>> Kevin Gover: Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us. It's my honor to be here with David Maraniss. David, let's get right to it. So Jim Thorpe has been biographied before. Why did you choose him as a subject for your latest book? >> David Maraniss: Well, I sort of think of this as the third book in a trilogy of sports figures who transcend sports. The first was Vince Lombardi, who not only was a great football coach but also represented the mythology of competition and success in American life and what it takes and what it costs. The second was Roberto Clemente, the beautiful ballplayer who also so many athletes are called heroes, and very few are. But he really was in the way he lived his life and the way he died delivering humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after an earthquake dying in a plane crash. And so Thorpe seemed to me the natural third part of that trilogy in that he not only was a stunning athlete but also offered me the opportunity through his life to explore the Native American experience from 1887 to his death in 1953, such critical years in the lives of all Native Americans. And I want to say, first of all, Kevin, I'm honored to have you be my interlocutor. It's really means a lot to me. >> Kevin Gover: So 1887 and 1953, whereas you point out very important in the history of federal Indian policy and you describe it in your book. >> David Maraniss: Well, 1887. I mean, just, you know, I don't know how these things happened, but the year Jim Thorpe was born was one of the crucial years in the government policy towards Native American Indians in that it was the passage of the Dawes Act, which was really an effort to take away the whole sense of communal property that Native Americans had and send them on to small parcels of land that were often even then taken away from them. And they had to prove over 25 years so they deserved to have that land So that was part of this long process of sort of trying to turn Indians into white people in different ways, and that's the start of it, and Jim Thorpe endured that in so many different ways throughout his life. >> Kevin Gover: Indeed. And then, in 1953, the less benign name termination policy was enacted. >> David Maraniss: Right, which was the same thing trying to terminate reservation life and that whole sense of that, luckily. That one didn't prevail in the end. >> Kevin Gover: But yes. So if I started reciting all the things I did not know, we'd be here until midnight. Black Hawk. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, Black Hawk. I start the book sort of with a parallelism between Black Hawk and Jim Thorpe because they were both from the same tribe, the Sac and Fox nation. They're both from the same clan or band of the Sac and Fox the Thunder. And it's a little bit unclear whether Jim Thorpe was actually a descendant of Black Hawk, but there's some indications that Black Hawk's great niece was Jim Thorpe's grandmother. In any case, Jim Thorpe's mother often told him that he was the reincarnation of Black Hawk. And what I really found fascinating was a way to explore how both of these famous men Native Americans were treated by white society. Black Hawk in 1833 after the 1832 Black Hawk War, so that was called. It was really a massacre of the Sac and Fox when Black Hawk tried to lead about 1000 members of his tribe back over the Mississippi into their homeland, and the military chased them back and killed many of them. Interestingly three future presidents were involved in that action on the government side. That was another little factoid that shocked me. Abraham Lincoln, of course, was in the Illinois militia. Zachary Taylor was an officer based in producing and fighting against Black Hawk, and Jefferson Davis worked under the president of the Confederate States of America worked under Taylor and actually took Black Hawk down to Saint Louis after he was captured. In any case, once Black Hawk was captured, he was taken east, and he became sort of an iconic figure in white America wherever he was taken as a prisoner of war. Huge crowds would come out. Black Hawkiana, they called it. And he was -- and that represented sort of the notion of Indians being romanticized and diminished at the same time. And I found that paralleling that trip of Black Hawk to Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Washington DC and Norfolk and up to New York was paralleled with Jim Thorpe after the greatest moment of his career, after he'd won the Olympic gold medals in 1912 being taken on parades to New York and Philadelphia and Carlisle. And he wasn't a prisoner of war, but he was a prisoner of fame, and they were both sort of equally being romanticized and diminished and mythologized. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah, yeah. So path lit by lightning. >> David Maraniss: Well, Jim Thorpe was born in May of 1887. The story is that there was a thunderstorm the night that he and actually he was a twin, which is another thing people don't realize. He had a twin brother Charlie who sadly died at age nine in one of the boarding schools of a disease. But anyway, the night they were born along the North Canadian River in Oklahoma, there was a thunderstorm. And Jim Thorpe was given the Sac and Fox name Wa-Tho-Huk which often is translated as Bright Path. But I also saw more poetic translation, which was path lit by lightning. And as soon as I saw that, I said that illuminates everything. And that's how I chose it as the title of my book. