Steve Sheinkin, The Maestro

Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team by Steve Sheinkin

I did not realize how much I cared about college football or Jim Thorpe until I read Steve Sheinkin’s Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team (Roaring Book Press, 2017). Steve Sheinkin is a maestro.

     In Undefeated Sheinkin tells an engaging and important story, a story with several moving parts. As he conveys the big story about the Carlisle football team, he pauses to pull along other stories, many interconnected stories. The biography of Jim Thorpe. Discussions of Pop Warner, the Carlisle coach. Descriptions of the Carlisle Indian School. The rise of football.  The history of Native Americans at the start of the twentieth century.

     And he tells about each via stories that drew me in.

     The themes are also important, especially one notion that is fundamental to the book: the cultural genocide of native peoples. We experience that horror as imbedded in the lives of native children and the ugly words of people who were meant to protect them.

     “To civilize the Indian, get him into civilization. To keep him there, let him stay.” That is the motto at Carlisle Indian School. Sheinkin shares this with the reader as an event, where Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle’s founder and first administrator, has a girl shout this out to the rest of the school. The book also includes a before and after photo of one student, the before photo containing the image of the student when he came to Carlisle and the after showing him “civilized” with shorn hair and western clothes. The pictures are stark in their demonstration of the cultural genocide that took place at Carlisle. Sheinkin quietly presents the horror, allowing the reader to take in the magnitude of the crime with minimal comment.

     Sheinkin shows how the racism that drove Carlisle was actually an infection existing throughout the country.  Sheinkin offers a comparison between the Carlisle student’s experience and Jackie Robinson’s experience in the future. Both the football players and Mr. Robinson had to demonstrate calm in the face of the constant racist remarks made by other players.

     Sheinkin’s narrative is powerfully engaging. He shifts focus, allowing stories to ultimately connect. I would get engaged in the narrative about Carlisle’s football team, forgetting that the book was also about Jim Thorpe. So Sheinkin had me hooked on the Carlisle story and then moved to a chapter on Jim Thorpe, equally engaging.

      I like how people speak in Undefeated. Sheinkin includes short quotes throughout. That allows speakers to display personality which further draws in readers. Here is Teddy Roosevelt at a lunch with some football coaches: “Football is on trial. Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” The quote allows us to see a president who involves himself in seemingly everything. Or Pop Warner’s words: “I opposed the forward pass as entirely foreign to the game.” The reader gets to see the contemporary sense of one aspect of the game that today we take for granted. We might have wondered before we read the book, “How could anyone oppose the forward pass?”

     Sheinkin shows the flux in football’s development during this earlier time. The reader experiencess football being invented. What a good way to teach an important lesson! We all tend to view the world as fixed. By looking back at earlier moments, we see how things have not always been as they are. In the case of collegiate football, it took much invention and change to get it to where it is today.

     The book is well researched. Sheinkin uses some of that research to spice up the telling, with newspaper headlines and those aforementioned quotes. Racist headlines (“Indians Out to Scalp the Cadets”) reveal the ugliness of an earlier age and a reminder that accusations of pc language often reveal ignorance of this accepted racist talk from those earlier days.

     For my taste, Sheinkin overdoes the descriptions of football games. Those tellings get somewhat overdone for me.They also slows the momentum of the book. So Carlisle is amazingly great. The only place they have to go is a little greater. What else might drive this story? I will add though that Sheinkin does a wonderful job of describing each individual game.

      I am certain some would find the many descriptions enjoyable. Still, I feel myself slogging into p. 164, reading about one more game, this one a game with Syracuse. This criticism is perhaps not fair. I may be wanting a different book from the one Sheinkin chose to write.

     There are some important stories Sheinkin introduces that need development. One is the controversy over Jim Thorpe and his participation in the Olympics. Jim Thorpe loses his medals because he had played professional baseball over the summer. I find it ironic that he lost his medals for playing baseball, a sport he did not excel at when he became a fulltime professional baseball player. I wanted to hear more about this tragedy.

     The other story that gets short changed is the story of Pop Warner. We find out toward the end of the book that Pop Warner was a bit of a sleaze. I would have liked these stories to play a bigger role throughout the book than they did and for the reader to find out earlier that he is not always such a great guy.

     It is also amazing how Jim Thorpe has multiple athletic talents. To some extent, Jim Thorpe’s story does not get as full a discussion as I would have liked. He seems to be a fascinating character.

     And being from Pennsylvania, I would have appreciated a comment or two about that PA town bearing his name. O.K. That is just me being state-proud.

       Despite the critical comments, I still think this is a great book. It tells an important story, mainly about the ugly racism experienced by native peoples during the later parts of the nineteenth century and early parts of the twentieth century. Sheinkin’s strength is in making history story-like. Historical figures are given personality through their actions and words. When information is provided, it is in the service of the story being told. Along with Jean Fritz, Steve Sheinkin is the measure for good history writing.