THE YARD OF BRICKS AT THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY

1909

THE YARD OF BRICKS AT THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY

A

lthough the practice dates to the mid-1990s, it seems that racers have been “kissing the bricks” in Indianapolis forever. The tradition started after NASCAR’s Dale Jarrett and his crew chief, Todd Parrott, lowered themselves to their knees, turned their caps around, and did just that after winning the Brickyard 400 in 1996. They were saying thanks—both for the victory and for the history that is paved into every turn of the 2.5-mile oval that is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Every Brickyard winner since has followed suit, and starting a few years later, so have winners of the Indianapolis 500, who pucker up after drinking the traditional glass of milk on the same track. Sometimes drivers kiss the bricks alone; usually, it’s a moment for team and family, too.

The 9.5-pound bricks themselves date back to the earliest days of American motor sports. Carl Fisher, a successful bicycle salesman,1 was transitioning to the auto business. He envisioned Indianapolis as “the world’s greatest center of horseless carriage manufacturing.” But it would need a track for testing. “What could be more logical than building the world’s greatest racetrack right here?”2

Fisher missed on the first part of the prediction; Detroit, not Indianapolis, became the horseless-carriage hub. But the Speedway is still the world’s largest sports venue, seating more than 257,000 people. And Fisher himself helped to pave the United States, by promoting the first cross-country road suitable for cars, the New York to San Francisco Lincoln Highway,3 as well as the Chicago to Miami Dixie Highway.

The first track on the site opened in August 1909, but its tar-gravel-oil surface was unforgiving to vehicles and deadly to their drivers, who couldn’t keep the cars steady on the slippery track. Several competitors and spectators died in the first few days of racing, and the American Automobile Association said it would boycott the Speedway unless a safer surface was installed. Brick, which was durable and offered better traction, was a natural choice. It took 3.2 million bricks to cover the original track, over a base of sand. The track reopened in December, and by the time the first Indianapolis 500 took place, it was already referred to as the Brickyard. Over time, asphalt replaced the brick, first on the turns, and then on the rest of the track. Except, that is, for the three-foot strip at the start/finish line shown in the picture opposite, known as the “Yard of Bricks.”4

1910

ANNIE OAKLEY’S RIFLE

F

orget the anthem from Annie Get Your Gun, the Broadway musical, that “You can’t get a man with a gun.” That was way too easy a target. The real Annie Oakley could nail the edge of a playing card. Backward. With either hand. And she got the man, too.

Five-foot-nothing, with big eyes and a quiet voice, Annie Oakley acted like a lady. She could also shoot out a cigarette held between Kaiser Wilhelm’s fingers. Or the pips on a playing card. Oakley literally made her name (she was born Phoebe Ann Mosey) in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganza. But that should not obscure the fact that she was also an extraordinary athlete in an era when the idea of a woman making a living through sports was unknown. And she is one of the few women, then or since, who not only competed with men on an equal basis, but creamed them. Her fellow sharpshooters had to concede her excellence. Before she was 20, she was barred from local turkey shoots because she won them all. Later she was regarded with awe in both Europe and the United States, where she instructed army sharpshooters. Although Oakley’s heyday was in the 1880s and 1890s, she was still shooting well into the twentieth century; in her sixties, she could hit a hundred clay targets in a row. This deluxe .22 caliber target rifle dates from around 1910.

For those who still aren’t sure that Annie Oakley counts as an athlete, consider the following feat. She would put her shotgun on the floor about 10 feet away from a table. When her husband, Frank Butler, released the clay target, she would jump over the table, pick up the shotgun, and blast the target before it hit the floor. She could also pick off glass balls with her shotgun while standing on the back of a running horse.1 Looked at this way, Annie Oakley might be America’s first great female professional athlete—and 120 years later, still one of the finest.

1912

JIM THORPE’S RESTORED OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALS

I

n July 1912 Sweden’s King Gustav V told Jim Thorpe: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”1 Few would have disagreed. Thorpe had just won the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, breaking the world record in the latter.

Back home in the United States, he was the country’s most famous football player as the star of the Carlisle Indians (see the 1925 entry on the modern football). If the Heisman Trophy had existed, he probably would have won it in both 1911 and 1912. And the year after Stockholm, he began a seven-year career playing baseball for the New York Giants. Beginning in 1915 he also played pro football; he was one of the early stars of the National Football League—and its first commissioner. In 1928 he played his last pro football game, which marked the end of his athletic career.

