The Amateurs (3 page)

CHAPTER

THREE

Tiff Wood had no illusion about why he was doing this. He was not doing it for his country. He was doing it for himself. If he won a medal, there might be an emotional moment on the platform when the anthem was played and personal and national goals merged. But that would be nothing more than the vindication of so much commitment and sacrifice. He exercised as many as 600 hours a year and practiced, hands on oars as many as 475 hours a year. Yet in a given year he might race only a few times, for perhaps a total of 130 minutes. Few sports had as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions. Given that ratio, how much this trial and the chance to row at the Olympics meant to the oarsmen competing became a great deal more understandable. Almost eight years of largely solitary effort was being summed up this weekend in a 7-minute race.

For in a nation where sports was big business, crew was apart. It had in no way benefited from the extraordinary growth of sports, both amateur and professional, which had been caused by the coming of television. By the 1980s, the marriage between sports and television (and merchandising) was virtually complete. Sports that the electronic eye favored underwent booms of astonishing dimension and became opportunities for celebrity and affluence. Sports that the camera did not favor atrophied by comparison. Many of the other great athletes who went to Los Angeles in 1984, the basketball players or the track and field stars, would have other chances to gain their moment of national recognition on the electronic eye during long and successful careers. Jimmy Carter would go on television again and again in his career. But the rowers would not.

Physically, rowing was remarkably resistant to the camera: Even if the television producers managed to rig a dolly on which the cameras could follow alongside the race, the angle of the camera might distort the finish, making a boat that was behind appear to be winning. Helicopters had been used with only marginal success. Worse, rowing at its best— the symmetry of powerful athletes pulling on their oars at precisely the right moment, in the grace of execution— seemed mechanical to the camera. When ABC covered rowing as part of an Olympiad, the network's haste to get away from this sport and on to something more telegenic was almost embarrassing. The camera liked power exhibited more openly, and the power of the oarsmen was exhibited in far too controlled a setting. Besides, the camera liked to focus on individuals, and except for the single scull, crew was a sport without faces.

That allowed it to remain an anomaly, an encapsulated nineteenth-century world in the hyped-up twentieth-century world of commercialized sports. Until television, sports had been largely divided between the worlds of the amateur and the professional. Even at the collegiate level, certain sports such as football and basketball became tinged with professionalism. But bastions of amateurism such as track and field were now beginning to fall. A top amateur track star named Carl Lewis, an immensely talented young man who might possibly win four gold medals in the summer Olympics, reportedly made $1 million a year in appearance fees and endorsements and was already a serious collector of antiques and crystal. When the Dallas Cowboys football team drafted Lewis as a possible wide receiver, Lewis's coach pointed out that they would have trouble signing him, not because Lewis did not want to play football but because their salary was likely to represent a considerable decline in income for Lewis. Some of the new affluence in track and field was a reflection of television's interest in it, although the networks put track on only when there was a vacuum in schedules or when, during Olympic years, there might be Soviets for these young (black) athletes to beat. Part of it as well was a reflection of a changing society: As America went from a blue-collar to a white-collar society and feared becoming sedentary, more people than ever before had taken up running and jogging, greatly increasing the possibility for endorsements and triggering the interest of Madison Avenue. That interest was great in ordinary years; in Olympic years, it was pervasive.

