In April Ulbrickson had all but crowed to both national wire services that this all-sophomore crew was great—“potentially the greatest crew I have coached,” he’d said, in front of the whole world. Now they seemed bent on making a fool of him. He marched them into his office, closed the door, and read them the riot act. “If you cannot get to doing business, I will break up the combination,” he growled. Ulbrickson hated to even say it. He still had not forgotten the stunning manner in which the sophomores had won the freshman title in Poughkeepsie the year before. Nor had anybody else. Almost every press account that mentioned them still harkened back to that moment in New York when their boat had pulled away from the field as if propelled by young gods rather than by young men. But Ulbrickson knew that, in the end, it wasn’t gods but young men who had to win crew races, and, unlike gods, young men were fallible. It was his job to find their failings and remedy them if he could and to replace them if he couldn’t.
• • •
Rowing is, in a number of ways, a sport of fundamental paradoxes. For one thing, an eight-oared racing shell—powered by unusually large and physically powerful men or women—is commanded, controlled, and directed by the smallest and least powerful person in the boat. The coxswain (nowadays often a female even in an otherwise male crew) must have the force of character to look men or women twice his or her size in the face, bark orders at them, and be confident that the leviathans will respond instantly and unquestioningly to those orders. It is perhaps the most incongruous relationship in sports.
Another paradox lies in the physics of the sport. The object of the endeavor is, of course, to make the boat move through the water as quickly as possible. But the faster the boat goes, the harder it is to row well. The enormously complicated sequence of movements, each of which an oarsman must execute with exquisite precision, becomes exponentially more difficult to perform as the stroke rate increases. Rowing at a beat of thirty-six is vastly more challenging than rowing at a beat of twenty-six. As the tempo accelerates, the penalty of a miscue—an oar touching the water a fraction of a second too early or too late, for instance—becomes ever more severe, the opportunity for disaster ever greater. At the same time, the exertion required to maintain a high rate makes the physical pain all the more devastating and therefore the likelihood of a miscue greater. In this sense, speed is both the rower’s ultimate goal and also his greatest foe. Put another way, beautiful and effective rowing often means painful rowing. An unnamed coach is reputed to have said, bluntly, “Rowing is like a beautiful duck. On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s paddling like mad!”
But the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.
The psychology is complex. Even as rowers must subsume their often fierce sense of independence and self-reliance, at the same time they must hold true to their individuality, their unique capabilities as oarsmen or oarswomen or, for that matter, as human beings. Even if they could, few rowing coaches would simply clone their biggest, strongest, smartest, and most capable rowers. Crew races are not won by clones. They are won by crews, and great crews are carefully balanced blends of both physical abilities and personality types. In physical terms, for instance, one rower’s arms might be longer than another’s, but the latter might have a stronger back than the former. Neither is necessarily a better or more valuable oarsman than the other; both the long arms and the strong back are assets to the boat. But if they are to row well together, each of these oarsmen must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the other. Each must be prepared to compromise something in the way of optimizing his stroke for the overall benefit of the boat—the shorter-armed man reaching a little farther, the longer-armed man foreshortening his reach just a bit—so that both men’s oars remain parallel and both blades enter and exit the water at precisely the same moment. This highly refined coordination and cooperation must be multiplied out across eight individuals of varying statures and physiques to make the most of each individual’s strengths. Only in this way can the capabilities that come with diversity—lighter, more technical rowers in the bow and stronger, heavier pullers in the middle of the boat, for instance—be turned to advantage rather than disadvantage.
And capitalizing on diversity is perhaps even more important when it comes to the characters of the oarsmen. A crew composed entirely of eight amped-up, overtly aggressive oarsmen will often degenerate into a dysfunctional brawl in a boat or exhaust itself in the first leg of a long race. Similarly, a boatload of quiet but strong introverts may never find the common core of fiery resolve that causes the boat to explode past its competitors when all seems lost. Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That’s the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades. But it takes young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical ability to pull it off.
That’s what Al Ulbrickson believed he had seen in Washington’s sophomore boat in Poughkeepsie the previous June. They had become that perfect thing that all crew coaches seek. He remained almost desperately reluctant now to tear the fabric of what held them together then, but the boys seemed to be leaving him no choice. They seemed to have come unraveled all on their own.
• • •
On May 22 he tested both boats again, rowing two miles at a racing beat. The older boys won by a length. The next day he tried them at three miles. The older boys turned in an impressive 15:53, a full 8 seconds faster than the sophomores. Finally, Ulbrickson told the reporters waiting on the ramp what they’d been expecting to hear for weeks now. Barring some kind of miracle, the older boys would race as the varsity crew at Poughkeepsie; the sophomores would almost certainly be demoted to junior varsity status, despite winning in California. But he added that the sophomores would continue to row together. He’d keep an open mind, Ulbrickson said, and see how both boats performed on the Hudson before the regatta. It was clear to everyone, though, including Joe and his dejected crewmates, that his mind was all but made up.
