Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe was an American athlete who belonged to the Sac and Fox Nation and became the first Native American to win Olympic gold for the United States. He grew up in Indian Territory and attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where he played football under coach Pop Warner and earned All-American honors three times. At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, he took gold in both the pentathlon and decathlon, and his decathlon record lasted nearly twenty years. He then played six seasons of Major League Baseball and joined the Canton Bulldogs, helping them win three professional championships. From 1920 to 1921, he was nominally the American Professional Football Association's first president. He also barnstormed as a professional basketball player and appeared in several films. In 1950, an Associated Press poll of sportswriters and broadcasters chose him as the greatest athlete of the 20th century's first 50 years.