At Dalton, Cole made two good friends. He grew so close to one, Jon Heller, that they shared a page in their high school year-book.

Cole and Heller didn't always get along. Heller calls his high school friend "a very difficult person." But they seem to have shared a desire to beat the system. With the Guinness Book of World Records, they saw an opportunity.

In 1980, Cole reported that he pitched an egg 350 feet to Heller, who caught it without cracking the shell. That figure smashed the existing record and was forwarded to the Guinness Book, which published it in the appendix to its 1980 edition. The two appeared in three subsequent editions of the world record book.

It was a tremendous achievement, with only one drawback.

"It never occurred," Heller says.

Heller says he and Cole decided to see if they could lie their way into the Guinness Book. By 1984, Guinness had apparently figured out the fraud. The official world record for egg throwing now stands at 318 feet.

At first glance, Cole's attempt to break into Guinness might seem like a harmless teenage prank. But, curiously, Cole bragged about the world record for years.

In fact, he took credit for the world record in an autobiography he submitted for the World Bridge Encyclopedia in 1991--more than seven years after Guinness withdrew the record.

At Columbia, Interest Turns to Bridge

The Manhattan Bridge Club sits in the penthouse of the Hotel Olcott on West 72nd St. here in New York City.

It's not the same place Cole frequented as a Columbia student during the early 1980s. Today, bridge players step out of the elevator to find a three-foot-high cardboard figure of the Queen of Hearts. The queen is pointing at an image of the White Rabbit, mounted 10 feet away on the same wall.

The clientele has changed, too. Few bridge players there today were around 10 years ago; even fewer remember a young, bush-haired college kid named Bill Cole. Those who do say Cole's expansive self-confidence sticks out in their memories.

"He was very brash, very cocky, very sure, certainly a strong developing player," recalls Jeff M. Bayonne, owner of the club.

Some who played with him charge that Cole would cheat in tournament bridge play. Bayonne, however, dismisses that notion. "When you're real brash, that sometimes is taken for poor ethics," he says.

Heller, Cole's high school friend who also attended Columbia, says the two played bridge together for a while. But after a time, Heller says, "I had to stop."