The Amateurs (20 page)

In time the race movies were shown, and in Cunningham's opinion they
were
grotesque. Afterward Biglow had sought Cunningham out. Cunningham, he said, had no right to be so critical of the national team. It was clear that Cunningham, having made the trip at Biglow's suggestion, had in some way betrayed him by being critical in Biglow's own house. Cunningham had thought, Well, this is all right, this is John defending his teammates who in his eyes worked so hard for that race. That was understandable. It was also, he suspected, John finally showing that he, too, was an adult and no longer a boy. Why else had he included his father in his denunciation of Cunningham? Well, that, too, was acceptable. Then it became personal. Biglow told Cunningham that his expectations of others had always been too high, that he had been too impatient and not sympathetic enough to young oarsmen. We are, Cunningham thought, talking about something a little different now. He had not tried to rebut Biglow, but he had left the house upset and feeling that in some way he had been dressed down by a young prince. For several weeks Cunningham heard nothing from John Biglow and assumed the relationship was finished. But then, about two months later, Biglow and his friend Paul Enquist showed up wondering if Cunningham could help them work on the double for the upcoming Olympics. No mention was made of the dinner party.

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

If rowing was an estimable sport filled with virtue and honor and strength, then there was something about the team camps that was the reverse of that. They became its Darwinian lowest common denominator. This camp was, if anything, worse; it was filled with anxiety and tension that turned inevitably into paranoia. So much depended on so little that was quantifiable. From the fourteen oarsmen invited, Parker had merely five weeks to pick both the double and the quad. In most sports the selection would be easy: Simply keep the various oarsmen racing against each other in singles and pick the top six. But crew was different; the whole was not the sum of its parts. A quad filled with four scullers of medium power who had perfected their technique might easily beat one filled with the camp's four most powerful scullers. Nor did making a camp boat necessarily mean that an oarsman would go to the Olympics. There was to be an additional Olympic trial at Princeton in June at which other boats, some of them filled with men who chose not to go to the camp, some filled with young men scorned by Parker (their motivation thus all the higher), had the right to challenge the camp boats. Since these boats, doubles and quads, were already practicing together and since the camp-boat crews might not be picked for several weeks, the outsiders had a certain advantage in rowing together, if not in natural gifts. The possibility of one of them winning the trials added to the element of paranoia at the camp.

Every sculler in those tense moments was watching Harry Parker, wondering if he was on Parker's good or bad side and wondering what Parker, so quiet and enigmatic, really thought. In this hothouse atmosphere old friends first became rivals and then enemies, while old rivals in the new juxtaposition of loyalties became allies. In addition, some of the oarsmen, Jim Dietz among them, did not like Harry Parker and knew that he did not like them. If most of the oarsmen called him "Harry" and spoke of him as a kind of rowing deity, Dietz referred to him as "Parker" and thought of him as an enemy. Those who had studied Harry Parker closely knew that his selections were an odd mixture of rationality and Scientology. He was the master of seat racing, which both in Harvard practices and in his camps he had brought to its most savage form; but he also trusted his own instincts, and he valued other rowing skills that did not show in seat racing but that won races. In camps he sometimes protected certain oarsmen whose skills he was confident of from the savagery of the seat racing by keeping exposure to a minimum or by creating an environment in which they would not lose. He would use stronger oarsmen as cannon fodder to wear out the oarsmen he did not really want. Would Harry play favorites with Tiff and Joe and Charley because they had rowed for him in Cambridge? If Harry was letting Tiff row with Charley Altekruse, did that mean that he had already decided on them for the double?

Tiff Wood never doubted that he would make the double or the quad. Nor was he in any way wary of Harry Parker. If there was one person in Wood's life over the past thirteen years who symbolized what he wanted to be, it was Harry Parker.