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah, great name. So Jim Thorpe is like a great many Native Americans at that time in history is raised in very difficult circumstances. But eventually, he ends up at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. >> David Maraniss: That was the third boarding school he went to. First he was sent to the Sac and Fox School in Stroud, Oklahoma, then to Haskell. He kept running away from both of those, and eventually, his father, who was kind of a ruffian and had five wives and 18 children altogether, and the wife he was married to at that point, Jim's mother, had died. She didn't want anything to do with Jim. So they sent him as far away as possible to Carlisle. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School which was the flagship government school of all of the scores of Indian boarding schools in this nation. And it was founded in 1879, only three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Most of the first students were Lakota Sioux whose fathers had fought against Custurd and been in many of the Indian wars of the mid-19th century. And Luther Standing Bear was one of those young Sioux, and he later wrote a book about all of his experiences. And he said that he thought he was going east to die. To show his bravery and die. The motto of that boarding school was Kill the Indians Save the Man. That was the notion of the founder Richard Henry Pratt who actually thought he was doing good. He thought he was sort of saving the Indians from the genocide of the past and that the only way they could survive was by being forcibly thoroughly assimilated and acculturated into white society. It was a cruel and traumatic process for many of the Indians who were sent there of that first group and the succeeding groups that came, especially in the early years of that boarding school. Many of them died. They did literally die at the school. The most haunting experience of my research was going up to Carlisle, where much of the school is still there, although it's now the Army War College, and the Indian cemetery is there. And to look at those crosses and gravesites of young Indians who are taken there against their will mostly and died in that process was really haunting experience. So that's the school that Jim Thorpe and about 8000 young Native Americans over the course of that school's existence endured. >> Kevin Gover: It seems an odd place for a college football team. >> David Maraniss: Well, you know, it does. And, you know, Kevin, it wasn't really a college. It was an industrial school. Yet it had a fabulous football team that played against the big football powers of that era, which was in Alabama. And LSU in Oklahoma. It was Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Penn and West Point. But as part of the, I would say the acculturation process, in a sense, they thought that football which was this eastern elite sport in that era, would help the young native athletes be acculturated even more. So they had a brilliant football coach, brilliant in football if not in other ways as we'll get to Pop Warner, who was taking these really great athletes, maybe even before Thorpe got there and devising this system he was one of the early innovators of the forward pass. It was only legalized in 1905, and of different formations, the single wing, the double wing formation, all of these fascinating formations, and he also loved to develop trick plays. I love the fact that in that early era of football, Warner devised sort of a kangaroo pocket for one of his players and would hide the football in there, and nobody knew where it was. He also had a play. Imagine this today where the line-up and end way by the sideline, and he'd go around the opposition bench and come out on the other side to catch a forward pass. Anyway, that was the football of that era. But yes, Carlisle was playing against the great teams of college football in that era and beating them thoroughly. >> Kevin Gover: Including famously the team from West Point. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, I consider that game in November of 1912 the greatest act of athletic retribution in American history. I mean, here it was on the plains of West Point before Myki Stadium was built, and it was the Indians against the army, and it was a level playing field at last, and it was Jim Thorpe and Gus Welch and just a fabulous Carlisle Indian team against the West Point team that had Dwight Eisenhower playing linebacker, Omar Bradley on the bench, and the Indians won 27 to 6. And Eisenhower and one of his teammates before the game, this was, I mean, football has always been a violent sport. It was even more violent then. So Eisenhower would acknowledge that he and a teammate were plotting before the game started on how to knock Jim Thorpe out of the game because Thorpe was the greatest player in America. And they actually did have one play where they hit him high and low, and there was a collision. And Thorpe was laid low on the ground, but he got up and kept playing, and soon he knocked Dwight Eisenhower out of the game. Eisenhower would later say, "Yeah, I tackled Jim Thorpe once," meaning once in the whole game. [laughter] >> Kevin Gover: So that came just a few months after Stockholm. >> David Maraniss: Yes. >> Kevin Gover: And how did Jim Thorpe end up in Stockholm? >> David Maraniss: Well. First of all, he was the greatest all-around athlete. So he was not only playing football for Carlisle, but he was also their track star. And again, the Carlisle track team was also dominant, so much so that