An unlikely Olympian

By Chris Rosenblum

Ron Coder flew Air Force tankers during the Cold War. The Russians were his enemy. So why was his arm draped over one in 1956? Why not?

CDT/Nabil K. Mark

Ron Coder, 79, was the goalie on the United States Olympic soccer team at the 1956 games. CDT/Nabil K. Mark July 31, 2008

View larger

There at the Olympic Games in Melbourne, they weren’t foes but fellow soccer goalkeepers, chatting in the Olympic Village like old pals. Actually, the Yugoslavian goalie, who had joined them, was doing most of the talking.

“We were standing arm in arm, on each other’s shoulders,” said Coder, 79, a resident of The Village at Penn State. “And the Yugoslav was translating English to Russian and Russian to English. He was the middleman.”

For Coder, the chance meeting remains a high point of his Olympic experience. An ankle injury, suffered before the Games, benched him for the Americans’ only match, a 9-1 loss to champion Yugoslavia.

But just being on the national squad was golden enough for an unlikely Olympian.

In high school in Montgomery County, track had interested Coder. A pole vaulter, he won district and state championships before enrolling at Penn State.

An intramural soccer game during his sophomore year changed his life.

Running around, he caught the eye of Bill Jeffrey, the legendary men’s soccer coach, who invited him to try out. That Coder knew zip about soccer mattered not at all. “It’s OK, laddie,” Jeffrey reportedly said in his Scottish burr. “I like the way you use your feet.”

Coder showed up at the first fall practice. Jeffrey asked if he could catch a ball, then told him to stand in a goal and stop everything that came his way. End of tryout.

Like that, he was a collegiate goalkeeper.

At the time, Coder could hardly have imagined helping Penn State win two national championships. Nor could he picture going to Iran in 1951 as a senior on an exhibition tour, his first trip abroad.

Sent by the State Department, the Nittany Lions played all-star teams in three cities, Isfahan, Shiraz and Tehran. In Shiraz, during a 3-0 victory, Coder received his first taste of the Olympic spirit when crowds gathered behind his goal.

“We’re on a goodwill trip, so I’m having fun with these guys,” Coder recalled. “They were applauding whenever I would make a save. It was fun. After the game, they mobbed me and picked me up and carried me off the field.”

And then the cheering stopped.

After graduation, Coder enlisted in the Air Force, earned his wings, got married and started a family. Soccer fell out of his life, except for a few pickup matches with foreign sailors while stationed near Savannah, Ga.

One day in 1955, a Pentagon colonel called with a proposition. Would Coder like to join an armed forces team and possibly go to the Olympics?

“His call set things in motion,” Coder said. “Within a week, I had my orders and I was on my way to Europe.”

Coder had stayed in shape playing racquetball and handball. His skills returned while the squad trained by giving soccer clinics at American bases in Germany.

A shellacking in Helsinki from the Finnish national team sharpened him further.

“We lost, 6-0, but it was the most fun game I ever had because I wasn’t standing back there watching the others play,” he said. “I’d make a save and kick the ball out, and here they come again. It was just bing, bang, boom.”

Coder survived the relentless Finns, and then the Olympic trial tournament cuts as one of 16 servicemen invited to New York. In March 1956, the U.S. squad embarked on a Far East tour, with warm-up matches in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, Seoul, South Korea, and Taipei — and then Hong Kong.

It began well. Coder delighted the packed stadium with his usual routine of inspecting the goal posts.

“The crowd went nuts, so I bowed,” he said.

But late in the second half, he went down, accidentally kicked in the leg by a forward taking a shot. The blow cracked Coder’s ankle, and he was taken to a Chinese doctor.

“I’m in this guy’s apartment, a couple of kids running around, his wife’s there,” Coder said. “And I’m wondering, ‘What kind of care am I getting here?’ ”

Very good, it turned out. Thanks largely to the doctor’s treatment, Coder stood without crutches within 10 days. But he wasn’t healed in time to play in the final exhibitions in Manila, Philippines, Singapore and Jakarta, Indonesia, exhibitions, or at the Olympics.

Still, the Games yielded lasting memories. Coder, today a retired lieutenant colonel, met two U.S track and field legends, pole vaulter Bob Richards and discus thrower Al Oerter. He saw the historic water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary, a brutal contest after the Russians had crushed a Hungarian uprising that year.

Coder didn’t play, sure, but he came out ahead anyway.

“You are disappointed, but not devastated,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world. I still got to go.”

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.

This series, "Olympians among us," continues during the Summer Olympics.