The Daily Stoic - David Maraniss on Why We Study the Greats

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Ryan talks to author and journalist David Maraniss about his approach to his work, and his most recent book: Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, which is an epic biography on the trials of America’s greatest all-around athlete. David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched Into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award. A Good American Family is his twelfth book.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives.

But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic podcast. Of probably all the genres I love to read the most. I love the big epic biographies, The Robert Carrows, The Blanch WWizen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt series,

the Taylor Branch series on Martin Luther King, Doris Kern's Good When. You've heard me rave about all these books, a million times. I love those epic biographies. And it's the kind of writing that I can't even wrap my head around doing, right? I've written in lots of different mediums. I feel like I'm pretty good. I just don't know how they sit down and they work for 10 years on one of these books.

I mean, Robert Carro still hasn't finished the Lyndon Johnson series. He's been working on it since Lyndon Johnson died and he's just getting to the Vietnam War now. It's an epic feat of creative brilliance, physical stamina, willpower, perseverance, foresight vision. It's just amazing.

So whenever I have a chance to talk to one of the people who can do that at the world class level, I'm always interested in David Marinus. It's certainly one of those people today's guests, a New York Times bestselling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians in a visiting distinguished professor in Vanderbilt. He's won two Pulitzer prizes. He has been a Pulitzer finalist

three other times. He's won pretty much every other major writing award, the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy book prize, the Anthony Lucas book prize, and I've enjoyed and I carry one of those books at the bookstore when pride still mattered. A biography of insulin party. We talk a little bit about his Bill Clinton biography, which is fascinating, but his new book, Path Lit by Lightning, The Life of Jim Thorpe, is an epic biography of what is perhaps America's greatest all-around athlete, a brilliant inspiring, also tragic figure. I was just so excited to do this interview. I was surprised. Usually you can't get these guys. Usually they're not the podcasting type. They live in a

rarefied air where they just get to put books out into the world and people buy them even though they're huge and intimidating and cost a bunch. And they don't have to do a ton of, you know, they don't have to hit the publicity road like I am doing for discipline is destiny right now. So for him to come on the podcast was awesome. I so enjoyed this conversation. I think you will too. You can follow him at David Marinus on Twitter, on Instagram, at David Marinus author. And you should definitely 100% check out this new book, Path Lit by Lightning, The Life of Jim Thorpe, an epic biography to say the least. And I was so excited to talk about greatness with David Marinus, which he both embodies

and has documented in all of his books. I think you're like this. Well, I love the new book, which I want to talk to you about, but I had one quick question for you. There was a little, it was kind of a little aside in the Clinton book, which always stuck with me as, as a user of no cards, I just wanted to know more about it. You talk about sort of index, rola decks card system,

and I just, I wanted to know about it. Well, that was my first book, Ryan. And so, you know, I actually talked to Taylor Branch and Robert Carroll about how they organized. Yeah. And I think it was Taylor who said that he used index cards. So I thought, well, what the hell? It was 1992 when I started it.

It was sort of before the era of all of the ways you could do it online. And as I said, I'm a technological idiot, so it sounded good to me. And I literally had probably 5,000 index cards in shoe boxes arranged by both chronology and theme. I've got my new cards in front of me. So I love hearing that that Robert Carro and Taylor branch both used them to you as well. I just thought I remembered in the book didn't Clinton use note cards. Like he wrote down on the book. I'm not sure if I can read it.

I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it.

I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm not sure if I can read it. I'm Taylor Branch both used them as well. I just thought I remembered in the book, didn't Clinton use note cards? Like he wrote down on like an index card everyone he ever met and what does he do for that? There was no connection between that and why I did it,

but you're absolutely right. That was probably in the 1970s when he was starting to run for office. and he kept it for a few decades. But yeah, anybody he met, you would write down their name, anything he can know about them. It's interesting because Clinton's intelligence sort of goes towards almost a photographic memory. sort of goes towards almost a photographic memory. So even though we had those note cards, he can meet somebody who hadn't seen it 30 years or he remembered not only their name,

but their parents' name and maybe even their phone number. So, but it all started with those note cards. Anybody he met was both a future voter or a future donor or somebody that could be helpful to him along is political rise. Well, and don't you think that with your experience with no cards, certainly it's been confirmed with mine. I feel like the act of putting it on the note card improves the memory,

even if although you are having the second backup that is the note card. Absolutely right. And that's why I still, even though I don't use note cards as much anymore, I still do everything I can to make sure that whatever I write down is etched in my memory. So I'll transcribe all of my own interviews. I won't have somebody else do it. I will take my notes from three ring binders and then put together a master notes that helps me sort of etch it in my memory again.

So I do all of the same things I did with note cards. I just use a computer now instead. Most of it. Yeah, it's like having the multiple touch points with the information allows you to then when you bump up into it in your notes or you know you're you're you're you're trucking along and then suddenly the exact right connection pops to you because you've you've taken the time to interact with it on multiple occasions. You know that's true and of course there are people

from younger generations who can do all that automatically in various you know programs. I can't and it wouldn't work for me even if I could because it wouldn't stick in my mind the same way. So I have to really remember it and to do that, I have to visualize it, see it, repeat it. I'm the same way. And I do, when I read these epic books that you and your sort of elite class of biographers, right, I'm always amazed at that you and your elite class of biographers,

I'm always amazed at how you manage to keep all this information straight. And I've got to imagine it's all about the organization. You're not just sitting down and seeing where it takes you. There has to be a plan, a plan of attack. Yeah, there he is. Definitely. As I said, I take, you know, now I use three ring binders of all of my notes and then I take those and turn it into a master notes.

