All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe - Hardcover

by Bill Crawford (Author)

All American is riveting and grand-that rare pairing of exquisite writing and unassailable research. Crawford delivers you to an age when iconic titans like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner marched across the planet, and he is the perfect guide to their enormous triumphs and tragedies. This is epic American history at its page-turning finest.
-Bill Minutaglio, author of City on Fire and First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty

He was the greatest football running back of his era, leading his Carlisle Indian Industrial School team to victory over all the great college powerhouses. King Gustav of Sweden called him ""the greatest athlete in the world"" after he won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. Yet Jim Thorpe was also at the center of the greatest sports scandal of the twentieth century-a scandal that took away his Olympic medals and banned him forever from intercollegiate sports.

Now, in this revealing new biography, Bill Crawford captures Jim Thorpe's remarkable rise and fall. From his youth on Oklahoma's Sac and Fox Indian reservation to his astounding feats on the gridiron, from his Olympic triumphs to his complex relationship with coach ""Pop"" Warner, who mentored, exploited, and ultimately betrayed him, All American brings you up close and personal with the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.

Front Jacket

This is a poignant and revealing biography of a pivotal figure in Olympic and American sports history.

In 1912, Jim Thorpe was the greatest sports celebrity in the world, a decathlon and pentathlon gold-medal winner at the Olympics as well as America's highest-scoring football running back-a combination of Jim Brown, Jesse Owens, Emmitt Smith, and Deion Sanders. Yet the very next year Thorpe was betrayed by his longtime coach and mentor, stripped of his Olympic medals, and banned from intercollegiate track and football because he had violated his "amateur status." Though he would go on to play professional baseball and become president of what would later become the National Football League, Thorpe was never able to live down the scandal that cost him his medals.

Now, in the first new biography of Thorpe in nearly twenty years, Bill Crawford brings this Native American sports legend to life for a new generation. Drawing on newly uncovered information about Thorpe's manager, Glenn "Pop" Warner, as well as the scandal that took away Thorpe's Olympic medals, Crawford captures for the first time the full arc of Thorpe's career. He tells the story of Thorpe's rambunctious childhood on the Sac and Fox Indian reservation in Oklahoma and shows how he went from a boarding school runaway to a Texas bronco buster to a student at the famed Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He reveals how Thorpe beat the Carlisle high-jump record on a bet (in street clothes) and twice flew through a full field of tacklers on his way to the end zone in his impromptu tryout for the football team. And he recounts Thorpe's astonishing triumphs of 1911--1912, when he led the Carlisle Indian football squad through two triumphant seasons-including victories over Harvard and West Point-and topped it all off with two gold medals at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden.

Crawford also brings to life Pop Warner, the pioneering Carlisle football coach and sports impresario who helped Thorpe achieve his greatest triumphs, then sided with the authorities when Thorpe lost his medals. Full of insights into the corrupt, rough-and-tumble world of athletics and the struggles of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, and illustrated with 33 rare photographs, All American is an indelible portrait of the greatest American athlete of the twentieth century.

Back Jacket

All American is riveting and grand-that rare pairing of exquisite writing and unassailable research. Crawford delivers you to an age when iconic titans like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner marched across the planet, and he is the perfect guide to their enormous triumphs and tragedies. This is epic American history at its page-turning finest.
-Bill Minutaglio, author of City on Fire and First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty

He was the greatest football running back of his era, leading his Carlisle Indian Industrial School team to victory over all the great college powerhouses. King Gustav of Sweden called him "the greatest athlete in the world" after he won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. Yet Jim Thorpe was also at the center of the greatest sports scandal of the twentieth century-a scandal that took away his Olympic medals and banned him forever from intercollegiate sports.

Now, in this revealing new biography, Bill Crawford captures Jim Thorpe's remarkable rise and fall. From his youth on Oklahoma's Sac and Fox Indian reservation to his astounding feats on the gridiron, from his Olympic triumphs to his complex relationship with coach "Pop" Warner, who mentored, exploited, and ultimately betrayed him, All American brings you up close and personal with the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Bill Crawford is a journalist and media producer who has written for Texas Monthly, the Austin Chronicle, and other publications. He is the coauthor of Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire and the author or coauthor of several other books.