sought by semi-pro baseball teams, and it was a good way to pick up quick summer cash. He was stripped of his gold medal because of it.

But lucky for football, because after Thorpe failed as a major leaguer, he was still young enough and athletic enough, to become a huge draw and a big factor in getting the fledgling National Football League off the ground. The league started in 1920, and was originally called the American Professional Football Association, APFA, but changed to NFL in 1922. Thorpe, still a player for the Canton Bulldogs, was named the league president. To say the league was loosely organized and poorly run would be an understatement.

In 1922 Thorpe took an offer to become player manager of the Oorang Indians, a team organized by a dog breeder who wanted an advertising vehicle to sell his dogs. The team had talent, but it was poorly managed, going 3-6 in the first season, and 1-10 in its last season. Great players partially played for the team: three former Carlisle greats, NFL Hall-of-Famer Joe Guyon, Pete Calac and Elmer Busch. But that you could have a team, comprised of nothing but Indians, play two years in the NFL, and actually win games, is astonishing.

Leon Boutwell, starting Oorang quarterback, spoke of the reality of that time: “White people had this misconception about Indians. They thought they were all wild men, even though almost all of us had been to college and were generally more civilized than they were. Well, it was a dandy excuse to raise hell and get away with it when the mood struck us. Since we were Indians we could get away with things the whites couldn't. Don't think we didn't take advantage of it.”

After Thorpe waned athletically, Guyon became the Indian golden boy of football. An Ojibwe from Minnesota, he was an exceptionally rugged halfback during a time when you had to be exceptionally rugged just to play. Carlisle, had shut down the football program a decade before, and it was just as well because college football was changing rapidly. Whatever it was that had given Indians such a sizable competitive advantage melted away. It is reasonable to surmise that when people just play sports, and don’t specialize in it like they do these days, the best natural athletes will dominate. This is why Indians were so dominant in early college football, and why they played such a huge factor in the development of the pro game.

Yank twenty-two reasonably athletic looking fellows from a checkout line, eleven Indian, eleven White, and make them play football against each other. The Indians will most likely win. But give them a year to prepare, and the White team will most likely win, and for off-the-field reasons as much as on-the-field execution. As the decades have gone by, this reality has deepened, to the point an Indian off the street, regardless of his athleticism, would struggle to make the team in a specialized local college program.

This brings us to a tragic figure: Fait Elkins, perhaps, if we just consider natural talent, a greater athlete than even Jim Thorpe. His father was a Caddo Indian, a tribe linguistically related to the Pani and Arikara. And if you combine speed, strength, durability, skill and a keen mind into a single person, Elkins is the most formidable Indian athlete this country has ever produced. He was also a deeply flawed, self-destructive soul, who found ways to squander all those gifts.

He should have won the decathlon gold medal at the 1928 Antwerp games. He never even competed. He was a handsome hunk of a man, with wit and charm, and a penchant for manipulating people to get his way, and in the end, his erratic behavior and drinking problems sabotaged any chance he had at the immortality Thorpe enjoys.

James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com

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