But, you know, I have one of my friends, Rick Atkinson, who's a brilliant historian about World War II and now the Revolutionary War. He writes outlines that are longer than his books. Wow. I don't do that. I have all my notes. I'll probably take about one page of a subkind of a way to, you know, I use these big artist books, P. And I'll sort of. Can I see? Yeah, like this.

Oh, got it. OK. Sketchbook. Yeah, Sketchbook. And on that, I will propose chapter write sort of what I call the stations of the cross. The points I want to make and how to get from here to there. Yeah.

And I don't do it in the great detail, because there is a certain magic to what can come into your head from the very creative process of writing. And so I always allow room for that within the organization of the chapter. I sort of, it's another variation of what I call freedom through discipline. You know, once I have the discipline of the chapters and of my notes and of my understanding of that, that's when I can improvise somewhat

within that structure. Well, that's very fitting. My next book is on the virtue of discipline, as it happens. I'm doing a series on the cardinal virtue. So I did courage. I just finished discipline. Now I'm writing a series on the Cardinal Virtue, so I did Courage, I just finished discipline. Now I'm writing about justice, but it is interesting that paradox,

like you would think being very regimented and orderly in what you do, it might be constraining, but it's almost like you have just the right amount of constraints and that creates the freedom to sort of take the thought where it leads, but if you haven't done the work, if you haven't laid the groundwork, the freedom to sort of take the thought where it leads, but if you haven't done the work, if you haven't laid the groundwork, the freedom is overwhelming

and you don't make any forward progress. That's exactly right. I actually learned some of that from my book on Vince Lombardi and the Jesuits, the whole freedom through discipline notion. And now he could take one play, you know, he, from learning from the Jesuits, he could take one play, you know, he from learning from the Jesuits, he could take one play his famous packer sweep and

Provide so many different variations of that the players knew it so well that they knew how to respond in 50 different ways to what was Coming at them and I think of that for musicians, you know great jazz musicians or any sort of musician as to learn the Punta metals first and then they can improvise or a great artist. I think writing is the same way. So I've tried to apply that to everything I do. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And I think people want to think that it's about sitting down and just letting the inspiration take you where it takes you, but you need the sort of the channeling of that energy at least in some vague overall direction, especially I've got to imagine when you're trying to get to the end of a 600 or 700 page, 70 year span of someone's life.

Absolutely. A biography helps in that process because there's a natural skeleton to it, a structure or life. And if the person is no longer around, of course, for Clinton and Obama, I had to figure out how to create sort of an artificial place to end the stories. But for someone like Jim Thorpe or Vince Lombardi or Clemente, that structure is already there. Yeah, that's really interesting. structure is already there. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, I was actually writing in the discipline book about that famous John Wooden scene where he would bring in the athletes and they'd think he'd be giving them all this inspirational talk. And then he'd walk them through like how to put on their socks and shoes. I don't remember if you disputed it as a as apocrypul or not in the Lombardi book, but the whole idea of gentlemen. This is a football, right? Like you have to, yeah.

He really said it. Yeah, I was after a second season. And of course, the great line is Max McGee saying, coach, can you slow down? You're going too fast for us. Yeah. Well, you, you, and I was, as I was reaching the, there's a line from a Zell of Fitzgerald, or Zell of Fitzgerald, which, you know, her own life sort of prude, what she's saying, but she said, it's with loose ends that men hang themselves.

And I thought that that's a good way to think about these tiny little details. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I keep trying not to hang myself. Any day we can get through it without that is a successful day, I guess. Yes. Yeah.

Well, one of the things I loved, I read the book and then I read the New York Times review about it, which was very positive, but I loved the opening scene. I forget who wrote it, but they were talking about how they were interviewing some like 90-year-old marathon runner, and all the 90-year-old marathon runner wanted to talk about was how they'd met Jim Thorpe as a young person.

And to me, it brings home something that we often miss on these stories, which is that they feel very distant to us, but they still exist almost in living memory. The injustices and the unbelievable athletic achievements of a man born in the late 1880s, like it's effectively still with us. Yeah, that was Aval Kiviyat, who was a New Yorker, a long distance runner, that Keith Oberman met while Kiviat was still alive. He wasn't alive for me when I was doing the book, but I found several oral interviews

of him. And yeah, I mean Thorpe athletic fame in 1912, 110 years ago, and yet you can almost find, I couldn't find anybody who was obviously around during his greatest era, but there's still a lot of those connections that make it feel closer and come alive even all of that time ago. And how quickly that intersects with, you know, major world events, right? You're talking about Dwight Eisenhower playing against Jim Thorpe. And I love there's an anecdote in SC Gwyn's book about the invention of the forward pass in football, where like Dwight Eisenhower is playing for West Point

when the passing game in football is invented. Again, we think about these things as, you know, existing and perpetuity, but some of these breakthroughs were like very recent and some of these major figures of history intersect with the sports world in a way that you wouldn't believe. Yeah, the forward Pass was only legalized around 1904

