Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (9 page)

T
he fin de siècle, an arbitrary phenomenon created by calendars of our own construction, elicits some mighty peculiar behavior in that biological oddball known as
Homo sapiens
—from mass suicides designed to free souls for union with spaceships behind cometary tails to trips to Fiji for a first view of the new millennium. Among the more benign manifestations, we might list our own propensity for making lists of the best and the worst where calendrical cycles end by our own fiat.

First published as “The Athlete of the Century” in
American Heritage
, October 1998.

Among the various impediments to fair and honorable listing, no factor could be more distorting—or of more immediate concern to devotees of this magazine—than the virtual erasure of historical knowledge among so many people who grew up with a television in each room, not a book in the house, and a convction that last year’s models must be antiquated, and last decade’s versions both extinct and erased from memory. In this context the greatest American athlete of the century must stand directly before us, either in the full flower of current performance or in constantly reiterated images of various media. Therefore the title could go only to Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, and why should anyone want to look elsewhere when directly confronted with such magnificence? (I make this last statement in full belief and without a trace of sarcasm, for these two men continue to awe and thrill me.)

Any great cycle also deserves recognition at the halfway point. In 1950 the Associated Press conducted an extensive poll of American sportswriters and broadcasters to determine the best football player of the half-century. Jim Thorpe beat Red Grange by 170 votes to 138, with Bronko Nagurski a distant third at 38. Three weeks later the same professional group voted for the greatest male athlete of the preceding fifty years, with the same winner, but by a larger margin: Jim Thorpe received 252 of 393 first-place votes, with Babe Ruth second at 86, Jack Dempsey third at 19, Ty Cobb fourth at 11, and at a distance surely recording the realities of racism, Joe Louis sixth at 5.

I was then, at age eight, a nascent sports nut and statistics maven. I well remember both these polls and the consensus among sports fans of all generations that Jim Thorpe was the world’s greatest living athlete—an impression heightened in 1951, when the popular film
Jim Thorpe—All American
, starring Burt Lancaster, told his story in the conventional hagiographic mode for youngsters like me who had never seen Thorpe in action.

This consensus has since evaporated. In fact I wonder if most younger fans have even heard of Jim Thorpe, a situation that can only be chalked up to the status of history (defined as anything unexperienced) as a tabula rasa for the “now” generation. Yet as I contemplated this assignment to write about the greatest American athlete of the twentieth century and thought about my own heroes, from Louis and DiMaggio in childhood to Jordan and Ali today, I could only conclude that the old consensus cannot be seriously challenged (except, just perhaps, by Man o’ War—and he couldn’t hit a curve, among other disqualifying factors of a more directly zoological nature).

For the bare bones, Jim Thorpe (1888–1953), of predominantly Sauk and Fox descent, grew up in a region now called Oklahoma but formerly designated as Indian Territory. He attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he starred on football teams drawn from small numbers of impoverished students playing with poor equipment under terrible conditions—but coached by the legendary “Pop” Warner. The Carlisle team regularly defeated the best Ivy League, Big Ten, and military squads. Thorpe, who excelled in almost every sport he ever attempted, won both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. He played professional baseball, mostly with the New York Giants, for several years (1913–1919), and then became the greatest star in the early days of American professional football (1915–1929).

Despite my affection for statistics, I do not think that such assessments can be made “by the numbers.” Thorpe’s incomparable greatness must be viewed as a singular tapestry, woven from several disparate threads into a unity for one distinct time and one unrepeatable set of circumstances: the off-the-scale numbers, the intense dedication and unbounded enthusiasm, the crushing obstacles posed by racism and a sanctimonious sports establishment.

In a run for the title of greatest athlete—not best boxer (Ali, Louis, Dempsey, Robinson, or Marciano), basketball player (Jordan hands down, as much as I loved Bird), or home run hitter (Ruth, Maris, Aaron, McGwire, now don’t get me started on this one!)—Thorpe wins by several laps for two key reasons.

