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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