SPOKANE, Wash.

He opened holes for teammate Jim Thorpe. He was the only coach to lead Washington State to a Rose Bowl victory. He is the reason Washington, D.C.,'s professional football team is called the Redskins.

Now the late William "Lone Star" Dietz also has a biography.

The book is called "Keep A-goin'," and is by Pennsylvania author Tom Benjey, who thought a character this much larger than life deserved his own volume.

"Dietz was like a rock star," Mr. Benjey said recently in Spokane, where he is on a book tour. Mr. Dietz was friends with people like Knute Rockne and Walt Disney. He was an actor in silent movies and was also a noted artist.

"He was a Forrest Gump-like sort of character," Mr. Benjey said. "He rubbed shoulders with lots of famous people."

The title of the book was derived from a well-known poem about perseverance in the face of adversity that Mr. Dietz was said to be reading at the time of his death in 1964 in Reading, Pa.

Washington State University fans may only know Mr. Dietz from photographs of him in full Indian regalia that were used to promote the 1916 Rose Bowl. He spent only three seasons in Pullman, where WSU is located, but they were memorable.

He coached the 1915 team to a 7-0 record and a 14-0 upset over Brown in the 1916 Rose Bowl. That game established the New Year's Day tradition for football bowls and is considered the first modern Rose Bowl.

The Cougars have yet to win another Rose Bowl.

While in California, Mr. Dietz also got himself and his players hired as extras for the silent film "Tom Brown of Harvard," for which they were paid $100 each.

Mr. Dietz' 1916 team went 4-2 and his 1917 team was 6-0-1 before World War I interrupted college football. He coached a football team of Marines from the Mare Island base during the war, posting a 20-3 record. Mr. Dietz later coached at Purdue, Louisiana Tech, Wyoming, Haskell Indian Institute and Albright College, compiling a 96-62-7 record as a college coach.

Before coaching, Mr. Dietz played tackle at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania starting in 1909. He was a teammate of Mr. Thorpe, and it was there he began a long association with pioneering coach Glenn "Pop" Warner.

After his playing days were over, Mr. Dietz became an assistant coach under Mr. Warner at Carlisle. Washington State hired him in 1915, after getting a reference letter from Mr. Warner.

Mr. Dietz was born in 1884 in Wisconsin and raised by white parents. His Indian origins are hazy, but he recalled as a teen-ager hearing his parents talk about his Indian blood and was told his real mother lived far away. He became convinced he had Sioux blood, adopted the Indian name Lone Star, enrolled in Indian schools and dressed in Indian clothing.

Many newspapers carried photos of Lone Star "strolling the sideline in full tuxedo, stove pipe hat, and cane," according to Bernie McCarty of the Professional Football Researchers Association.

But all was not good for Mr. Dietz in Washington.

During World War I, enemies had him brought up on trumped-up draft evasion charges before the Spokane County draft board. He eventually pleaded no-contest because he did not have the money to defend himself. The widely followed case heavily damaged his image and coaching career, and ended his tenure at Washington State.

He became head coach of the Boston Braves of the National Football League for two seasons in 1933 and 1934. He so impressed owner George Preston Marshall that the team was renamed the Redskins in his honor, a name which stuck after the move to Washington, D.C.

Mr. Dietz fell into poverty in his later years.