1. Versatility.
Superlative athletes often perform well in several sports. No one but Thorpe has ever been the best of all in so many. He was America’s number one football player and general track-and-field man at the same time. He also played major league baseball for several seasons and excelled in lacrosse and swimming (while dabbling with success in boxing, basketball, and hockey). He won
both
of the most diverse and grueling Olympic competitions in 1912—the pentathlon (running broad jump, javelin throw, two-hundred-meter dash, discus throw, and fifteen-hundred-meter race) and the ten-event decathlon (these multiple events had been introduced into the 1912 Olympics at the behest of European athletes, who complained that American styles of training, based on intense specialization, failed to showcase European strength in general fitness). John McGraw, the feisty New York Giants manager, did not like Thorpe and branded him with an unfair epithet that stuck: the old charge that he couldn’t hit a curve ball. In fact, Thorpe performed competently (though not brilliantly) in professional baseball, compiling a lifetime batting average of .252 in six seasons as an outfielder.

2. Extent of excelling.
In the same sense that Maris’s home run record is vulnerable (and will probably fall this season), while DiMaggio’s hitting streak may stand for generations, Thorpe not only won all these events but usually relegated the opposition to embarrassing relative incompetence, putting more distance between himself and the second-place finisher than the full range from the penultimate score to the very bottom.

The narratives of Thorpe’s collegiate football career frequently descend to near comedy (for the relative ineptitude of others), as Thorpe wins game after game, virtually all by himself (often scoring all the points by kicking field goals every time his team penetrates the opponent’s territory). Thorpe won the pentathlon with 7 points (on the basis of a scoring system of 1 for a first-place finish, 2 for second place, and so on). The next six competitors scored 21, 29, 29, 30, 31, and 32. He then won the decathlon with 8,413 out of 10,000 possible points. The runner-up scored 7,724, with five others above 7,000.

A heroic tale in a decent nation would end here, but if you know anything about Jim Thorpe, you recognize that I must now add the sad and final chapter. Like so many athletes, Thorpe knew no other life and could never adjust to other professions and realities once his bodily strengths faded. He tried the usual range of activities, from inspirational speeches before civic groups to bit parts in movies. But nothing worked for him, and Thorpe died in poverty, wrecked by alcohol and the early deaths of close family members.

Jim Thorpe in 1925.
Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

To this sad generality, we must add Thorpe’s additional burden of an Indian heritage in a largely racist nation, a burden that destroyed him in both a general and a specific way. I cannot begin to measure, or even understand, the generality, but a man of Thorpe’s intense pride must have railed inwardly—with a galling bitterness that may have propelled him to self-destruction—against the stereotype of his people (gross enough as an abstraction) constantly applied to his own being. I read several biographies of Thorpe to prepare this piece, and nothing struck me more profoundly than the constant drumbeat of this deprecation, from the paternalism of Pop Warner, speaking of his good-hearted but naive braves (led by a great chief who would always need his white handler) to the caricatures of even the best-intentioned reporters, as in this characteristic newspaper account of a Carlisle victory over Georgetown in 1911: “Not since Custer made his last stand against Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn had a battle between redskins and palefaces been so ferociously fought as that which was waged on Georgetown field yesterday afternoon, when the husky tribe of chiefs from Carlisle savagely forced Georgetown’s weak, though gallant, cohorts to bite the dust 28 to 5.”

The specific story must rank among the saddest incidents in American history—for all its implications about ideals versus actualities and for all the personal pain thus inflicted upon the greatest athlete this country has ever produced. As an impoverished Indian college student, Thorpe received a few dollars for playing semiprofessional baseball in the summers of 1909 and 1910. He was following a common practice among athletes—just a more pleasant way than farm work to make some necessary and minimal cash during the summer break—but he didn’t know the accepted ruse of not using one’s real name and therefore not jeopardizing one’s amateur status. His “handlers,” including Pop Warner, must have known (for Thorpe hadn’t hidden his activities and didn’t recognize their consequences for amateur athletes), but these coaches couldn’t forgo such a grand opportunity as the Olympics, and they let Thorpe compete.

When the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) discovered this “transgression” of their sacred rules, Thorpe lost his medals, and the distant second-place finishers received both the titles and the objects. (To complete the humiliation, Thorpe not only lost his records but was also browbeaten into returning the medals themselves, even after humbling himself and begging forgiveness for his supposed sins, and despite support from most major sportsmen and the American public.)

