The Amateurs Read Online Free Page A

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