NATIVE AMERICAN SON

The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe

By Kate Buford

Knopf. 479 pp. $35

Jim Thorpe and Kobe Bryant both won Olympic gold medals (Thorpe for the pentathlon and decathlon in 1912, Bryant for basketball in 2008). Both got paid for playing sports before competing in the Olympics (Bryant earned millions with the Los Angeles Lakers, Thorpe made $25 a week playing baseball for the Rocky Mount Railroaders). But Bryant's name is in the Olympic record books. Thorpe's is not.

After news accounts revealed that Thorpe had committed the unpardonable sin of playing baseball for money, Olympic officials summarily stripped him of his medals and expunged him from the record books. In 1982, 29 years after Thorpe's death, the International Olympic Committee tried to rectify that injustice by restoring his amateur status and minting new medals for his family. But the committee refused to repair the official record, a towering act of timidity. As Kate Buford writes in her new biography of Thorpe: "Without the public records, what did reinstatement mean? There was a whiff of frontier noblesse oblige: give the Indians the shiny trinkets but honor the dominant tradition and maintain the false but official record." (Just a few years later the Olympic committee allowed pros like Bryant to compete, but money still vexes college sports.)

Buford's first book was a biography of actor Burt Lancaster (who played Thorpe in the movies), so she knows about mythic heroes and draws a complex portrait: from his superhuman athletic talent to his all-too-human personal flaws. A member of the Sac and Fox tribe, Thorpe was raised in rural Oklahoma, where the tests of manhood started early. When the boy was 3, his father dropped him into a raging river and made him struggle to safety. He built up his stamina chasing and breaking wild horses. In Buford's telling, Oklahoma sounds like ancient Crete, and the animals could have been minotaurs.

Thorpe was sent off to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he started playing football, a game that perfectly utilized his superb combination of strength and speed (interestingly he lacked the "elastic freedom" of a natural baseball player and never succeeded at that sport). Carlisle played the top Ivy schools, and during the 1907 season the privileged preppies from Harvard were no match for a team that had both muscle and memory on their side. Wounded Knee, the last great battle of the Indian wars, had happened only 17 years before, and as Carlisle's famous coach, Pop Warner, put it: "The Indians . . . [had] a real race pride and a fierce determination. They believed the armed contests between red man and white had never been waged on equal terms." On the gridiron, the terms were equal, and the braves finally won.

Thorpe helped create professional football and was eventually named the greatest male athlete of the first half of the 20th century. But great saxophonists and teachers and cooks can keep working into old age. Not athletes. Their bodies fail, and the cheering fades. Many have trouble adjusting to this decline, and so did Thorpe. He was reduced to organizing vagabond football teams that paid players $13.30 a game. He was never comfortable with his celebrity ("to be famous, for Jim, was to feel alone in the middle of a mob") and always felt "like an exile" in the "harshly competitive white world." His habitual drinking grew worse. He moved to Hollywood and worked in the movies, but on film - as opposed to football - the Indians always lost.

Buford can be a tedious writer, and I would tell her what I tell my writing students: Edit carefully, less is more. We do not need to know every movie Thorpe ever made. But the story is too compelling to be ruined. As a final humiliation, Thorpe's third wife convinced two towns in Pennsylvania to bury his body there and take the name Jim Thorpe. He would be a great tourist attraction, she promised. But it never happened. "By the mid-1960s, the citizens of Jim Thorpe felt like suckers," writes Buford, and one official complained about the deal: "All we got was a dead Indian."

Today Thorpe's surviving children want to return his remains to Oklahoma, and they continue "to insist that without a complete Indian burial ceremony, their father's spirit is a restless traveler from one dimension to another, at home in none of them." But that was Jim Thorpe in life, too. Always restless, never at home. That's what happens when you grow up in Crete taming minotaurs.

Steven V. Roberts teaches writing and politics at George Washington University; his latest book, "From Every End of This Earth," is out in paperback this fall.