The Amateurs (4 page)

If that was a critical part of the community, then there were other reasons for the rivalries within the same community. On other sports teams, Tiff Wood thought, athletes were aware of their limitations and their differences. In football, the lineman, he noted, knew that he was different from the quarterback, and in basketball, the forward knew that he was different from the guard. Only the second-string quarterback secretly thought he should be the starting quarterback. But each oarsman did essentially the same thing and thought he was the best at it, some of them secretly, some of them not so secretly. This egocentrism, Wood said, was particularly true among the port-side oars, who even within the sport were notorious egoists.

Port-side egos were almost generic. On the first day of practice, the coach usually asked for volunteers who thought they might stroke the boat—that is, sit in the first seat and set the pace that the seven other oarsmen would follow. Since all the most egocentric people thought they should be strokes, and since the stroke was a port oar, the most egocentric oarsmen all stepped forward. That divided the team by ego from the start. Wood himself was convinced that he should have stroked his Harvard crew. He had been both admiring and mildly resentful of Al Shealy, who had stroked the crew brilliantly. Those Harvard crews that Shealy had stroked had been uniquely successful. They had lost only one dual meet, they had won at Henley and many thought them the greatest Harvard crew of all time. But nine years after they had rowed their last race, a part of Tiff Wood was still resentful of Al Shealy—while a part of Al Shealy recognized that resentment and was ready to prove in complete detail why he, rather than Wood, should have stroked those boats. Wood knew there was a certain madness in believing this, but he believed it nonetheless. He was also aware that one reason he had ended up in a single scull was that it was the only way he could get to stroke a boat.

Probably the world of rowing was, to a great degree, genetically preselected. In countries such as East Germany, where sports fell under state control, authorities physiologically tested young rowers to see who should and who should not be encouraged. In America, fortunately, selection was less mechanical. Those who were good endurance athletes, whose lungs were unusually good at extracting oxygen from the air and whose tissues were replenished to a high degree during a race, usually liked the sport and did well at it. Those who were physiologically less suited never liked it, did not perform well and soon drifted away. (Gregg Stone, who had watched and rowed with Tiff Wood from the time they were in prep school to the time they were both singles champions, had thought that at first it was simply Wood's competitive drive that had made him successful. Later, as Stone learned more about the physiology of the sport, he was inclined to believe that Wood's triumphs were based on an intense competitive spirit combined with such a strong genetic base that Wood was able to waste immense amounts of energy with poor technique and still succeed.)

Those who dominated in sculling were, said Fritz Hagerman, an Ohio University professor who specialized in testing athletes, such remarkable physical specimens as to be, in his words, almost physiological freaks. Their great ability was their capacity to take in oxygen at an astonishing rate, thus releasing the food inside them as energy. If the normal person could take in three liters of oxygen per minute, then a world-class rower such as Wood or Biglow could take in six liters per minute. This oxygen intake was the key to their power and placed them way above other athletes. Baseball players might consume about three liters; professional basketball players, playing a stop-and-start sport, might consume four. Six was virtually off the chart. Only bikers and cross-country skiers were close—indeed, in proportion to their body size they might take in a little bit more oxygen than rowers—but bikers and cross-country skiers were much smaller, and on a pure sampling, the rowers took in more oxygen.

There are two ways for the body to produce energy, the aerobic and the anaerobic; the aerobic, by far the more efficient, is what sets rowers apart. The more oxygen that is available to the body, the more quickly the body can use its foodstuffs to produce energy. The energy thus produced is measured in kilocalories, one kilocalorie being necessary to raise one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. Someone brushing his teeth produces roughly one kilocalorie a minute; someone walking through a parking lot to a car uses about four to five; someone jogging at a slow pace produces about six to eight. A cross-country skier produces roughly thirty kilocalories per minute, but an Olympic-class rower produces thirty-six kilocalories a minute.

