“Never Give Up, Never Surrender!” Especially When We’re Talking Real Life.
“Never Give Up, Never Surrender!” is the classic quote from the very fun Star-Trek parody “Galaxy Quest.”
Variations of its most famous line have been used perennially (even before the film) to motivate us to do our best, be persistent, etc. But it’s particularly meaningful when we see its personification as a finished or nearly finished product in real life.
During the 2012 Olympics and during Michael Phelps great run of success, a New York Times video asked the question: “Greatest Olympian of all Time?”; and concluded that it was not Phelps in spite of his amazing accomplishments. It claimed the honor of “Greatest Olympian” for Jesse Owens because of his 1936 on-the-track symbolic confrontation with Hitler and thus his subtle attack on the hypocrisy of racism in the US. It argued that his impact on history makes Owens the greatest. I liked the reasoning and appreciate Owens using his gifts and accomplishments to strengthen world resolve against Nazism and every action that weakened segregation and racism in the US.
But, if you’re going to make that case, you’ve got to put someone else on the list for consideration as the greatest Olympian—a man whose life and even after-life have required adherence to that Galaxy Quest motto.
According to an interesting article in the Washington Times, the Associated Press (AP) in 1951 proclaimed our candidate “the Most Outstanding Male Athlete of the first half of the 20th century. Baseball slugger Babe Ruth … finished a distant second.” AP started their annual proclamations in 1931, and Jesse Owens won the annual recognition in 1936. Our athlete’s sports career ended before the annual recognition began. According to Jim Adams, a senior historian with the National Museum of the American Indian in the Washington Times Story, “He [our candidate] played the same kind of role in refuting racial myths about indigenous people that Jesse Owens later did about African-Americans.”
Our candidate is Jim Thorpe, winner of both the Olympic decathlon and pentathlon competitions exactly a century ago, and the article reminded me of what a great athlete—and apparently person—Thorpe was. It also highlighted—news to me—that his struggle for respect still continues: “Never give up. Never surrender!” But more on that later.
Some amazing stuff and quotes from the article:
“During the 1912 Olympic tryouts, Jim threw the javelin standing still. He didn’t know you could have an unlimited run-up approach. He didn’t have any sophisticated training. His was that of a 6-year-old boy growing up in the Oklahoma Indian territory, going on 30-mile hunts with his father and catching horses.”
“…When [Jim's coach at Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School Glenn 'Pop'] Warner first suggested to Thorpe that he participate in the 1912 Olympics, the latter man had no idea the games existed.”
The following anecdote is hard to fathom, but is specifically noted as a true story:
“Before the final event of the decathlon…—a 1,500-meter foot race—Thorpe reached into his bag and found that his shoes were missing. Undaunted, he borrowed one shoe from a teammate and found another in a trash can. The discarded shoe was too small for Thorpe’s foot; the borrowed shoe was so large that he had to wear extra pairs of socks to keep it from slipping off. Still, he captured a gold medal and won the race in 4 minutes, 40.1 seconds — an Olympic decathlon record time unsurpassed until 1972.”
“’In the 400-meter race [in the London Olympics decathlon] a couple of days ago, the gold medal winner beat Jim’s time by 0.7 of a second,’ Mr. [Bob] Wheeler said. ‘That’s on a modern, high-tech composite track. The track was cinder when Jim ran.’” (More on Wheeler in a paragraph or two.)
Thorpe “helped found and popularize the National Football League and was arguably the best-known, most-revered athlete of his era.”
Thorpe played professional basketball, baseball and football. “Thorpe made his biggest mark in football. In 1915, he signed with the Canton Bulldogs; immediately, the team went from attracting about 800 fans per game to as many as 12,000. The Bulldogs won three championships, and in 1920 they joined 13 other teams in the nascent American Professional Football Association, which two years later became the NFL. Thorpe was named the league’s first president, while he was still playing for Canton,’ Mr. Wheeler said. ‘His popularity and name meant the survival of this fledgling new sport.’”
But Thorpe’s story only begins with these facts and the needed persistence extends well past his lifetime. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) unfairly broke its own rules to strip Thorpe of his medals, months after he won him. Only the persistence and extensive research of the fore-quoted Bob Wheeler and his wife, Florence Ridlon, forced the IOC to give Thorpe back his medals 30 years ago—unfortunately, it came only posthumously for the athlete.
But, unbelievably, there’s still more to the article and the story: “During Thorpe’s 1953 Native American burial service in Oklahoma, his third wife and widow, Patricia, pulled up in a hearse. Declaring that Thorpe was ‘too cold,’ she took his body and coffin to Pennsylvania, where the small towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk had agreed to combine and change their name to Jim Thorpe, Pa. in a macabre bid to attract tourists. Today, Thorpe’s remains still lie in a mausoleum there while his four sons have fought a decades-long, unresolved court battle to return their father to Oklahoma.” I understand that Jim Thorpe probably never visited either of the towns.
Never-give-up-never-surrender Wheeler and Ridlon have dipped their proverbial toes in this Jim Thorpe controversy as well, working with Thorpe’s sons and garnering support reportedly of more than 100 American Tribes in their efforts to move Thorpe’s remains to his native Oklahoma.
But there’s always another side: Not all descendants agree with moving Thorpe.
If you’d like to read more or support the effort to move Jim Thorpe’s body to Oklahoma, visit a web site Wheeler’s set up: www.jimthorperestinpeace.com.
There does seem to me to be something unseemly and exploitative about using a human’s remains to create a tourist site of any kind, but especially if the location is unrelated to the person’s life.
The battle for Jim Thorpe continues: A Tug of War for a Man’s Remains. Never Give Up. Never Surrender!
