Weekly Cover: The Last Living Lacrosse Olympian

Bill Coleman stores his 1948 Olympic Games medal for lacrosse in his sock drawer. Alongside it rests an Eagle Scout award, some reading glasses and various household items.

It’s a humble collection considering the 100-year-old Coleman is something of a Forrest Gump figure (minus the cross-country running) deserving of his own movie based on the true story.

Coleman scored the first goal for the United States in a 5-5 tie with Great Britain that earned every player a medal the last time lacrosse was a part of the Olympics. It came three years after he became licensed to fly P-47 Thunderbolts in World War II, and before he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and became a successful entrepreneur in the fiberglass industry, championship-level college lacrosse referee, avid sailor and skier, passionate pianist, a husband of 71 years to wife Billie and playful parent and grandparent.

“If he hadn't achieved all of these incredible things in his life — especially with the 1948 Olympic lacrosse team and being this go-to referee for college lacrosse for decades — he very much could have been a mayor or a governor,” said his grandson, Chris Potter. “He’s just a person who everybody wants to be around.”

Coleman, who turned 100 in August, is the last living player from the 1948 Games, when lacrosse was included as a demonstration sport in London, England. He has a great sense of humor and a sharp mind that can circle back to details of those days three-quarters of a century ago. He went up in a plane a year ago at age 99 as a passenger, and he still plays the piano every day, though some of his fingers have lost feeling from years of working with fiberglass.

England’s last living player, Rick Wilson, died in 2017 at the age of 96. The U.S. and Great Britain played only the one game in 1948, the culmination of an eight-game tour for the Americans in which they went 7-0-1.

Coleman plans to watch when lacrosse returns to the Olympics in 2028 in Los Angeles.

“I hope so,” he said.

Lacrosse will be played in the new sixes format in the 2028 Games, this time as a medal sport. Coleman was happy to see the IOC add it to the Olympic program 10 months before his centennial birthday. He had confidence the sport would return to the Olympics in his lifetime.

“Yes I did, when I saw how popular it was growing everywhere,” he said.

It was a far different game and a different time when Coleman played lacrosse in the 1948 Olympics. He was part of the RPI men’s lacrosse team that formed after the war and thrived in the years to follow under coach Ned Harkness.

“When we joined it, lacrosse was a club there at RPI and you joined the lacrosse club,” Coleman said. “That grew into a more organized team and we went out a way to hire Harkness, who was a Canadian lacrosse player and trying to get a coaching job.”

Harkness was a Hall of Fame coach in both lacrosse and ice hockey. After leaving RPI in 1955, he coached at Cornell and was later coach and then general manager of the Detroit Red Wings.

“He was a no-nonsense, good-humored, compassionate, sensible guy, which is all things you better be if you want to be a good coach,” Coleman said.

Coleman had never played lacrosse at Bristol High School in Connecticut, but he was athletic. He played varsity soccer, rec softball and touch football.

When World War II started, Coleman earned his fighter pilot license. He never saw combat, however. His plane was en route to the Pacific when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb Aug. 6, 1945, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Coleman was rerouted to a U.S. air base, according to Potter.

When Coleman returned to RPI, Harkness was establishing the foundation for the lacrosse team.

“When we got back from the war, we all could see these guys out in the field with lacrosse sticks and we all wanted to play,” Coleman said. “He didn't have to convince us. We had to convince him.”

Without any prior lacrosse experience, Coleman and others had to learn the game fast. It came naturally to most of them, and they got plenty of practice.

“Albany’s State Street Armory had a big empty building on the edge of the campus, which they later bought,” Coleman said. “And that's where we started practicing in the first winter. And that's where we learned to play lacrosse.”

RPI went 9-2 in 1946 and 11-1 in 1947. They put together a 13-0 season in 1948 — the reward for which was a No. 1 national ranking that would designate one college team to represent the U.S. in the Olympics. It was strong motivation.

