AMERICAN ROWING COMES OF AGE who had been covering collegiate rowing extensively ever since the 1869 Harvard- Oxford race. Like a Catholic making a pilgrimage to the Vatican, Yale undergraduate captain Robert J. Cook (1849-1922) took a semester leave of absence and went to England to really learn how to row. Crowther: “So anxious were they for the English ways that the legends say that furniture and overcoats were sold and pawned to raise money for the captain’s trip.”1192 Bob Cook “had, above everything else, the willingness to break away from custom.”1193 Three months later, he brought back to America not just English Orthodox Technique but also the English prejudice against professionals. Cook: “Professional oarsmen could teach college crews very little, if anything. They were men who had a very crude idea of scientific rowing for college men. They were men of great endurance, and they worked their crews and pumped them dry on hard work and limited diet. “I was in the Yale boat in ‘72 and became satisfied that the professional oarsmen have very poor heads as a rule, and they have no idea how to impart what knowledge they have.”1194 This was a direct criticism of the Massachusetts Aggies, who were coached by professional oarsman Josh Ward, one of the famous Ward Brothers,1195 and coached effectively enough to have humbled the Eli.1196 Immediately upon his return to the U.S., Bob Cook, employing what he had learned in England, led Yale to victory in the 1873 1192 Crowther, p. 43 1193 Kelley, p. 205 1194 Qtd. by Mendenhall, Coaches, Ch. I, p. 4 1195 See Chapter 10. 1196 nickname for Yale University, which had been named after benefactor Elihu Yale in 1718. RAAC Regatta for coxless six-oared shells. Trailing were Wesleyan, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Amherst, Dartmouth, Massachusetts Agricultural, Bowdoin, Trinity and Williams in that order. From the Yale perspective, rationality had been restored to American collegiate rowing. The Bob Cook Stroke In England, Cook had received his first rowing lesson from Francis C. Gulston, the same man who had “proven” in front of The London Rowing Club that sliding seats yielded an extra eighteen inches in the water.1197 In fact, Cook had been there that day to witness the experiment. Mendenhall: “And Bob Cook could not have found a better teacher.”1198 Dodd: “In their first outing together in a tub-pair, Cook exhausted himself trying to prevent being pulled around, while Gulston remained quite fresh. He learned to do as much work with half the fatigue.”1199 That particular spring in England, the smell of change was in the air. For the first time, both Oxford and Cambridge would employ sliding seats in the Boat Race, and Cook was there to see that, too. Crowther: “Cook came back with a modification of the English university stroke. He took their long sweep and the slow recovery in a degree and retained the American riggings; he reduced the Yale stroke [from 40+] to 32 to 34. It was a sensible stroke and did not attempt too much, but brought rowing at Yale gently from the vicious short dig to a longer and more logical sweep. 1197 See Chapter 8. 1198 Mendenhall, unpublished biography of Bob Cook, Mystic Seaport Library, pp. 21-2 1199 Dodd, Water Boiling Aft, p. 64 313
