The 2012 Summer Olympics in London will mark the 100th anniversary of Jim Thorpe’s greatest achievement: his gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the Stockholm Games.
So you would think this would be a big deal in Jim Thorpe, Pa., the small mountain town where the greatest athlete of the 20th century was buried in 1954 solely as a tourist attraction.
But it seems that no one in Jim Thorpe noticed that this is the centennial of the games that created the legend who is buried on a hill beside Route 903.
“It’s a shame, but nobody thought about it,” said Jack Kmetz, president of the Jim Thorpe Area Sports Hall of Fame in the Carbon County community. “We celebrate his birthday every year. We added another statue last year, this one of him throwing the discus, to go along with the statue of him in a football uniform.
“But there’s nothing special planned here for the 100th anniversary,” Kmetz said.
Kmetz and others who are keepers of the Jim Thorpe flame are busy doing what they can to keep the remains of the great Olympic athlete buried on that hill — and maintain the identity the town adopted more than 60 years ago.
Instead of planning the celebration of the town’s adopted namesake, they sent a lawyer to Oklahoma to interview members of the Sac and Fox tribes as part of a court case initiated by one of Thorpe’s late sons, who sought to bring his father’s body back to the family burial grounds.
Jack Thorpe filed suit in federal court in Scranton to alter what Thorpe’s widow, Patsy, had done years before. On the night before Thorpe was to be buried in Oklahoma, she took the body with a police escort and shopped it out to the highest bidder promising to change the name of its town to her husband’s.
Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, two small coal mining towns looking for an economic boost that never materialized, agreed to become the borough of Jim Thorpe.
Jack Thorpe passed away in 2011, but a judge has allowed the suit to go on with other relatives pursuing the case.
Kmetz is determined for Jim Thorpe to remain Jim Thorpe.
“He’s never been dead as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “We’ve done a lot to honor him here. When ABC Sports named him the greatest athlete of the 20th century in 2000, we had a parade for him. We were the ones that lobbied to have his picture on a Wheaties box in 2001.”
Yet the centennial year of Jim Thorpe’s greatest achievement will pass unnoticed in Jim Thorpe.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
