October Autograph Pickup

[Michael B]

Eddie Eagan - mistakenly credited with being the first athlete to win a gold medal in the Summer and Winter Olympics. Gillis Grafstrom won a gold medal when figure skating was competed at the Summer Olympics in 1920 and won again in 1924 and 1928 the first two Winter Olympics.

Eagan has one of those stories that seems like fiction. He enrolled in the University of Denver. After one year enlisted in the army and served as an artillery lieutenant in France during WWI. He enrolled in Yale after the war. He was named captain of the boxing team. He won the AAU heavyweight boxing championship in 1919. Later that year he competed in the Inter-Allied Games in Paris which were only open to those who served in the military. He won the middleweight championship. He was a member of the 1920 U.S. Olympic boxing team where he won his first gold medal. After graduating from Yale in 1921 he enrolled in Harvard Law School. He left after one year as he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. While at Oxford he became the first American to win the British amateur championship. He was a member of the Olympic boxing team in 1924, but was eliminated. After touring the world for 2 years he returned to the U.S. where he trained Gene Tunney for the 'long count' match with Jack Dempsey. He started a legal career. In early 1932 the head of the U.S. Olympic Bobsled Committee, a friend of Eagan, asked him to compete in bobsled as one of the four man team members decided to compete in two man bobsled. It may seem odd, but besides boxing, Eagan also competed in tennis, fencing, swimming and wrestling in college. Eagan would go on to win a gold medal at the 1932 games in Lake Placid. His bob mates were Billy Fiske one of the first U.S. pilots to die in WWII while flying for the RAF, Tippy Gray a songwriter of over 3,000 songs and the aforementioned head of the U.S. Bobsled Committee who was 49 years old. Eagan would join the U.S. Army Air Corps during WWII becoming chief of special services and achieving the rank of Lt. Colonel. He became an assistant U.S. Attorney, head of the NY State Athletic Commission and director of sports for the 1964 World's Fair.

This is the first TLS I have encountered of Eagan. I have owned multiple signed copies and editions of his autobiography "Fighting for Fun". The only other item of his signed that I have had was an envelope where he signed his name as the return address, sent to boxing coach Spike Webb, while Eagan was at Oxford.