Joe Guyon stood in right field, his fist pounding the well-worn glove he wore on his right hand. He played shallow; his closeness to the infield allowed him to quickly scoop up any balls that got through the infielders, while his trademark speed swiftly carried him to the outer reaches of any ballpark and spear a deep flyball.
That speed came with a few caveats, namely, he would have to rely on the center fielder to shout a warning when he neared the outfield wall, as his own eyes would be tracking the fly ball. Back in Louisville, this wouldn’t be that much of a necessity; he knew the Parkway Field outfield like it was his own front yard. But on the road at one of the American Association’s seven other ballparks, help from the center fielder would be needed.
He’d played in Indianapolis’s Washington Park many times, but the center fielder next to him was new. Dick Loftus had been to The Show with Brooklyn a few years back, so he should know how outfielders helped each other. But, all the same, he had told Loftus, “We play together… I’ll be over there to help you, and you help me.” Joe figured that as an ex-big leaguer, Loftus knew the score.
So, when Wid Matthews hit a booming fly ball to the far reaches of right field, Joe took off after it at full throttle. Always a high stepper when he poured on the speed, Joe’s legs were spinning like the wheels of an overdue express train. He sensed the wooden outfield fence getting closer, but he kept his eyes on the descent of the ball and his ears peeled for any guidance from Loftus.
As he ran, Joe heard the faint roar of the crowd behind him, the soft rustle of his sharp new spikes hitting the grass, and the even sound of his own breathing. The next thing he heard was the sickening crash as his left foot hit the outfield fence, then the dull thud as the rest of his body landed on the grass. What he hadn’t heard was any warning from Dick Loftus.
When he gathered his wits, Joe found that his left spike was embedded in the wooden wall. He tried to pull it out, but the sharp new spikes had really buried themselves in good. As he lay there helpless, two teammates ran out from the bench. The pair pulled as hard as they could, but the stubborn spike held. Two more teammates ran over, and the four pulled. That’s when Joe heard one more sound: the popping of his left knee.
As his teammates carried him off the field, Joe thought back over the long path his career had taken. College football and a national championship, pro football and another championship, and finally two pennants and a batting title in the highest level of the minor leagues. All that was left was a spot on a major league team. He had been so close – but Joe knew that the pop of his knee was the sound of his athletic career coming to an end.
JOSEPH NAPOLEON GUYON was born on the White Earth Reservation in north central Minnesota in 1892. His father, Joseph Guyon, was a French-speaking Canadian, and his mother, Mary, was a full-blooded Native American of the Ojibwa Tribe of the Chippewa Nation. Mary would have twelve children, with seven living past childhood. Joe was given the name O-Gee-Chiden, Ojibwa for “Big Brave.”
When he was eleven, Joe attended the Haskell Industrial School in Kansas, a boarding school for Native Americans. There, Joe gained a reputation as the clumsiest boy at the school. When he returned to the reservation two years later, he worked hard to change this and live up to his Ojibwa name of “Big Brave.” Joe spent countless hours on horseback and tramping through the woods, climbing trees, and jumping from rock to rock.
The natural workouts paid off. He grew to be a healthy 200-pound six-footer and began winning awards in athletic contests held on the reservation. Running was his specialty, and he was thought to be the fastest in his tribe.
Somehow, likely through his numerous reservation awards, Joe Guyon came to the attention of the Carlisle Indian School in 1912. The school had come to national attention when its football team, led by legendary coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, began beating anyone who challenged them. Their finest athlete, Jim Thorpe, excelled at every sport he tried. Besides being the star of the football team, Thorpe’s unrivaled skill in track and field earned him a spot on the 1912 Olympic Team. At the games in Stockholm, Thorpe won two gold medals and the title of the “Greatest Athlete in the World.”
In that first year at Carlisle, Joe played tackle to Jim Thorpe’s fullback. The two thus began a lifelong friendship. Of their first meeting, Joe recalled, “I guess he was five years’ older than me, about twenty-four or twenty-five, and of course he was already an All American star at Carlisle. I got to wrestling the boys there at the school, and Jim wanted to see who in the hell that damn Chippewa was that had come off the reservation and was flipping all these guys. So we wrestled. I couldn’t throw him because he was quick and fast himself. We wrestled to a standoff and we became buddies right away.” The two would eventually become family after Joe wed Thorpe’s cousin, Isabelle Bourboinaise, in 1916.
