The Amateurs (22 page)

At Ithaca, Tony Johnson, who was coaching the fours both with and without coxswains, was willing to help them. It was the perfect place to train, the water was good and above all there were a lot of boats to race against, for a double with its four oars was well matched against a four, particularly a four with a coxswain. Johnson, a good coach, was in a delicate position. He was helping Lewis and Enquist, but Bouscaren, one of his favorite Yale oarsmen, was in the camp double. Even so, Johnson believed that these were medal-class oarsmen and that they were entitled to some level of help. He got Enquist, who was taller and had an exceptional reach, to shorten up on his stroke so that the angle of his oars was the same as that of Lewis. That alone made the boat go faster. He also thought the pair was rough at the end of the stroke, which was easy to help them with. He had rarely seen such motivated athletes.

At Cornell, Lewis talked every night about their mission. They were hunters out to avenge their wrongs. They would track Altekruse and Bouscaren. Nothing was to break Lewis and Enquist's concentration. Again and again they played a tape from Lewis's California coach, Mike Livingston. It was an unusual tape, set to slightly eerie music that Livingston had composed. "Good day," the tape began, "we are privileged to live another day in this magnificent world. Today you will be tested. Today you will confront your death with the power of your living. As a warrior this is your practice. You must silence your body and senses and quiet your breath and mind that you may create within yourself by act of will the mood of a warrior . . ."

In Ithaca, Lewis and Enquist rowed not only on the water but also in front of mirrors while working on the ergometers. Cut off from the normal world of rowing and coaching, Lewis had always been unusually inventive in creating his own training devices. Once he had invented what he called a speed tube, a piece of rubber tubing he put alongside the boat. If water flowed through it constantly, his speed was high; if it didn't, his boat was lurching. At Newport he had staked out a 250-meter course and had one of his friends, Paula Oberstein, take video movies of his technique. He would work out, come back and check out his form on the video, return and practice his strokes. He would work on his mind by using what he called image rowing. He would sit at the dock in a tank and row a full two-thousand-meter race, setting himself against Tiff Wood and John Biglow, fighting off their challenges. It was important for Lewis to win the image rowing races. At Ithaca, he and Enquist practiced shadow rowing, in which they imagined different racing situations. "One thousand meters," Lewis would say, "and Joe and Charley have just gone out a length." Or: "Five hundred meters to go and I just caught a crab."

He knew they had to expect the unexpected. It was important to be mentally tough, and they could be mentally tough only if they were prepared for any contingency. They had their friends come in and try to distract them while they rowed—concentration was critical. They were going to be the best, he told Enquist. He was sure he had to focus Enquist's mind, make him concentrate more. "No one beats us," he kept saying, "that's our motto—no one beats us." He placed, right in front of the ergometer when they worked every day, a huge chalkboard that said, "No one beats us." Just before the trials he bought a large canvas and a can of spray paint. "No one beats us," he had painted in a ten-foot-long sign.

Then they worked on the water. The key to Lewis was speed. He was sure they had the endurance and the power, for theirs was an unusually big double. But speed was Altekruse and Bouscaren's forte. So every three or four days, he and Enquist did five-hundred-meter sprints to check their time. Steadily it came down. They started at about 1:37. Then 1:34. Then 1:30. Near the end of their stay on Cayuga, they did two five-hundred-meter sprints at 1:29 each, a time not many doubles could match. They were ready. Tony Johnson, watching them in their last few days, was almost sure they were going to win. He felt a certain twinge of regret about Joe Bouscaren, who would be knocked out of the Olympics, but he hoped that Bouscaren would be made the spare if his double lost.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

Tiff Wood's friend John Biglow, secure now as the single sculler, watched Wood's pain with immense sympathy. Here was a great rower trapped by forces he could not control. Biglow hated the fact that Wood might miss the Olympics.

"Do you think you've been given a fair chance at this camp?" Biglow asked him.

"No," said Wood, "not at all." His voice did not betray the full rage he felt.

"Well, are you going to talk to Harry about it?" Biglow asked.

"No," Wood said. Biglow asked why not.

"Because I don't think it's an oarsman's job to complain to the coach," he answered.

