The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

by Daniel James Brown

The revelation that one could find free food just sitting on a stump in the woods landed on Joe like a thunderbolt. That night he lay in his bunk in the schoolhouse, staring into the dark rafters above, thinking. There seemed to be more than a schoolroom science lesson in the discovery of the fungus. If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind.

The bad Joyce was made to sit on a chair and was not acknowledged in any way, or allowed to leave the chair until the good Joyce spontaneously reappeared. As a result, Joyce had spent much of her childhood wrestling with the notion that any wicked thought or misbehavior on her part meant that she was not worthy of love and, in fact, was in imminent danger of ceasing to exist.

Too often men stood hollow-eyed and women wept in doorways as Roger loaded onto a truck the last of their possessions, destined not for another home but for an auction house. Each time it happened, Roger whispered a little prayer of gratitude that so far his own family had managed to hang on to their house. Like so many, they had slipped, in a few short years, from a comfortable, secure middle-class existence to one in which every dime seemed harder to come by than the one before. But at least they still had their home.

The boys who had made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their western roots. They were the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of their lives out-of-doors. Despite the hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to strangers. They looked you in the eye, not as a challenge, but as an invitation. They joshed you at the drop of a hat. They looked at impediments and saw opportunities.

“Coach said Cal had their necks out a foot. He is giving out pessimistic reports so that they will stick them out farther. Makes them easier to cut off.”

In order to root him on, she had taken a rare afternoon off from her live-in job at the judge’s house in Laurelhurst. She detested the job as much as she had expected. It was the kind of housework she had always loathed. She was required to wear a ridiculous uniform and creep around the house as quietly as a mouse, lest she disturb the judge in his seemingly endless and sacrosanct deliberations. Between that, studying for her classes, and the unusually long, wet winter, she had grown wan and pale and sometimes depressed, so she luxuriated in the fresh air and bright sunlight on the ferry.

To defeat an adversary who was your equal, maybe even your superior, it wasn’t necessarily enough just to give your all from start to finish. You had to master your opponent mentally. When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not—that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself, make him falter just when it counted the most. Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your own heart.

Al Ulbrickson generally made a point of discouraging anyone in the crew house from reading the sports pages during the school year. No good and much ill could come from boys worrying too much about whatever Royal Brougham at the Post-Intelligencer or George Varnell at the Seattle Times might be speculating about on any given day.

“You will eat no fried meats,” he began abruptly. “You will eat no pastries, but you will eat plenty of vegetables. You will eat good, substantial, wholesome food—the kind of food your mother makes. You will go to bed at ten o’clock and arise punctually at seven o’clock. You will not smoke or drink or chew. And you will follow this regimen all year round, for as long as you row for me. A man cannot abuse his body for six months and then expect to row the other six months. He must be a total abstainer all year. You will not use profane language in the shell house, nor anywhere within my hearing. You will keep at your studies and maintain a high grade point average. You will not disappoint your parents, nor your crewmates. Now let’s row.”

She demanded to know why Joe let his parents treat him as they did. Why did he go on pretending that they hadn’t done him any harm? What kind of woman would leave a boy alone in the world? What kind of father would let her do that? Why didn’t he ever get angry at them? Why didn’t he just demand that they let him see his half siblings? She was nearly sobbing by the time she finished. She glanced across the seat at Joe, and saw at once, through a blur of tears, that his eyes were full of hurt too. But his jaw was set, and he stared ahead over the steering wheel rather than turning to look at her. “You don’t understand,” he murmured. “They didn’t have any choice. There were just too many mouths to feed.” Joyce pondered that for a moment, then said, “I just don’t understand why you don’t get angry.” Joe continued to stare ahead through the windshield. “It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I’ve just gotta take care of it myself.”

On the cliffs themselves, men suspended on ropes crawled and swung from one spot to another like so many black spiders. Studying them, Joe saw that they were drilling holes in the rock faces with jackhammers. A long, shrill whistle blew, and the jackhammer men scrambled quickly to the tops of their lines. The men with picks and crowbars scurried away from the base of the cliffs. The deep, hollow, concussive sound of an explosion boomed and blossomed across the canyon, reverberating against its rock walls as plumes of white rock dust shot from the face of the western cliffs, and a shower of rocks and boulders tumbled down onto the piles below. Joe watched with deep fascination and considerable apprehension. He was not at all sure what he was getting into here. But he was dead set on finding out. On the long, undulating drive across the wheat fields up on the plateau, he had had a lot of time to think about where he was and where he was going.

Australien

The jackhammer work was brutal, but Joe came to enjoy it. For eight hours a day, he dangled on a rope in the furnacelike heat of the canyon, pounding at the wall of rock in front of him. The jackhammer weighed seventy-five pounds and seemed to have a life and a will of its own, endlessly pushing back, trying to wrest itself out of Joe’s grip as he in turn tried to push it into the rock. The continual, rapid-fire chock-chock-chock of his machine and those of the men around him was deafening. Rock dust, gritty and irritating, swirled around him, got in his eyes, his mouth, and his nose. Sharp chips and shards of rock flew up and stung his face. Sweat dripped from his back and fell away into the void below.

In point of fact, though—as Joe would soon find out—there was no place that Chuck Day was more likely to be that summer than at Grand Coulee. To understand him, you had to understand his heart. He was a ferocious competitor. If you put a challenge in front of him, he attacked it like a bulldog. And he just plain didn’t know the meaning of surrender. If a river needed to be dammed, then by God just get out of the way and let him at it.

He hadn’t really thought before about the fact that it mattered to him that those two fellows were in the boat with him, but it turned out that it did matter, a lot. It came now as a startling and painful realization that he’d had something and lost it without fully understanding that he’d had it in the first place.

There was a straightforward reason for what was happening. The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they. The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.

recalcitrant

Walking back to the Princeton Inn that evening with George Pocock, the two men holding their suit coats over their shoulders in the warm, humid twilight, Ulbrickson stopped suddenly, turned abruptly to Pocock, and extended his right hand. “Thanks, George, for your help,” he said. Pocock later remembered the moment: “Coming from Al,” he mused, “that was the equivalent of fireworks and a brass band.”

Extremt moget av pokock att uppmärksamma en så liten kommentar som något så kraftfullt. Inget ego inblandat.

Like the Hirschhahns, many of the Köpenickers the boys passed on the street that afternoon were doomed: people who waited on the boys in shops, old women strolling around the castle grounds, mothers pushing baby carriages on cobblestone streets, children shrieking gleefully on playgrounds, old men walking dogs—loved and loving and destined for cattle cars and death.