When Thorpe graduated in the spring of 1912, it was Joe Guyon who became the school’s star athlete. He switched from tackle to the backfield, where his speed made him their best ball carrier. Walter Camp, syndicated sportswriter and the “Father of American Football,” made Joe Guyon a household name when he declared him a second Jim Thorpe. A string of All-American honors further demonstrated his athletic prowess.
AFTER TWO YEARS at Carslisle, Joe entered Keewatin Preparatory School in Minnesota with the objective of getting into a big college. At Keewatin, Joe captained the football team and played basketball and baseball. Keewatin Prep was unique in that the summer term was held in Minnesota and the winter term in Florida. When the summer term ended, the football team barnstormed its way north. The southern colleges began to take notice of the speedy halfback, with one school offering him a scholarship.
However, it was Georgia Tech who would win Joe Guyon’s services in 1917. Charlie Guyon, Joe’s older brother, was a football coach at the university under head coach John Heisman, for whom the Heisman Trophy was later named.
In his first game, Joe ran 75 yards for a touchdown against Wake Forest. But his best game came against Vanderbilt when he rushed for 344 yards. Sportswriter Morgan Blake of the Atlanta Journal wrote, “Guyon has been great in all games this year. But Saturday he was the Superman.”
Perhaps the most impressive play of his time at Georgia Tech came against Auburn. Joe attempted a diving tackle of “Moon” Ducote at Auburn’s 10-yard line, but missed, ending up on the ground. As Ducote sprinted down the field, seemingly headed for a touchdown, Joe picked himself up and raced after him. Unbelievably, he caught up with Ducote at the Tech 26-yard line and sacked him, bellowing out a “war cry of celebration.”
As this story shows, Joe Guyon was never shy about showcasing his Native American heritage. One can find contemporary newspaper accounts of the “blood curdling war whoops” he occasionally used to punctuate a great play on the field. While today, some might think this exploitative, Joe obviously did not. Other references to his heritage foisted upon him by the press fell flat, such as when writers unsuccessfully tried to nickname him “Injun Joe” after the ruthless antagonist in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
GEORGIA TECH would go 9-0 for the 1917 season and be awarded the Collegiate National Championship. Now on a national stage, Joe continued to forge a reputation as one of, if not the, best football player in the south.
As a blocker, he had no peer. Atlanta Constitution sportswriter Ralph McGill wrote of Joe, “They could follow that big fellow and run to glory because he cleared the way, and I mean cleared it.” A biography of Joe Guyon by Bob Lemke gives us another contemporary quote by an unnamed sportswriter: “Survivors of the teams Tech played in those days still shudder to recall the multiple impacts when Guyon blocked or tackled them, and he could punt more than 60 yards, place kick from midfield, and pass with the best.” Georgia Tech coach Bill Fincher recalled the reason for Joe’s offensive success: “tackling Guyon was like grabbing an airplane propeller.”
Joe Guyon earned another All-American title the following season as Georgia Tech won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association Championship. Years later, after John Heisman became a legendary football coach who saw first-hand all the greats of the game, declared, “Guyon is the best man I ever coached,” and he was “one of the three or four greatest college football players of all time.”
IT WAS AFTER his spring semester in 1919 that Joe reconnected with Jim Thorpe. In the years since his triumph at the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe had played major league baseball with the New York Giants as well as one of early professional football’s biggest stars. 1919 found Thorpe player-coach for the Canton Bulldogs of the Ohio League. Joe joined Thorpe and fellow Carslisle alum Pete Calac to form one of the greatest backfields in the game. Canton won the league championship, and the following season became a founding member of the new American Professional Football Association, soon renamed the National Football League.
At the same time he was carving out a football career in the NFL, Joe Guyon decided one sport was not enough. He wanted to play major league baseball. He played semipro ball in the upper Midwest during the summer of 1919 and was offered a tryout by the New York Giants that fall.
He didn’t make the Giants, but signed on with the Atlanta Crackers of the American Association, about the same level as today’s AA. He played the 1920 to 1923 seasons with Atlanta, steadily improving his mastery of the game. While his batting needed work, Joe’s running did not. He led the league with 45 swipes in 1921 and claimed to have clocked running bases at a blinding 13 seconds.