in Pop Warner, who was the Carlyle coach, was one of the earlier proponents of it. He didn't invent it, as some people say, but he was an early proponent. And, you know, those Carlyle teams were using the Ford Pass when a lot of schools were, but before that you couldn't. One of the things I love about that you're,

is the things that you could do that you can't do now. There's one scene where they're playing the University of Chicago and an end line lines up right by the opposition, the out of bounds and goes around the opposition bench and comes out on the other side to catch fast. You know, wouldn't that be fun if you could do that today? And this isn't that far, even another, you know, sort of intersection of a major historical event. This isn't that far from Theodore Roosevelt and the sort of invention of modern college athletics,

and the invention of helmet and protective gear in sports, and how, yeah, these things didn't, these things weren't always with us, but there were people that predated them, or people who were there present at the creation, so to speak. Yeah, some things weren't with us, some things were. So the violence was always there. It's there today in a different form with CTE

and the effects of that despite all of the modern equipment. But hard to believe that this violence sport was even more violent around the turn of the century. Did you play in the time of the flying V, sort of formations? No, wait, that was outlawed right before Thorpe got there. And that was part of what Theodore Roosevelt and called all the leaders of college sports together

to try to get some rules that would prevent the flying wedge and all of that. So that was no longer allowed. So in that sense, things were different. In another sense though, they haven't changed because human nature doesn't change. So I write a lot about the notion of the fallacy of the innocent past, you know, that, oh, if we can go back to the good old days when everything was amateur and, you know, people played for the love of it and they weren't getting $240 million contracts. You know that's all baloney. I mean that sort of form of corruption

of sports has always been there. When the and the double standard therein you know you obviously talk a lot about in the book about his metals being stripped of him and then in the discipline book I wrote a lot about Lou Gehrig And there was a college athletics or an amateur eligibility scandal in his career. But like you said, in the book, he, Thorpe wasn't informed enough or let inside the club enough to know you're supposed to do that under a fake name. And so he got caught when many of the best athletes of that era, you know, were making a mockery of the same rules that, you know, this guy gets the book thrown at him for. Yeah, you're right. Gerrug played under an alias Dwight Eisenhower,

played under the name Wilson and the Kansas State League. Literally scores of college athletes were playing under pseudonymms so they could maintain their eligibility. Now, I don't think it was Thorpe's ignorance, which is what Pop Warner tried to claim that all he was just to delmi-indian. I just think he didn't, he didn't, you know, he wasn't in on the, that part of it, you're right. That's what I mean. Yes. Right. It's not that he was stupid. He just wasn't corrupt enough. Yeah. He played under the name Jim Thorpe and Carlisle, Indian athletes, and been doing that for quite a while. Pop Warner knew about it. You know, and I said, no, you know, we'll talk about it. I mean, a lot of people knew about it and lied to save their own reputations.

Well, it was starting to me too. You look at the cover of the book. And, you know, if it wasn't a black and white photo, he looks like he could have stepped off, you know, football practice last week. Like, you know, you look at a lot of the old sports photos and some of the ones that are in the book. You definitely go, okay, this was an athlete

from a different era, especially like baseball and stuff. But just as far as like a raw athletic figure, he looks like he could be playing professional sports right now. It's pretty remarkable physique style to like, it's surreal almost. Well, it's a paradigm. I mean, you look at that. I mean, it's surreal almost. Well, it's a paradigm. I mean, you look at that. I mean, it's magnetic, electric.

Yeah. He is sort of the classic athlete, you know, and as soon as I saw it, I said, you know, thank you. That's the cover of the book, you know, it just radiates that. And you're right, it is timeless in that sense. Yeah, it's timeless in that sense. Yeah, it's, I mean, he looks like he could be an abacromion-fitch model or something. Like, you know, he doesn't look, and I wonder how much of that was, you know, him sort of not being fully assimilated into society. So he's not, you know, he's not as trendy

of a figure then. He's sort of, it's more of the raw, unvarnished sort of athleteness in him, probably in the same way we can see ourselves in a Greek statue of a wrestler or something. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it's just so natural, I guess you would say. You know, it looks pure and so it's timeless meaning it could be in ancient Greece or it could be today. Yes, yes.

And was he just one of those natural amazing athletes or was there sort of the work ethic behind it? You know, like obviously he works very hard. You can't be good at sports if you don't work very hard. But was he like a freak of nature or was he more of a workhorse of an athlete? You know, I think he was both. I mean, I definitely had that, you know, he, when he got to Carlisle, the Indian school at age 16, he was only five, five, and weighed 115 pounds.

So he had this enormous growth spurt, but he did have natural strength, speed, and jumping ability, all of the things that made him that great all-around athlete. But I think it's kind of a tendency for sports writers and others. You know, if there's especially an African-American or in his case, a Native American, if they have the skills, they're sort of well, they're just naturals at it. But they work and thought not only worked physically at it and had since he was young, I mean, in other ways hunting and fishing and walking long, long distances certainly helped his stamina, jumping out of trees into the North Canadian river, probably helped him in some ways.

All the things he did as a kid, but he not only worked physically, although there was a somewhat racist stereotype that he didn't have to train for the Olympics when, in fact, there are pictures showing him, showing that he trained and the other athletes saying it. But he also, it was a little bit ahead of his time, mentally, I'd say. You know, he could envision things, you know, as that same able Kiviyat told Keith Obergman, you know, you could do something and Thorpe could watch you do it and do it better than you could.