The turning point of Madison Avenue's heightened interest in the Olympics was the surprise victory in the 1980 winter Olympics of the U.S. hockey team over the Soviet Union. College hockey had never before fascinated the viewing public, but a victory over the
Russians
was another matter. Many of the commercials aired during the 1984 winter games reflected that triumph and Madison Avenue's expectations for another. The commercials portrayed clean-cut, farm-bred, young American kids bidding farewell to family, going to the hockey camp, giving it, as they say, their best shot and ending up with the magical gold. The commercials were so successful that myth and fact blended together as one. They helped convince a nation of decidedly less than great winter athletes that, in fact, it was going to win medals that were not in the cards. The embarrassment caused when the commercials exploiting the 1980 hockey team turned out to be better than the 1984 hockey team was palpable. The coach of the 1984 team said that for a time he felt almost ashamed to come home. Now Madison Avenue was shifting from hockey to the summer Olympics, using principally runners and pole vaulters instead of skaters. Some athletes, under the looser regulations governing amateurism, were huckstering products. There was one runner who liked something called Z-bec, and there was another runner who swore that his schedule was so busy that he had to eat Snickers, a candy bar that helped him make the Olympic grade. Marathon running, which once had been almost as arcane as rowing, now had stars who were getting rich from endorsing running shoes and breakfast cereals. But rowing remained old-fashioned, only in part because the $2,000 or $3,000 price of a scull was beyond the means of a mass public. In the world of the professional and the pseudoamateur, the sport of single-scull rowing, had, however involuntarily, remained a citadel of the true amateur.

That would have pleased Andrew Carnegie, for whom the lake where the trials would take place was named. Rich though he was, Carnegie was a serious believer in the physical and spiritual good that came from rowing. In 1903, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, had approached Carnegie hoping for a huge donation for a graduate college, the chief ornament of which would be a law school. The fund raising up until then had not gone particularly well. Wilson needed about $1 million and had fallen considerably short of it, though he had traveled around hitting up wealthy Princeton alumni. In a long letter to Carnegie asking for money he had pointed out that Princeton was American, and in his words, "thoroughly Scottish." Carnegie visited Princeton and told Wilson what his young men needed was not a law school but a lake to row on. In addition to being a sport that built character and would let the undergraduates relax after all that studying, rowing would keep them from playing football, a roughneck sport Carnegie absolutely detested. With that Carnegie gave $150,000 to dam a nearby stream, and Lake Carnegie was born, financed and named. Princeton never came up with a law school (later Wilson told Carnegie, "we asked for bread and you gave us cake"), and football remained a more popular sport on the campus than crew. But who was to say, some 80 years later in an America that was an increasingly litigious society, that Andrew Carnegie had made the wrong choice?

Oddly enough, the oarsmen had not always been anonymous. There had been a time in the late nineteenth century when rowing, particularly sculling, was a celebrated sport. The newspapers were filled with the accomplishments of professional scullers and the challenges they laid down to their adversaries. As many as thirty thousand people might gather for a championship match in the late 1870s, and the top scullers made as much as $15,000 a year in purses and even more under the table from bribes and payoffs. In a way it rivaled boxing in those days. Sculling had been a raffish sport, populated by what were known as sporting types, and the amount of betting had been unusually high. The oarsmen themselves had often been Irish immigrants or the sons of Irish immigrants, beginning their trek upward in American society. Given the heavy betting, it was not long before more and more outcomes became suspicious and the sport as a public and professional spectacle grew tainted.

By the beginning of this century, rowing was strictly an amateur domain, and a regatta was only a vaguely athletic event. If the weather was good, lots of young people gathered near a riverbank, drinking pleasantly and completely out of touch with what was happening a mile or two up the river, where the race was either about to start or perhaps even taking place. Very quickly the boats would flash by, and the crowd would briefly wonder which one had won before returning to their refreshments. They knew that rowing was first and foremost a participant's sport.

The people who were most fascinated by rowing almost always rowed. It was, said Al Shealy, the stroke of the Harvard crews on which Tiff Wood had rowed, "a hermetically sealed world." During their college years the oarsmen put in terribly long hours, often showing up at the boathouse at 6:00 a.m. for preclass practices. Both physically and psychologically, they were separated from their classmates. Events that seemed earth-shattering to them—for example, who was demoted from the varsity to the junior varsity—went almost unnoticed by the rest of the students. In many ways they were like combat veterans coming back from a small, bitter and distant war, able to talk only to other veterans. Who else knew and cared of this distant land, of this terrible sacrifice and of arcane moments of bravery and heroism? Fittingly enough, when oarsmen got married, it often seemed that they married young women who rowed, or sisters of their teammates. The cast of characters at a wedding or at a boathouse was often indistinguishable.

