His professional sports career had lasted until he was forty-one.

And he had become, across the decades since his death, one of the most significant figures in the history of Native American representation in American public life.

Not the only such figure — not a simple symbol, reduced to what a symbol requires — but a person whose specific life and specific achievements had been used, by Native communities and by American society more broadly, to demonstrate something about what Native Americans could do when given access to arenas that had been designed without them in mind.

The boarding school system had been designed to eliminate Jim Thorpe’s Sac and Fox identity and replace it with something more convenient for American purposes.