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Yeah, I remember I read Bo Jackson's memoir a few years ago and he was just sort of like, yeah, I don't practice. I'm just this way, you know? You, so it does seem like there are certain people who are just, you know, a one in a trillion package, not that they don't also have a hunger and a tenacity and a skill for the game.

But, you know, it's hard to tell because you can't really watch clips of him, was he, you know, what was his playing style? What did he, like, was he one of those graceful natural athletes? Or was he, you know, one of those sort of sculpted himself into that? Yeah, you know, you're right. I wish I could have seen more film of him during that era. But there isn't there enough descriptions of him

from not just sports writers, but even the great poet, Mary Ann Moore, who was his teacher at Carlisle, you know, and she had a description of his sort of readiness to pounce with equal liberty, with plenty and reserve, you know, she described it, you know, that sort of hit ready energy. So, you know, I had to base it more on that than any film that I could watch. I'm glad you mentioned Bo Jackson because I don't believe that either. I mean, he might have said it, but he certainly, I mean, you have to practice to play football. And I consider Bo Jackson, perhaps the closest when people ask me who's the Jim Thorpe of the modern era, I would say it was him. You know, you watch that clip of him breaking the bat over the leg and you're just like,

this guy, it was dealt a different set of cards than not just the rest of us, then even everyone else on the field. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And he's the one who probably could have been a great decafeli too. Yes. You know, and the, and now that you can pull vault with a pole, vault that doesn't break, you know, pull, doesn't break. I jumped up, could barely pull, what? Because he'd break the pole, you know, but that's the one event in the decaf line. There was a little problematic for him, but strength, speed, and jumping ability,

they both had it in just intermeneous qualities. Yeah, you watch the Bo Jackson highlight real, and the clip where he runs up the side of the wall. You think of what would they have captured. You talk about in the book some of his his, some of Thorpe stories or legends that even he passed along, but you got to imagine there must have been moments that happened that didn't get reported by reporters that would have just taken your breath away, just the sheer physicality of what someone like him

must have been able to pull off in certain moments. I think that's true. And, you know, because we can't see it, I wish I could have, I wish there were film of that 1912 game against Army, for instance, or against Harvard the year before, or to see a point of a ball from Inzone to Inzone, which he did, all of these different things that I know happened because I can document them from many different sources, but I just

couldn't see. Well, and it's one of the things we we don't really on we don't really take into account when we think about, you know, these sports figures from the past. It's not just, you know just the uniforms or the technology of the stuff, but like the grueling nature of the game itself, like before they understood about sleep, before they understood that you shouldn't smoke before a game. All this stuff, when I was reading about Gary, you're like, you think about the street, you think about 2100 games in a row, and then you go, wait, he was traveling by train. He was playing often multiple double headers in the same week.

And then in the off season, he'd have to go barnstorm in Japan or something, right? When you think of the toll of the multiple back-to-back world series, et cetera. Jim Thorpe, to travel to the Olympics, isn't flying there in a chartered airplane, right? He's pulling this off with none of the advantages that we're thinking about today. Oh, I know. I mean, sometimes I just marvel at how did he get there? He's splitting it. Well, no, I mean, yes, I absolutely got to stock on by-bought, like he's putting it right? Well, no, for the, I mean, for other, yes, I absolutely got to stack home by boat. But like he's in Chicago coaching a game for Indiana University. And all of a sudden, the next, you know, noon the next day, he's playing a football in Ohio. You know, I mean, that has to be exhausted, right? Yeah. So many instances of that

where, yeah, they took trains or, or in his case, he probably could have gone by car, but cars weren't the same then either in normal the highways. Yeah. So that, that's another sort of hidden part of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the,

of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of an ad bill. They don't even have the same kind of athletic tape, just the toll that this must have taken on the body. Then we go, well, why were they this way when they were older? It's like, because he basically got in multiple car accidents professionally, like every day of his life. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. And played to a fairly, I mean, for someone, and they, you know, it just take football. I mean, he was playing 60 minutes a game. You know,

he was sure as no one, you weren't coming out. You're playing offense and defense. He was playing running back, which takes the most grueling toll on on it. And he had defense of back or linebacker where he was tackling people. There was a collision on every play he played for every football game. Yeah, and his shoes probably weighed five pounds each, and you know, his uniform was made a wall. And just the, you just think of the headwinds that these guys had. It must have been, and that's not even getting into the extra psychological headwinds It must have been, and that's not even getting into the extra psychological headwinds and the adversity that he would have grown up with. I mean, it's kind of remarkable that he was still standing at all by the time he finished playing.

That's the way I felt. And then that, you know, that final athletic endeavor where he's 45 years old playing baseball for hard Jo's Indians, you know, a traveling team going around playing the Negro League teams and, and these coasts, and still hitting, you know, still still doing well at age 45 was kind of amazing. Yeah, I was just reading about Satchel Page and, you know, he gets drafted like in his 50s or whatever, and he's still striking a batters out. And he's just like, you know, it gets drafted like in his 50s or whatever. And he's still striking batters out. And I just like, we wouldn't Indian.

