The Amateurs (8 page)

But he was also aware that his ability to absorb that pain had made him an exceptional competitor. He had rationalized all of it very carefully, going over and over in his mind the pluses and minuses of what he was doing. The race itself was a terrible ordeal. The pain bordered, he thought, on a kind of torture. The worst part of the torture was that it was self-imposed. There was no need to go through with it. But he had willed himself to deal with it; he wanted to measure himself against the best, and the only way to do that was to bear the pain.

In truth, deep down, he liked this aspect of the sport because it permitted ordinary and not particularly talented young men and women to reach beyond themselves. "I think," he once said, "that what I like about it is the chance to be a hero. Every day in what seems like a very ordinary setting there are heroes in every boat, people reaching down to come up with that much more energy to make it work. I like that, I honor it and I think that is special in this world." In the end, rowing made him feel good about himself.

Parker, his coach and a former Olympic sculler himself, thought that Tiff Wood was particularly good at calibrating exactly how much energy he had left and giving every single bit. Part of his strength, Parker thought, was in coming across a finish line on the surge of his last possible stroke, absolutely depleted. This was true even in practice, and Parker recently had a graphic illustration of it. He had, near the end of a long and punishing workout, asked Wood for a final twenty power strokes, and Wood had given them. But Parker had not been paying attention, and he had asked Wood for ten more, ten more strokes from a body that was finished; and Wood, the most modest and proper young man imaginable, had screamed at Parker in a kind of elemental rage, "Fuck you!"

Early in Wood's college career Parker had decided that any attempt to make him row with greater finesse would be counterproductive. He was impatient with technique. The best way to coach him, Parker decided, was not to coach him but to leave him to his furies. What set Wood apart was will, the power of the mind to bend the body to its uses. There was a certain madness to that, Wood knew, but there was also a purpose. He had, after all, been raised in a tradition in which sacrifice, if not pain, was an essential ingredient. He believed, he said, in the Puritan ethic, not the leisure society. A world where people sought only leisure seemed empty to him. The best thing about rowing was in the obstacles it presented, even if these were, in his words, manufactured obstacles.

He was, of course, intensely competitive. Rowing indoors on the tanks during the long, boring winter months, he invented competitive games to keep him going—he would try to row a larger puddle than the oarsman just ahead of him. (He was scrupulous about not cheating, though of course the other oarsman did not know the contest was going on.) When Wood graduated from college he had gloried in taking the tests for both business and law school and had done exceptionally well. He always tested well. Some friends had teased him about the fact that he should have taken the tests for medical school as well. Just one more group of applicants to compete against, they said.

His fiance, Kristy Aserlind, also a rower, liked going for long, aimless walks. Tiff Wood did not. If Tiff went for a walk, there had to be a form to it, 3
^1/2
times around the block. It would be even better if there were an existing record for those 3
^1/2
blocks that he could compete against.

There had to be form and purpose to the walk because there had to be form and purpose to life. That was one of the interesting things about rowing. Those who competed at this level did so with a demonic passion. Yet there was no overt financial reward at the end, nor indeed was there even any covert financial reward, a brokerage house wanting and giving special privilege to the famed amateur. Yet the athletes were almost always the children of the upper middle class, privileged, affluent, a group that in this society did not readily seek hardship. One could understand the son of a ghetto family playing in the school yard for six hours a day hoping that basketball was a ticket out of the slum; it was harder to understand the son of Beacon Hill spending so much time and subjecting himself to so much pain to attain an honor that no one else even understood. Perhaps in our society the true madness in the search for excellence is left for the amateur.

For Tiff Wood was a son of Beacon Hill, the home of the American establishment, and he had gone to the best schools, as had his father before him. The Woods were not very old Boston. Reginald Wood, the grandfather, who had quit school at fourteen to be a runner on the floor in Wall Street, had been successful in the stock market. Very much a self-made man, he had been determined that his children would have the best in education.

