The Amateurs (9 page)

Some traditional scullers were offended by the crudeness of his technique. For a long time this did not bother him. If anything, he disdained those who placed a premium on form. "Form is for gymnastics and figure skating and diving, not rowing. I want to win. Rowing is about winning. If you win, then everyone says your form is good anyway," he once said. He was quick to summon historical precedents for the defeat of finesse crews by strong but crude crews. He took pleasure in talking about a famed (and victorious) University of Washington crew that was so rough it was known in the sport as "Lurch, Wobble and Gobble." He liked to quote Steven Fairbairn, an Australian oarsman who had been a critic of the traditional view of rowing that style was more important than power and endurance. "Drive at your blade," Fairbairn had said, "and let your body and slide take care of themselves." Tiff Wood took solace in those words.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

He had never thought of going anywhere else but to a rowing school, Harvard if possible, for Harvard in the 1960s and the 1970s was the great center of collegiate rowing. In his freshmen year he had weighed about 165 pounds, and he had tried for the lightweight crew. But he soon switched to the heavies for two reasons: first because, as an oarsman, he had to sacrifice enough in his life and he did not want to starve himself constantly to make the weight for the lights; and second because, in the world of rowing, true status and prestige belonged to the heavies. The lights were merely the opening act in most regattas. His career at Harvard was a distinguished albeit somewhat anonymous one. In 1972, he rowed on a great and undefeated Harvard freshman crew that had gone on to Henley and won the Thames Cup. In 1974 and 1975, his junior and senior years, respectively, he had rowed on Harvard crews that never lost a race in domestic competition. Those crews were very good and very cocky.

The stroke was Al Shealy, with his flair for publicity and self-promotion that was almost unparalleled in Harvard rowing history. Journalists wrote about him. Nonrowers knew his name; and if he was not a natural eccentric, then he was a brilliantly self-made one, on occasion setting off minor bombs in his own room to frighten his roommates. As Harvard won race after race, Shealy began to put his signature on each victory. When Harvard made its move and went by Yale or Penn, he would shout out—it was unheard of in the gentlemanly sport of rowing—"Good-bye, Yalies!" or "Farewell, Quakers!" Sometimes it was simply, "So long, suckers!" Other crews hated Shealy and the Harvards; it was bad enough to row against them and be beaten every time, but his cockiness made it all the worse.

A race with the University of Washington had highlighted the Harvard crew's elitism. Since most of Harvard's victories were against
eastern
crews, the Washington oarsmen regarded the race as one for the national championship. In the eyes of the Harvard oarsmen, a race on that same trip against Wisconsin, a race they had barely won, had already given them the national title. Before the race, to be held in Seattle, Shealy had played his usual gamesmanship by announcing plans for a naked heliborne raid on the Seattle Space Needle. The Washington oarsmen were duly offended by the Shealyisms ("I think that they probably saw us as a bunch of extremely arrogant upper-class prep-school-Harvard kids, and I think they were probably right," Shealy said years later.) The Washington oarsmen had their own means of retaliation. Timing was critical. At the exact moment that the Harvard crew arrived at the boathouse, the Washington oarsmen were getting ready to row. They were immense, obviously the biggest crew in the country. They all wore dark glasses, they had all shaved their heads, and they were stripped to the waist and oiling their bodies. They were at the least fifteen pounds a man heavier. But it was more than that, Shealy thought, they were
ominous,
so big and muscular, "like genetic defects, with these huge, bulbous muscles. Like primitive man. We were these skinny, snotty, little eastern kids." Harvard won by two lengths. With a third of the race left and Harvard pulling ahead, Shealy had yelled, "Farewell, Huskies!"

