Does anyone else have a problem with the fact that by the end of the picture Jim looks 100 years old, but 'Pop' hasn't aged at all?
shareJim Thorpe had a very bad drinking problem,
and in real life, it aged his looks considerably.
He always had an old look to his face anyway, if you look at early pictures of him. As for drinking, he was known to be quite a big drinker even in his Carlisle days...Pop Warner had to pull him out of bars on more than one occasion.
shareIn a confrontation at a bar circa the early 1940s, Thorpe laid out a rowdy Errol Flynn with one tremendous punch. The stuntmen and other roustabouts who had witnessed it said it was the hardest they had ever seen a man get hit. I read it in a biography on Flynn. You didn't mess with Thorpe.
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Equally odd is that Pop was 17 years older than Jim. Pop was a week short of 82 at the time of Thorpe's death and lived another year and 5 months.
Pop: April 5, 1871 – September 7, 1954
Thorpe: May 28, 1888 – March 28, 1953
Didn't bother me that Pop didn't seem to age throughout the course of the film because Charles Bickford alway seemed to be the same age in all his films.
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