So I know. Yeah, how good must he have been in his prime or how good could he have been just like Thorpe if the deck hadn't been so thoroughly stacked against him? I mean, it sort of boggles the imagination. It does. And I was delighted when I saw that Thorpe had competed against so many of those African American players before they got their shot too. Not just Sacho Page and Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson, but in football he played against Paul Robson, you know, and

Fritz Pollard. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, that's that's remarkable. I didn't really think about that because of the way that his career went. His achievements are almost more translatable to today because he wasn't always in a sort of artificially anti-competitive environment that even a Babe Ruth or Joe D'Amaggio or Lou Gerrard would have been like where many of the best players they didn't have to face and that was intentional. Yes. Football was not segregated. Then there weren't very many black players, but Fritz

Pollard was a player coach and a great one. And Robeson played a couple of years before he went on to his famous, you know, an opera singer and actor and all of that and an activist. You know, I write in the book that the one, you know, Thorpe met almost every famous person of the first half of the 20th century. From Eisenhower and Omar Bradley and George Patton to Bob Hope and John Ford and everybody on Hollywood. But the one place I would have wanted to be on was in a field in Milwaukee in 1922, when Thorpe the Colossus of Native Americans was on one team and Paul Robeson was on the other. You know, to see that game would have been just awesome.

He's sort of like a zealot figure in sports. It's kind of unbelievable. A forest gump, you know, that he would just have net or, and these aren't just like, hey, they passed each other on a train somewhere, but they seem to have, you know, gone head to head. It's almost unbelievable. Yeah, it was a fun part of the book to do sort of document all of the famous people that he encountered. I mean, Eisenhower famously said, after that West Point game, yeah, I tackled Jim Thorpe once, he tackled him once, the whole game. Thorpe eventually knocked him out of the game.

Yeah, it must have been weird to be this Native American guy. You're so talented. And then you're just like, oh, yeah, this guy I played against, he just conquered, like he just won a World War, you know, like where these figures go on. And that must have been strange and obviously sad too, you know, you die in this trailer more or less in obscurity and poverty The world sort of having the world that sort of extracted what it wanted from you and then passed you by Yeah, the last 25 30 years of his life were difficult, you know, I kept rooting for him for something better to happen but you know some of it was it was his own human flaws.

He had trouble drinking and he wasn't home much. And the first two wives divorced him because of that and his drinking. And he didn't see his seven children as much as I would have liked or they would have liked. That's more important during their childhood. But he kept persevering. He kept trying no matter what obstacles were in his way. And I came to admire that. But you're

right. I mean, he wanted more than anything. Well, I'd say two things. He wanted to be a college football coach. You know, we got that chance once for one season with Indiana University. Then the head coach was fired. And that was the end of that. And he wanted to somehow set up some kind of a hunting lodge or fishing lodge because he loved to hunt and fish more than anything else. And that never quite happened either. And you know, there are points in his life where he's writing letters and it's it's almost like Willie Loman, you know, he keeps thinking that something good is going to happen. These opportunities are going to open up in Florida or Cuba or somewhere in Nevada, and

they never do. And yeah, so. The Hondigan Fishing thing is an interesting, again, overlap with him in Bo Jackson, who you wouldn't, you know, is this sort of avid bow hunter. And I wonder if it was the solitude of it because they both seem like very introverted figures. That's something you talk a lot about in the book. He was not the gregarious sort of celebrity athlete who soaked up the spotlight. He had every opportunity to, but that doesn't seem to be who he was.

No, he only did it when he had to stay alive, like be a greeter in a bar or something, or earlier the expectations of what an Indian should do, which is perform in the stereotypes that white society expected of them, do these half-time Indian shows and things like that. But that wasn't what he wanted to do or be. And he was much happier just off by himself or with his buddies hunting and fishing.

The other historical character that I was thinking about sort of related to him, and I guess I don't know if they ever met me, but you would. But I guess a major tailor would have been about what 10 years older than Thorpe, another one of those sort of transcendent athletes that the system choose up and spits out, and is more or less lost to history because it challenged the sort of great white hope modality of sports.

Yeah, I don't know, honestly, whether they ever met, I wouldn't doubt it. I do know that, you know, in the 1912 Olympics, aside from his teammate at Carlisle, Lewis Tawatima, the two people that was closest to where Duke Cwanaw and Howard Drew, who was a black sprinter, who would have been the fastest man in the world, but he got hurt during those Olympics. But on the boat there and afterwards, there was a small group of minority athletes, Duke's, thekes, you know, the Hawaiian swimmer

and drew the sprinter from Massachusetts, to Anima, Alex Sack-Electics, another marathon runner from Panab Scott in Maine, in Thorpe, and they sort of bonded together and they all had various ways must have felt, you know, sort of that, not isolation, but separation from the rest of the have felt, you know, sort of that, not isolation, but separation from the rest of the sort of, you know, wealthier amateurs of that era.

What was he more accepted in Europe? I know that sort of major tailor goes and just makes a fortune in France, as entertainers often did. It was seen, you know, race was just seen differently there. But how did that go for Thorpe? Was he sort of fetted about in Europe or was that a one-time thing when he was in the Olympics? It was not a one-time thing. I mean, actually the year after that, he toured the world with this New York Giants baseball team in the Chicago White Sox. And they went from Japan to China to Philippines, Australia, Egypt, and then Europe. And nobody else on those teams, even the Hall of Famers, Trist speaker and Sam Crawford, nobody knew them, everybody knew Jim Thorpe, and they wanted to see him. So he had this global name and identity that no other really American athlete of that era had.