The camp did not begin well for Tiff. His disappointment over losing in Princeton was evident, and it soon became clear to him that his sole objective there had been winning the single sculls. For a time he thought of leaving the camp and competing in the singles at the international regatta at Lake Lucerne. The idea was not really a serious one, but it showed how important being a single sculler had been to him. His life for three years had been built around one goal, and now he had fallen short of that goal. Going back to rowing in team boats was harder than he had expected. He had spent the past four years rowing by himself, and he had been his own master. If he rowed roughly, he had also rowed strongly, and he had disturbed no one else's timing. He had difficulty adjusting now that he was back in team boats; it was as if the better he had gotten in the single, the worse he had gotten in team boats.

The camp was a game of musical chairs in which there were bound to be a lot of losers. Besides, those who knew Parker found him unusually distracted this year. Part of the problem was that even as he was coaching the single scullers in Hanover he was preparing a rather ordinary Harvard crew for its four-mile race against Yale. After Harvard's long ascendancy over Yale, Yale had won the past three races; and other crews, not just Yale, were catching up to him. Coaches elsewhere were now imitating his year-round training methods; and some were recruiting more actively than he, for it was the part of the job he liked least and was least suited for. He did not like going to a young man and encouraging him to come to a college where he might not even make the program.

In addition, he was fighting his own personal disappointment. He was accustomed to being the preeminent figure of American rowing, and he had wanted to be the coach of both the sweeps and the scullers. Originally, the Olympic committee had set up specifications for the sweep job that would permit the coach to divide his time between his college team and the Olympic crew. Harry Parker had, accordingly, made his proposal to the Olympic committee. But even as he was doing this, the Olympic committee, bothered by the generally poor performance of American oarsmen in recent Olympiads, changed its mind, in part because Kris Korzeniowski, a talented Polish coach in exile from his homeland, was available. Korzeniowski was willing to serve as a full-time national coach who would spend an entire year working with the national talent available without any other responsibilities. Suddenly the job specifications changed dramatically. The Olympic rowing committee chose Korzeniowski to coach the sweeps and left Parker only the scullers. The fact that the Olympic rowing committee had picked a foreigner, scorning the best of the American coaches, had devastated Parker. After years of being unchallenged, he felt betrayed and he protested the committee's decision in the most personal terms. In his mind the committee was giving his rowers to another coach, and he never entirely reconciled himself to his diminished status.

On the day of the Princeton trials there had been a brief flare-up between Parker and Charley Altekruse. Altekruse had not qualified for the final; but he was supposed to row in what was called the
petit
final, a consolation event that would give the standing for the next six oarsmen, places eight through thirteen.
Petit
finals were normally not important; but for a sculling coach trying to make selections for an Olympic camp, they had a relatively high priority. Altekruse's decision to skip the
petit
final had angered Parker. Even though Altekruse was one of his favorite oarsmen, Parker had taken Altekruse aside and had told him that he did not like his attitude. To his surprise, Altekruse had then told him that he didn't like
Parker's
attitude, that he did not seem committed to the Olympic sculling team and that the scullers felt that they were being neglected because of his disappointment about not coaching the sweep oarsmen.

Altekruse's response had surprised Parker, and a few days later, Parker called Tiff Wood to tell him what had happened. Wood felt that during their talk Parker had, in fact, confirmed that Altekruse was essentially right—he
had
been disappointed in not getting the eight, and it
had
affected him. When Harvard oarsmen of the past heard what Altekruse had said, they were staggered; no one would have dared talk to Harry like that fifteen years earlier.

In Hanover Parker quickly decided that all the concentration on the single-sculls final had set the team back considerably. As a coach, Parker had been as fair as he could to Wood, Biglow and Bouscaren but had privately hoped for Wood's victory in the singles. The difference between Wood and Biglow was negligible—if one could win a bronze, the other surely could. But Biglow was a considerable asset in the team boats, and Wood more limited there. It soon became clear that Tiff Wood was not going to have an easy time in the camp.