Jim Thorpe, who could compete in events of all sorts, you know, the motto of the Olympics is, it involves jumping, running, and throwing weights, and he could do all of those things. And he and his teammate, Lewis Tawana a Hopi an Indian who was a long-distance runner could literally beat entire track teams by themselves. So both of them competed in the tryouts to go to Stockholm, and they were selected. They went over with Pop Warner, who was their coach, and Jim Thorpe dominated there. Imagine competing in 17 events in two weeks which is what he did because the decathlon is ten events. The pentathlon, which is a shorter version of that, is five events. And he also competed in the high jump and long jump, and he won two gold medals during that period. And during one period of the decathlon competition, he couldn't find his shoes. The sort of mythology is that they were stolen. I couldn't document that. I don't, really-- Anyway, he misplaced them probably. So he had to find some shoes to wear to compete in the high jump. And they found these mismatched pair of shoes. One was bigger than the other. And there's literally photos of Thorpe wearing those shoes having to wear two extra thick pairs of socks on one shoe to make it work, and he still won the event. So that was at the end of those Olympics. King Gustaf, the fifth of Sweden, the sponsors of those Olympics, was handing out the medals and trophies. And when Thorpe came up, he said, "You, sir, are the most wonderful athlete in the world," to which the mythology is. Thorpe responded, "thanks, King." Which is funny, but it's also a little bit, I don't know, condescending in a way that he didn't know any better. He really just said thank you. But anyway, he was the greatest athlete in the world at that point; world famous. >> Kevin Gover: Indeed. And so brings this to mind. You talk about some of the mythology around Jim Thorpe. One of the myths I heard as a kid growing up in Oklahoma was that for one track meet, they arrived at the stadium, and it was just Pop Warner and Jim Thorpe. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, that's one of the myths. And the other one is it's Pop Warner Jim Thorpe And Tawana. In any case, it's not true. But it might as well have been because they won all the events, yes. >> Kevin Gover: So let's talk about Pop Warner, then. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, well, so as I said, he was an incredibly innovative, brilliant coach but not a reputable human being. You know, his coaching, he became so famous at Carlisle and then at Pitt where he won two national championships and then at Stanford that he's in the College Football Hall of Fame. Some of you might know that youth football is the Pop Warner League, but when you really study what he did at Carlisle, it's not so good. I mean, that's putting it mildly. There was a congressional investigation in 1914 of the school, and among the many things it found was that Warner was betting on games selling tickets in the lobbies, and mentally and physically abusing his players, many of whom turned on him at that point. And then, at the critical moment of Jim Thorpe's life after those Olympics, when his medals were taken away from him, Pop Warner lied to save his own reputation. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah. Talk a little more about that. So in early 1913, the not-so-secret fact that Jim Thorpe had played minor league baseball comes to light. >> David Maraniss: Not so secret, is right. He had played Bush League Baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for two summers, 1909 and 1910. For about two bucks a game or $30 a month. And scores of college athletes were playing minor league baseball then but using aliases to preserve their amateurism. So Dwight Eisenhower, again Eisenhower played in the Kansas State League under the name Wilson. The Eastern Carolina League, where Thorpe played for the Rocky Mountain Railroaders and the Fayetteville Highlanders had so many college players playing under aliases that, it was called the Pocahontas League because everyone was named John Smith. [laughter] Jim Thorpe played under the name Jim Thorpe. He never tried to hide it. His name was in the papers from Charlotte to Raleigh to all the small towns of that league for those two summers, and there are several key factors here. One is that all of the powerful white figures who were involved in Jim losing his medals knew exactly what he was doing, starting with Pop Warner, his coach who had been sending Carlisle Indian athletes to play baseball for years whose close associate in Pennsylvania was the scout who brought Jim and two of his teammates down to Rocky Mount, who met with Thorpe at least twice during the period when Jim was away from school playing baseball. Once they went hunting in Oklahoma together, you think that Warner didn't ask well, why aren't you at school right now? Anyway, after the story broke that Jim Thorpe had played baseball, the story broke in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the Worcester Telegram in January of 1913. It had been in the papers in Carolina for years, but a reporter in Worcester heard that one of Jim's former managers was in town in Worcester, Massachusetts, and had talked about how he had managed Jim Thorpe. So then he wrote the story. It became a big deal. It got to New York. Warner was asked about it he denied he knew anything about it. He was just lying. James E. Sullivan, the head of the Amateur Athletic Union and the head of the American Olympic