MEANWHILE, JOE’S NFL career flourished. Although he was recognized as one of the game’s best halfbacks, 1920s pro football was a tough way to make a buck. A couple hundred bucks per game was not worth suffering a career-ending injury for. Besides, Joe was now a widower with two young kids after Isabelle passed in 1921. He had his and his kids futures to think of.
Joe made the rounds of early NFL teams without getting hurt as he attempted to climb higher up the baseball ladder. After a stop in Little Rock in 1924, Joe’s contract was bought by the Louisville Colonels.
In the 1890s, Louisville had been a member of the National League, but a contraction of the loop in 1900 cut Louisville out. The baseball-mad city soon reemerged as part of the American Association, the highest classification in the minor leagues. As a member of the Louisville Colonels, Joe Guyon was now just one step away from the majors.
Joe’s arrival in Louisville was much heralded in the press. He was already a big name, and the Colonels were one of the top teams in the American Association. Under the managership of Joe McCarthy, Louisville won the Little World Series in 1921. Now with speedster Joe Guyon in the lineup, Colonels fans looked forward to another pennant. They would not be disappointed.
Joe Guyon played the 1925 season as if every day were the World Series. He led the American Association with a sky-high .363 average and 228 hits. He wasn’t all business, however, as one game from that season demonstrates. Batting against Toledo, Joe was very lightly brushed by Grant’s pitch – so light in fact that only Joe, the catcher, and the umpire knew it happened. But, as Joe trotted to take his base, he suddenly began a theatrically melodramatic limp, to the delight of both the players and fans.
Behind Joe’s bat and speed on the bases, Louisville won the pennant. Though they lost the Little World Series to Baltimore, Louisville’s success earned Joe McCarthy the job as manager of the Chicago Cubs. Although he slipped to .343 in 1926, Louisville won their second consecutive American Association pennant, though they subsequently lost the Little World Series to Toronto.
His third season with the Colonels saw him hit .358. While Joe didn’t win a baseball championship that season, he did win one in football.
AFTER SITTING OUT the 1926 NFL season, Joe Guyon became a member of the New York Football Giants in 1927. The Giants charged to an 11-1-1 record, with all but one of their wins being shutouts. Because the NFL did not have a playoff system in 1927, the championship was awarded to the team with the most wins. Therefore, the November 27 game against the second-place Chicago Bears proved to be the deciding game of the season.
Even in an era when pro football was known as a brutal sport, the Giants-Bears game stood out for its extreme ferocity. With professional refereeing still in its infancy, many players took advantage of the lax enforcement of rules, and dirty plays were commonplace. One of the most notorious practitioners was Chicago’s George Halas. Known today as “Papa Bear,” Halas had taken a semipro team sponsored by a food starch company and turned it into an NFL powerhouse. In an attempt to level the playing field against New York, Halas set his sights on neutralizing Joe Guyon.
In the third quarter, Halas tried to take advantage of inattentive refs and take out Joe Guyon from behind. Fortunately, Joe sensed the dirty play coming on and protected himself by meeting Halas with a knee to his midsection, breaking three ribs. “George, let that be a lesson for you.” Joe taunted as Halas was carted off the field, “Never try to sneak up on an Indian.” The Giants prevailed over the Halas-less Bears, 13-7.
When spring came, Joe was back in a Louisville Colonels uniform. He would be 35 that season, and the window for a major league debut was almost closed. But, with another season of .350 hitting and his unrivaled speed, there remained a chance that a second division team would take a chance on him. In a spring training series against the Chicago White Sox, one of those second division clubs, Joe put on a great show – that is, until an aborted steal attempt injured his left knee. Previous gridiron collisions had weakened that knee, but until then had been nothing but a nuisance. But this time a doctor proclaimed it a “dislocated cartilage in his left knee.” Joe nursed it along as the season began. All was well until May 30, the fateful game in Indianapolis, when he hit the outfield wall.
THE KNEE INJURY marked the end of Joe Guyon’s baseball and football careers. Louisville gave Joe his unconditional release before the end of the season, and he failed to make the Giants’ team that fall.