Richard Wood, Tiff's father, had gone to Harvard, and in his early sixties, he was as lean as his son. He still ran three or four miles a day, and on weekends he usually ran ten miles a day. In his late fifties, he had run in three marathons. In the first one he quit after seventeen miles. In the second, when he made twenty-three miles and could no longer run, he alternately walked a block and ran a block, finishing in 5
^1/2
hours. The next year, better prepared, he made it home without limping, in 4
^1/2
hours. He loved the outdoors, and he was the first one on the ski slopes in the morning, the last one off in the evening. He took a special pleasure in being on the slopes on days when it was ten degrees below zero and no one else would go out except, from the time he was eight years old, his son Tiff. There had never been a doubt in Richard Wood's mind that the boy was determined to stay with his father on all occasions, to push himself as hard as he could even if he had to absorb an unusual amount of punishment in the process. If he was not competing with a father (for the question of whether an eight- or nine-year-old competes with a parent is a difficult one to answer), he was certainly proving something to his father, again and again. Even as a little boy he had been obsessive. In kindergarten, he had become so voracious a reader that the school at the end of the year had given him a handsomely lettered certificate proclaiming him "the World's Greatest Reader." His father thought his willingness to take on excessively harsh challenges bordered on a form of masochism.

When he was ten, he had stayed at the home of a friend named David Hansen and they had decided to sleep outside in the simplest kind of tent. It was early spring and cold. That night there was a horrendous rainstorm. In the middle of the storm David Hansen had come inside, but the next morning Richard Wood was appalled to find his son asleep in four inches of water. From then on he had realized that his son was always going to push himself to the limits in terms of physical risk, that he was not just proving something but gaining recognition as well.

A year later they had gone mountain climbing in New Hampshire, and very high up they had come to a tiny pool of water that was at most twenty feet in diameter. The water was absolutely ice cold. Above it stood a very steep mountain cliff, perhaps thirty feet high. Anyone diving from it to the pool would have to make an almost perfect dive or be splattered on the rocks. Richard Wood had taken one look at the cliff and known exactly what was going to happen. Tiff was going to want to dive in, but the pool was so small that he could easily miss it. "It'd really be something to dive in from there," Tiff had said. "I think I'll pass," Richard Wood had said. He had watched as Tiff had measured the distance and he thought, Do I tell him not to do it? He had decided, no, he could not forbid him, and Tiff had made one dive and done it cleanly, a dive into water that no one in his right mind would want to swim in in the first place.

Those were not particularly happy years for Tiff Wood. His parents' marriage was coming apart and they were about to get a divorce. He found himself painfully shy, and his feelings about things were completely internalized: It was not that he was without feelings, it was that he found no way to express them. Just after his parents had been divorced, he had once started to cry over some minor incident. When his stepmother had tried to comfort him, he had turned away from her abruptly. "I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me," he had said. Given a chance by his father to stay at home or go away to boarding school, he had seized the chance to go away.

He had arrived at St. Paul's School in 1967, thirteen years old, small for his age, unsure of himself, confused. He was, he realized later, a very shy little boy who kept all of his pain inside. At St. Paul's he had not done well in the beginning. He was smart, but he had realized immediately that too strenuous a use of his intelligence and the accumulation of exceptional grades did not bring popularity. He was rebellious and wore his hair long. Popularity eluded him. "The people I wanted to be my friends were not interested in being my friends," he said of that time. "I thought they were making a mistake. But it was not easy to show this to them."

At St. Paul's popularity and status were in some indefinable way tied to things that might well be outside his reach, such as looks and size and athletic accomplishment. He had never been a particularly gifted athlete. His eyesight was terrible, and in those days there were no soft contact lenses. He felt clumsy and awkward at almost everything, and then he tried rowing. On the first two days he had gone out, the conditions had been appalling, cold and snowy. The boat had been filled with water and he had loved it. The harsh weather, which drove off most of his contemporaries, drew him in. He had always felt comfortable in such weather. From the start he had had a sense that this was a sport in which he could excel, for it required only strength and dedication, not skill or grace or timing.

