The NFL season just started. What better time to learn a valuable lesson from one of the original founders of the NFL, Jim Thorpe. He was the subject of one of the most acclaimed books of 2022, Path Lit by Lightning. It's two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss’ biography of Jim Thorpe - perhaps, probably, maybe, almost certainly, definitely, likely the greatest athlete of the 20th Century.
The Myths
We use all those qualifiers because that's what Jim Thorpe's life and times before this biography were. There were myths built around him, layer upon layer. Maraniss managed to sort them out.
There was a 1951 Thorpe biopic - Jim Thorpe, All-American. Until this book, that stood as Thorpe’s biographical standard for more than sixty years. The movie is pure myth. At least they got a great athlete, Burt Lancaster, to play Thorpe . . . despite the fact he was Irish with blue eyes. The movie got the following facts right: there was a great athlete named Jim Thorpe, he won world renown in the 1912 Olympics, he played major league baseball, and he was a founder and the first star of the infant NFL. The rest of the 1 hour and 47 minutes gets everything wrong. Everything.
Thing is, the movie wasn't built on lies; it was built on a series of small myths that were woven together into the [much] bigger myth of the movie. And, since it became a major motion picture with a major movie star, the movie became the new myth, a myth that buried the real Jim Thorpe.
Myth v Reality
Here's what the experience of reading Path Lit By Lightning is like: a great story relayed by several contemporaries and, usually, Thorpe as well. Example: the Carlisle Indians’ game against Army at West Point when Jim ran a kickoff back 92 yards for a touchdown . . . only to be called back by a penalty. On the ensuing kickoff, he did it again only this time it counted.
Everyone agreed that it happened. His teammates, Thorpe himself, Army players including linebacker Dwight Eisenhower, and more either wrote about it in later years or mentioned it in interviews. The problem? Thorpe did have that touchdown run called back by a penalty, but he didn't follow it up with another one - as a matter of fact, he didn't score a touchdown that day.
The book is fascinating in this way throughout: a story relayed by a teammate, a friend, a family member, the movie, the press is quickly followed by what really happened. There was usually some element of truth in the story, but it wasn’t the truth.
Unreliable Narrators and Finding the Truth
When you pile enough of these stories with 'bits of truth' and 'bits of myths' on top of one another you get an unreliable narrative - at best.
Everyone who comes through our doors has a story. That story is a collection of big and little truths and big and little myths. The overall story may, in rare instances, lean toward Path Lit By Lightning. Sometimes, in rare instances, it leans toward Jim Thorpe, All-American. Almost always, it’s somewhere in the middle.
Our job is to sift through the myths, half myths, and truths and construct the real narrative. We won’t claim to be David Maraniss good, but we’re close.