The tensions in the camp continued to grow. With Frackleton rowing in the quad and Wood virtually without a boat unless he rowed a single, Biglow suggested that he and Wood row a double together. That would allow Biglow to work out without aggravating his back, give Wood a place in a boat and potentially provide some competition for the double. Biglow had made that suggestion earlier, and Parker had been amenable. "We may create some problems for you," Biglow said. "Nothing that I can't deal with," said Parker. Biglow was a passionate oarsman who competed at everything, and for Wood the double was a last desperate chance at an Olympic life. Suddenly the double was intriguing to both of them. Biglow's European tour had not been a success. Based on that trip, not only were Karppinen and Kolbe above him, but even a bronze looked shakier. He had returned home with more doubts about his chances at Casitas than he had left with. But the double was another question. There was no dominating double in the field. If Biglow and Wood combined their talents as world-class rowers well, there was no telling how good they could be. A silver, perhaps even a gold. Altekruse and Bouscaren had taken a fourth and a fifth at Lucerne; if Biglow and Wood could beat them by a couple of seconds, there was a genuine chance for a silver. They tried the double together, and it went well. Parker seemed mildly encouraging. He was aware that he had opened a Pandora's box, that the camp was too tightly charged with someone as strong and admired as Wood not making a boat.

On Wednesday, Parker let the double compete. All the anger and frustration stored up in Wood finally found an outlet. Biglow, his partner, liked to punish himself, anyway. Theirs was not so much a workout as a war. During the competition, which consisted of about fifteen pieces, or segments of twenty strokes each, their faces were astonishing. Everything that was happening in the camp was written on them; they were filled with fury and rage. Wood and Biglow won each piece. Someone mentioned to Parker that the workout had seemed unusually violent. "No worse than Lebanon," he had said.

Afterward Parker was annoyed with the camp double. In the middle of the competition, Altekruse had asked Parker what rate they were supposed to be rowing at. "Charley," Parker had answered, "you're rowing as if this is a race." Bouscaren had fidgeted and complained about the riggings, which Parker interpreted as a sign of anxiety. The double was clearly shaken. Already worried about the Lewis-Enquist challenge, it now had been challenged in the camp.

Parker postponed any further racing on Thursday, no longer so sure that creating a second double had been a good idea. On Friday they raced again, four pieces at a thousand meters. Wood and Biglow won the first by half a length; Altekruse and Bouscaren, the next three by the thinnest of margins. Decisive it might not be, but to Harry Parker it was decisive enough. At that point he called off the idea of a competition between the two doubles. Wood was upset. "But you were the one who encouraged us," he said. "Yes, but I've changed my mind," Parker answered.

Wood, still believing that he was stronger in the double than Bouscaren, asked for a chance to seat-race against him; he would row with Altekruse, and Biglow could row with Bouscaren. Parker seemed surprised by the request. Wood said that he had not had as much time in the boat with Altekruse as he wanted. In fact, he said, he had not had as much time with any of the top racers as he wanted or deserved. But Parker did not want to reopen this question. In his mind the double was set, the quad was a problem and time was very short. "Why didn't you say something to me earlier?" Parker asked. "It's too late now." His reply made Wood so angry he could barely speak. The one thing he hated in rowing camps were oarsmen who lobbied for themselves and coaches who listened to their lobbying. How could Harry miss what had gone on in the camp? How could he miss how Wood felt? Wood's rage was total.

Biglow and Wood were not ready to agree with Parker. The following day, Wood and Biglow rowed the double again, but not in competition. On Sunday, they did what they should have done from the start: They let Biglow stroke, and the boat seemed to take off. Both of them were impressed. On Monday, Parker announced that Frackleton was in the quad and that Wood was out. Hearing the news, Wood asked Biglow if he was encouraged by how well they were doing in the double. Biglow said he was. "Do you want to row at Princeton?" he asked. Biglow said he did.

No one knew what the ramifications of Biglow's agreement might be. Would he have to give up his single title before he took off from the starting line? Or, if he and Wood won, could Biglow have his choice, the single or the double? Wood asked Parker for an opinion. "I don't think you can do it," Parker had answered. He did not say, Wood remembered, "I don't want you to do it." Wood started calling Olympic officials, but no one knew what the rules would be. Wood, as a veteran of Olympic politics past, was sure that Biglow would not have to renounce a title in advance, that the Olympic committee was so anxious for the best scullers to row at Casitas that it would follow what the talent showed. In the meantime, Bouscaren, one of Biglow's oldest friends, angry over Biglow's possible challenge to his own boat, moved out of the room they shared in the Dartmouth dorm and stopped talking to him. Altekruse also moved out on Wood and wrote Biglow a scathing five-page letter in which he stated he was not afraid of Tiff and John and would love to cram the whole thing down their throats on the water. At the same time, Bouscaren and Wood had harsh words.