Even the great box, you know, Dempsey or the tennis players or golfers, we're not as big as Jim Thorpe in the world in that period. He was like Muhammad Ali sort of. It must have been from what I've read, I was going to say this was in with Taylor, but then, you know, after the First World War and then the Second World War, it must have made the coming home so much harder because they had the experience, that sort of brief moment where all the baggage they were carrying and the the the caste system that they were so stuck in disappears for that brief moment. And they're seen for what they are, which is this amazing athlete and this interesting

person and this hero and equal and peer. And then they come home and they're just quickly reminded like you're lower than the lowest white person. Well, Ryan, that's been true throughout American history. Yes. I mean, it happened to Wilma Rudolph in Rome in 1960. She came home and her hometown wanted to have a segregated banquet in her honor. You know, it happened to all the soldiers of World War II who came home after fighting

her liberty and democracy and then had to face a Jim Crow segregation. And it certainly happened to Jim Thorpe after he came back, yeah, absolutely. It's kind of, yeah, there's this, if you think about, so he's, he's one of the few that break through, right? You think about how many incredibly talented athletes were born that never got that shot or decided it wasn't worth it. Yeah, again, not just the loss of the footage of the moments he was in, but the sort of invisible graveyard of other brilliantly talented people that these attitudes have cost, the world, but America specifically for generations.

You know, one interesting aspect to that is the difference between African Americans and Native Americans and the way that white society perceived them, so that, you know, Thorpe could play major league baseball, right? In a time when no baseball player could. He could go to the deep south, Jim Crow South, and give speeches at a time when the only blacks at a touchdown club would be the waiters. And the difference is largely that for a lot of different historical reasons, Native Americans faced

genocide big time and then serious discrimination, but it was different because white America romanticized Indians from the very beginning, even when they were killing them. As I write in the first chapter of the book, comparing Thorpe with Blackhawk, who was his ancestor in many ways, in the Second Fox Nation and the same clan. You know, when Blackhawk was captured after the Blackhawk war, White Society went nuts to see him, right?

And sort of everybody, the press throughout the country covered his travels through these coasts as a prisoner of war, the press throughout the country covered his travels through these coast as a prisoner of war, including the Southern newspapers, that never would have done that for an African-American. So, you know, both discriminated against in horrible ways, but there was this difference in that from the beginning, white society also romanticized Indians. Could he have passed as white? Was that part of it too?

Like did he, was it sort of, I mean, from the photo, you know, like I'm saying, it looks like. I'm saying no, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was lighter skinned than, he had a twin brother who died sadly at age nine in one of those Indian boarding schools

who had darker skin than Jim, but no, all of his features show that he was a Native American. I don't think he could have passed in that sense, but yet Native Americans and his status as an athlete, all of that helped him sort of at least maneuver within white society in ways that blacks could not.

Yeah, for whatever reason, the convoluted insane logic of a white supremacist system make an exception, or he's outside that system, he doesn't clearly sit here or there in the hierarchy, and then you look for excuses. When it benefits you also, I have to imagine in a system like that, there are probably lots of people that looked like Jim Thorpe that experienced a much worse version of America at that time. Probably could not travel so easily in the South

or somewhere else. Yeah, no doubt that his status helped him in that regard, but he suffered enough himself. So that was plenty. Well, how do you think about that? That's one of the fascinating parts of American culture, particularly in these sort of minority communities, which is the person who is so mistreated and underappreciated in that system, endures it with this kind of dignity and poise.

And puts up with it as a wrong word. It's just, you know, it is, it takes, I guess, it's surreal to watch someone endure with quiet dignity, what he endures when he had every incentive or reason to say like, I'm going to live in Sweden now. You know what I mean? As someone like Al Roberson and other talented African Americans would do, yeah. Yeah, I think that in that sense, Thorpe was sort of emblematic of all Native Americans. I mean, they endured these horrific things in the Indian boarding schools,

where they were subjected to the worst kind of forced assimilation, where there were efforts to get them to lose their religion and culture and language, and cut their hair and dress them in the uniforms of the US Calvary, you know, that killed their ancestors, all of that. And yet so many of them, the ones who didn't die, figured out how to survive and actually prevail.

And so, you know, so many of their descendants became the lawyers and doctors and activists who have helped the Native Americans not just preserve their race but prevail. And when Jim Farp was at the height of his fame in 1915, the most famous statue in America was called the end of the trail, which I write about. This Indian slumped on horseback and the notion is, this is the end. Manifest destiny is prevailed. Indians are archaic, they're on their way out, they're dying, and that really didn't happen. What I'm saying is they figured out ways to game the system enough and survive in it, that they were able to get through it for the better.

Did Jim throw a bit of a play lacrosse? Yeah, he did. He didn't play it, he didn't play it in the organized way that Jim Brown did in a later generation. But, and he was too busy. You know, I mean, he was playing football or track and field at the same time

with a little cross season. So, he did manage to play baseball and track and field at the same time for Carlyle. And he did play lacrosse just, you know, and he was great at it, but it was not an organized sport for him. Yeah, I was there's this new ESPN plus documentary about PLL, the the premiere of the Cross League. And if a big chunk of it focuses on this guy, Lyle Thompson, who's like one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time, his native Native American, he's sort of inherent in this whole tradition of playing it where they make their own gear

and stuff. There is a long standing sort of sporting community inside Native, the Native American reservations. I guess probably because, you know, like it's always been in sports, there's not a lot of other avenues for advancement. Yeah, I would say that today that's reflected most in basketball and volleyball. And, you know, there are a lot of great women athletes, professional volleyball players from the reservations, really good basketball, you know, in Arizona and the decodas and elsewhere, more than football. But in Thurps era, football was seen, you know, in those boarding schools, it was seen as part of the assimilation process, right?