At St. Paul's, rowing had a particular prestige, it was bound into the tradition of the school as much as football was. Besides, football was out. He could barely see the ball. But in rowing the athletes looked behind them. His mother, aware of his problem, encouraged him in crew; his father still preferred football. Tiff Wood's instincts told him crew was his sport. Whatever price was required to succeed in rowing, he decided he would pay it. He had been rowing what were called club boats, which were like intramural boats, and had noticed that the coach of the crew, Richard Davis, was very popular with the more senior rowers. Davis was young, just out of the Air Force, and at night he ate with the students; Tiff Wood by chance had been assigned to his dinner table, and Tiff quietly sat there night after night, absorbing as much of this cherished atmosphere as he could. He sat there torn between desperately wanting to be noticed and just as desperately wanting not to be noticed. He was aware that he was almost too small to be in the company of such important and accomplished young men. He was so silent that he was not even sure that Davis had noticed him.

In his second year at St. Paul's another boy broke his collarbone, and Davis had reached down and placed Wood in the third varsity boat. After that his life centered on rowing. He was awkward at everything else, but about this he felt strong and confident. It was his one chance of asserting himself. If almost everyone else had better technique, Tiff Wood would compensate for lack of finesse by simple determination and will. His instinct, when something went wrong, was simply to pull harder, to punish himself a little more. That became his trademark. Richard Davis was the perfect coach for a young man like him. Davis had coached for a time at Harvard while a graduate student, and he patterned himself after Harry Parker. Davis was less interested in technique than in conditioning and attitude. If his rowers were in better shape and had worked harder, he taught them, they would win. "You have to row until it hurts," he told them. That was perfect for Tiff Wood. The key was not God-given, it was in the rowers themselves. If, at the end of a grueling afternoon on the water, Davis called for a run back to the school, which was a mile away, there were perceptible groans from the other kids; but Tiff Wood would lead the run back with pleasure showing on his face, for this was his territory, these were his rules.

Soon he began to build a reputation as a very strong oar. On some days he thought he was rowing so well that he could move a boat all by himself. If he pushed himself to his absolute outer limit, pushed the level of pain above any acceptable limit, he could make his boat win. Knowing this, he punished himself that much more. His mother faithfully came to all his races. "I'll see you at Henley one day, Tiff," she said.

The next year he returned to St. Paul's and was assigned a new dorm. As he approached the form on the first day, he saw one of the most admired boys in the hip, irreverent crowd he hoped to join, one of those golden boys for whom everything seemed to come easily and who had seemed a thousand social levels above him in the past. "Hello, Tiff," the boy had said. Tiff had arrived. If, in years to come, he stayed with rowing much longer than any of his contemporaries, it was partly out of gratitude and partly because rowing was so crucial to him. At a time when he was most vulnerable, rowing had given form to his life and brought him confidence.

He was not a pretty rower—indeed, he was rough and elemental. "I am," he said, "propelled by a sense of urgency." His nickname, befitting his style, was The Hammer. That was a term, slightly pejorative, for a rower who used brute strength to cover up technical deficiency. He was the quintessential hammer. Because he had a knack for moving boats—his boats
won
—his coaches both in prep school and college had been reluctant to tamper with his style and add technique. It was as if he were too impatient to use his power to bother to learn technique, for in the transition to greater finesse, at least at the start, power would have to be sacrificed. When he drove his oars into the water, he did it with such fury and strength that it virtually drove a physical shock into his body. He was rough at the catch, the moment when the oar hits the water; he knew that, but he was forgiven even that flaw. When his boat was behind, his response was always to punish himself a little more. "Which one is Tiff?" his stepmother, Jane Wood, quite new to the sport, had once cried while watching a Harvard boat race. "I can't pick him out." "He's the one who keeps moving his head," answered one of her friends, more sophisticated about rowing.