“He said there were only four members of that team that had ever played lacrosse before,” said RPI president Martin Schmidt, who visited Coleman over the summer to commemorate the event and celebrate his 100th birthday (pictured at top of page). “Harkness takes this team with only four guys that ever played lacrosse, and in three years they’re the national champion. It's amazing.”

Coleman nearly didn’t get to go to London, though. Harkness was unbending with some of his standards. Players had to make every practice and have passing grades in all their classes. Those requirements came into conflict for Coleman when he failed an engineering final exam after missing the class’s labs to attend practices. Allowed another chance, Coleman’s fraternity brothers kept him awake around the clock studying and he passed on his second try.

“The pictures of the traveling team were that week. He's got these huge bags under his eyes in all these pictures because he had to stay up to pass that exam,” said his daughter, Meg Coleman.

RPI had to do its own fundraising to support its trip to England. They raised $20,000 by charging admission to their games — it’s reported that $5,000 was raised from their game against Virginia — and smaller fundraisers like pie-eating contests, dances and a student carnival. The town of Troy and the entire Capital Region got behind the effort. The team was shipped along with other U.S. Olympic participants with 875 pounds of rations.

“They had two or three old troop carriers from the U.S. lines that they had used to carry troops on and were now using to carry students across,” Bill Coleman said. “We took over the whole boat.”

The trip across the Atlantic took more than a week and the players did calisthenics on the boat to stay ready. The prep wasn’t entirely necessary when they showed up and found on their tour of regional teams woefully under-equipped English players who were prepared to play a less physical brand of lacrosse.

“There were some Rhodes Scholars over there at Cambridge and Oxford that knew American-style lacrosse that helped scrounge together all the equipment,” Meg Coleman said. “While they were touring, before the games, they taught the British teams how to play American-style lacrosse.”

The Americans sported dark red jerseys with “RPI” in large white letters across the chest and “USA” in smaller white letters beneath it.

“One of the things I suggested to my athletic director is in the spring of 2028, when the men's and women’s lacrosse are playing, I want them to wear those replica jerseys,” Schmidt said.

The first game they played was on a lighted cricket field in Manchester. The U.S. team was accustomed to playing man-to-man, but the British players did not have numbers on their uniforms. There was no danger of losing the first tour games, but the Americans grew frustrated by the success of England’s “Owen,” who seemed to be uncovered everywhere on the field.

It wasn’t until after the game they discovered the error of their ways.

“My roommate had one of their guys by and said, ‘Point out which one of these guys is Owen,’” Coleman said. “And he looked at us and started laughing. He said, ‘Oh, hell no, you're playing Owens College of the University of Manchester.’”

While dismantling their competition, the U.S. players received a warm reception along their tour stops. The graciousness was something that stood out for many of them.

“The whole continent of England turned out to welcome anybody that had anything to do with the Olympics,” Coleman said. “They gave you a pass. You could ride free on all the trains. You've got various breaks. It was very bent over backward to make us feel so welcome. You couldn’t miss it.”

There were plenty of laughs. Before playing a combined team of Oxford and Cambridge, Coleman and his teammate Art Beard were the only ones to take note that there was only one large bathtub for the Americans in the locker room.

“As soon as the game was over, they wanted to sit around and take pictures. He and I zoomed right in and hopped in that tub,” Coleman said. “By the time we got out, the rest of the team was in saying, ‘What the hell is this?’”

The culmination of the tour came in the exhibition event at the Olympics. Coleman remembers a full crowd at Wembley Stadium, though accounts have anywhere from 35,000 to 60,000 in attendance for the U.S. game against an all-star English team.

Coleman started the scoring and the Americans jumped out to a 4-1 lead before the momentum shifted with the arrival of some special guests.

“About one-third of the way through the first game, everything stops,” he said. “Everybody looks up, and there’s King George VI, his daughter Elizabeth and his wife Queen Elizabeth, who arrived in their box in the stadium. We all stand there while they play ‘God Save the King’ and go through their rigmarole. That was a surprise.”

