The Amateurs (19 page)

Johnson, coaching in the shadow of Harry Parker, his job jeopardized because of the Yale losing streak, knew that he had finally come across some exceptional oarsmen. He was a distinguished oarsman himself, holding a silver medal from the 1968 Olympics in the pair without cox (he and his partner had lost in the last ten yards to the East Germans by about four feet or, by the clock, 7:26.56 to 7:26.71). He was not nearly as intense as Parker. If by the standards of mere mortals Johnson seemed obsessive, in the world of rowing his relative normality was regarded as being the sign of an eccentric. In the beginning he had not pushed his Yale crews that hard. He was learning about coaching just as they were learning about rowing. There was if not a country-club atmosphere to Yale rowing when he arrived, certainly a great deal less than total commitment. Andy Fisher, coxswain of some of the Johnson crews, had been appalled in his sophomore year to go to a March team meeting where the senior Yale oarsmen had talked of their goals for the coming season. Goals for the coming season? It was March, and it was too late to talk about goals. The season was about to start, and Harry Parker's crews had been in rigorous training since September. The new rowers joining the Yale program had that intensity, the old ones did not and the Yale boathouse was divided. Some of the more senior oarsmen looked down on people such as Bouscaren and Fisher because they were too brash, and on Biglow because he was not hip; in turn, the three younger men barely managed to veil their contempt for those who did not care enough.

To John Biglow, the great thing that Tony Johnson taught his athletes was that there were no limits to what they could force their bodies to do. Johnson would say this again and again. The limits were only in the mind, not in the body. In the struggle between the mind and the body, the mind would win if the body had been pushed hard during practice. Thus Johnson pushed them to work harder and harder on the weight machines, to do one more repetition; and they would do it, almost screaming with pain, their friends helping them to move their legs on the machines when they could no longer continue without help. The body in effect had given up, and it was being manipulated by the mind. That was what Johnson meant by expanding the limits.

Bouscaren always wanted to analyze what they were doing and why. He was not just an athlete but also a student of sports, and occasionally his questions got under Johnson's skin. One day when the oarsmen were doing weight repetitions, Bouscaren suggested they might try more repetitions of lighter weights. Johnson, normally mild and careful, simply said, "Shut up and do it." What he was saying, in effect, was "Joe, you think too much, and it hurts your rowing." (In 1984, with both Bouscaren and Biglow preparing for the Olympics, Bouscaren had gone to see Yale race at a regatta in Cambridge. "Did you see Tony?" Biglow asked him. "Yes," said Bouscaren. "What did he say?" Biglow asked. " 'Don't think too much,' " Bouscaren replied.)

No one in those four years pushed himself as hard as John Biglow. On occasion the others found it hard to live up to his standards. His concentration was so exceptional that he could tell if someone in the boat was not putting out. When that happened, he would become furious. The pain of rowing was as hard on him as on others, but he tried to hide it as much as he could. From time to time he would tell Fisher, the cox (no one else but the cox), "I just don't want to do it today. It hurts too much." Fisher would nod, and Biglow would keep rowing harder than anyone else in the boat. Years later, as a champion single sculler, he did his Nautilus workouts just before going out for his sculling workouts. There was a reason for this. In the Nautilus workouts, it was easy to calibrate pain. If, after a certain number of repetitions, he hit terrible pain, he could, by doing a few more repetitions, tell how final the pain was and whether he could push through it or not. Then, when he went out on the water and encountered the same level of pain, he could calibrate how much more he could push because he had just done the same thing on the machines.

Biglow's freshman crew had almost won the Eastern Sprints. In his sophomore year he rowed the number-two oar, and the Yale varsity began to win. In the same season, 1978, Yale went back to its fancier rowing shirts. That June Fisher told Johnson that he thought Biglow was too great a talent to be rowing the number-two oar; he should stroke the boat, he was so natural a leader. Johnson had been thinking much the same thing, and in his junior year John Biglow stroked the 1979 Yale boat, one of the great crews in Yale history.

