The next day, at lunchtime, things erupted again. It had become a tradition for different crews to sing national songs during meals. When it came time for the Yugoslavian crew to rise and sing, they launched into an odd rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” Nobody could quite tell what the point was. It wasn’t even entirely clear if they were singing in English or one of the several languages of Yugoslavia. But the American boys knew the tune, and something about the way certain lines were delivered convinced Chuck Day that the Yugoslavians had figured out the previous night’s shenanigans and now were directing a mortal insult at the United States of America. Day bolted out of his seat and plowed into the Yugoslavians, fists flying. Bobby Moch charged in right behind him, going not for the Yugoslavian coxswain but for the biggest man on the crew. Right behind Moch came the rest of the Washington boys, and behind them, just for the hell of it, the entire Australian team. The German crew rushed to the side of the Yugoslavians. Chairs flew. Insults were hurled. Chests bumped into chests. Boys shoved other boys. A few more fists flew. Everyone was yelling again, and again nobody could understand what anybody else was saying. Finally the Dutch national crew dove into the melee, separating boys, pulling them back to their tables, smoothing out their feelings in crisp, perfect, diplomatic English.
• • •
Yet even as they fretted and fumed, something else was quietly at work among Ulbrickson’s boys. As they began to see traces of tension and nervousness in one another, they began instinctively to draw closer together. They took to huddling on the float before and after workouts, talking about what, precisely, they could do to make each row better than the one before, looking one another in the eye, speaking earnestly. Joking and horseplay fell by the wayside. They began to grow serious in a way they had never been before. Each of them knew that a defining moment in his life was nearly at hand; none wanted to waste it. And none wanted to waste it for the others.
All along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport, and he still tended to row erratically. But what Joe didn’t yet know—what he wouldn’t, in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men—was that every boy in the boat felt exactly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in the boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and that he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen.
Slowly, in those last few days, the boys—each in his own way—centered and calmed themselves. Huddled on the dock, they draped arms over one another’s shoulders and talked through their race plan, speaking softly but with more assurance, accelerating their advance along the rough road from boyhood to manhood. They quoted Pocock to one another. Roger and Joe took walks along the shores of the Langer See, skipping stones, clearing their minds. Johnny White took some time to lie shirtless in the sun on the lawn in front of Haus West, working on a tan to complement his Pepsodent-white smile but also thinking through how he was going to row. Shorty Hunt wrote long letters home, purging his anxiety by leaving it behind on pieces of paper. And finally the boat beneath them began to come to life again. Rowing twice a day, they began to release what was latent in their bodies and to find their swing. Everything began to feel right again, so long as Don Hume was in at stroke. And Hume seemed to be key. As soon as Hume returned, the tentativeness, awkwardness, and uncertainty they had felt when Ulbrickson had taken him out evaporated. George Pocock had seen the difference at a glance. They were back. All they needed now, Pocock told them on August 10, was a little competition. The next day a British reporter watching them warned readers back home that the boys from the Leander Club might just meet their match in the American crew: “The Washington University [sic] eight is the finest eight here, and it is as perfect as a crew can be.”
• • •
By the rules devised for the 1936 Olympic rowing regatta, each of the fourteen eight-oared crews was to have two chances to make it into the medal race on August 14. If a given crew won its preliminary race on August 12, it would proceed directly to the medal round, and have a precious day off. Each of the losing crews would have to race in a repechage, a re-rowing, on August 13 and would need to win that heat to advance to the medal race the following day. For their preliminary, the boys from Washington were assigned to race against France, Japan, Czechoslovakia, and the crew they were most concerned about, Great Britain.
View from the grandstands at Grünau
With the boat finally performing as it should, Al Ulbrickson did what he always did before big races: he backed off the training and, except for some light paddling, he told the boys to rest up for their first race. On August 11 they sat in the Grünau grandstands and watched the preliminaries in all the rowing events except their own eight-oared contest, scheduled for the following day. The entire American rowing team had arrived in Berlin with high hopes and expectations. “Rowing experts and critics were unanimous today in predicting the United States will carry off its share of the Olympic crew races,” one sportswriter had proclaimed boldly back on July 28, under a confident headline, “Experts Figure U.S. to Sweep Rowing Events.” George Pocock wasn’t so sure about that. He had examined the equipment of the other American crews and found it heavy, shoddy, old, and decrepit.
In the six events held that day, the United States finished second to last in three and dead last in the other three. To the great delight of the crowd surrounding the boys in the grandstands, Germany came in first in all six heats. “A very rotten performance,” Chuck Day wrote that night. “The rowing started today but the old USA seemed to forget to start,” Roger Morris said. “I guess it is up to us to come through,” said Johnny White.
