Colorful characters keep 'Boys in the Boat' afloat
Of all collegiate pursuits, none is quite so associated with elitism as the sport of rowing. When it comes to crew, those Thames-taming masters of Oxford, Cambridge and, in America, the privileged oarsmen of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn or Columbia spring to mind.
Then there's a legendary eight-man shell from the University of Washington. It captured the gold at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, where Hitler mounted a PR blitz for the rise of the Third Reich, only to have his "master race" shamed by a black American track hero, Jesse Owens.
As for that eight-man shell, it was crewed not by fortunate sons but by an octet of poor, Depression-era athletes who were, almost literally, rowing for their lives.
The Boys in the Boat is Daniel James Brown's cogent history of that shining moment, and a surprisingly suspenseful tale of triumph. But it's not about individual glory; in crew, the winning boat is a clockwork mechanism of timed strokes, each rower almost mystically attuned to the other as they strive, often in agony, for the "swing" of perfect rhythm and maximum speed. Led by the coxswain who faces forward and commands the crew through a megaphone – "Give me 10 big ones!" – each oarsman must be careful not to "catch a crab," that deadly moment when an oar sticks in the water and ruins the pace.
Brown notes that in the 1920s and 1930s, "collegiate crew was wildly popular, often ranking … with baseball and collegiate football in the amount of press it received and the crowds it drew." And the rivalry between two Western schools, the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley, typically outshone the efforts of the Eastern elites. Indeed, California and Washington drew from rough-hewn loggers, farm boys and girls not only with great physical gifts but the enormous will to make something of themselves at a time when there was little hope, given the double whammy of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.
One of them, Joe Rantz, is Brown's protagonist, an indefatigable 6-foot-plus specimen with a Dickensian life story. After his young mother dies of cancer, his father and stepmother repeatedly abandon him, but Joe never gives up, scrabbling for food and money through hard labor and the truest grit, digging tree stumps from the Washington earth, or suspended from a cliff with a jackhammer to pummel rock for the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. For Joe, a place on Washington's crew is utter salvation, carrying the promise of part-time campus work to help with tuition and claim his future as an engineer.
Brown certainly romanticizes this era of supremely rugged individualism -- as boats drift through the gloaming of Lake Washington and eight unsophisticated Americans stick it to Hitler's Aryan champions -- and he sometimes loses the war against cliché, describing Joe's future wife, Joyce, as "a slip of a girl."
Yet he limns memorable characters in Joe's mentors, especially Washington rowing coach Al Ulbrickson, the "Dour Dane" who says little yet struggles soulfully to find the right eight-man combination. And there is the ninth man (of the subtitle) Bobby Moch, the gifted coxswain, who fearlessly holds back his crew to 29 or 32 strokes per minute, then unleashes them for sprinting victories.
But the spirit and sage of this saga is George Yeoman Pocock, a renowned British oarsman who emigrates to Washington and sculpts peerless shells of native red cedar in his workshop at the university boathouse. Pocock's boats, with their uncanny "camber," or tensile power, seem to fly through the water, and there's national demand for his craftsmanship.
It is Pocock whom Ulbrickson and his boys turn to for subtle guidance and serene wisdom. And it's Pocock who brings out the poetry in Brown's narrative, as he equates the camber of his shells to that of the Washington rowers: "This unflagging resilience – this readiness to bounce back, to keep coming, to persist in the face of resistance – was the magic in cedar, the unseen force that imparted life to the shell. And … a shell that did not have life in it was unworthy of the young men who gave their hearts to the effort of moving it through the water."