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"Undefeated" by Steve Sheinkin, List 2

Sun Jul 07 16:43:33 EDT 2024
By Vocabulary.com (NY)Visual Thesaurus Moderator
This nonfiction narrative focuses on Sac and Fox Nation member Jim Thorpe, a 1912 Olympic gold medalist, who led Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School's football team to victorious seasons that redefined the sport and immortalized his coach, Pop Warner.

This list covers "First Half" from "Restless Disposition"–"Football Imagination."

Here are links to our lists for the book: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
disposition
“I was always of a restless disposition,” Thorpe would say, looking back on his childhood. “I played all the games and played them hard.”
incorrigible
He shot at flies with rubber bands when he was supposed to be reading. He was a daydreamer and “an incorrigible youngster,” according to school records, “uninterested in anything except the outdoor life” and “always fidgeting to get outdoors.”
waver
His confidence wavered when he walked out to the playing field. It was a patch of sun-dried dirt, he remembered, “bare and hard as an iron griddle.” Then the game got under way, and he really started to worry.
rugged
The Butte club was stacked with rugged miners and former college players.
relentless
The University of Pennsylvania rolled over Carlisle, 36–0. Yale crushed them, 18–0.
Carlisle managed to win two of its last three, finishing the season a respectable 4–4, and newspapers praised the team’s relentless effort.
crude
But the same papers resorted to crude stereotypes, describing Carlisle’s wins as “massacres” or “scalpings.”
perpetrator
Historians have found that Native Americans were more likely to be the victims of massacres and scalpings than the perpetrators.
bounty
As early as 1703, leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony started offering settlers a bounty of $60 for every Indian scalp they brought in.
uprising
“There was an uprising of Indians in the northern part of Manhattan Island yesterday afternoon,” the New York Times wrote after one of Carlisle’s 1895 games. “A band of eleven full-blooded warriors, with their war paint and feathers, attacked a band of men from the Young Men’s Christian Association.”
incentive
The players read these articles. They knew exactly what they were up against.
All the more incentive to win.
berate
Fans understood that if Carlisle managed to beat Princeton—or any one of the Big Four—it would be the greatest upset the sport had ever seen.
At halftime it was still 6–0. Panicked Princeton coaches spent the ten-minute break berating their players.
impose
The Tigers came out sharper in the second half, imposing their will on the smaller team, aided by vicious slugging that was not penalized.
officiate
Frustrated by the officiating—or lack of it—Bemus Pierce called time and strode to the referee.
ambassador
He especially liked the attention football was bringing to his school. To Pratt, the players were traveling ambassadors for Carlisle, living proof the school was working—so long as they continued to behave like “gentlemen,” that is.
reception
As the New York Sun reported, the moment the Carlisle men jogged onto the field, “the crowd at once began to indulge in war whoops.”
The Indian players didn’t respond. They’d already learned to expect this obnoxious sort of reception.
speculator
Confident Yale fans were heard offering two wagers.
First: the Indians would not score.
Second: Yale would top Princeton’s total of twenty-two points.
“After the game,” noted the Sun, “these same speculators denied having made any such offers.”
stout
The second half began, and Carlisle charged again and again into the stout Yale defense.
jeer
Fans suspected the worst. They shouted “Robbery!” as Hickok walked to the spot where the play had begun, stamped his heel into the soil, and said, “The ball is down right here.”
The jeers from the stands lasted five full minutes.
brood
“Now, if we have a right to rob the Indian anywhere,” a Rochester paper commented with bitter sarcasm, “we certainly have a right to cheat him out of football games.”
For the players, there was no time to brood.
typhoid
When Jim and Charlie were eight years old, measles and typhoid fever swept through the Sac and Fox Agency School in Oklahoma.
makeshift
Charlotte and Hiram hurried to the school and rushed into the room that was being used as a makeshift hospital.
rut
An endless cycle of work, lectures, rules—Howard Gansworth called it “the Carlisle rut.”
resort
Many students—sometimes forty or more a year—resorted to Jim Thorpe’s method of resistance to Indian boarding school. They ran away.
influential
“Too much praise cannot be given this Indian team for its showing this year,” wrote Caspar Whitney, an influential sportswriter, in Harper’s Weekly, “for the quality of its football after but three years of the game at Carlisle, and above all for its sportsmanly conduct and clean play.”
provoke
They were picked on and provoked, got some lousy calls from the refs, but they kept their cool and played through it all.
wholesome
“I regard the conduct of these Indians,” Whitney wrote, “to have had a more wholesome influence on the game than any occurrence of recent years.”
dire
And this was a sport in dire need of a wholesome influence.
grisly
But with each grisly injury, the national debate over football’s future intensified.
utter
The New York Journal printed a front-page editorial calling for the banning of the game.
Utter nonsense, charged a young politician from New York named Theodore Roosevelt.
vigorous
“The sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk,” he wrote in 1893.
emphatically
“I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or any other college turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men,” Roosevelt told students at a visit to his old school.
baseless
Repeating baseless stereotypes, writers suggested the Indians were lazy and easily discouraged, and had no hope of breaking the Big Four stranglehold.
shortcoming
Their chief shortcoming seems to be a limited knowledge of the fine points of the game.
reveille
Just as at Carlisle, each day began with reveille at five-thirty.
immaculate
Jim learned to dress quickly, making sure his shoes and clothes were immaculate—even brass jacket buttons had to shine.
emulate
“An Indian on the Haskell squad named Chauncey Archiquette became my idol,” Thorpe remembered, “and I decided to try to emulate him.”
romp
He and his friends chose teams and romped around the massive field, free—for the moment—of rules and routine, discipline and punishment.
monumental
When Princeton came to town, he felt his club could pull off a monumental upset, a win that would propel Cornell—and Pop himself—into football’s top tier.
audacity
He knew they’d already gained a reputation for audacity, for going anywhere, playing anyone.
appeal
Sure, the players needed help with fundamentals. But their athleticism and heart were things you just couldn’t teach.
As Warner would later say, “The Indian boys appealed to my football imagination.”

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