• • •
By August 12, the day of the eight-oar preliminaries, Don Hume had lost a worrisome 14 pounds from his normal weight, the 172 pounds he had carried in Poughkeepsie. At 158 pounds, his six-foot-two frame was down to skin and bones. His chest was still congested, and he was running a low fever on and off. But he insisted that he was ready to row. Al Ulbrickson kept him in bed in Köpenick for as long as he could. Then, late that afternoon, he rousted him out and put him on the bus, with the rest of the boys, headed for the regatta course.
Conditions were almost ideal for rowing. The skies were lightly overcast, but the temperatures were in the low seventies. Only a hint of a wind out on the Langer See ruffled the slate-gray water, and what wind there was came from the stern of the boats. The boys had been assigned to row in the first heat, at 5:15 p.m., and in lane one, the most protected lane on the course, though with such calm water it hardly mattered.
By the time the boys arrived in Grünau, festive crowds clutching binoculars and cameras had begun to line up at the ticket windows in front of the regatta course. As they made their way into the grounds, spectators with pricier tickets headed for the permanent, covered grandstand on the near side of the water; those with less expensive tickets trundled across a pontoon bridge to the massive wooden bleachers on the far side, where the national flags of the various nations entered in the rowing events fluttered along the broad back side of the structure. On the flagpole in front of Haus West, a large white Olympic flag stirred lazily.
Two thousand meters up the course, on the far side of the lake, a gangway had been constructed to the starting line, 325 feet out into the Langer See. Young men in uniforms stood ready there to grab hold of the sterns of the boats when they arrived for the start. Well behind the gangway, and oddly out of sight of the coxswains, the starter stood on a platform constructed atop the superstructure of a flat-bottomed boat. Hundreds of international reporters with notepads and cameras crowded the opposite bank; a short distance away fleets of automobiles stood ready to rush them to the finish line so they could witness both the start and the finish of each hea
t. A boat carrying an announcer and a shortwave-radio transmitter idled behind the line, ready to trail the shells down the course, broadcasting a stroke-by-stroke account of each heat directly to loudspeakers at the finish line, so spectators and reporters could be apprised of the progress of each boat before any of them came into view.
Waiting to go for gold
By the time Joe and the boys had limbered up and paddled to the starting line, at a little before 5:15, perhaps twenty-five thousand people had entered the regatta grounds. The boys backed the Husky Clipper up to the gangway and waited. Right next door, in lane two, Ran Laurie, Noel Duckworth, and the rest of the British crew did the same. Duckworth nodded at Bobby Moch, and Moch returned the gesture.
The race started at 5:15 exactly. The American boys got away badly again. Just as at Princeton, someone in the middle of the boat washed out on the first or second stroke. In lane four the Japanese fluttered rapidly out into the lead, whipping the water at nearly fifty strokes per minute with their short oars and short slides. Noel Duckworth and Ran Laurie took the British boat out hard but then eased up and settled into second place behind the Japanese, followed by Czechoslovakia, France, and the United States, dead last, rowing at thirty-eight.
Moch and Hume kept the rate up until they passed the Czechs at three hundred meters. Then they eased the throttle back to thirty-four. Out in front, the Japanese, still rowing like demons possessed, stretched their lead over the British to a full length. But neither Moch nor Duckworth was thinking about the Japanese. They were thinking about each other. For another seven hundred meters, the boats held their relative positions. As they approached the halfway mark, the exhausted Japanese suddenly and predictably began to fade and fall away behind the field, along with the Czechs. So did the French. That left the Americans and the Brits right where they had expected to be, alone with each other at the front of the pack as the grandstands and the boathouses began to come into view down the course. Now it was a game of cat and mouse.
Moch told Hume to edge the rate up, to see what would happen. Hume kicked it up to thirty-six. The U.S. boat crept up to within a half length of the British boat’s stern. Duckworth glanced over his shoulder. He and Laurie took the British boys up to thirty-eight. That checked the Americans’ advance. The British boat held its lead. The boys in both boats could now hear the roar of the crowd down the lake. Both coxswains could see the grandstands and the large black-and-white sign, “Ziel,” demarking the finish line up ahead, but neither was ready to make his move yet. Both were holding back. The British boys were taking long, sweeping strokes, all but lying on their backs at the end of each pull. The Americans were taking somewhat shorter strokes and spending a lot less time recovering between them.
Finally, with 250 meters to go, Moch shouted, “Now, boys. Now! Give me ten!” The boys dug hard and the American flag snapping on the foredeck of the Husky Clipper began to move past Duckworth, creeping halfway up the length of the British boat. Duckworth and Laurie went up to forty strokes per minute. For a moment, they held their position, the white blades of the U.S. shell flashing furiously alongside the crimson blades of the British. Then Bobby Moch yelped at Hume to up the rate again, and the Clipper resumed advancing.
In the British boat, Ran Laurie dug furiously at the water. He was still relatively fresh. He wanted to do more. But like many British strokes in those days, he was wielding an oar with a smaller, narrower blade than the rest of his crew—the idea being that the stroke’s job was to set the pace, not to power the boat. With the small blade, he avoided the risk of burning himself out and losing his form. But it also meant he wasn’t getting a full purchase on the water. Now he was in danger of finishing the most important race he’d rowed without having come close to exhausting himself—the last thing any oarsman wants.