"You're destroying the camp system," Bouscaren had told Wood.

"The system doesn't work," Wood had answered. "If it did, none of this would have happened."

Harry Parker was furious. He accused Biglow of being manipulative and mischievous out of an old enmity toward Altekruse. (The two, for a variety of reasons, did not get on. A near-fight a year earlier had ended with Biglow's rolling Altekruse's bike down the ramps in front of the Harvard boathouse. Symbolically, the bike fell on its side, short of the water's edge.)

In the camp, the other oarsmen decided that Wood was doing only what anyone in his position should do. Their hostility centered on Biglow. On Tuesday, Biglow, under enormous pressure from Bouscaren, Altekruse and Parker (and knowing that the double was also a challenge to his friend Paul Enquist), backed off. After Biglow announced his withdrawal, Wood remembered seeing Parker kneeling by the water's edge at the boat dock, flicking pebbles into the water, a man apart, unreaching and unreachable.

On Tuesday afternoon, Tiff Wood phoned the American Stock Exchange and asked to speak to Jim Dietz. Would he like to row in the double in Princeton this weekend? It was a call Dietz had been sure he was going to get. In the world of scullers there were no secrets, and it was widely known that the camp had turned into a disaster. He had heard earlier in the week that Wood and Biglow might row the double, and he had loved that because it meant they would have to rerow the single trial. Then, when that idea died, he was sure Tiff would call. Nothing, he told Wood, would please him more. They would have two days on the water to practice. They would either make it or not make it quickly. Tiff Wood went to Harry Parker and told him he was going to row with Dietz. Parker did not appear angry; but when Wood asked for the use of a double that belonged to the Olympic committee, Parker said no. Wood mentioned a very good double owned by Sy Cromwell, who had won a silver at the 1964 Olympics in the double. Doubles were hard to find, and this one was known throughout the world of rowing as a very good boat. Cromwell's widow, Gail, had leased it to the committee for $500, but she was also a friend of Tiff Wood's. When she had done the leasing, she had thought the unthinkable: What happened if Tiff went to the camp and didn't make a team boat? Wary that Harry Parker might put the camp boats out of his reach, she had written the lease so that it expired a week before the Princeton trials. That way, if anything went wrong, she could make sure that Tiff had a boat. Wood now mentioned the Cromwell boat and the fact that he knew the lease had run out. "I'm not happy about the situation," Parker said, "and I don't want to talk about it." So Wood left camp. For fourteen years the interests of the two men had been almost identical, and Wood had believed in everything that Harry Parker had said. Now, at this critical moment, their interests completely diverged and their relationship had been torn apart.

Jim Dietz thought that the idea of a Dietz-Wood double was a good one. Although he was worried about the Lewis-Enquist boat, he believed he and Tiff had a very good chance to win. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. He regarded Wood as the best of the contemporary scullers. He also liked him as a person.

Jim Dietz was the son of a carpenter in the Bronx, and the sound of the New York streets, the blue-collar part of those streets, was still in his voice. His enthusiasm for rowing was almost childlike. "High-School Harry" some of the other rowers called him, with slight condescension, as if he had not entirely grown up. He was aware of how the Ivy Leaguers regarded him. In turn, he felt their snobbery was so pervasive they weren't even aware of it. It was as if a line had been drawn; the rest of them were on one side of it, and he was alone on the other, never completely accepted. During much of his career, some of the scullers had been exceptionally critical of his failure to finish big races strongly. Although physically imposing to them with his height and his immense reach, he often did tire at the end of his races. Some considered the problem as a sign of a lack of character. A few years later, when they all knew a great deal more about genetics and body tissue, they realized that Dietz's failures had not been a lack of character at all, that, despite an unsympathetic genetic structure, one that was probably fifty-fifty in slow-twitch, fast-twitch fiber, Jim Dietz might have been rowing more heroically than any of them. With that knowledge had come a certain grudging new admiration for his career.