Those are the highlights. Contemporary observers also said that Thorpe was accomplished at swimming, wrestling, lacrosse, boxing, hockey, shooting, and handball; he even won a ballroom dancing title.2 In 1950 sportswriters named him the greatest American athlete of the half century.3 To look at photos of Thorpe in his prime is to see a body of such beauty and perfect proportion that it would have made Renaissance painters swoon.

Thorpe’s American Indian name was Wa-Tho-Huk, meaning “Bright Path,”4 but off the field, his journey was marked with shadows. One of the worst blows came in January 1913, when a Massachusetts newspaper revealed that he had played a few months of pro baseball in North Carolina in 1909.

To the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the matter was straightforward. Thorpe had earned money for playing a sport; therefore, he was a professional. Case closed. In this narrow sense, the facts are not in question. But there were extenuating circumstances. For a start, the sport was baseball, not track, and there is no evidence that Thorpe was thinking about the Olympics at the time. That is one reason he competed under his own name, not a pseudonym.

In addition, the legalities are murky. Under Olympic rules, any such objection was supposed to be lodged within 30 days of the close of the Games. Moreover, the Swedish Olympic Committee, which might have taken a softer view of the infraction, was supposed to make the decision. The court of appeal was never consulted. Ironically, the founder of the modern Games, Pierre de Coubertin, was not troubled by the apparent infraction of the tenets of amateurism: “Such a lot of blame for a peccadillo!”5 The European press was also sympathetic. But the AAU wasn’t, and its opinion sealed Thorpe’s fate. At its behest, the International Olympic Committee stripped him of his gold medals.6

Thorpe was publicly stoic about the decision, but privately devastated. Many years later, one of his teammates with the Giants, fellow American Indian John “Chief” Meyers, recalled how Thorpe woke him up in the middle of the night, crying, “They’re mine, Chief, I won them fair and square.” The decision, Meyers concluded, “broke his heart.”7

Beginning in the 1940s, there were efforts to reconsider the decision. By that time, though, the most committed apostle of the amateur creed, Avery Brundage, was in power. Brundage had also competed in Stockholm: He finished fifteenth in the decathlon and fifth in the pentathlon. Despite not winning a medal, the experience changed him. “Here was no commercial connivery or political chicanery,” he recalled. “The rules were the same for everyone, respected by all, and enforced impartially.”8 For the rest of his life, Brundage would see the Olympics through these rose-colored perceptions.

A self-made man who built a successful construction business, Brundage’s heart was in sport. Named to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1936, he led it from 1952 to 1972, retiring at age 84. Brundage’s views on amateurism were so exalted, and so rigid, that they curdled idealism into a legality that was simultaneously crabby and inconsistent. Somehow, he could overlook the obvious fact that Eastern-bloc athletes were full-time employees of the state. “I have yet to see any evidence that the Russians are not amateur,” he declared in 1960.9 But he was so bothered by the omnipresence of ski companies that he questioned whether the Winter Olympics should be held at all.10 In 1972 he forced swimmer Mark Spitz, in the middle of his seven-gold performance, to write a groveling apology after he was photographed holding his Adidas shoes.11

Once Brundage was out of the picture, things began to move in Thorpe’s favor. In 1973 the US Olympic Committee restored Thorpe’s Olympic status and in 1981 the word “amateur” was struck from the Olympic charter, signaling a major change in official thinking. Eventually, this led to today’s more open rules, in which athletic federations set the standards for participation—and most are happy to have professionals compete. In 1982 good sense and belated compassion prevailed, and the IOC voted to rehonor Thorpe’s achievements, 29 years after his death. He is now recorded as cowinner of the events. The two medals in these pictures were struck from the original molds and sent to his family.

Members of the Thorpe family are fighting one last battle. After his death in 1953, Thorpe’s third wife interrupted the Sac-and-Fox tribal burial rites and placed his body in a crypt. Then in 1954 she sold it to Mauch Chuck and East Mauch Chuck, in northeastern Pennsylvania. The two towns agreed to merge, rename the new municipality Jim Thorpe, and create a suitable final resting place for the athlete. The town has kept its word. The red granite mausoleum, set atop a knoll and flanked by statues of Thorpe at play, is attractive and dignified. But it still seems more than a little strange that Thorpe, in death, lies in a place where he never set foot in life. Some of his surviving children believe that his remains should rest in the land of his forbears in Oklahoma. In late 2015, however, the US Supreme Court refused to settle the matter,12 so it looks like Jim Thorpe will stay in Jim Thorpe.

شاركه

عن lamkadmi

هذا النص هو مثال لنص يمكن ان يستبدل في نفس المساحة ايضا يمكنك زيارة مدونة مدون محترف لمزيد من تحميل قوالب بلوجر.