The resulting humiliation marked and destroyed this wonderfully proud man. Thorpe’s name became inextricably linked with the incubus of this supposed misdeed. (I purposely left this topic for the end, and I’ll wager that most readers have been wondering throughout the piece, “Well, when is he going to discuss those Olympic medals?”) Chief Meyers, Thorpe’s roommate and a great catcher for the New York Giants, recalled (note also the paternalism reflected in the almost automatic decision to pair Indian players as roommates, and in the epithet “Chief” applied to nearly all Indian ballplayers at the time): “Jim was very proud of the great things he’d done. A very proud man…. Very late one night Jimcame in and woke me up…. He was crying, and tears were rolling down his cheeks. ‘You know, Chief,’ he said, ‘the King of Sweden gave me those trophies, he gave them to me. But they took them away from me. They’re mine, Chief, I won them fair and square.’ It broke his heart and he never really recovered.”

Far too late to appease Thorpe’s wounds, and despite arguments and pleas that never abated, the U.S. Olympic Committee finally restored Thorpe’s amateur status in 1973, twenty years after his death. The Olympic medals were returned to his family in 1982. (Avery Brundage, a “gentleman” of wealth and breeding, had competed against Thorpe, and lost, in both the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912. He later became the aristocratic and sanctimonious head of the International Olympic Committee and never wavered on this issue, while hypocritically proclaiming his personal sympathy with Thorpe.)

Any further moralizing could only be tendentious. As Ethel Barrymore famously said, “That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.” I would only close with this footnote: According to legend, the King of Sweden, in presenting the Olympic medals to Jim Thorpe, said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” To this basic factual judgment, Thorpe replied, in his own elegantly simple way, “Thanks, King.” And what can we say but “Thanks, Jim.”

T
he society of males, especially when bonded by a shared physical activity, often promotes a distinctive and curious form of camaraderie, neatly balanced on a fulcrum between near cruelty and ferocious loyalty. The nicknames given to professional athletes stand as telling testimony to this important social phenomenon. The press, particularly in earlier times of more leisurely and flavorful prose, may have christened Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio, The Yankee Clipper; or Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat. But ballplayers themselves usually favored the pungent and the derogatory. Ruth, to his peers, was usually called “Niggerlips.”

From
Forgotten Heroes: Inspiring American Portraits From Our Leading Historians
, edited by Susan Ware. Copyright © 1998 by the Society of American Historians. Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Trade Publishing Group.

We should interpret this apparent harshness as a badge of acceptance into a special sort of guild, with membership strictly limited both by the skills needed to play, and the toughness required to brave the daily struggle. If you can’t take a nasty name without an eyeblink (“like a man,” as folks of my gender tend to say), how will you survive the fastball thrown at your head next time you crowd the plate, or the spikes aimed at your calf the next time you cover second base on a force play?

These derogatory names were often fixed upon the particular mishaps or weaknesses of individuals. Thus, Fred Merkle, the first baseman of the New York Giants during the early years of the century, remained “Bonehead” throughout his distinguished career, for a stupid mistake in a crucial contest of his sophomore season (1908), when he forgot to touch second base on his teammate’s supposedly game-winning single. But my greatest sympathy goes to H. S. Cuyler, Hall of Fame outfielder of the 1920s and 1930s—but known only as “Kiki” because he stuttered badly and frequently tripped over his own last name (pronounced Ki-ler).

Another and more common class of nicknames uses the tactic of the ethnic slur by labeling individuals with a pejorative name for their group—as in numerous short players called “Stump,” or “Specs” for players with eyeglasses. In the early days of baseball, all Indian players were “Chief” (with Philadelphia pitcher Chief Bender and New York catcher Chief Meyers as the leading stars), while naïfs from the farm became “Rube” (with Hall of Fame pitchers Rube Marquard and Rube Waddell as most notable bearers of the label).