The great teams were the upper class teams in the East Coast. And so, you know, part of the reason Carlisle had emphasized football was to sort of introduce them to that white society. Sure. Yeah. And then that's what puts you suddenly on the same field as the kids at West Point. It's kind of an equalizing ticket to a level of society that you're not normally going to have access to. And Harvard and Yale and Princeton, yes. That must have been surreal, too, the different stratosphere economically, culturally, academically that suddenly Thorpe is rubbing shoulders with or more or less driving them into the ground on the field must have been, it must have been strange. Well, it was certainly an incentive. Yeah. So that game against West Point in 1912, where you know, that was, that was, you know,

for my research, I went up to the Binake library at Yale where not only does it have the papers of Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlyle School, but also of the great Native American novelist, M. Scott Momodei, and he wrote quite, you know, he was really fascinated by Carlisle and wrote a screenplay that was never produced about it in a play. And he really sort of focused on that game against West Point in 1912 as sort of, you know, the, the level playing field

at last, you know, after, after, you know, the, the Indians ancestors have been killed by the army. You know, here they finally got to compete against them on a level playing field and crushed them 27 to 6. I don't know if you've seen the show Ted Lasso, but there's that scene in the first season where the, you know, the sort of Midwestern football coach goes overseas. He's teaching soccer or he's coaching soccer and he goes to one of the players who's African, I forget which country, but he's sort of hands him this little green army man as like a token of good luck. And the guy goes, where I come from, this is not a positive image or figure.

He's like, can you keep this, right? And that, you know, that must, you're right. You talk about the boys at the Carlisle School being forced to wear these, you know, Calvary uniforms. I've got to imagine there was a different kind of feeling fighting the officers at West Point. In some cases, it was not, it was those boys' father. Like, you know, MacArthur grows up on MacArthur grows up on a frontier army base.

It was those boys' fathers that he was playing against or were even in the stands. Absolutely. And Custer's tomb is there, a mile away from where they were playing. All of that is true. And of course, there's this great contradiction and paradox to the whole thing, which was the the kind of Indian athletes were incredibly popular wherever they went. You know, they were exotic. They were not just good, but they were different. Sure. And that was part of the attraction. And yet,

they were playing for a school that was trying to rid them of that very heritage, you know, that was right to the school. So, yes. Right, you have that horrible sort of motto in the book of Indian policy at that time. Kill the Indian, save the man. That was what it was all about. Yes. And it was thought by the founders, Pratt and the government, and so many of the people who supported the school, that they were doing good, that they were saving the Indians who had been suffering from genocide before that,

and that the only way they could survive was by becoming white, is that the only way they could survive was by becoming white, sort of the unwitting unintended consequences of do-gooders of that era to try to rid them of their entire culture. Yeah, this is the natural extension of the sort of white man's burden. These people are coming from a good place and that they were, you know, probably unlike most of society, is utterly indifferent to the suffering and pain of these communities. These people are at least trying to do something, but they're so fundamentally stained by the racism and the supremacy of their culture that they can't see that they are committing a different form of genocide, a less violent

form of genocide by their very methods. You know, that was so true in various levels of grievance, but, um, you know, I mean, even the the the sports writers, they thought they were being sympathetic to the carlile, you know, and they basically supported Jim Thorpe throughout his life and thought he'd been done wrong. Yeah. And yet all of the stories talked about, they called every Native American athlete chief, and every story had scalping and people going on the war path. But it was just so ingrained into the white culture that they didn't even think twice about what they were doing. Well, yeah, that's the, that's the, that's the, what the, the reversal of that famous sports

writer line about, about Floyd Patterson, a credit to his race, the human race. Like, they, they was so, the trope of seeing black athletes as different and being held to different standards and rules. That's what that quote is playing against. Yeah. And it's certainly played against Jim Thorpe and all of his teammates throughout it. Native American teammates throughout his career. So when you study the life of one of these people, it must be strange.

You sort of so immerse yourself. Do they become almost real to you? Like is there a grieving process when you leave the book or do they live forever with you? How does that go? Well, it depends on the character. I mean, after Clinton was my first biography, Bill Clinton, and he was exhausting. I mean, fascinating, but difficult and exhausting. So I was kind of glad to get away from there, you know, for a while. But yeah, what happens is, and this started with Clinton, and I think it was important lesson for me because, you know, that was a

political, he was a political figure. It was my first biography, and there are chapters in the book where I found a very admirable when he was like a young law professor at Arkansas really saving the first wave of black law students there and chapters where I found him not at all, not pitiful and I didn't like him and so as I was finishing that book, I really beat myself up and said, you know, what is it? This is a biography. Do you like the sky or not? And then I realized that he was that duality,

you couldn't separate the two. And that was him. And that's the way most human beings are to one degree or another. He perhaps more so than others. And that he's a character in my book. And I have to appreciate that whatever he's doing to try to understand it. And that's really has helped me through all of my biographies. I do become obsessed with them. You know, at one

point, I can't remember which biography it was, but I was driving with my wife Linda and going up the street and I made a left turn, but not onto a side street, but into a fire station. And she literally slapped me and said, David, what chapter are you on? That's how it does become that intense, you know? And I am living with these characters and they do stay with the, until the next one comes

along and sort of takes over the obsession. Because I imagine what you really love is the process less than the specific person. It's the process of the immersion and the solving the equation of both the enigma who they are but the equation of like how does the book actually work and go and what's in it, what's not in it? Exactly. I do. Luckily, I love all of that, trying to figure it out. And, um, you know, some, some, uh, the figures I've written about, uh, I like in the end more than others. I mean, I think Clemente was to me the one figure I wrote about who I was a little afraid of because I admired him so much, you know, but I ended up thinking the same way about him.