Committee, and on the Board of Advisors of the Carlisle Athletic Association, he knew, and he, too, lied about it to save his reputation. The superintendent at Carlisle, Moses Freedman, who there documents of letters he'd sent to Thorpe urging him not to play baseball. He lied and said he didn't know about it. Pop Warner even wrote Thorpe's letter of confession, and in it, in the most condescending way, he basically made the argument in Jim Thorpe's words that, he was just an ignorant Indian and didn't know any better. So in all of those ways, Pop Warner was disreputable and disappointing, as were the other people who basically just saw Thorpe as an easy target. Now there are two other aspects to the whole amateurism part of it. One is technical that in the Olympic rules, it said that to have a challenge to someone's amateurism, the challenge had to be filed within 30 days of the end of the Olympics. The story in the Worcester Telegram broke six months afterward. So it's too late. Which Sweden even said when Sullivan and Warner and everybody sent the medals back. They said too late. But it persisted in the-- The International Olympic Committee eventually agreed with them and took the medals away. So that's technical. But morally, it was more reprehensible not just for the reasons of the hypocrisy of those people but also the whole notion of amateurism was a sham. Another member of the 1912 Olympic team was George S. Patton, the future general. He competed in the modern pentathlon, which was a group of military events target shooting, fencing equestrian. He was paid by the US Army to practice for those events. Was that amateurism or professionalism? Jim Thorpe played baseball which had nothing to do with the events he was in. The entire Swedish team was let on leave from their jobs for six months before the Olympics to train for the Olympics, but they're getting full pay from their jobs to do that. Is that amateurism or professionalism? So in so many ways, Jim Thorpe was just the fall guy, the victim of all of that sham of amateurism. >> Kevin Gover: And that sort of brings us to Avery Brundage. >> David Maraniss: Yes. >> Kevin Gover: And again, something I never knew. Avery Brundage competed in the 1912 Olympics. >> David Maraniss: For those of you who don't know Avery Brundage was then the future president of the US Olympic Committee and then the International Olympic Committee for decades. And I always envisioned him as this sort of fat cat plutocrat, right? Traveling the world and staying at posh hotels. And well, he was a decathlete himself. A mediocre one, but he competed in the 1912 Olympics against Jim Thorpe. Thorpe defeated him so overwhelmingly that Brundage, you know, the avatar of amateurism and just compete. And it doesn't matter whether you win or what nation you're from. Well, Brundage was so humiliated he quit after eight events. Anyway, that was the beginning of that relationship which then, as Brundage rose to power for decades, he consistently denied Jim Thorpe his justice is due and refused to give back the medals and records. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah. So after the Olympics, these days, you win the decathlon and the pentathlon, you're on the cover of Wheaties Box, and you're making lots of money from endorsements. So did that happen for Jim Thorpe? >> David Maraniss: Not quite. You know, I mean, a baseball player decides today for 240 million bucks, right? Well, Jim Thorpe, after he lost his amateur status, did sign to play baseball with the New York Giants for $5000. He later played professional football, making about $300 a game. He was never able to make the money out of athletics that modern athletes do. So that was always a struggle for him, but he was still world famous. So one of the reasons that he was signed to play baseball for the New York Giants was because, at the end of that 1913 season, they were going to go on a world tour with the White Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Giants, and the White Sox. They went to Japan and China and Philippines, Australia, Egypt, and Europe. And there are a lot of famous American baseball figures on that tour, including John McGraw, the manager of the Giants, and Charles Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, and a lot of Hall of Famers. But the rest of the world didn't know any of them. They knew one person on that tour Jim Thorpe. So wherever they went, everybody wanted to see Jim Thorpe. And he maintained even as he lost those medals and it chafed against him for the rest of his life, he never lost that fame and admiration from the world. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah. So one of the things that struck me I had no idea how mobile he was. He saw the world. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, he did. He saw the world in 1913. All of those places. He saw it again at age 57. In World War II he joined the Merchant Marines. He wanted to participate in World War II or his -- of his four sons, they were all involved in the military. He wanted to join them. The army wouldn't take him even though he was great with rifles. So he joined the merchant Marines and saw the world again went through the Suez Canal for a second time. I mean through Egypt for the second time. And in America, after his athletic career was over, he was constantly struggling to find footing. And he lived I documented in 20 different states. He took jobs ranging from, at one point digging ditches in Los Angeles during the heat of the Depression to serving as a greeter in bars and taverns to working for the Chicago Athletic Youth Association, to the most interesting period, I think, was when he was in Los Angeles and he was on the fringes of the Hollywood studio industry and was an actor in about 70 movies. He was directed by John Ford and Frank Capra. He was acting with all of the famous Hollywood stars of that era. But most importantly, and that was in that period that he sort of found his identity again as a leader of Native Americans and really helped organize them to get the jobs in all of the Westerns as Indians, which were going to white people dressed in greasepaint. And he said hire us. And he really became the spokesman for that as well as fighting to get sort of the stereotypes the negative stereotypes in those movies removed. >> Kevin Gover: In a phenomenon that is not entirely ended. >> David Maraniss: Actually, yes. >> Kevin Gover: There was a line in your book that really rang huge for me. You pointed out the duality of honoring his ancestry while performing as a white man's version of an Indian was a situation Jim had dealt with his entire adult life. >> David Maraniss: Well, he certainly did at Carlisle, you know, where these the Carlisle Indian team was the most popular team traveling. They didn't play at home. They played at all the other places. And so here you have these exotic Indians playing against all these teams for a school that's trying to rid them of their Indianness, right? And then in the professional ranks, you know, he played for two years for unbelievably there was an NFL team called the Oorang Indians based in this small town in Ohio, and they would have to perform at halftime all of these in headdresses and just different rope tricks and all of this. It was a constant in his life the expectations of Indians playing the stereotypes of what whites thinks of Indians. And most of the-- he and his teammates and colleagues all understood that dichotomy. And they would play to it but understand what was going on and trying to take advantage of it in different ways without the white people knowing what they were doing. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah, that was always some. That became clear to people like me that seeing what they were doing and going now, why would they? You compared it to minstrelsy at one point. Why would they do that? But as you think about it and know the circumstances under which they were living at the time and how people viewed Indians, you began to see it and understand it a little bit. So I thought that was enormously insightful. So we're going to run out of time before too long. And I don't want to miss this question. How did Burt Lancaster end up playing Jim Thorpe? [laughter] >> David Maraniss: Well, he's a movie star, not an Indian, right? He was 37 years old. This was 1951. A movie was made called Jim Thorpe All-American, and it had starred Burt Lancaster. And it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who was better known for directing Casablanca. And, you know, they were-- in that era, even today, it's hard to know. I mean, it's starting to happen with Rez Dogs and some other great things that are organically Native American. But in that era, they needed a movie star. So it was Burt Lancaster. So he's 37 years old, playing Jim Thorpe starting at age 16, for starters. But Lancaster was a good athlete. Give him that. So he couldn't do the pole vault but neither really could Thorpe because Thorpe was too big. The pole vault would break, but he did a lot of the athletic parts of it himself and trained for it. It's a sympathetic movie. You know, many people that I've talked to about Thorpe have said either one of two things. Either oh, I read about him in fourth grade, or oh, I saw the movie, and that got me fascinated in his life. So to that extent, great. But the movie itself, like most biopics, is completely wrong in almost every small respect. You know, it has these big mountains in Oklahoma, right? I mean, among many other things. But it's also wrong in one crucial respect, which is that the narrator of the movie is Pop Warner. He's the white savior. He's the one who comes to Jim's, you know, tries to shake Jim out of his trauma with the notion that, you know, Jim, if only you had listened to me and thoroughly assimilated into white society, you wouldn't have had the problems later in your life that you had. And, you know, it's just so wrong that I can't get past that to see the larger, you know, the other side of the movie, which is sympathetic to him. >> Kevin Gover: And pretty much every Indian at the time who didn't meet somebody else's expectations heard that same thing said to them. How did Jim Thorpe's body ended up residing in a mountain valley in Pennsylvania? >> David Maraniss: So this is another unbelievable story. So Jim Thorpe died of a heart attack at age 65 in Lomita, California. He was living with his third wife, then Patsy Thorpe. He had told his children that he wanted to be buried in Oklahoma or in the Sac and Fox region. He was brought back to Oklahoma and his Coffin was. there was the beginning of a Sac and Fox ceremony, you know, a very important spiritual ceremony. And Patsy Thorpe interrupted and took his coffin away because she was unhappy with how Oklahoma was going to honor him, and she eventually just sort of put him up to the highest bidder. So she took the coffin to Tulsa. Then she tried to get Pittsburgh and Philadelphia interested. And she was in Philadelphia watching television and saw a report about these two small struggling coal towns in the Pocono Mountains. Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, and she developed this scheme. She went up there and said, look, if you merge and rename yourselves, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, you can have him. you know, and she was sort of like Harold Hill in the Music Man. She also said you know, not only can you have him, but we'll have a college named Jim Thorpe, a hospital. I might open a teepee-style motel up there. We'll have the Pro Football Hall of Fame started there. None of which happened. But they did change the name to Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania, and they did get Jim Thorpe's body. I have nothing against the people there. It's not their fault, really. But he doesn't belong there. I mean, it's a mausoleum. It's a nice little park on the side of a road in a place that he'd never set foot in his entire life. >> Kevin Gover: But to this day, they resist returning the body. >> David Maraniss: Well, it went to court. His sons took filed suit, you know, based on the Museum Act, you know, bringing the artifacts back to where they belong. They won the first federal court, and then the appeals court overturned it. Supreme Court upheld this. The appeals court and so the legal part of it is over. And no, I mean Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania is taking some of its fame from him being there. They're not going to give him back. It would take an act of real integrity and moral courage for him to be returned to where he belongs in Oklahoma. I don't see it happening. >> Kevin Gover: Not soon, but one thing we know about Native Americans is they're patient. They are patient. >> David Maraniss: Well, let's hope so. Yes absolutely. >> Kevin Gover: So Jim Thorpe continues to make news. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, I had nothing to do with it, but it was pretty good timing. So he, is medals are taken away from him and then only last month, in July of this year, were all of his records finally restored after a long campaign from many people who needed France on the International Olympic Committee. Robert Wheeler and his wife, who were his earliest chroniclers, many people were, and a lot of Native American activists were fighting for this forever, and it finally happened. 110 years too late. The other way that the story is in the news is the Indian boarding schools. You know, here you had the Pope going to Canada only a few weeks ago to apologize for the way that the Catholic Church had handled Indian boarding schools over the years and the trauma of that, and we have this wonderful Secretary of the Interior Deb Holland who has made it one of her causes to study both what happened in those schools and the intergenerational trauma that ensued from that. >> Kevin Gover: And yeah, in, most of the boarding schools now are closed and good riddance. Those that remain are largely run by tribes themselves. And so, but it is a fascinating legacy because there were, as you point out, the failings were obvious, and yet the students found a way to persevere and make something of it. >> David Maraniss: And a lot of those students and their children became the lawyers and activists that have fought against that old system. Including Kevin Gover. >> Kevin Gover: Well, I will say this. I didn't go to a-- actually, I went to a boarding school. Not one of these. No, that's right. I had relatives who went to the boarding schools. But I will say that the native people who survived this period did what they had to do to survive this period and really did, in so many ways, lay the groundwork for current generations of Native people who are doctors and lawyers and museum administrators and scholars of various types and so we owe them. We owe them a profound debt. >> David Maraniss: And that's if I could say one last thing. I mean, that's the central thread of my book, in the end, is that perseverance that Thorpe emblemized personally, and that is the entire native population did as well figuring out how to survive through all of that. >> Kevin Gover: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I'll ask you to if you can quote his daughter Grace Thorpe when addressing the question of whether Jim Thorpe was great. >> David Maraniss: Well, she gave a speech in 1968 where she dealt with that question and said, first of all, I didn't. I just thought of him as a father, not as this mythological figure. But, you know, I'm terrible at remembering things precisely. But she basically took the dictionary definition of what it meant to be great. And in every possible definition of that, Jim Thorpe was. For all of the obstacles he faced, for some of his own doing it, trouble with alcohol, and he was constantly on the move. But in what he did, he was the best at what he did for a long period of time. No one could match him. And in that sense, he met the definition of greatness. >> Kevin Gover: Remarkable in magnitude degree and effectiveness. >> David Maraniss: Thank you. >> Kevin Gover: He was great. David, we're at the end of our time, but I just want to first congratulate you on a wonderful book. I would point out it was produced during COVID, which is quite extraordinary. But also to thank you very sincerely for such an insightful and sympathetic treatment of Jim Thorpe and of the native people of this period because it was a particularly dark time in many respects. And too little known, too little written about. So, thank you. >> David Maraniss: I can't say how much that means to me. Thank you.