If oxygen is the key to aerobic energy, anaerobic energy comes into play when less and less oxygen becomes available—but anaerobic energy is only one nineteenth as efficient, and it produces as by-products lactic acids, which cause immense pain. Thus at the end of a race, when a rower inevitably finds his normal supply of energy depleted, it is replaced by a source that is far less efficient and a good deal more painful.

If Tiff Wood was the favorite for the single sculls, he did not feel like a favorite, nor was he sure he wanted to be one. He had, because of the harshness of the Cambridge winter, spent perilously little time on the water and even less time in racing, for it was one thing to practice and another thing to race. Whatever edge he might have over his chief challenger, Biglow, was negligible, and it was entirely possible that there was no edge at all. Harry Parker had warned Wood that being the favorite meant that everyone zeroed in on you. But off a fine year in 1983 it had fallen his burden to be the target for everyone else, particularly Biglow.

From 1981 to 1983, the rivalry between Wood and Biglow had been one of exceptional intensity, not unlike that between McEnroe and Connors, with Biglow having a slight edge. Then in 1983 Biglow, suffering from a bad back, had rowed poorly, and Wood had dominated the event, winning not just the single-scull trial but also the bronze medal in the world championship. (Friends of Biglow's were not sure that his back was the only problem. They felt he might have been suffering from being the favorite in exactly the way Parker described to Wood.) But Biglow was now medically and psychologically ready, and no one, no American at least, could come from behind on him. In the world of rowing, his closing sprints were legendary.

CHAPTER

FOUR

A photo of John Biglow published several years ago in the
Yale Daily News
was the most revealing image Steve Kiesling knew of his friend. The photo made Kiesling more than a little uneasy. It showed Biglow rowing alone in a single scull, not in a race, simply rowing against himself and his own standards, drawing on some last desperate source of energy to push himself a little harder, his face contorted in pain. The pain, thought Kiesling, was primal, something that even Steven Spielberg could not have created. Looking at the photo, Kiesling felt that rowing touched something deep and almost Conradian in Biglow, a dark place of almost total rage, hidden away most of the time but always wanting to get out. Biglow's high-school coach, Frank Cunningham, had a slightly different view. Cunningham, by and large, was wary of heightened expressions of pain on the faces of rowers. He thought that more often than not it was a gimmick used to impress coaches, that to the degree that oarsmen avoided showing pain they would avoid thinking of rowing as pain. If they thought of it as pain, the pain would increase. But Cunningham believed that Biglow's face showed something else. "With John it's all concentration, and the concentration is in his face. I like it—mouth open, lips drawn back. Breathing through his mouth. It's like"—Cunningham paused for a moment to think of a simile— "like a predatory animal about to pounce on some smaller one.”

Biglow himself was aware that he rowed with such intensity in part because portions of his emotional life were unresolved and rowing provided the almost perfect outlet for them. He had once asked one of his fellow oarsmen, Brad Lewis, why Lewis rowed, and Lewis had answered that he was essentially very hostile and aggressive and this was the only positive channel he knew for the aggression. An answer that direct and blunt had surprised Biglow, and Lewis had added, "You're the same way, John. You have a lot of hostility, too. But you just ritualize it better and hide it better through rowing." Biglow had thought about it for a while and decided that Lewis was probably right.

Biglow, thought Kiesling, was almost certainly the best Yale oarsman of the modern generation and quite possibly, given the advantages of modern training techniques and modern body-building machinery, the greatest oarsman in Yale history. Though he had come to Yale from a private day school in Seattle instead of one of the great eastern prep schools where rowing occupied a special niche, he was a skilled, well-coached oar, and his style was memorable, lean and powerful. He was able to pull more weight than men far bigger and seemingly stronger than he, and he was willing to punish himself to an uncommon degree to achieve his objectives. When he had arrived at Yale, that school, one of the handful in America that took rowing seriously, had slipped badly in its rowing program. It was being beaten regularly in dual competitions and, even worse, being beaten annually in its four-mile race against Harvard. A turnaround had begun the year before Biglow had arrived, but he had certainly played a central part in the renaissance of rowing at Yale, and many of his contemporaries thought of him as a kind of model for what an oarsman should be—powerful, relentless and indefatigable. Feeling unsure of the challenge ahead and the pain they would face in a given race, they had taken comfort from Biglow, who never seemed to be fazed. If they met his standards, they, too, would be strong.