Seattle’s sportswriters weren’t at all sure that it was the correct decision. The Post-Intelligencer’s Royal Brougham had been loudly backing the cause of the sophomores for months, despite their recent sloppiness. George Varnell of the Seattle Times had watched the last few trials closely, and he’d noted something that he wondered if Ulbrickson had picked up on. In the two-mile and the three-mile trials, the sopho
mores had gotten off the line badly, flailing at the water inefficiently, as if overexcited and flustered, and letting the older boys get out ahead of them. But by the end of the first mile, they seemed to row as well as the older boys. What’s more, in the three-mile trials the older boys had begun to look decidedly ragged by the time they entered the last mile. Clarence Dirks, a writer for the Post-Intelligencer, had already noticed the same thing. The sophomores seemed to get smoother with every pull of the oar, and they had been closing fast at the end of that third mile. The varsity course at Poughkeepsie was four miles long.
• • •
The trip to Poughkeepsie was not the boisterous and carefree jaunt of the year before. The weather was hot all the way across the country, the train stuffy and uncomfortable. Al Ulbrickson was on edge. Following the triple victories in California, he had taken to telling Seattle that he would sweep the regatta in Poughkeepsie this year, winning all three events. In response the excited citizenry had shelled out precious nickels and quarters and dollars, raising an astonishing twelve thousand dollars to send the crews east. Ulbrickson figured he needed to repay the debt by making good on his word.
The tension between the sophomores and the older boys was palpable. To the extent that it was possible, they tried to stay out of each other’s way, but the train was a confining environment and it was a challenge for both groups all the way east. Day after stifling day, the coaches and crews sat in small, almost sullen groups, playing cards, reading pulp magazines, shooting the bull, choosing whom they went to the dining car with and whom they didn’t. Joe and Shorty Hunt and Roger Morris kept largely to themselves in one corner of a coach. There was no singing this time; Joe had left his guitar at home.
Five days later, they arrived in Poughkeepsie. When they stepped off the train, on a Sunday morning, they were all relieved to find themselves in the midst of a cool, refreshing summer rainstorm rather than the sticky, oppressive heat they had been anticipating. As Pocock issued anxious instructions, they gingerly unloaded the shells from the baggage car. A large construction crane lifted the coaching launch from a flatcar and placed it gently in the Hudson. Then the boys began to unload the dozens of milk cans they had brought along. Each contained ten gallons of fresh, clear, sweet Northwest water. They would row on the Hudson’s water. They might even shower in it. But they weren’t about to drink it again.
Reporters pressed around Ulbrickson as he detrained. He still hadn’t officially announced his varsity boat assignments, but he was frank: “The sophomore crew has been a deep disappointment to me.” He went on to elaborate: “We can’t figure out what happened to them. . . . They began losing their punch a while before the California race . . . unless they come back again they’ll row here as the junior varsity.” The eastern sportswriters were flabbergasted. They could not believe that Ulbrickson would even consider demoting the boys whom they had seen with their own eyes sweeping to victory so easily a year ago, boys who had gone on to defeat the California varsity just two months ago.
The next day the Husky crews performed a time-honored Poughkeepsie ritual and visited each of their rivals’ shell houses to pay grudging respect to their competitors before taking to the river. At each stop Ulbrickson had to explain, all over again, to his coaching counterpart that, yes, indeed, he planned to send the sophomores off in the junior varsity boat. The coaches were as incredulous as the reporters had been. Venerable old Jim Ten Eyck of Syracuse, now eighty-three years old, shook his gray head and said he didn’t believe Ulbrickson would really do it, that in his opinion it was a ruse, that on June 18 the sophomores would go off in the varsity boat. After Ulbrickson and his boys left, Ten Eyck shook his head again and said, “Ulbrickson must have two great boats if he can do that.”
The sophomore boat was not now, in fact, quite composed entirely of sophomores. Ulbrickson had swapped a senior, Wink Winslow, for George Morry, as coxswain, to capitalize on Winslow’s greater experience with river rowing. Other than that, though, it was the crew that had swept to victory here so effortlessly a year before.
By the time they got to rowing, things were tough out on the water. It was still rainy, and a cold, stiff wind was whipping downstream. The river was a heaving mass of rollers, the water dark and oily. These were exactly the kinds of conditions that the Washington boys most dreaded, not because of the rain or the wind, with which they were better acquainted than most, but because of the peculiar sideways motion of the river water when wind-driven waves interacted with a tidal current. Ulbrickson hustled the boys out onto the water twice that day to give them as much exposure as he could to the challenging conditions. The Washington boats were the only ones there. All the other crews—having been visited by the Huskies and having sneaked a peek at them in action—were content to remain in the warmth of their shell houses for the rest of the day.
