Undefeated

Sheinkin, Steve. Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team. 
New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2017.

Long before there was a National Football League, there were college teams, the  "big four" of that early twentieth century time being Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. One of their chief rivals was a team from the Carlisle Indian School, in Carlisle Pennsylvania, and their most famous player, Jim Thorpe. 

Undefeated tells Jim Thorpe's story, while also shining a light on the cruelty of the U.S. Government's misguided attempt to "educate" Native American students by, essentially, erasing their culture. Life at Carlisle was difficult, at times brutal. Thorp tried to escape more than once. Football became the outlet for his remarkable physical abilities, as well as his rage. 

The book includes some fascinating "out-takes" from college football history, such as Thorpe breaking away from an attempted tackle by two future American war heroes, Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower, in a game against Army. It also tells the story of Thorpe's incredible feats in the 1912 Olympics in Sweden, where he won gold medals for both the pentathlon and the decathlon. In a racially based move by the USA's Amateur Athletic Union, however, he was stripped of those medals because he had spent summers earning money by playing for minor league baseball teams. He was not the only "amateur" athlete to have done so, but he made the mistake of playing under his own name. 70 years later, those medals were restored. 

Steve Sheinkin is a master at bringing to vivid life the stories of important characters in our nation's history. Undefeated is a fascinating read as well as an insight into the origin of many of the issues that continue to affect our lives in the United States today.