The Amateurs Read Online Free Page B

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    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