Yet many of them had retained a certain ambivalence about Biglow as a person. He was simply too different. Even his political ideas were different. He cared about saving the whales, while some of his conservative teammates in retaliation talked about a campaign to nuke them. Lacking social grace, he did not know how to make others feel at ease. If anything, he seemed to take a perverse delight in making others feel uncomfortable. If he was going to experience a certain amount of culture shock, he was going to bestow a little on his teammates as well. At Yale, crew members were primarily eastern prep-school sophisticates. There were certain clothes you wore and certain clothes you never wore, certain things you said and certain things you never said. Biglow was western, albeit with certified eastern genes. By manner he seemed almost willfully a hick. He wore the wrong clothes and said the wrong things. He was constantly asking questions of Buzz Congram, the freshman coach. The prep-school oarsmen on the freshman crew found him difficult indeed. Some teammates nicknamed Biglow The Coach. Others had a phrase for him that was more description than nickname. Biglow, they said, was Nuts as a Bunny. It stuck to him.

Yale was always hard for him. It was a place where everyone seemed to be smarter, more facile and more verbal. When he was in the seventh grade in Seattle, his teachers had discovered that he had a serious reading disability. "You cannot believe," the teacher in charge had told his parents, "how hard reading is for him." He had been placed in a special reading class that had been almost as embarrassing as the disability itself; he had been, in his eyes, placed in a class for those who were slow. He had so hated the stigma that he had set out to finish the year-and-a-half course in just one year. The teacher, who was very sensitive to his needs, remembered that he would sometimes come to class exhausted by the pressure of trying to deal with his disability. Often, at the beginning of the class, she told his mother that John could not even talk, all he could do was utter a groan of pain. In spite of this, feeling immense parental pressure to succeed, he had received good grades. But reading and writing remained exceptionally difficult for him. In college he read only what he had to for courses, and he had almost no concept of what it was to read for pleasure. He would never, in Ivy League terms, test well, either in an admissions exam or in class. His handwriting, friends thought, was almost childlike. Writing a paper for class was a form of minor torture. (His Yale average at graduation was 2.9 on a scale of 4; the list of medical schools that turned him down was awesome; and for a long time it was a real cliff-hanger whether he would get into medical school or not.) It was not Biglow's intelligence that was at issue. His problem was in the expression of that intelligence.

His reading disability had deprived him of social confidence. Williams College, where he had wanted to go, turned him down; were he not a legacy at Yale, son and grandson of loyal Yale men, he might have been rejected there as well. He had arrived in New Haven shy and socially awkward, and in his early years he expressed himself largely through crew. It was the one outlet that gave him confidence. The coxswain of his freshman crew, Dan Goldberg, thought that Biglow was like a Thoroughbred horse, fine yet high-strung and nervous, skillful and brilliant at one thing and awkward and shy and unsophisticated in everything else.

Without crew, he would have been completely stranded. After his freshman year, he had returned to Seattle, and friends had asked how he liked Yale. "I liked the athletics there a lot," he answered. "But what about the college?" one friend persisted. "I didn't like it at all," he said. "It was very hard for me."

Biglow was not only hypersensitive to any slight, he also hated to fail in the eyes of others. There were times in his junior year, when Yale was preparing for its annual race against Harvard and he was the stroke, that he would come back so disheartened by a practice that he could not bear to eat breakfast with his teammates. He blamed himself for whatever went wrong, and he was sure the others blamed him as well. If one of them had said anything even mildly critical during the meal, he was sure he would have blown up.