The Amateurs Read Online Free PDF Page A

oarsmen were almost to a man highly individualistic and exceptionally compulsive. "A world of Type A personalities," said Al Shealy, one of the great Type A personalities himself. Loyalty and rivalry were most finely separated. Bonded though they might be to each other, there were ferocious undercurrents of rivalry among them. Because the rowing community was a closed one, its rivalries and jealousies were greatly magnified. The slight by one rower of another, real or imagined, took on immense significance, and tensions within a boathouse were often considerable. It was, Kiesling wrote in his memoir of rowing, "like a friendship between duelists," even on the same crew.
    If the loyalties and rivalries were narrowly balanced, the loyalties almost always won out. One reason for that adhesion was the pain. It was a critical part of the bond. It was part of the oarsmen's unwritten code that one did not mention the pain. That was considered unseemly and, worse, it might magnify the pain and make it more threatening and more tangible. It was as if by not talking about it, the pain might become less important.
    In his fine memoir of the sport, Steve Kiesling, who had rowed on very good Yale teams and a national team as well, had described in detail the pain involved in the sport. Some of his teammates felt that by doing this, Kiesling had shown that he was never able to cope with the pain. If he had been able to, their theory went, he would not have written about it. By contrast, the legendary figures of the boathouse were men who had passed out and who had somehow managed to keep rowing. When Tiff Wood had been at St. Paul's, he had grown up in the legend of a rower named Mad Dog Loggins. One day at practice, Mad Dog Loggins had been in a boat that was asked to give a power forty strokes at the end of a workout. (A power stroke is one in which the oarsman gives every bit of power he can; a power forty is forty all-out strokes.) Loggins had responded so vigorously that he had passed out at the end of the power forty. That was the stuff of myths, to pass out not just at the end of a race but after a power forty.
    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