His relationship with his teammates was always complex. In his junior year, the seniors, some of whom represented the old guard of Yale rowing, named him Ball and Mallet. It was a traditional Yale rowing position but not one many many people aspired to, for the Ball and Mallet was, in truth, a bit of a buffoon. It was his job to organize the bus trips and make sure there were cookies on them and take care of the croquet games played at Gales Ferry while waiting for the Harvard race. Frequently the B and M came from the jayvee or the third boat. The Ball and Mallet never lost at the croquet games because he could make up the rules as the games went along, which was one of the few benefits of the job. It was a job that diminished the holder; and in the case of Biglow, that aim was, his friends thought, quite deliberate. The designation had come as something of a surprise to Biglow, and he was not pleased. It was the old guard's way of saying, "All right, you may be a great oar, but we are going to remind you that you remain an outsider."

The B and M was known as the Boy. "Boy," the others would call, "Boy, we want some cookies." At the first meeting, Biglow had tried to set his rules as the Boy. The Boy, he had said, would be fair. The Boy would be just. The Boy would try to earn the respect of everyone there. And the Boy would be Nuts as a Bunny. But he did not do a very good job as the Boy, and it was, when all the jokes were done, demeaning.

In John Biglow's junior year, the Yale crew was favored over Harvard for probably the first time in almost 20 years. Yale had already won the Eastern Sprints, beating Harvard among others, and its only loss had been against a relatively weak Dartmouth crew in water so rough that the Yale boat nearly sank. This was an exceptionally big crew, six-four and 200 pounds on the average, bigger than Harvard and almost, it seemed, cocky.

Even within the punishing world of rowing, the Harvard-Yale race stands apart. Most races are two thousand meters or roughly a mile and a quarter. The Harvard-Yale race, rowed every year on the Thames in New London, is four miles. It is the equivalent of a football team that plays all its games in sixty minutes, going for one final championship game lasting three hours. It is a unique test of stamina and courage. In 1978, Dave Potter, the Yale stroke, had been suffering from a bad back and he had virtually passed out after three miles despite the attempts of Andy Fisher to splash water on his face. The Yale boat had lagged accordingly, and Harvard had won by two lengths. That was considered a great race, but the 1979 race stands apart.

"I doubt that there was ever a better one before," said Harry Parker, "and I doubt that there will be a better one again." Because Yale had started too tentatively in 1978, Biglow was determined to bring his crew out very quickly. That he did, bringing Yale out very high, a thirty-eight for the beginning and then settling at a thirty-six for the rest of the race. It was a punishing beat, but it seemed to work. At two miles Yale held a length lead, which was in one sense a great deal and in another very little, given how furious the Yale pace had been and potentially how much it might have taken out of the oarsmen. At 2
^1/2
miles, Harvard pulled even. If Biglow was stroking brilliantly for Yale, then Gordie Gardiner was stroking just as brilliantly for Harvard. Steve Kiesling, rowing behind Biglow, watching the two of them out of the corner of his eye, had a feeling that there were two races, one between Harvard and Yale and a separate and private one between Biglow and Gardiner. For a time the lead went back and forth, depending on whose oars had last been in the water—first Harvard, then Yale, then Harvard, then Yale. Each crew was trying to row through its opponent, but neither crew would break. With about a mile left, Harvard went ahead by a length. That, thought Harry Parker, is probably the race. Usually, in a case when crews that have battled evenly for that long and that hard and then one rows through the other, the feat represents a triumph of will that is geometrically amplified. The crew that surges feels stronger and more confident, and that strength and confidence generate more power; the one that has been passed feels weaker, and the mind releases the body from its earlier resolve. But at the very end, Biglow brought the Yale crew back, and it once again began gaining on Harvard. There was too little time left, and one Yale oarsman missed a stroke, and Harvard won. Four seconds over four miles.

