NEW YORK - (NEA) – It was not widely known that Roy Ruggles Johnson wrote what often is considered the greatest sports “scoop” of the first half of the 20th century. But the impact was worldwide and tragic and is still in the news.

Obituaries across the country carried the fact that Johnson, who died recently at age 89, wrote the story disclosing Jim Thorpe’s professionalism.

Johnson was the county editor of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram when he wrote the copyrighted story which broke on Jan. 22, 1913. He was tipped off that a man visiting relatives nearby was bragging that he managed Jim Thorpe on the Rocky Mount, N.C., baseball team in the Piedmont League. Johnson found the manager, who told him Thorpe, an outfielder, had been paid $15 a week. Johnson returned to his office, flipped through his Reach Baseball Guide and saw Thorpe posing with a smile in the Rocky Mount team picture.

The story resulted in the Amateur Athletic Union stripping Thorpe of medals and trophies he had won in the 19 12 Stockholm Olympics (where he had won, incredibly, both the decathlon and the pentathlon).

Thorpe tried to explain: “I did not play for the money. I was not very wise to the ways of the world and did not realize this was wrong. I hope I will be partly excused by the fact I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know I was doing wrong, because I was doing what many other college men had done, except they did not use their own names.”

His medals were never returned and his name has not been restored in the Olympic record book despite various efforts through the years. Today, a group headed by former Yankee pitcher Allie Reynolds, also an Oklahoma Indian, plans to petition President Nixon to plead the case to the International Olympic Committee.

Don Johnson, son of Roy Ruggles Johnson, said in a phone interview that his father supported the idea that Thorpe’s name and medals be restored.

“My father felt that the AAU was too strict,” said Don Johnson, now an executive with the Worcester Telegram. “There were other athletes playing for money under assumed names in those days and Thorpe was simply guileless to that.”

Did Roy Ruggles Johnson ever regret writing that story?

“I’m sure he didn’t,” said Johnson. “The old gent – that’s what my brother and I called my father, - was a man of rectitude and high moral principle. He felt it was his job as a newspaperman to write the story.

“He never boasted about the scoop. He rarely talked about it. In fact, I didn’t know he had written it until I was in college.

“And he never exploited it. He never wrote magazine stories about it. A year after the story broke he did get a job with the Boston Globe, but he didn’t even get a writing job. He got a desk job, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with the Thorpe story.”

It was the lone scoop in Johnson’s life. He went on to write some 3,000 columns for the Globe on Yankee folklore. Meanwhile, he followed Thorpe’s career, which went from pro football and major league baseball to drunkenness, destitution, three marriages and, finally, death in an obscure trailer at age 64.

Johnson, himself a tee-totaler, continues to believe in the sanctity of the free press, according to his son.

“It was the classic example of a dedicated newspaperman doing his job,” said Don Johnson. “It takes a lot of integrity to tell the truth when the truth is unpalatable as it so often is.

“I was always glad about one thing for my father. That was what happened when h met Thorpe. It was in 1952, forty years after the Stockholm Olympics. The Boston Globe sponsored a Sportsmen’s Show. Thorpe came, since he was a great fly-caster. Someone got the idea to bring him up to the office to meet my father. They had never been faceto-face before. “My father said, ‘Jim, I’m proud to shake your hand. I always thought you were the greatest athlete that ever lived.’ Thorpe bore no rancor to my father. ‘You were only doing your job,’ said Thorpe.’” Thorpe died one year later.

In Washington, Grace Thorpe, a daughter of Jim’s said recently, “No, I don’t think the loss of the medals or the fact that his name was taken off the record books made much difference to Dad. He felt that his achievements were proof enough of his abilities.”

“But I would like to get the medals back to put in the Indian Hall of Fame in Kansas. And I’d like Dad’s name restored in the official books. It would be for Indian kids, something for them to try to emulate.”

(Editor’s note – On July 15, 2022, nearly 70 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee reinstated Jim Thorpe as the sole winner of the gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics.)