Retracing a ‘Path Lit By Lightning’

If Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss has one regret about his riveting new book, “Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe,” it’s the unfortunate publication date. 

A month after he passed it off to Simon & Schuster, the decision was made to restore the two Golf Medals Thorpe won at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm.  

That would be one of the few details Maraniss missed about the man still regarded as “the greatest athlete who ever lived.” It will no doubt be added to an inevitable second edition. 

Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics but was stripped of his medals because he played minor league baseball in a summer league for pay, a common practice at the time. 

In his monumental 700-page biography, Maraniss deftly tells the complicated story of Thorpe, a product of the now controversial Indian Boarding School system, who for more than 40 years dominated sports coverage in the United States thanks to his long career in track and field, baseball, football and basketball. He even had a run as a bit player in around 70 movies. 

The book follows Thorpe's extraordinary and sometimes depressing life and tells the genesis of professional football and baseball. It digs back to pioneering figures like Pop Warner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Walter Camp and John McGraw. 

This is Maraniss’ 13th book and third title in his trilogy on iconic sports figures, following biographies on baseball great Roberto Clemente and legendary Packers’ coach Vince Lombardi. A Detroit native, Maraniss, 73, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his coverage of presidential candidate Bill Clinton for The Washington Post and shared  in another for the Post’s coverage of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. 

Maraniss said the initial idea to write the Thorpe biography came from  a reader. 

“I never listen to suggestions about books I should write, but at a meeting of journalists in Denver in 2003, I was approached by Norbert Hill, an Indian writer,” he recalled. “He said to write a book about Jim Thorpe.”  

In the book, the author commemorates this conversation: “I owe this book to Norbert Hill with belated gratitude.” 

In addition to detailing Thorpe’s prodigious athletic skills, Maraniss also unearths the private life of Thorpe, including his three marriages and unstable relationship with his children. He also reflects on how the sports star dealt with racism directed at American Indians. That is perhaps best represented in sports coverage of the powerhouse Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team, a dominant force in early college football. 

Maraniss found actual news reporting on the team often used racial slurs. Even The New York Times referred to him as “Chief Thorpe,” and game day articles were peppered with words like “massacre,” “scalping” and “dead Indians.” 

The book also delves into the concept of the noble stoic Indian and how the phrase “Lo, the poor Indian,” ripped from a poem by Alexander Pope, followed Thorpe throughout his athletic career until he died in 1953 in a California trailer park.  

 The glory stories are documented, such as when Thorpe led the way to Carlisle’s upset victory over Army — and supposedly sidelined a West Pointer named Dwight Eisenhower. But  Maraniss doesn’t turn a blind eye or sugarcoat Thorpe’s drinking or even his sometimes-lackluster baseball skills. For instance, he couldn’t hit a curveball.  

Though, the trunks with medals and trophies from various sports are tangible proof of Thorpe’s achievements. But he was never able to, as Maraniss writes, “fully erase the history of the reality of Native American experiences.” 

Maraniss said he believes that even the 1951 Thorpe biopic starring Burt Lancaster, a non-Native American, was narrated through the eyes of Pop Warner and what he thought he created rather than Thorpe’s point of view.   

Sidenote: That outdated film narrative is reportedly getting an update. In a 2018 story, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Angelina Jolie is producing “Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story,” which is expected to star actor Martin Sensmeier, a multitalented athlete and member of the Sac and Fox Nation. This time, it will be told through the Native lens and is also being financed in Indian country. Producing a major motion picture outside the Hollywood machine is undoubtedly something the dynamically independent Thorpe would appreciate.  

“Despite all the obstacles,”  Maraniss said, “he kept adapting.”