The members of the Yale crew that day still see that race and still feel each stroke. They remember with remarkable clarity each surge by both boats; and when they talk about their college rowing, the talk will inevitably come back to that race. They still seek an answer to what went wrong. Some of them think, Biglow may have taken Yale out too high. But they were a powerful crew, and they had been ready. Just as possibly, if Biglow had taken them out lower, Harvard might have surged ahead earlier. Perhaps that Crimson crew was simply too good. Earlier in the year, when Harvard had won in a race at San Diego, one of the Harvard oarsmen had stood up and yelled to his teammates, "Oh, you Harvard gods!" In the 1979 race, Andy Fisher mocked that. Each time Yale pulled ahead, instead of saying, "I have one seat ... I have two seats on Harvard," he said to his crew, "I have one Harvard god ... I have two Harvard gods ..." It is at once their most cherished memory and their most troubling one. They had rowed so well, they were such a good crew and they had lost.

The next year Biglow did not stroke but rowed the six oar instead. There was a feeling that he might be too good an oar to stroke the boat, that his pace was too demanding for the others to keep up with. But Yale did not win the following year, either. It simply unraveled in the last mile, and that was almost as bitter. The careers of the Yale crew were finished, oddly incomplete. Even though they had been part of the renaissance of Yale rowing, even though they had been a great crew and rowed magnificently, they had never beaten Harvard.

John Biglow left college uncertain of his future. He had, like most of his teammates, devoted himself so fully to rowing, had been so completely encapsulated in that world, that he did not know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. The oarsmen had committed themselves to something at an almost professional level, but unlike other sports, rowing offered no professional career to follow through with. At twenty-one and twenty-two the crew's pseudoprofessional incarnations were over, and they had to start their lives again.

Biglow seemed particularly lost. He thought of medical school, but he had not done particularly well as an undergraduate, and he had not been premed. He had broken up with his girlfriend; even worse, she had gone off with another Yale oarsman. The parting had been bitter and acrimonious, and air had mysteriously disappeared from the other oarsman's tires. A little lost, his life vague now without the single-minded focus of rowing, John Biglow returned to Seattle to live at home and ponder his future. Because there was an immense vacuum in his life and because he did not know what to do with himself, he started working out in a single scull.

Back in Seattle he sought coaching from both Cunningham and McIntyre, even though the relationship with Cunningham remained an uneven one. To the early uneasiness was added Cunningham's dislike of Biglow's emphasis on strength and endurance at the cost of technique. For a long time those tensions did not flare up, and their mutual love for rowing kept them friendly. Then, in the winter of 1983, they had a major confrontation. The origin of their confrontation was somewhat ironic. In 1983 John Biglow had suggested to Harry Parker, the coach of the national team, that it might be a good idea to have Frank Cunningham accompany the national team to the world championships as a boat repairman, a field in which he was an expert hand. Cunningham had retired some 3 years earlier after 30 years of teaching in Seattle, and he was then doing free-lance coaching and repairing boats.

Biglow, annoyed by Cunningham and McIntyre's criticism of his style, made the suggestion of the European trip in the hope of proving to Cunningham that a boat could move well without expert technique and that a boat with exceptional technique often moved slowly. Harry Parker, who did not know Biglow's reason, had been slightly puzzled but, knowing Cunningham's skills, he had quickly assented. But if John Biglow intended to teach Frank Cunningham a lesson, he picked the wrong trip. The American team had not done well. The most successful oarsman had been Tiff Wood, who had gotten a bronze in the single. In Cunningham's view, even Tiff had won in spite of himself, and Cunningham had been appalled by the wasted effort in the young man's style. Biglow had stroked the quad, which came in seventh. Cunningham had not kept his feelings about the poor showing entirely secret, but there had been no confrontation between Cunningham and Biglow. That came later that year when Bruce Beall, one of the Harvard coaches, was in Seattle.

There had been a dinner party at the Biglows' house, and Cunningham had been invited for a collegial evening of rowing men at which Lucius Biglow's home movies of the world championships would be shown. But before dinner, while everyone was sitting around talking, someone had passed around pictures of the races. One of them showed the American eight rowing with an almost total lack of symmetry in a sport that depended upon its precision. The picture was passed to Cunningham. "Grotesque," he said and laughed. The moment he made the remark he knew it was a mistake, and he regretted it. John Biglow, enraged, his face taut with anger, had got up and made a formal speech. Later he realized he wanted to hurt Cunningham. "You and my father may talk about these photos after the race movies are shown. But not before. I do not want to hear anything more from you right now."