The Amateurs (16 page)

Harry Parker, coaching on the Charles

Tiff Wood showing with the violence of his stroke why he was called The Hammer

Brad Lewis as a young sculler in 1976

John Biglow, smaller than his two German opponents, gets a world bronze in 1981. From left, Rudiger Reiche, who got the silver, Peter-Michael Kolbe, who got the gold.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Tiff Wood took fifteen strokes in the final and knew he was rowing the wrong race, not setting his own pace, unable to take command. It was almost, he said later, as if he had been in some way predisposed toward defeat. Within a minute, he had the terrible sense he was going to lose. He did not think it was fatigue from the previous race; it seemed more mental. Perhaps he had been too aware of Biglow's advantage in back-to-back hard races. There was, he decided later, a softness to his rowing, as if he were rowing in a fog. He had had races like that before, when things moved as if beyond his control, but he had never had them happen at such a critical moment.

In the final, Joe Bouscaren went out much faster than he intended to. At the five-hundred-meter mark he had a half length on Tiff Wood and open water on the rest of the field. Bouscaren felt fast and strong. He was sure he was rowing not just well, but also his best. Then, suddenly, around the twelve-hundred-meter mark, Brad Lewis had surged ahead, going by so quickly that Bouscaren could not even respond. That seemed to stagger him mentally for a moment, and he felt a letdown. He had not expected Brad to make so quick a surge. Now as he looked out he saw both Wood and Biglow beginning their sprints. It was hard for him to find more energy, and he had a sense that he had gone out too fast.

Brad Lewis, who expected Bouscaren to go out early, had decided to pace himself and to burn off as little energy as possible in the first thousand meters. Two or three years ago endurance had been a problem for him, and he knew the Easterners expected him to tire. Now he was sure that he knew how to race. That was not easy. It took a long time to learn how to plan your race, ration your energy, understand the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents, not to panic if someone else went out too quickly. At the halfway mark Lewis was surprised by how easy the race seemed. Suddenly, knowing the others were not expecting him to, he took his shell out. His surge, coming just when they expected him to fade, caught them completely by surprise. He had a full length on the others before they knew what had happened. He felt absolutely wonderful. The race was going just as he had envisioned during all those weeks alone in California.

That Bouscaren had gone out quickly and taken the early lead did not bother Biglow. What threw him off was Tiff Wood's slow start. It was unlike Tiff to come out so slowly; Tiff was a rower who liked to take charge of a race. Biglow thought Wood was up to some new strategy, decoying him and trying to throw him off. Why is Tiff hanging back? he thought—if I had the ability to generate speed and power the way he does, I'd be out as far in front as I could. With that he decided to go ahead and row his own race. At about the midway point of the race Biglow passed Sean Golgan, another sculler, and Jim Dietz. Only then did Biglow notice to his astonishment that Brad Lewis was moving out on Bouscaren, and in fact moving out very strongly. Although Lewis was a good sculler and a desperately serious one, he had not been part of Biglow's calculations for this race. Now here Lewis was, rowing more strongly than ever at just the point where he usually began to fade. Clearly Brad Lewis had improved a great deal in the past year without anyone noticing it. Looking at the two lengths of open water between him and Lewis, Biglow thought two lengths was too big a lead for the final five-hundred; it would take nothing but sheer pain to catch Brad, assuming he could be caught.

But it seemed wrong to Biglow that Brad Lewis should be the sculler. It offended his Biglovian sense of order and hierarchy. It was easy to picture Tiff as the single sculler. He was intelligent and confident, he was very good at handling the media and he was an exceptional spokesman for the rowers. But Brad Lewis was different. He looks confident, Biglow thought, and he talks confidently, but the confidence does not seem genuine. It comes and goes, just as he is friendly with the other oarsmen and then unfriendly. John Biglow decided he did not like the image of Brad Lewis as the single sculler. With five-hundred meters to go, Biglow set out to catch him. Probably Biglow would have tried to win anyway, but his feelings about Lewis gave him more reason. Slowly and steadily he closed on the leader, still sure that the lead was too great.

At this point, Tiff Wood, too, realized that Brad Lewis, whom he had always beaten, was ahead. When it looked like Brad was going to win, Tiff began to push himself harder. He felt the boat begin to move faster. Wood began to come on strongly, passing one shell after another. He was surging, gaining on Lewis, but Biglow was surging, too, and Wood knew that it was going to be very hard to catch both of them. He might have caught Lewis and at the end he had been gaining on Biglow. If there had been another hundred meters he might have won. If, he thought in his anger,
if. . .