Still, the British bow remained out in front of the American bow with 150 meters to go. But the American boys had found their swing and they were holding on to it. They were rowing as hard as they had ever rowed, taking huge sweeping cuts at the water, over and over again, rocking into the beat as if they were forged together, approaching forty strokes per minute. Every muscle, tendon, and ligament in their bodies was burning with pain, but they were rowing beyond pain, rowing in perfect, flawless harmony. Nothing was going to stop them. In the last twenty strokes, and particularly in the final twelve gorgeous strokes, they simply powered past the British boat, decisively and unambiguously. The twenty-five thousand international fans in the stands—a good portion of them Americans—rose and cheered them as their bow knifed across the line a full twenty feet ahead of the British shell. A moment later, Don Hume pitched forward and collapsed across his oar.
It took Moch a full minute of splashing water on Hume’s face before he was able to sit upright again and help paddle the shell over to the float. When they got there, though, the boys got sweet news. Their time, 6:00.8, was a new course record. And, sweeter yet, it was a new world and Olympic record, eclipsing California’s 1928 time of 6:03.2. When Al Ulbrickson arrived on the float, he crouched down next to the boat and, with a cryptic smile, quietly said, “Well done, boys.”
Joe had never heard his coach speak in quite that tone of voice. There seemed to be a hint of hushed respect in it. Almost deference.
• • •
As the boys tucked into their dinners at the police academy in Köpenick that night, they were jubilant. The British would now have to row and win in a repechage the next day if they were to be one of the final six boats in the medal race. The American boys would have a day off. Al Ulbrickson, though, was anything but jubilant. He was deeply concerned. After dinner he ordered Don Hume back to his sickbed. The boy looked like death risen. Whatever he had, it was clearly more than a cold—perhaps a bronchial infection or walking pneumonia. Either way, Ulbrickson had to figure out who was going to stroke the boat when the boys raced for gold in forty-eight hours.
After lunch the next day, the boys wandered through town, joshing one another, poking into shops, taking pictures with their new cameras, buying a few souvenirs, exploring corners of Köpenick they hadn’t yet seen. Like most of the Americans in Berlin that summer, they had concluded that the new Germany was a pretty nice place. It was clean, the people were friendly almost to a fault, everything worked neatly and efficiently, and the girls were pretty. Köpenick was charmingly quaint; Grünau green, leafy, and pastoral. Both towns were about as pleasant and peaceful as anything back home in Washington.
But there was a Germany the boys could not see, a Germany that was hidden from them, either by design or by time. It wasn’t just that the signs—“Für Juden verboten,” “Juden sind hier unerwünscht”—had been removed, or that the Gypsies had been rounded up and taken away, or that the vicious Stürmer newspaper had been withdrawn from the racks in the tobacco shops in Köpenick. There were larger, darker, more enveloping secrets all around them.
They knew nothing of the tendrils of blood that had billowed in the waters of the river Spree and the Langer See in June of 1933, when SA storm troopers rounded up hundreds of Köpenick’s Jews, Social Democrats, and Catholics and tortured ninety-one of them to death—beating some until their kidneys ruptured or their skin split open, and then pouring hot tar into the wounds before dumping the mutilated bodies into the town’s tranquil waterways. They could not see the sprawling Sachsenhausen concentration camp under construction that summer just north of Berlin, where before long more than two hundred thousand Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and eventually Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, and Czech university students would be held, and where tens of thousands of them would die.
And there was much more just over the horizon of time. They could see the sprawling yellow clinker-brick complex of the AEG Kabelwerk factory just outside town, but they could not see the thousands of slave laborers that would soon be put to work there, manufacturing electric cables, laboring twelve hours a day, living in squalid c
amps nearby until they died of typhus or malnutrition. When the boys walked past the pretty synagogue at 8 Freiheit, or “Freedom,” street, they could not see the mob with torches that would loot it and burn it to the ground on the night of November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht.
If they peered into Richard Hirschhahn’s clothing shop, they might have seen Richard and his wife, Hedwig, at work on sewing machines in the back of the shop as their daughters—eighteen-year-old Eva and nine-year-old Ruth—waited on customers up front. The Hirschhahns were Jewish, members of the congregation on Freiheit street, and they were deeply concerned about how things were going in Germany. But Richard had fought and been wounded in the Great War, and he did not think any harm would come to him or his family in the long run. “I’ve bled for Germany. Germany won’t let me down,” he liked to tell his wife and daughters. Still, Hedwig had returned recently from a trip to Wisconsin, and the Hirschhahns had begun to think about trying to move there. They had, in fact, some American friends staying with them in Köpenick that week, in town to see the Olympics.