Fortunately, Joe Guyon had a backup plan. Between playing professional football and baseball, he had put in a few good seasons coaching both sports at the collegiate level. He had begun coaching baseball at Clemson University before his career-ending injury in 1928 and would do so through 1931. He transitioned back to pro ball as the player-manager in the low minors for a few seasons before moving back to Louisville. There, Joe was named head coach for St. Xavier High School.
Tragically, Joe’s second wife, Charlotte Dinwiddle, passed away, leaving him a widower for the second time. He married a third time to Christine Denny, a Louisville native whom he met back when he played for the Colonels. He and Charlotte spent the war years in Oklahoma, where Joe worked at Tinker Air Force Base. In 1953, his best friend Jim Thorpe passed away. Joe served as a pallbearer in a traditional Native American ceremony.
In the early 1960s, he and Charlotte moved back to Louisville. In retirement, Joe enjoyed donning his Native American regalia and teaching school children about his heritage. He also became an avid golfer and decided to give baseball one last try when he hatched a plan to form a barnstorming team of Native Americans. Local Louisville company Hillerich and Bradsby agreed to outfit the team, and Joe went on the road to recruit a team. Along the way, Joe was in a car accident. He suffered head trauma from which he never fully recovered. Joe Guyon passed away one day after celebrating his 79th birthday.
THOUGH JOE GUYON never achieved his goal of playing major league baseball, his part in making football history was recognized by being enshrined in both the College and Pro Football Hall of Fames.
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The story that opens this piece originates from Joe Guyon's own recollection as recounted in the book Doctors, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs by Tom Benjay. In his retelling, Joe recalls the center fielder being a rookie fresh out of college. However, when I tracked down the box score and game story, I found it was the former big leaguer and newcomer to the team, Dick Loftus, who played in center the day of the injury. Why Joe recalled him being a college kid, I cannot say.
Because Joe Guyon was so well known during his career, there are numerous contemporary articles and profiles on him, especially in the Louisville newspapers. Two modern biographies, Greg King’s “Louisville’s Forgotten Sports Hero: Injun Joe Guyon” and “An Overlooked NFL Giant: Joe Guyon” by the late Bob Lemke, provided valuable insights looking back on Guyon’s career from a modern perspective. King’s piece was especially exceptional since the author had conducted his own interviews with Joe Guyon’s descendants and had even met the two-sport star as a boy growing up in Louisville.
The aforementioned book, Doctors, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs, by Tom Benjay, provided superb information on the Carlisle Indian School, its incredible football team, and the beginnings of Jim Thorpe and Joe Guyon’s careers.
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On this past September 16th, the Frazier Kentucky History Museum in Louisville honored Joe Guyon with a Special Presentation. I was one of the many attendees of the program, and I must say that it was extremely well done.
The MC for the evening was Rachel Platt, the legendary WHAS news anchor and now Director of Community Engagement at the Frazier History Museum. She led the way as various guest speakers from St. Xavier High School and the Louisville Bats paid tribute to Joe Guyon, who had made a profoundly positive impact on both their organizations. The key speaker of the night was Greg King, the historian whose research into the life and times of Joe Guyon reintroduced this Louisville legend to a whole new generation of admirers.
Present that evening were dozens of Joe Guyon’s family, brought to Louisville from all directions. His grandson spoke on behalf of the family, adding a personal touch to the proceedings. The family also loaned several personal items of Joe’s, including some priceless Ojibwa tribal artifacts. You can see them for yourself at the Frazier.
I’ve attended many tribute programs, but I felt the need to write about this one in particular because it was so well done. Thank you, Rachel Platt and Greg King, for really making this tribute to Joe Guyon something I’ll remember for a long time.
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This story is Number 85 in a series of collectible booklets
Each of the hand-numbered and signed 4 ¼” x 5 1/2″ booklets feature an 8 to 24 page story along with a colored art card attached to the inside back cover. These mini-books can be bought individually, thematically or collected as a never-ending set. In addition to the individual booklets, I envision there being themed sets, such as the series I did on Minor League Home Run Champions. You can order a Subscription to Season 7 as well. A year subscription includes a guaranteed regular 12 issues at a discounted price, plus at least one extra Subscriber Special Issue. Each subscription will begin with Booklet Number 078 and will be active through December of 2025. Booklets 1-77 can be purchased as a group, too.