Our Arklahoma Heritage Mayes County produced a stellar athlete who stood out in football and professional wrestling
Jim Thorpe is the undisputed giant among athletes who came out of the federal Indian boarding schools. The name that belongs in the next breath is Mayes Watt McLain: a Cherokee fullback whose 1926 season still sits near the top of college football’s oldest scoring lists, and who then spent two decades in wrestling rings from Toronto to Sydney.
He was born April 16, 1905, in Pryor, Oklahoma, the youngest of six; a brother and sister had died in infancy. His father, farmer Pleas L. McLain, was listed on the Dawes Rolls as an Intermarried White; his mother, Martha, as one-quarter Cherokee. In 1906, at one year old, Mayes was enrolled as Cherokee by blood at one-eighth. That enrollment followed him into every headline that later called him Chief McLain.
A wealthy Osage sponsor helped send him from Pryor football to the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Haskell was a federal boarding school through grade 12, built to assimilate Indigenous children. Athletic students often stayed past graduation age, so the teams played closer to junior-college ball and routinely beat major colleges. After a 10,500-seat stadium opened in 1926, representatives of 75 tribes watched Haskell beat Bucknell 36–0.
McLain arrived at about 20, already 6-foot-2 or 6-foot-3 and more than 215 pounds, and played both ways. In 1926 Haskell went 12–0–1, outscored opponents 558–64, and led the country in scoring. McLain missed two games with a leg injury. In the other eleven he scored 253 points: 38 touchdowns, 19 extra points, and two field goals.
Against Wichita he scored eight touchdowns and seven extras for 55 points; against Still College, six touchdowns. The 38 touchdowns stood as the college single-season record for more than 60 years. Official NCAA books later started after 1937, so some later tallies omit him. The 1926 game-by-game counts still add up to 253.
At Iowa in 1928 he helped the Hawkeyes go 6–2 and share the Big Ten title. He ran for 100 yards and scored the winner against Chicago at Soldier Field, and scored both touchdowns in a 14–7 win over Ohio State. The New York Times compared the interest in him to the days of Red Grange.
After one season the Big Ten ruled his Haskell years counted against eligibility. A booster scandal -- $60 a month for an Iowa City “real estate census” he apparently never did --finished his college career.
As Chief McLain he played 24 NFL games in 1930–31 for the Portsmouth Spartans and Staten Island Stapletons, starting 10 and scoring nine touchdowns. He later appeared for the St. Louis Gunners, Paterson Panthers, and Hollywood Wolves. He figured he made $4,500 across a 20-game season.
“I was born 40 years too soon,” he told the Atlanta Journal, “before the bonuses, before plane travel, before the good hotels, meal money and pension funds.”
He entered pro wrestling in March 1933 as a 240-pound heavyweight and worked until 1942, then again from 1947 to 1953 -- Madison Square Garden, Maple Leaf Gardens, Sydney Stadium, the Olympic Auditorium.
Opponents included Strangler Lewis, Ed Don George, Ray Steele, and Joe Savoldi. In September 1938 in Toronto he beat the Masked Marvel (Ted Cox) for a local world heavyweight title and held it six weeks.
He was mostly a babyface and did not lean on a Native gimmick. During the war, he worked at Lockheed in Los Angeles and did film stunts; he had already appeared, uncredited, in 1936’s The Magnificent Brute.
In February 1951 at Maple Leaf Gardens, Whipper Billy Watson unmasked him as the Masked Manager in front of about 8,000 fans. Columnist Carlton Byrd remembered him reciting Shakespeare in libraries on the afternoons he wrestled.
Knocked down one night, he came up roaring, “Lay on, MacDuff.” When his opponent told the referee to make him open his fists, McLain said: “Shame on you. Don’t you know you are never supposed to end a sentence with a preposition.”
He later refereed near his Georgia home, kept an affiliation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and retired as a Lockheed inspector in Marietta. He had been married for a time to actress Viola Weller. Survivors included daughter Rita Haynes of Marietta and Charles W. Barrett of Smyrna.
Mayes Watt McLain died March 6, 1983, in Marietta, at 77, and was buried in Mountain View Cemetery. In 1987 the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in Lawrence -- the same town where he scored 253 points in a season-- inducted him posthumously.
