Other college athletes who played summer baseball for money used aliases.

They understood, or had been told, that playing under a false name allowed them to maintain a fiction of amateur purity while still earning the summer income they needed.

Thorpe, by his own later account, did not understand this.

He knew he was being paid.

He did not know that the payment would cost him his Olympic eligibility if it were discovered.

“I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things,” he wrote in a letter to the secretary of the AAU after the controversy erupted.