Brad Lewis saw Biglow make his move. His boat seemed to jump out of the water in what was obviously going to be one of those special Biglow sprints. Lewis was far from tiring. If anything, he felt relatively strong. It was simply that Biglow at this point in a race was awe-inspiring. Lewis decided that all he could do was to remain calm and count in sets of tens. Five hundred meters meant six sets of tens. The finish line was coming up and Biglow, and now Tiff Wood, were charging at him, with Wood coming on even faster.

As they neared the finish line, John Biglow had a sense that Brad Lewis was coming back on him. Was Lewis coasting because he was so much in control and the finish line so near? That was a possibility, but the other possibility was that he was falling just short and dying right there. Biglow reached back and poured on everything he had. He saw Tiff Wood making his charge. With thirty strokes left, Biglow heard people on the shore chanting, and he thought they were shouting, "Biggy! Biggy!" If they were rooting for him, he still had a chance. That gave him another boost, and he poured everything into the last thirty strokes. He knew, as he crossed the finish line, that he had closed on Brad, but he was sure that Lewis had won. It was as close a race as Biglow could remember. The only thing that gave him hope was that perhaps he had looked at the finish from a bad angle. Earlier in the weekend, when he had rowed the course with Bouscaren, Joe had showed him the finish line and had told him that it was an odd one. There was an optical illusion at the end, and the man who wins may be the loser. Even though he saw Tony Johnson, his old Yale coach, give him a thumbs-up sign, he was not sure he had won.

The judges decided that Biglow had won in 7:27.1, that Lewis was second in 7:28, that Wood was third with 7:28.1 and Bouscaren fourth with 7:32.1. Jim Dietz, burned out by two hard back-to-back races, had come in seventh.

Lewis was not happy. He had come so close, only to see victory slip away. Besides, he did not entirely accept the decision of the judges. Who knew whether they had the right angle, or whether they could see accurately something as close as that final? He had beaten Tiff, he had almost rowed the race he had intended and somehow Biglow had probably slipped by. Everyone else was stunned by how well he had rowed, but he was bitterly disappointed. "We did everything right," he told Mitch Lewis that night. "The only thing wrong was that I didn't win." All he wanted to do was get away from the scullers and away from Princeton.

Tiff Wood went over and congratulated Biglow, who seemed puzzled by Wood's race. When he asked Tiff why had been so slow off the line, it was not a question Wood could answer. Instead, he put his arm around Biglow and said, "John, the thing I'll miss most about your winning is that now we won't be able to row the double together." Then Tiff Wood joined his family for a tailgate picnic. He felt terrible to have invested so much for so long and then to have rowed so badly. The worst thing of all was that he had had energy left at the end. That was almost sinful.

He would probably row in the Olympics in a double or a quad,
but not the single,
the goal he had sought with such determination for so long. He kept his disappointment in and tried to enjoy the picnic before driving home with Kristy. She was in tears, taking his loss even harder than he did. He did not talk about the race very much, but she knew he was rerowing it all the way home. What he wanted to do was scream. Instead, every once in a while he would simply say, "oh, shit." It was a very long ride back from Princeton.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

John Biglow did not return to Cambridge immediately. Instead, he drove to Connecticut to spend a few days with Grandmother Biglow. He had wanted to share the pleasure of his triumph with her. She was ninety-four and they were not going to be able to have that much more time together. Even though she could get around now only with a walker, Grandmother Biglow was still competitive. She listened faithfully to radio broadcasts of Yale sports events with the Yale programs and alumni magazine in front of her so she would know as much as possible about the players. When a player entered the game, she would say, "Oh, John, he's very good," and she would detail his accomplishments. (A few months later, John Biglow met the Harvard quarterback at a party and said to that young man's astonishment, "Oh, listen, my grandmother thinks you're very good. She's a real fan of yours.")

She had not been in favor of his rowing this year; she thought he had given too much to the sport at the expense of himself and the Biglow family; it was time to go on to other things. He had tried to explain that this year was different, that this was an Olympic year. In the days he spent with her after the trials, the phone rang incessantly with different people calling to congratulate him and interview him. When she asked him what all the fuss was about, he said that it was the
Olympics,
that he had won the right to represent his own country against the world. "Oh," she had said, "that's nice," and she had been pleased and he had known that the Olympics were all right with her.

He was supposed to return to Cambridge on Tuesday. On Monday, he called Harry Parker. They had talked about the race, and in the middle of the conversation Biglow had said, "I have a feeling that you would have preferred that Tiff had won."

Parker was startled. He had become accustomed to dealing with Biglow and his quick flashes of brutal frankness and candor; but this caught him off guard, in no small part because it was true. He realized immediately that he had to match Biglow's candor with his own. "I think you're right, John," he answered. "I think I did prefer that Tiff win because you're almost equal as scullers, and I think you're better in the team boats than he is."