Failing to get their deeds and names known to the world of outsiders, they had become the custodians of their own honor, their own record-book keepers. They remembered with astonishing fidelity each race, who had beaten whom by how many seconds, who had rowed at what beat, who had rowed through whom (for that was the phrase that oarsmen used, rowing through someone else, one man finding extra strength as another tired). If they lost a particular race, they remembered each mitigating factor, heavier wind in their lane than in the winner's, a poor rigging in the boat, a particularly bad airplane trip that had cost them two days of rest. Because their sport was one largely ignored by the traditional media, it was also to a remarkable degree a sport enshrined in myth rather than reality. Because their deeds were passed on by word of mouth rather than by book and newspaper, the sport gained a mythic aura. Fifteen years later, members of Harvard crews knew that during an Olympic camp a normally stern and unbending Harry Parker had knelt beside Fritz Hobbs, one of his favorite oarsmen, when Hobbs had finished his ergometer test and passed out. Harry, who never showed emotion or even sympathy for an athlete, was even said by some to have mopped Fritz Hobbs's brow.

Every bit of knowledge about another racer was an advantage. The competitors at Princeton knew that Wood was probably the strongest but also the roughest oar, that he rowed well into the wind; Bouscaren, who was smoother but not as strong, was better with a tail wind. Biglow was slow off the mark but strong at the end. Bouscaren was the quickest off the mark but did not finish as strongly as the others. Jim Dietz, a former champion now thirty-five and back for his last hurrah, could probably row one very good race, but it would be hard for him to row all out in both a semifinal and a final in back-to-back races. They competed furiously with each other and then went out to dinner together and talked about rowing. It was not surprising that they were bonded to each other. Who else, after all, knew how terrible and bleak a boathouse was in the dead of winter on an early morning, and who else knew the pain involved in each race?

It was in its way a very
macho
world. The egos were immense—they had to be for so demanding a sport. Men of lesser will and ambition simply did not stay around. The oarsmen were almost to a man highly individualistic and exceptionally compulsive. "A world of Type A personalities," said Al Shealy, one of the great Type A personalities himself. Loyalty and rivalry were most finely separated. Bonded though they might be to each other, there were ferocious undercurrents of rivalry among them. Because the rowing community was a closed one, its rivalries and jealousies were greatly magnified. The slight by one rower of another, real or imagined, took on immense significance, and tensions within a boathouse were often considerable. It was, Kiesling wrote in his memoir of rowing, "like a friendship between duelists," even on the same crew.

If the loyalties and rivalries were narrowly balanced, the loyalties almost always won out. One reason for that adhesion was the pain. It was a critical part of the bond. It was part of the oarsmen's unwritten code that one did not mention the pain. That was considered unseemly and, worse, it might magnify the pain and make it more threatening and more tangible. It was as if by not talking about it, the pain might become less important.

In his fine memoir of the sport, Steve Kiesling, who had rowed on very good Yale teams and a national team as well, had described in detail the pain involved in the sport. Some of his teammates felt that by doing this, Kiesling had shown that he was never able to cope with the pain. If he had been able to, their theory went, he would not have written about it. By contrast, the legendary figures of the boathouse were men who had passed out and who had somehow managed to keep rowing. When Tiff Wood had been at St. Paul's, he had grown up in the legend of a rower named Mad Dog Loggins. One day at practice, Mad Dog Loggins had been in a boat that was asked to give a power forty strokes at the end of a workout. (A power stroke is one in which the oarsman gives every bit of power he can; a power forty is forty all-out strokes.) Loggins had responded so vigorously that he had passed out at the end of the power forty. That was the stuff of myths, to pass out not just at the end of a race but after a power forty.