The warmest and coziest of them were the Bears from California. Ky Ebright and his freshman and varsity crews had arrived several days before and moved into a brand-spanking-new boathouse on the more convenient Poughkeepsie side of the river, complete with city water, hot showers, a dining room, cooking facilities, electric lights, and spacious sleeping quarters. The contrast with their own arrangements did not set well with the Washington boys. As the rain continued to fall and the wind to blow, their rickety old boathouse on the Highland side of the river, with its leaky roof and cold river-water showers, seemed by comparison to have been designed to make them as miserable as possible. And the meager fare at Mother Palmer’s boarding-house up on the bluff was proving downright starvation inducing this year. Instead of sleeping six to a room, as they had the year before, they now had to find places to stretch out eight or nine of their long frames in each room. Even absent the stifling heat of the previous year, the accommodations were decidedly uncomfortable.
What likely made Al Ulbrickson most uncomfortable, though, was late-breaking news he had just received from Ebright—that shortly before leaving Berkeley, he had moved four boys from his national championship crew of the previous year back into this year’s varsity shell. All told, in fact, six of the boys in the Cal boat were now veterans of last year’s championship crew. Ulbrickson had to wonder if Cal’s losing crew in Oakland had, to some extent, been a ruse employed by Ebright en route to the greater prize of a national championship in Poughkeepsie. Worse, from Ulbrickson’s perspective, was that after a few days of watching the reconstituted Cal varsity boat working out on the Hudson, the throng of bookmakers and sportswriters who had descended on Poughkeepsie had already begun to make comparisons between this Cal crew and the great crew that won Olympic gold for California in 1932. And still worse news, in some ways, was the skinny on Cal’s big stroke oar, Eugene Berkenkamp. In the Poughkeepsie cigar shops, where men gathered to exchange the latest news and keep an eye on the odds that bookies were offering, the straight dope was that Berkenkamp was easily the equal of the great Peter Donlon. Donlon had stroked Cal to its other Olympic gold medal, in 1928, and to the fastest time ever on the Poughkeepsie course.
On June 12, six days before the race, Ulbrickson put both boats head-to-head on the river again, and the sophomores fell apart as soon as they saw the older boys. They came in a staggering eight lengths behind them. That finally settled it. Ulbrickson threw in the towel. The sophomores were officially demoted to junior varsity status; the older boys would row as varsity. For Joe and his crewmates, it was a terrible blow, but from Al Ulbrickson’s point of view, his new varsity’s eight-length margin of victory seemed to betoken good things to come in the climactic race on June 18. And it was the varsity race that he most wanted to win. Washington hadn’t managed that since 1926, when he himself stroked the Huskies to victory here. The same afternoon Ulbrickson made the sophomores’ demotion final, though, the New York Times’ Robert Kelley, watching the newly anointed Washington varsity in a trial, observed the same thing that reporters back in Seattle had noticed earlier—in the fourth and final mile the older bo
ys seemed to be dragging just a bit.
• • •
Later that day Ulbrickson received a hand-delivered message from the president of the United States. A few days before, Ulbrickson had invited FDR—an enthusiastic crew fan, whose son Franklin Junior would in a few days be rowing for Harvard against Yale—to ride along in his coaching launch and observe a time trial. The president responded regretfully that he could not make it, as he had to be in Washington, D.C., to sign the extension of the National Recovery Administration into law before going to New London to watch Franklin Junior row. But that evening Ulbrickson got a call from Hyde Park, just up the river. It was John Roosevelt, the president’s youngest son. He had also rowed for Harvard, and he wondered if he might ride along in the president’s place.
The following day, with John Roosevelt—a tall, good-looking kid with his hair slicked back and a warm, fetching smile—riding along in the launch, Ulbrickson held one final trial, just to see what to expect on race day. He started the older boys, his new varsity, at four miles. At the three-mile mark, Joe and the sophomores joined in. They quickly powered ahead of the varsity. At the two-mile mark, Tom Bolles’s exceptional freshmen joined in. For the rest of the way, the sophomores and the freshmen battled for first with a clearly exhausted varsity trailing both. At the end the freshmen came in half a length ahead of Joe and the sophomores, with both boats well ahead of the new varsity. George Pocock, surprised, said, “The sophomores looked like something today for the first time in weeks. It surely looked like a crew that is coming.” So far as we know, Al Ulbrickson said nothing—neither publicly nor to those closest to him—but he must have tossed and turned in his bunk that night. By now the die was cast, the programs had been printed, the older boys would still row as the varsity. But he couldn’t have liked what he had just seen.