Jim Thorpe, Original All-American by Joseph Bruchac

Author:Joseph Bruchac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group

24

THE TOUGHEST SEASON

Thinking back on it, that year of 1908 was the toughest season of football I ever had, even though it had started off so well for me. October 3 was Penn State. That was our first away game, played in Wilkes-Barre. They managed to get a touchdown on us, when they blocked a punt and then ran the ball in. But we controlled the rest of the game and I did all the scoring, kicking three field goals to make the final 12-5.

Syracuse was on October 10, another game on the opponent’s home field. The papers were full of the news that the Orangemen had whipped Yale. Carlisle’s Indians were about to get massacred. Pop countered with his own publicity campaign. Instead of telling the reporters how good we were, he went the opposite way.

“Carlisle is a beat-up team,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “My boys just don’t have what it takes to beat a power like Syracuse. They are demoralized and out of shape.”

When we took the field at Syracuse, we looked as bad as Pop had described. You’d think we’d all been in a train wreck. We limped out with our heads bandaged and our fingers wrapped with so much tape it looked like we were wearing white mittens. We grunted and groaned and staggered through our warm-ups like a squad of seventy-year-olds. But when it came time to really start the game we pulled off all those fake bandages and showed those surprised boys from Syracuse what we really had. We shut them out, 12-0.

We didn’t know it then, but we’d just about reached the high point of our season. The Susquehanna game on October 17 got canceled. The hardest part of our schedule—all road games—started on October 24 when we went to Philadelphia to play the University of Pennsylvania. Unbeaten, they were regarded as the best team in the country and deserved every word of praise they got. They had three times as many players as we did with talent at every position, including two All-Americans. The best of them was Bill Hollenback, their quarterback, who was also the fiercest tackler I ever ran into in my life. No matter what play Pop called, those Penn players knifed right through our line and got to the ball almost before we did. They scored on their first possession and then stopped us cold when it was our turn. Boy, did we get stopped cold!

I’d always been able to sidestep most players or fake them into making foolish dives, but not Bill. When he came at me, it was just a question of how hard he’d tackle me. When he did hit me, it was like being struck by a battering ram. I quickly learned that if Bill Hollenback didn’t pulverize or half paralyze you with a head-on hit, you still played with a shaky feeling for the rest of the game.

What saved us in that game was that for once we held on to the ball.

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