Jim Thorpe

A gambler with a swing straight outta’ rehab who built dimes and dollars into a distinguished career...

- Gavin Newsham

Jim Thorpe was one hell of a guy. You name it, he could do it. American football, baseball, basketball, he played the lot. He won Olympic gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 games in Stockholm. He was voted the greatest athlete of the 20th century, held places in innumerable halls of fame and even had a town named after him in Pennsylvania. Imagine, then, growing up with the same name. Those, after all, are pretty cavernous footsteps to follow in.

As a sports fan, and with a surname like his, it was inevitable that one of Elbert Thorpe’s 12 kids would be saddled with the name Jim. Eventually, the honour went to his ninth child, a boy, born on February 1, 1949. “Even today,” says Jim, “guys ask me if he was my uncle or some relative.”

Growing up in a house alongside the eighth fairway at Roxboro Country Club, North Carolina, it was nigh on impossible for Jim Thorpe and his family to not like golf, especially as his dad was the superintendent at the course. All the boys played a bit. One brother, Bill, would be good enough to go through National Qualifying while another, Chuck, played briefly on the PGA Tour and, according to Jim, was the pick of the Thorpe clan. Trouble was, Chuck drank, smoked and chased the ladies with significantly more effort than he ever expended on the range and it would be his downfall. Arnold Palmer summed him up best when he said Chuck was a player with “a million-dollar golf swing and a 10-cent brain”.

If Chuck had a million-dollar swing, then what price Jim Thorpe’s? A nickel? A quarter? On first glance, Thorpe’s action resembles the kind of agricultural swing you witness every weekend down the local municipal. With more moving parts than Kramer vs Kramer and a finishing loop so huge that it wouldn’t look out of place at Black pool Pleasure Beach, it is part Jim Furyk, part Zorro.