Two posts ago I opined that, had Jim Thorpe not left Carlisle in 1909 to play summer baseball and instead returned to school, he would have had a good chance of receiving tutelage as a minor league baseball player. I need to revise this conjecture and not just because he had tried out unsuccessfully for the 1908 Olympic games.
Had Thorpe returned to Carlisle for the 1909 fall term, he would have likely had another good season, his third year of eligibility for football, improving the Carlisle team’s 8-3-1 record. He might even have made Walter Camp’s Second Team. If he ran track in spring 1910, he would have used up his four years of eligibility and there were no Olympic tryouts that summer or the next. His track career would probably have come to an end because no economic opportunities existed for track and field at that time. Had he played football in the fall of 1910, he would surely have improved on Carlisle’s 8-6 record and might have made Camp’s All-America First Team, but he wouldn’t have been as dominating as he was in 1911 and 1912 because his body wouldn’t have the extra year of growth it had when he returned in 1911.
Jim would have used up all his college football and track eligibility by the end of 1910. With football not having a professional league yet, only semi-pro teams existed at the time. The irregular and unreliable income from semi-pro football would not have been enough to support him. His only likely professional athletic opportunity at that time would have been minor league baseball. He had already tried that route. While it’s impossible to know if the 1911 baseball season would have worked out better this way than it already did. Perhaps a better team in a more stable league would have picked him up. But, with two summers already under his belt, the team that signed him that summer was in a league that was insolvent, resulting in Jim being out of a job and back in Oklahoma with no good options on the horizon.
Returning to Carlisle would not have been an option because all his eligibility had been used up. Other schools would have been reluctant to enroll him because of the reactions to Frank Mt. Pleasant playing for Dickinson College in 1908 after having played for Carlisle. Some schools refused to play Dickinson if Mt. Pleasant was on the field. The four-years-of-eligibility rule was being enforced.
Had Jim returned to Carlisle after the 1909 summer, he would likely have had fewer options in 1911 than he had after not returning in 1909. Ranching would have been a good outcome for him.
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