Thorpe is close and the interesting thing about the Thorpe book is that most people who've read at C and especially, and this was what would worry me, you know, I spent a month or two before I even started the real book just talking to Native American scholars to see if I can figure it out. And if I was the right person to do it. And just as, you know, at the National Book Festival, my interlocutor was Kevin Gover who was the head of the National Museum of American Indians, and had been the head of the Indian Bureau and was a pawnie from Oklahoma.

And at the end, he thanked me for my understanding of it, and that meant an enormous amount to me. You know, that I'm trying to sort of get inside these people, be honest about everything about them, their talents and their flaws, but from a sympathetic, humanistic viewpoint. And so that's where I came out on Jim Thorpe. And a few people have read and said, I don't like this guy, but very few. And that says more about what they brought into the book than what everybody brings in their own life into a book, a reading of a book. So I didn't worry about that, but the people that I really cared about understood

what I was trying to do. Well, to go to the idea of sort of loving the process of it, it's kind of, I imagine similar to where an athlete comes out. I remember Lance Armstrong said to me once that he hated racing. He only likes practicing. And the racing was what they paid him for. And as an author, I think you have to like writing more than you like publishing. Oh, totally. I mean, the whole process after I'm done with the book is just anxiety. First, you know, what are the, what are the reviews gonna be like? Is it gonna sell? Are people gonna understand it?

And then, and that exhaust you, you know, traveling around, well, this, the, my publisher is almost treating this book like COVID doesn't exist. I mean, I'm literally traveling to 22 different events, you know, and- I'm doing that this month myself. And that's exhausting. Um, so, but, but everything before that, I mean, I, I grew up in a newspaper family. I love to write. I don't get Raiders block. Unless I haven't done the research,

which is what you learn as a trained journalist, you know, get the story first. Um, and if you, if you're And if you're having trouble writing it, it's because you don't have the story. So I love the process of going there and getting the material and finding little pieces of gold and archives, and then putting it all together. All of that, I enjoy thoroughly. It's what I do in life, you know. I'm kind of

disorganized in other parts of my life, my wife would say, but for a book, I know how to do it, and I love doing it. Well, as we wrap up sort of a publishing slash sports question, you have a very touching dedication at the beginning of the book to Alice Mehu. Having written about great coaches and great athletes, what do you feel like a great editor like her was able to do? Because she worked with essentially every great biographer and nonfiction writer of the second half of the 20th century. What did she do? I was her secret. What if you were doing the Lombardi style book about her?

What's the story there? You know, she had this graphic, graphic exterior, but just like Lombardi did. But she knew exactly how to treat every individual writer. And with me, she knew I was sensitive and that I knew how to do it on my own. And so her main function with me was larger discussions about the larger meaning of my books and letting me figure out all of the details. She didn't really edit the books in that sense, but she edited me in a larger sense.

And she was incredibly encouraging. And always sort of wanting to talk about the issues of the book. And understanding that I was one of those writers that didn't really need her to come in and pencil edit a book, but I did love the whole process of talking about it with her. And then she was fiercely defending anything I did after that, you know, and pushing it and really believing

in me and giving me the encouragement that made a lot of difference. Yeah, writers unlike athletes are more like, I guess, lone wolves. So it's probably closer to like a great golf instructor or something of the party figure. You know? Yeah, you know exactly. I mean, totally lone wolves. I mean, that was one of the great things about COVID

is it didn't, I mean, it affected my travel some, but I could sit in my office anyway and write 12 hours a day, you know? So, and I was alone, except for talking on the phone to friends or stuff like that, or hanging out with my wife. It was closer to what we should be doing every day, as opposed to disrupting what we normally do every day.

It's like, oh, I mean, I really realized how much of my time is spent traveling, you know, when I went without before COVID, or just doing things that, you know, that I didn't really have to do. And so for this book, you know, it was a plus and a minus, a plus that I didn't get to Stockholm. I mean, a minus, but plus in that that I really was able to focus almost entirely on what I was doing. Yeah, it's like people, I remember, as the pandemic started to wane a little bit, people are like, are you going back to the grocery store? And I was like, never again in my life. I just, like, I learned, I learned just how much, or I was letting ordinary things that are actually quite

getting ordinary things that are actually quite delegatable, take up chunks of my time and the opportunity costs when I did a book during COVID and it was five times easier than normally doing a book. I was like, Oh, man, I've been, I've been white knuckling it for no reason. Let's say with me exactly. Well, I loved not just this book, but the Clinton book and the Lombardi book. And so it's been an honor to talk with you. And I think this one was wonderful.

And I encourage everyone to read it. Thank you, Ryan. I really enjoyed the naturalness of this conversation. Thanks for listening to The Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The app goes away. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key. The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com.

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