Harry Parker watched Shealy's antics with a certain mild ambivalence. If they represented unnecessary arrogance, then nonetheless it was arrogance earned. His crew behaved as if they were that good because they
were
that good. They became known in rowing history as "the Rude and Smooth" Harvard crew. The name came from an early victory when an older rowing aficionado had come up to them after the race and had told them that they had rowed a very smooth race but their antics were very rude. They loved it. They immediately became Rude and Smooth. There was madness in what they did. But then, why not? "Physical madness—and surely what we were doing every day, putting so much into so little was a form of madness—begets cultural madness. We were culturally mad," Shealy said. Because Shealy was a World War II buff, they practiced in World War II helmets. Because Shealy was a Patton freak, they called their boat the
George S. Patton.
Before races Shealy liked to quote one of Patton's most famous World War II speeches, about going through the Huns like shit through a goose, taking particular pleasure in doing it in the same boathouse as the East Germans. The Harvard crew began to have rituals. Before a race with Yale, desperately hungry at night because of the caloric output of their training and anxious to get out of the training camp, they would make what were called doughnut runs. Into the Jack-in-the-Box they would drive, and Tiff Wood would grab the microphone that customers used to order. "We want five hams," he would say, and the man on the other end would say that they did not serve ham. "Yes, you do—five hams coming up," Wood said, and then they would moon.

They were very good. Four of them, every port oar, eventually made the national team, and two of them, Wood and Gregg Stone, became national champion scullers. They not only won, they won by a lot. They began to call some of their victories "horizon jobs" because there was so much daylight between them and the next crew. They were not without tension. Tiff Wood's belief that he should have stroked those crews was a small but very real barrier in terms of friendship between him and Shealy. Gregg Stone did not always row in the first boat; this was a source of some annoyance to him, although there were others who thought Stone tended to coach too much. The competitiveness showed in their daily workouts when they tried to beat each other. In running stadiums (a Harry Parker off-season special, the
tour de stade
it was called, running up and down each of the thirty-seven sections of the Harvard stadium), they kept times, and records were posted. Gluttons did two tours, but that was not required. Finishing in under 25 minutes was generally considered good. Worse than the
tour de stade
were the sprints, which were done in relays, from the stadium floor to the top and back, five repetitions of five sprints. They competed on the ergometer, though Dick Cashin, the six man, was the strongest, with scores of about 3,800 for 6 minutes while everyone else hovered closer to 3,600. They competed in the weight room as well, but no one was particularly good on the weights; that was a sign of being musclebound, they thought, and they wanted flex in their power, not stiffness.

Part of the fierceness of their internal competition came from the fact that it was so hard to hold a seat in the boat; the junior varsity and the third boat were loaded with people just as intense and committed. In the way they drove each other, they were an extension of Harry Parker. The intensity showed in the seat racing. Seat racing was a primitive form of trying to find out who really moved a boat. It was fiendishly simple and brutal: Two oarsmen were pitted against each other in competing eights; after an all-out race, they switched boats. Gradually, over the weeks of practice, the coach could tell who was regularly winning and who was regularly losing and pick his boat accordingly. Tiff Wood was a violent seat racer. "He was absolutely savage," Cashin, his much bigger teammate, remembered. "I don't think he
ever
lost a seat race. I was bigger and stronger and I was better on the erg and I made the national team in my sophomore year, which was unusual, but I could never beat Tiff in seat racing. I came back from being on the national team in my sophomore year and I had a hard time getting a seat because Wood was there. I once tied with him in a seat race—it was on April seventeenth, 1975; I remember it because it was my birthday. But I never beat him."

Harry Parker tended to hold Shealy back from seat races; Shealy was a great stroke, skillful and deft and a compelling figure. Part of his strength was his bravado. It was critical to his psyche that he consider himself the preeminent oarsman of the group. It would not do if he lost in intramural competition to others in the boat. One year the Cal coach had said, "We'll never beat Harvard as long as Shealy and Cashin are there." The remark had stung everyone else, particularly Tiff Wood. Gregg Stone was sure that one of the main reasons both he and Wood had gone over to sculling was to prove that they had been as much a part of those boats and those victories as Shealy and Cashin had; and they were proving it, in Stone's words, "to Shealy and Cashin, to Harry Parker and even to our parents. My father, who used to row, would come down to see Shealy and Cashin race—even he caught the hype and, God, that irked me. Five years later we were pushing ourselves as national-champion scullers to prove that we were as much a part of those eights as they were."

