James Francis Thorpe was born on May 22, 1887, on the Sac and Fox Reservation near Belmont in Oklahoma Territory and entered the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1904, where he built a brilliant college football career. He was named First Team All-American at Carlisle in 1911 and 1912, and on November 9, 1912, he and his Carlisle teammates defeated Army and West Point halfback Dwight Eisenhower. In 1915, he began playing professional football for the Canton Bulldogs. In 1920, he was selected as the first president of the National Football League. In 1922 and 1923, he organized, coached, and played for the Oorang Indians, an all-Indians professional football team, and in 1929 he played his last professional football game with the Chicago Cardinals on Thanksgiving Day. In 1950, he was named the Greatest Football Player of the Half-Century and the Greatest Athlete of the Half-Century. Thorpe died on March 28, 1953, at Lomita, California. In 1954, the National Football League established its most valuable player trophy in his honor, and the town of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, became his final resting place and was renamed for him. In 1963, he was named a charter member at the founding of the National Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. In 2000, an ABC's Wide World of Sports online poll named him the Greatest Athlete of the Century, and on November 20, 2001, General Mills Inc. unveiled Wheaties cereal with his picture on the box.