Forty summers ago, a man wearing a tracksuit stepped out onto Fifth Avenue to celebrate his 90th birthday by running down the sidewalk in front of the Guggenheim Museum. He was there to publicize the New York City Marathon because in those days the New York City Marathon still needed the help. But, as nearly always happened to Abel Kiviat, the talk quickly turned to Jim Thorpe because there is a convincing argument to be made that Thorpe was the greatest athlete of all time. And 70 years earlier, Abel Kiviat had been Jim Thorpe’s roommate at the 1912 Olympics.
“Thorpe!” Kiviat’s eyes sparkled when he said the name. “What you could never know is: It wasn’t just he was the greatest athlete. Greatest runner. Greatest jumper. Greatest hurdler. Greatest football player. Played in the World Series. He won trophies for ballroom dancing! But see he could watch you do whatever you did best, and then he could do it better.” He tapped the CNN flag on my microphone. “He could take this out of your hand and five minutes from now, he’d be better at it than you are.”
In his exhaustively researched new biography of Thorpe, David Maraniss calmly lets witnesses like Kiviat express the eternal astonishment about how well Thorpe did seemingly everything, and how beautifully he did it. A 22-year-old football opponent from the Army team named Dwight Eisenhower confirming Kiviat: “He could do everything anybody else could do and do it better”; an anonymous New York Times reporter from Nov. 10, 1912: “At times the game itself was almost forgotten while the spectators gazed on Thorpe, the individual, to wonder at his prowess”; the poet Marianne Moore, who, in an impossible coincidence, was one of Thorpe’s college instructors: “Equilibrium with no strictures, but crouched in the lineup for football he was the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve.”
