THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN ROWING livan Award as the nation’s top amateur ath- lete during 1939. He was the overwhelming favorite to win the 1940 Olympic Trials and would have been the overwhelming favorite at the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki, had they not been cancelled because of the outbreak of World War II. As a consolation, the Schuylkill Navy awarded him the solid gold Philadelphia Challenge Cup,2011 symbolic of the world amateur singles title since it had first been awarded to Jack Kelly, Sr. in 1920. How did Time Magazine describe his 1938 Diamond Sculls victory? “Britons who thronged the banks of the Thames last week for England’s No. 1 row- ing carnival, the annual Henley Regatta, saw an amazing performance. “For four days they gaped at a red- “[The technique] was not very fast, but sufficiently fast to win any race that was longer than a quarter-mile or half-mile.”2008 Sufficiently fast to win any race? Joe Burk was a very modest man. At the 1936 Olympic Trials, his Penn Graduate Eight placed second to the Univer- sity of Washington,2009 and in his single, he placed second by half a length to U.S. Champion Dan Barrow, who had rowed 7- seat in the Penn A.C. 1930 European Cham- pion “Big Eight.”2010 That was the last race Joe lost for four years. In 1937, Joe won the U.S. and Canadian Championships, and then won them again every year through 1940. He won the Diamond Sculls at Henley in 1938 and 1939. He amassed thirty-seven consecutive victories in all, and won the Sul- 2008 Burk, personal correspondence, 2004 2009 See Chapter 59. 2010 See Chapter 56. haired American sculler, Joseph William Burk, who decisively outrowed his oppo- nents over the mile and five-sixteenths course, day after day in the elimination heats of the Diamond Sculls, the most famed race in the world for individual scullers. “‘He does everything wrong,’ muttered experts and dubs alike. Rowing an extreme- ly high stroke (36 to 45 a minute, compared to an average sculler’s 28 to 32), Joe Burk, who weighs 195 lb. and has arms like piano legs, propels his shell with an unorthodox short jerk of his arms and a quick kick of his legs, sits up almost straight at the end of each stroke. “This freak style he developed two years ago on New Jersey’s Rancocas Creek, hard by his father’s fruit farm, after rowing in orthodox fashion on the University of Pennsylvania crew. “He can row for miles at 40, and can maintain a speed of 12 miles an hour over a mile and a quarter course. Last year, after running away with the U.S. and Canadian sculling championships with machine-like 2011 See Chapter 55. 551
