MARCH 28, 1953

In 1950, the Associated Press conducted a poll of sportswriters and sports broadcasters, trying to determine who was the greatest athlete of the first half-century.

The runaway winner: Jim Thorpe.

He died at 64 on this date 46 years ago, stricken by a heart attack while having dinner in his small trailer on Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita.

The range of his athletic achievements remain unmatched, even by modern standards of two-sport athletes such as Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders.

Name another athlete who:

* Won an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon.

* Was an All-American college football running back.

* Played pro football well enough to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

* Played major league baseball for six seasons.

He was a Sac and Fox Indian, born in a cabin on the North Canadian River near Prague, Okla. A rough and tumble youngster, he was sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and there discovered sports.

He became a back without peer at Carlisle on teams that defeated Army, Penn and Columbia. He also played semipro baseball (for $25 a week), a fact not generally known until after he had won his gold medal at Stockholm in 1912.

Branded a pro, his gold medal was taken away and not returned to his family until 30 years after his death.

His post-sports life was a sad one, spotted with bouts of alcoholism and broken marriages. Some of his last happy days were spent with his sons, rabbit and raccoon hunting in Orange County’s Santa Ana Mountains.

A final unhappy chapter in the Thorpe story occurred when his widow, in effect, sold his body to the town of Mauch Chunk, Pa. The town then changed its name to Jim Thorpe, Pa., and erected a marble tomb for Thorpe, on a site far from his happy boyhood days in Oklahoma.

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Also on this date: In 1984, the Baltimore Colts secretly summoned moving trucks to their offices, loaded them up in the middle of the night and left for Indianapolis.