He played under his own name, which meant that when a Massachusetts newspaper reporter found the record of his Eastern Carolina League appearances, there was no fiction to maintain.

The structure of the amateurism rule, and its selective non-enforcement through the false-name convention, created a situation in which athletes who were well-connected enough, or well-advised enough, to know the rules could preserve their Olympic eligibility while doing exactly what Thorpe did.

Thorpe, who had come through a boarding school system that was explicitly designed to exclude Native Americans from the full knowledge and navigational tools of American institutional life, did not have that knowledge.

He paid for its absence.