Elizabeth II would take power four years later, but her family’s royal appearance that day turned the tide. England would go on to take a 5-4 lead before a goal in the final minute gave the U.S. a 5-5 tie. Coleman didn’t return home immediately after the Olympics. His tour was formative to the rest of his life. He found he liked to drink tea, and he discovered sailing as a pastime.

“He got to be great friends on the ship over with this guy, Sydney Ross, who was a physical chemistry professor at RPI who is Scottish,” Meg Coleman said. “After the games he taught my dad how to sail. They sailed around the isle. They chartered a sailboat and just had a great time over there.”

Coleman played his senior year at RPI and in 1949 he met Billie — a Russell Sage College student who had obtained her pilot’s license at 16 — on a blind date ice skating. Billie and he were said to be inseparable until her death three years ago. They had four daughters, the youngest of whom, Meg, played lacrosse and soccer at Middlebury College.

“I remember him teaching me how to play with modern metal lacrosse sticks,” she said. “He was always helping me, getting me to practice, picking up ground balls and all of that. I definitely felt like I had a leg up in terms of all the stick work.”

The family also attended a lot of lacrosse games that Coleman refereed. He was declared an honorary lifetime member of the New England Lacrosse Officials Association, though he doesn’t remember exactly how he got into officiating.

“Somebody that I played with was reffing and they were short and said, ‘Hey, do me a favor and get in here,’” Coleman said. “I said, ‘I don't know any of the rules.’ He says, ‘It doesn't matter. Neither do I.’”

Coleman became one of the most respected officials in the game. He once reffed a Syracuse-Dartmouth game in which Jim Brown played. In 1981, he was an official for the NCAA championship games at all three college levels.

“Bill was the first official from our area to work the national championship tournament games,” official Dick Eustis said, according to Eric Evans’ exhaustive account of the history of New England referees.

Added Hall of Fame ref Vin LoBello in the same account: “Bill probably worked more big games than any other New England official."

Coleman stopped officiating after 36 years.

“You had to have a pretty good record because they didn’t want anybody screwing up the game,” he said. “After every game, the coach of each team rated you. The coaches association and the referees association kept a list of these. In the end, I come out pretty well on that list.”

Coleman still had a lacrosse stick in his hand 10 years ago. He’d play catch with his grandkids.

“I remember one time playing catch with him, I looked away for a second and he threw the ball because he was still so quick. It hit me right in the chest and knocked the wind out of me,” Potter said. “And this was when he was 86 years old.”

Coleman has slowed down over the last decade, most regrettably giving up the downhill skiing that he cherished, as well as sailing. He lives by himself in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where he and Joseph Manning opened Bean Fiber Glass, Inc., in 1957. He summers on Swan Island, Maine, where he has two houses — one built entirely of fiberglass that he formed and hauled to the island piece by piece to assemble.

“He got to know most of the lobstermen who live on the island full-time and became good friends with a lot of them,” Potter said. “Some of them were at his 100th birthday.”

Coleman used to patch their boat bottoms with fiberglass, and even their trucks when the salt water rusted holes into them. He could fashion just about anything out of fiberglass. He even has a fiberglass teapot.

“There are rolls and rolls of fiberglass and there's resin, and there's countless tools. He would always be in his basement building something, tinkering with something,” Potter said. “He's someone who has remained active — mentally, physically, intellectually — throughout his entire life.”

It was to one of Coleman’s Maine homes that Schmidt took a plane, car and ferry to reach him this summer. Coleman, Schmidt noted, was born on the 100th anniversary of RPI’s founding and is now alive to see the school’s bicentennial celebration. Schmidt brought some RPI gear to share while listening to stories first-hand from the notable centenarian.

“He's successful as an athlete, successful as an entrepreneur, inventor and so on,” Schmidt said. “He’s a really interesting guy.”