Remembering Eddie Eagan: A Unique Olympian

– By Paul Hicks –

Just as Harry Potter has countless youthful admirers today, Frank Merriwell was a widely popular fictional hero among young readers in the early 1900s. In a series of novels that sold over 200 million copies, Merriwell achieved inspiring success, first as a stellar athlete and campus leader at Yale and later as a lawyer, by being honest, courageous, intelligent and hard working.
There was probably no greater fan of Frank Merriwell than Eddie Eagan, one of Rye’s most notable residents who lived here from 1935 until his death in 1967. Growing up in Colorado with little means and no connections, Eagan set out to emulate Merriwell and went on to achieve even more success in life than his mythical hero.
Born in Denver in April 26, 1898, Edward Patrick Francis Eagan was the youngest of five sons of John William and Clara Bartholomew Eagan. He never got to know his father, a railroad engineer who was killed in an accident when he was only 1, leaving the family close to poverty.
Eagan’s mother, who was of Alsatian background, managed to earn a small income by teaching German and French, as well as doing needlework and taking in washing. In his 1932 book, “Fighting for Fun”, which appeared first as a series in the Saturday Evening Post, Eagan wrote of his early days, “Life was a fight for bread.”
While working as a ranch hand at age 14, Eagan was taught how to box by one of the cowboys and, by the time he finished high school, he had won a number of boxing matches. Instead of pursuing a professional boxing career, he heeded the advice of his cowboy coach to get a college education and enrolled at Denver University on an academic scholarship.
During his freshman year Eagan advanced his boxing reputation by winning the western amateur middleweight title. That led to an invitation to fight in an exhibition charity match at Denver with the great Jack Dempsey, called the “Manassa Mauler” because he hailed from Manassa, Colo.
As Eagan describes humorously in his book, he landed a hard punch on Dempsey, but then "Soft brown cushions like fairyland balloons were making circles before my eyes .... One came toward my nose and halted lightly on it, then fell like a bomb on my neck …. The lights went out." The next thing he knew, Dempsey was holding him up and whispering, "Take it easy, kid." Eagan managed to finish the three-round match on his feet, and the encounter with Dempsey led to a life-long friendship.
He left Denver University after one year to enter the army, and served as an artillery officer in France at the end of World War I. Fighting as a middleweight, Eagan won the championship of the American Expeditionary Force in 1919. When he returned home, he followed in Merriwell’s footsteps by transferring to Yale.
As captain of Yale’s boxing team Eagan competed in the national amateur championships in 1919 and won the U.S. amateur heavyweight title. The following year, he fought as a light heavyweight at the Summer Olympics in Antwerp, defeating boxers from South Africa, Great Britain and Norway to gain a gold medal.
After graduating from Yale in 1921, Eagan attended Harvard Law School for a year and then continued his legal studies at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. While at Oxford, he became the first American to be crowned an amateur boxing champion of Great Britain. Fighting for the Oxford boxing team against Cambridge, Eagan flattened his opponent, who supposedly remarked from the canvas: "I'll get up — eventually — but not until that man has left Oxford."
His closest friend and boxing teammate at Oxford was a Scottish aristocrat named Douglas Douglas-Hamilton who was then Marquess of Clydesdale but later became the Duke of Hamilton.  Following their graduation in 1924, they went on a world tour together, fighting the best amateur boxers in the British Empire along the way. Eagan won every match, including one with the 7-foot, 300-pound heavyweight champion of Australia.  
During his stay in England, Eagan fought several boxing exhibitions with Jack Dempsey, who encouraged him to remain an amateur despite the offers he received from some noted fight promoters to turn professional. When he returned to the U.S. he remained active in the boxing world for a few years, helping Gene Tunney train for the defense of his heavyweight title, but set his sights on marriage and a legal career.
In 1927, Eagan married Margaret (Peggy) Colgate, whose father, Sidney Morse Colgate, was the head of Colgate & Co., the large soap manufacturer. The wedding notice in the New York Times described Eagan as a “noted amateur athlete” and listed many of his boxing achievements but, curiously, failed to mention his Olympic gold medal. The couple resided initially in New York City but moved to Rye in 1935 where they lived on Milton Point.
Although Eagan’s boxing days were over, he continued to be an active participant in many sports. He agreed to be a last minute substitute on the U.S. four-man bobsled team even though he had only three weeks to learn the sport before the 1932 Winter Olympics opened at Lake Placid. When his sled won the final race by two seconds, he became (and remains) the only person ever to win gold medals at both the Summer and Winter Games.
That same year Eagan was admitted to the New York Bar and joined the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which was briefly headed by Thomas E. Dewey. After switching to private practice in the late 1930s, he was a partner for many years in a prominent Manhattan law firm.
When the U.S. entered World War II, he again volunteered for military service, joining the Army Air Corps and rising to the rank of Lt. Colonel and chief of special services in the Air Transport Command. Traveling the globe in that capacity, he earned all three theater service ribbons.
Shortly after his return to civilian life in 1945, Eagan was appointed by Governor Dewey to head the New York State Athletic Commission, which was responsible for overseeing boxing in the state. Although he seemed ideally suited for that job, he came under increasing criticism from sports writers and others during his tenure and resigned in 1951.
As Time magazine commented, “No one would put the full blame for boxing's sorry state on ex-Commissioner Eagan. But he was never one to crack the whip over boxing's hoodlums.” New York Herald Tribune Sport Columnist Red Smith wrote: "Eddie Eagan is a genuinely sweet guy. He is profoundly honest and profoundly sincere, diffident, humble and considerate. The first two qualities are indispensable in a boxing commissioner; probably the other three are a handicap."
Recognizing Eagan’s international reputation as a sportsman, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him to head the sports committee of the People to People International Program when it was formed in 1956. It is still going strong today as the People to People Sports Ambassador Program. In 1964, Eagan also was named director of the sports program for the New York World’s Fair.
Because of the time commitments of his many civic responsibilities at the national and state level, Eagan did not take on any political or civic roles in the local community. Mrs. Eagan, however, was active in many local organizations as a supporter of music and the arts.
Among his friends in Rye, Eagan was famous for taking daily swims from his home on Long Island Sound. Explaining how he managed his polar bear routine in winter, he said, “It’s easy. I take an ice-cold shower in the house before I go down to the beach and push the ice aside.” When he played golf at Apawamis he was noted for going around the course carrying just a driver and one iron with an adjustable head.
Eagan was selected as a member of the first class to be inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1983. Among other notable athletes with whom he shared that honor were Cassius Clay (Mohammad Ali), Peggy Fleming, Bob Mathias, Jesse Owens, Mark Spitz and Jim Thorpe.

At the time of Eagan’s death in 1967, sports columnist Arthur Daley wrote an article in The New York Times titled “An Amateur at Heart,” in which he said, “For him everything was strictly gung-ho in the highest tradition of for God, for country and for Yale.” Perhaps Daly had just finished reading Frank Merriwell at Yale, which ends with “sturdy lads in blue, delirious with delight, hugging a dust-covered youth… Merriwell had won his own game, and his record was made. It was a glorious finish!”