The Boys in the Boat: Chapters 6-8

When crew practice started up again on January 8, Joe and the seventeen other boys in the first and second freshman boats learned that they were now entitled to abandon the shell barges and step for the first time into proper racing shells, the sleek and lovely cedar craft built by George Pocock in his loft workshop at the back of the Washington shell house.

Through it all, Bolles followed them doggedly back and forth across Lake Washington and down the Montlake Cut into Lake Union, where they rowed past the wet, black hulls and dripping bowsprits of old lumber schooners.

Riding through the slop and the chop in the open cockpit of his brass-trimmed, mahogany-planked motor launch, the Alumnus, wearing a bright yellow rain slicker, he bellowed commands at them through his megaphone until his voice grew hoarse and his throat sore.

One of his oarsmen, Buzz Schulte, recalled, “He yelled, goaded, teased, whatever it took to motivate his boys."

California wanted an effective coach, Ebright wanted a coaching job, Washington wanted a rival, and the upshot was that Ky Ebright became the head coach at California in February 1924, with the mission of rebuilding the school’s program.

As coveted as his shells were, Pocock had begun to find himself struggling to stay in business, reduced to writing plaintive letters to coaches around the country, pleading for orders.

Ebright seemed eager to seize the opportunity to exact revenge for the wrongs he had imputed to Pocock.

“They seem to be getting slower every day,” a dour and subdued Bolles complained.

When a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle asked him, on April 6, what he thought of his freshmen’s prospects, the Cal coach answered with surprising candor: “Ebright took on a radiant look and boomed out, ‘Our frosh boat will beat the stuffing out of the Husky yearlings.’”

Bolles had returned gloomily to the dock and gone atypically out of his way to approach the sportswriters assembled at the shell house, giving them a terse but bleak forecast for the freshmen: “It looks as if we’ll be rowing from behind.”

Early in the afternoon, it arrived at the university’s Oceanographic Dock, where Joyce Simdars joined fourteen hundred other boisterous students dressed in purple and gold as they piled aboard, accompanied by the blaring brass and rattling drums of the university’s varsity band playing fight songs.

Sleek white sailboats, burnished mahogany-hulled launches, stately yachts trimmed in teak and brass, and humble skiffs and rowboats were already crowding together and dropping anchor, forming an enormous semicircle of boats off Sheridan Beach, just past the barge on which the finish line for the races was marked by a large black arrow pointing down at the water.

More than that, though, they were hard up against the fact that a few minutes of extreme exertion were about to tell them whether five and a half months of training had been worthwhile. During those few minutes, each of them would take more than three hundred strokes. With eight oarsmen in the boat, oars would have to enter and exit the water cleanly more than twenty-four hundred times.

Another called down the aisle, “Hey, boys, come and hear Rantz, the rowing troubadour!”

In 1869, Harvard met Britain’s most elite institution, Oxford, in a match on the Thames. Rowing before an immense crowd, Oxford defeated Harvard, but the event was so widely publicized in the United States that it produced an explosion of interest in rowing. It also imbued the sport with an aura of elitism that has lingered to this day.

Transporting a crew and several delicate racing shells to the East was an expensive proposition, and the western boys were met each time with an uncomfortable mixture of gawking curiosity, subtle condescension, and occasional open derision.

A notable element of all these East-West rivalries was that the western representatives nearly always seemed to embody certain attributes that stood in stark contrast to those of their eastern counterparts.

As the leaders swept under the railroad bridge at a mile, officials on the bridge set off a salvo of three bombs, signifying that the boat in lane three, Washington, was ahead with another mile still to go.

When Morry had swum back to the dock, the boys helped him out of the fetid water and made their way upstairs into the rickety shell house to take their showers and get their own tastes of the Hudson.

Despite its relative lack of drama, the New York Times—the very epitome of the eastern establishment—called the race “stunning.” It wasn’t the margin of victory or the time of 10:50 that people marveled at. It was how the boys had rowed the race.

From the starting gun to the final salvo, they had rowed as if they could keep going at the same pace for another two miles or ten. They had rowed with so much composure, so "serenely" as the Times put it, so completely within themselves, that at the finish, rather than slumping in their seats and gasping for breath as oarsmen generally do at the end of a race, they had been sitting bolt upright, looking calmly around.

An hour later the Syracuse junior varsity improved their ancient coach’s day when they withstood a furious come-from-behind charge to fend off Navy—even as sirens wailed on the navy destroyer, urging the midshipmen on—to win the second race of the day.

“You have great opportunities and you are doing nobly in grasping them. So I leave here today with the feeling that this work is well undertaken; that we are going ahead with a useful project; and that we are going to see it through for the benefit of our country.”

The last thing he needed was for a bunch of upstart sophomores to start thinking they were God’s gift to rowing.

It wasn’t just the status of his boat that worried him. It wasn’t just the brutality of the long workouts or the inevitable days of rowing in the rain and bitter cold. It was personal stuff. Despite the long summer of work, he found himself even poorer than he had been the previous year. Even the cost of a movie on a Saturday night now seemed unwisely extravagant to him.

Dedicated to distributing food and firewood to the destitute, members of the league gleaned what they could in the way of partially spoiled crops in the fields of eastern Washington and foraged for firewood in the Cascade Mountains, bringing whatever they could find back to Seattle.

Joe thought Thula looked careworn and exhausted, much older than her thirty-six years.

The rituals of rowing, the specialized language of the sport, the details of technique that he was struggling to master, the wisdom of the coaches, even their litany of rules and the various taboos they proscribed—all seemed to Joe to give the world of the shell house a measure of stability and order that for a long time now the outside world had seemed to him to lack.

In point of fact, Pocock, with only a lower-school education, tended to believe that it was he rather than these college men who should be deferential.

By placing these book-matched pairs on either side of the keel, he could ensure perfect symmetry in the boat’s appearance and performance.

He stretched sheer silk fabric over the stern and bow sections and painted the silk with varnish. As the varnish dried and hardened on the fabric, it created a fragile and lovely translucent yellow decking fore and aft.

Pocock wrote back with a long, detailed technical explanation of his design and proposed a few minor modifications that he thought might mollify Ebright without compromising the integrity of the shell.

There they removed it gingerly from the water, inverted it over their heads, and began a mile-and-a-half portage across Seattle.

It was not quite the deluge of the previous year, but it rained more days than not for the rest of October and into November.

The whole premise of Joe’s struggle to stay in school was the prospect of a more promising future afterward. It had not occurred to him that doors wouldn’t just open for a man with a college degree.