Early baseball did dispense an odd form of rough justice based on the elite but democratic premise that all men who could stand the heat and hazing would be named for their weakness but judged only by their play. (Lest we descend into maudlin romantic reverie about these times, let us remember the restrictive covenant applied to such “democracy”: black men could not play, whatever their talent.) Several deaf men also played major league baseball during the game’s early years—and every last one of them bore the name “Dummy.” As another linguistic cruelty by extension, the etymology of “dumb” refers only to muteness, not stupidity—as in the old phrase “deaf and dumb” for people who could neither hear nor speak. These men played at a time when few deaf people learned to vocalize, and when signing was not yet regarded as true language. To the hearing world, therefore, they did not speak, and were consequently regarded as mute or dumb—hence “Dummy” in a world of derogatory nicknames.

Two deaf players of baseball’s early years stand out for excellence of performance—Luther Haden “Dummy” Taylor, a fine pitcher who won 112 games for the New York Giants between 1900 and 1908; and the subject of this essay, William Ellsworth “Dummy” Hoy, a superb center fielder with a lifetime .288 batting average for six teams in four major leagues between 1888 and 1902. The career of Dummy Hoy—Mr. Hoy bore that nickname with pride and dignity during his career and later life—also offers us great insight into the history of American sports by virtue of Hoy’s keen intelligence through such a long life, for he died in December 1961 at age ninety-nine, just five months shy of his one-hundredth birthday. He was, at the time, the longest lived of all major league players. Since then, one man has slipped past the century boundary by a mere eight days—an unknown pitcher named Ralph Miller, who compiled an undistinguished record of five wins and seventeen losses in a two-year career from 1898 to 1899. So Dummy Hoy remains the most longevitous major leaguer of note.

Note a central paradox and irony in the career of Dummy Hoy, a peculiarity that would have appealed to his wry sense of humor. We are drawn to this man because his disability, as recorded in a nickname now regarded as cruel, attracts our attention in an age of greater sensitivity toward human diversity. But when we study his career, we discover that he stands out not for his unusual deafness (which he regarded as largely irrelevant to his profession and, at most, a nuisance), but rather because he was such an exemplary performer and human being.

Dummy Hoy’s biography typifies baseball’s early history, when the game reigned supreme as a national pastime, but drew professional players almost entirely from the proletarian population of agricultural and industrial workers. Knowledge of this background remains essential for understanding many key features of baseball’s social and organizational ways. Consider the paternalism of wealthy owners and their horror and confusion at the successful unionization of players during our generation, or the structure of advance that leads from minor to major leagues, rather than from college teams to professional leagues, as in sports that rose later, including basketball and especially football (which began as an elite college sport).

Dummy Hoy was a farmboy from the tiny rural hamlet of Houckstown, Ohio. He was born on May 23, 1862, and became deaf at age three following an attack of meningitis. He did not attend school until his parents learned about the Ohio School for the Deaf in Columbus. Beginning at age ten, but advancing rapidly, he finished both primary and high school, learned the trade of a cobbler, and graduated as valedictorian of his class at age eighteen. Hoy recalled that his father gave his sister a cow and a piano for a legacy when she turned eighteen, and then provided a suit of clothes, buggy, harness, and saddle to each of his brothers at age twenty-one. When Dummy Hoy reached majority, however, his father give him just the suit, and free board until age twenty-four, for the family had decided that, due to his deafness, Hoy should remain at home and become a cobbler.

He began as an assistant to the local Houckstown shoemaker, but eventually saved enough money to buy his boss out. Hoy recalled: “I got the good will for nothing, but the leather, lasts, tools, and sewing machine cost me about $100.” The rest of the recorded story smacks a bit of bucolic mythology and was, no doubt, more complicated; but as Hoy told the tale: Rural people went barefoot in the summer and business became slow. Hoy therefore encouraged the local kids to gather around his shop and play ball. Hoy recalled in a 1947 interview:

Hoy signed his first contract (with Oshkosh of the minor Northwest League) for $75 a month, with a stipulation that he could leave at the beginning of August because work was piling up at his cobbler’s shop. But Oshkosh offered him $300 to finish the remaining two months of the season, and Hoy never looked back again. He starred in his sophomore season at Oshkosh (following an indifferent rookie year), hitting .367, stealing sixty-seven bases, and leading his team to a pennant. He was then promoted to Washington in the major National League, where he enjoyed a fine rookie season in 1888, batting .274 and stealing a league leading eighty-two bases. (Steals were defined differently and more generously in baseball’s early years, so we cannot compare this figure with modern records. For example, a player was awarded a stolen base when he reached third from first on a single that, in the scorer’s judgment, would usually advance a man only one base).