There had been a certain wildness to Wood at prep school. He did drugs, mostly pot, and a little psychedelic exploring. His crowd was a hip one, not a jock one. At Harvard he was still passionate about rowing and still wild. The other oarsmen roomed together, but Wood for most of his years was with a different group, longer hair, more drugs, different interests. The drugs soon faded out of his life, replaced by a growing commitment to rowing. Looking back on it, he saw the drugs as part of the times, a way of rebelling within entirely comfortable limits. He was an immensely talented student, but he was on probation twice and missed one season of rowing because of poor grades. He was on probation because he simply had not gone to a particular class all year. His long, leather trench coat and dark glasses further stamped him as a leftover child of the 1960s in the mid-1970s. He liked the schizophrenia of his images. If, to most outsiders at Harvard, crew was the most inside or clubby of sports, then he was both an insider and an outsider.

The savagery with which he rowed bordered on a kind of athletic violence. His reputation among the other oarsmen was that he was a powerful oar but on occasion an erratic one. There would be moments, even his friends thought, when he would try to do it all, try to move the boat entirely by himself, and that always hurt the boat. In their freshman year there had been a heat at Henley, an early one with more to come. They had been under orders to get a three-quarter-length lead and hold it and thus conserve strength for the races still ahead. But midway in the race there had been Wood, enraged by his inability to turn on full power, screaming at his teammates,
"Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!"
Even as he was screaming, Ted Washburn, the Harvard freshman coach, was bicycling on the bike path along the river, and he could clearly hear Wood.
"Confidence, Tiff!"
he shouted back.
"Confidence, Tiff!"

The egos in the boat were immense. Shealy and Cashin would argue from time to time about which one was better, an argument that ended with an admission of mutual need. Wood showed his ego with the near-violence with which he rowed. Nothing showed the ego conflicts so much as the election of a captain at the end of their junior year. There were four clear candidates: Shealy, Cashin, Wood and Stone. None of them would vote for the others, and each probably voted for himself. No one in the jayvee boat would vote for any of the four. The compromise candidate became Blair Brooks, the relatively mild-mannered two-oar.

Behind all the hype and all the internal tension, Shealy thought, there had been something wonderful about being a part of those crews. A good crew meant shoehorning some eighteen hundred pounds of meat and ambition and ego into a thin shell that weighed about 180 pounds and then making it work. But in the case of a great crew, there was something glorious. Shealy believed that all people sought symmetry and purpose in their lives, something that lifted them up and made them feel better about themselves; and here were eight oarsmen, having worked so hard and sacrificed so much, catching something magical and doing it race after race, each oarsman making the others better. The feeling made them not just confident but also complete, and it was magnified by the knowledge that what they were accomplishing was pure in its amateurism. They were doing this because they wanted to, for no reward other than the feeling itself.

After rowing in those great Harvard boats and then in different international regattas in both fours and eights, Wood had moved over to sculling. There was a certain inevitability to that move. Not only was the national-champion sculler acknowledged as the best American rower, but at a more pragmatic level it was simply easier, as one got older and took on greater responsibilities, to be a sculler, just as it was easier to play tennis than to play baseball. A sculler could work out at whatever hours he fancied, adjusting his athletic routine to his work schedule; a member of a team had to practice when his teammates could.

In 1976, after Wood's friend Gregg Stone had gone to the Montreal Olympics as a tourist, he had suggested to Wood, who had made the team as a spare for the sweep oarsmen, that they try a double together. Stone had already done a fair amount of sculling, once a week as a senior while on the varsity crew and more frequently while he was in law school; for Wood, sculling was a new experience. In the fall of 1976, with only three days of practice together, they had entered the Head of the Charles, which was a major regatta. They had surprised themselves by taking second, beating, among others, Jim Dietz and Larry Klecatsky, who had often been the champions in the past. The following year, in 1977, they went to Henley and took second behind the British double that had been second in the 1976 Olympics.