Parker was quiet and distant in the early weeks of the seat racing; and the quieter he was, the greater the tension became. There was no doubt that he favored Charley Altekruse and Joe Bouscaren in the double. Wood was at first annoyed, then worried. The more anxious he became, the more he sought to push through solely on power, and the rougher he rowed. He was not sure that anyone was having that good a camp. As far as he was concerned, only Altekruse was doing well. Altekruse had not rowed strongly in the Princeton single trials, but he seemed to be cresting here. He was a powerful oarsman, still in transition from sweep oarsman to sculler. On the basis of his pure aerobic ability, he was viewed by his peers as the equal of Biglow and Wood. Wood could understand Parker's thinking: Altekruse, a great racer, as strong or stronger than anyone in the camp; and Bouscaren, a formidable sculler of exceptional skill.

But Wood thought Parker's decision misguided. In a major regatta, where there would be a series of races, endurance became a factor and he was stronger than Bouscaren. In addition, because Bouscaren was so mechanically skilled as an oarsman, his boat was likely to be as good on the first day of practice as it was several weeks later. Another double, perhaps one that paired him, Wood, with Altekruse or Lewis or Biglow, might not be so efficient in the beginning, but it would have more power to harness. Long after the Altekruse-Bouscaren boat hit its plateau and stopped improving, the other boat was likely to become stronger. Wood wanted Parker to
project
the idea of power in a boat, not just seize on what was immediately happening at the camp. Wood also thought that he was being paired with lesser oarsmen too often and not being given enough chances to row with some of the other top scullers, such as Jim Dietz, Paul Enquist and Brad Lewis. Wood soon believed that his only chance lay in the quad, and the quad was being stroked by a young man named Charley Bracken, whose stroke he had a difficult time following.

Brad Lewis shared Tiff Wood's sense of frustration. Lewis had come to camp in a relatively good mood. He knew there had been unspoken tensions between him and Harry Parker in the past. (A few years earlier, coming East with his shell, he had asked Tiff Wood to ask Harry for a storage rack in the Harvard boathouse; it was better, he had said, if Tiff inquired, since he and Harry did not get along that well.) But in that sculling camp summer of 1983, Harry Parker had placed Lewis in a good double, and he and Paul Enquist had finished a respectable sixth in the world. The Hanover camp seemed fair but puzzling to Lewis. He rowed with Altekruse and Bouscaren. The one person he wanted to row with and did not was Tiff Wood. At one point Lewis went up to Chris Allsopp, Parker's assistant, and asked to be paired with Tiff. For Lewis that was the most natural pairing, since he and Wood had finished two, three in the single trial. If the combination worked, it would be a very good boat. Allsopp said he would think about it, but nothing ever happened.

Lewis did not like Hanover. It rained every day, and the rooms were small and damp and had no phones. His cousin Mitch had accompanied him, and there were some complaints about Mitch's clothes. Since Mitch went through life wearing sweat suits and Brad did not want his cousin to feel out of place, he spent $20 on some eastern clothes for him.

Like Wood, Brad had concentrated so much on the single that the return to team boats was difficult. He did not do as well in seat racing as he should have. Although he thought Altekruse and Bouscaren's success in the seat racing legitimate, he was not so sure they were that good a double. That boat seemed to him a particular kind of coach's choice, what he called a "click combination." If a coach put two oarsmen together and they immediately clicked, becoming a fast boat from the start, the coach was happy.

Even so, his best chance, like Wood's, was in the double, not the quad. The double was an easier boat for oarsmen who were strong instead of graceful, and it was easier to put together at the last minute. The quad, which placed a premium on combined experience and smoothness of group technique, was a difficult boat for Americans. It often went at very high strokes, deftly rather than powerfully executed. The best quad in the world probably was the West German one, and there the same four oarsmen had been rowing together since 1977. The quad at this camp was likely to be stroked by Charley Bracken, and Lewis also had trouble rowing behind Bracken. Since he had no memory of ever seeing Bracken before, he asked one of the other oarsmen if Bracken had rowed at the Princeton trials. His friend said he had. "How did he do?" Lewis asked. "He didn't make the semifinals," the friend answered.