Dummy Hoy followed a peripatetic career thereafter, although his play remained consistently excellent. After two seasons with Washington, he cast his lot with baseball’s first prominent revolt and joined the Players’ League, organized by New York Giants’ captain John Montgomery Ward in hopes of winning fairer pay and working conditions, especially freedom from the peonage of the reserve clause that bound players to their owning teams and did not fall until the legal battles of our current generation. But Hoy landed with the particularly inept Buffalo team in 1890, and the league failed in any case. In a letter written at age ninety-three, Hoy recalled this season in writing to thank a journalist for sending him a photograph of the 1890 Buffalo Club:

In 1891, Hoy therefore moved to St. Louis in the American Association (then a major league), and thence back to the National League, where he played for Washington (1892), Cincinnati (1894), and Louisville (1898). But he bolted again to join the fledgling (but this time successful) American League in 1901. After the 1902 season, he could have continued in the majors, but decided to see another part of the country, and played all 211 games for Los Angeles in the minor Pacific Coast League in his last season of 1903.

Dummy Hoy may not have stood in the very first rank of players, but he certainly played as a star of the game’s early history. He played 1798 games, nearly all as center fielder, in fourteen seasons, and compiled an excellent lifetime batting average of .288. But his greatest skills lay in three other areas: his speed and superior baserunning abilities (with 597 lifetime steals); his acknowledged intelligence and savvy understanding of the game’s subtleties; and his excellent fielding, particularly his rifle arm. In his most famous single achievement, Hoy once threw three players out at home plate—from the outfield, of course—in a single game in 1888.

Dummy Hoy accomplished all these feats under an additional disadvantage potentially more serious than his deafness; he was one of the smallest men in the major leagues, even in these early days of lower average height for the general population. Hoy stood between 5' 4" and 5' 5" (sources differ) and weighed about 145 pounds.

On the more universally human side of our admiration, Hoy’s later life remained a rare model of prosperity and apparent contentment. Hoy saved his money and bought a dairy farm in his native Ohio upon retirement. He married Anna Lowery, a teacher of the deaf (and a deaf woman herself) late in his career, and had three surviving children, two daughters (both of whom taught in schools for the deaf), and a son (who became a distinguished judge in Ohio). Hoy also left seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren when he died in 1962.

William “Dummy” Hoy, at the age of ninety-eight, throws out the first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds game on April 11, 1961.
Credit: AP/Wide World Photos

After selling his farm in 1924, Hoy worked as a personnel director for deaf employees at the Goodyear Rubber Company in Akron, and then for the Methodist Book Concern in Cincinnati until his retirement. He maintained a home, and continued to walk at least five miles a day, until his wife died during his early 90s. He then lived with his son until his death, just a few months shy of his one hundredth birthday. As a wonderful last baseball hurrah, Dummy Hoy, at age ninety-eight, threw out the first ball both on opening day and (having turned ninety-nine in May) at one of the World Series games, for the 1961 Cincinnati Reds, the principal team of his own career (1894–1897, and again in his last major league season of 1902). Dummy Hoy had a truly wonderful life.

In addition to
what one might call his more generic excellence, Dummy Hoy commands our attention (and commends our study) for at least three particular reasons that illuminate the history of American sports and our social history in general.

His deafness.
One cannot (and should not) fail to recognize the defining feature that gave Dummy Hoy his baseball name. First, as all aficionados of the game will instantly recognize, Dummy Hoy played center field—and center fielders must serve as generals of the outfield by calling which balls they will catch, and which should be handled by the right or left fielder. How could a mute player express such leadership? That he played center serves as testimony to the acceptance and respect that Hoy commanded among his fellow players. Wahoo Sam Crawford (from Wahoo, Nebraska), one of the game’s early stars, played with Hoy in the outfield, and provided personal testimony in his interview for Lawrence S. Ritter’s wonderful 1966 book,
The Glory of Their Times
, an oral history told by the few survivors of baseball’s early years: