THE SUNSET OF CONIBEAR after a stint at Stanford, was hailed for a job well done. Most of the praise was for the manner in which his oarsmen had progressed from a third in the Eastern Sprint Championships to second in the IRA and finally victory in the big one.”4063 The Seattle Times: “‘I recommended Lou for the Navy job,’ Ky Ebright, retired California coach, said here yesterday. ‘And look what he did to us.’ “‘I have to hand it to Lou,’ said Rusty Callow, Lindsey’s predecessor at Navy, now living in Seattle. ‘I knew that was a red-hot sophomore crew last year. But I didn’t know it was that good.’”4064 Bos: “That evening at dinner time we placed a call, and each one of us talked briefly with Rusty and told him that we ‘did him good.’ He was ailing at the time and died only a few months later.”4065 Perry: “We as a crew definitely had an ‘attitude’ that worked against us, for our loyalty had been with Rusty and Paul. “We weren’t about to accept Lou, this little coxswain with all his weird ideas, as our coach. It was very, very bad. We didn’t behave properly for him, and history has proven that his coaching and training were correct! “Had we listened to Lou more often, we might have done a lot better. It tainted our whole attitude, even our attitude in rowing.”4066 Lindsey’s own crew was not the only group that had second thoughts about him. The New York Times: “Stan Pocock, the coach of the Lake Washington Rowing Club,4067 was named coach of the Olympic small-boat flotilla. In past years, the coach 4063 Strauss, op. cit. 4064 Georg N. Meyers, Sub Cox Makes Good, The Seattle Times, July 10, 1960 4065 Bos, personal correspondence, 2006 4066 Perry, op. cit. 4067 see p. 405 of the winning eight was named head coach of the [entire] rowing team, but the United States Olympic Rowing Committee said there would be two separate coaches and no head man.”4068 Lindsey’s Technique The technique of the 1960 Navy Crew differed a bit from the 3rd Generation Conibear aggressive leg drive technique of Rusty Callow’s 1952 Great Eight. Lou Lindsey, University of California, Class of 1942, had learned his rowing from 1st Generation Conibear coach Ky Ebright. “I’ve never pulled an oar in my life. I was a coxswain for four years, but the best I ever made at Cal was the third boat, and looking back, that’s where I would have put myself. “I figured all along that a guy who was good at rowing would have no idea how he became good. I think the guy who has to struggle, like me, to learn to row better is in a much better position to teach rowing to somebody else.”4069 Lindsey’s pullthrough was founded upon the same elegant back swing that Rusty had taught, but the rhythm had noticeably changed. The 3rd Generation Conibear hybrid-concurrency built around aggressive initial leg drive had for the most part disappeared and was replaced by a return to the most elegant 0-10, 0-10, 0-10 1st Generation Conibear concurrency. Lindsey’s preferred force application was Schubschlag to the release, but whereas Callow’s Navy crews of the early ‘50s had accelerated rather physically to their strong send at the release, the acceleration of the 1960 crew appeared less extreme, smoother, and, as we shall discover, reflective of the general trend in world rowing at the time. 4068 Strauss, op. cit. 4069 Lindsey, personal conversation, 2006 1125
