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Bo knows nothing compared to the man history remembers as James Francis Thorpe.
born at the turn of the 20th Century as a member of the native Oklahoman Sac and Fox Nation, the young Wa-Tho-Huk enjoyed the good fortune of having the United States military temporarily distracted from massacring his people with the Spanish-American War.
he took full advantage of the opportunity, displaying unprecedented versatility in following a lifelong enthusiasm for sport. Thorpe was a pro athlete in baseball, basketball, gridiron football, and competed in practically every pursuit on the track or field at a world class level.
indeed, his gold medal in the decathlon event of the 1912 Olympics added to his claim of being one of the greatest athletes to ever lace up a pair of sneakers...even if they weren’t his own.
as the starting gun drew near, the all-sport athlete was dismayed to discover that his running shoes managed to walk out of the locker room just minutes before the start of the competition. accounts differ as to whether the shoes were stolen by racist fans or competitors in the event, but regardless of who had the shoes...Jim Thorpe did not.
still, this determined sportsman would scarcely allow something as trivial as a lack of proper athletic footwear stop him from running into the history books on this sunny Swedish day. he searched the grounds frantically until finding two separately discarded shoes that barely fit his feet, then calmly returned to preparing to compete with the finest athletes standing on the planet.
as a somehow more realistic tale from the world of sports noted, “there was only one thing left to do...win the whole fn thing.”
so, that’s exactly what he did, nbd.
upon his return to the States Jim Thorpe was hailed as a cultural sensation, participating in a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City. federal officials were so proud of the way he represented the country during the Olympics that they continued to deny native peoples full citizenship rights on the land that was violently stolen from them by evil immigrants until 1924.
Thorpe was later stripped of his Olympic gold when it was revealed that he had played semi-professional baseball before competing in the Games, making him one of the few human beings ever stripped of a high profile athletic accolade for being too good at sports. fortunately, his status as an Olympic medalist was restored just 30 years after his death, because life is fair and everything always makes sense.
for his unprecedented prowess in multiple fields of competition and the unfortunate draw in the Birth Circumstances Lottery that ensured he would never be fully appreciated in his own time, the legacy of Jim Thorpe stands as an illustration of both how far one human being can go, and how far a society can come.
thank you for your time.
. I’m jealous of people that lives around here or in LA. A lot of options and the food seems to taste a lot better than the Bay, more authentic too. I have today and tmr free to myself and meeting up with a friend on Friday and Saturday, came a couple days earlier for some me time too.
