INTERNATIONAL ROWING TURNS PROFESSIONAL riding it home on Sunday night to their East Coast bases. Hecht: “Flying now took the place of rowing. Carrier landings were even more exciting than lining up for a start. Gunnery, aerobatics, instrument approaches to GCA3228 landings, night flights solo at 40,000 feet over East Texas thunderstorms, Navy wings on a Marine officer’s uniform – heady stuff for a youngster just out of college.3229 But that was not to be the end of their rowing. Military Personnel in Sport Members of the military of all countries had long participated in international sport. The United States Naval Academy had won the Olympic Eights title shortly after each World War with athletes, many of whom had gained physical and emotional maturity during active duty tours prior to entering the Academy. With the increasing prestige accorded the winners of an Olympic Gold Medal, by the mid-20th Century, active duty servicemen in countries around the globe were being assigned to train well into their late 20s for international competition. By the 1950s, the U.S. military was also recruiting athletes from within their ranks and from the civilian population to represent their country on the world stage. The result was that rowing teams across the board were becoming older, bigger, stronger, more experienced and faster. Worldwide, the most successful elite rowers were quickly beginning to resemble the modern understanding of what a full-time professional athlete is. Hecht: “After Helsinki, rowing had been forgotten, stuffed down the memory hole because it had been unsuccessful. “And I hated making excuses to myself and others about why we had not done better. “These feelings must have been more painful than I realized at the time because early in 1955, when a bulletin circulated to Navy and Marine personnel asking for expressions of interest in trying out for the 1956 Olympics, I wrote to Fifer. His enthusiastic positive response came right back by return mail. “Initially we tried to row a pair-with, but we couldn’t find a coxswain. Jimmy Beggs was the paid coach of the freshmen at Penn, and in those bygone days that made him a professional and therefore ineligible for the Olympics. “So we settled on a pair-without . . . but where could we find a boat? “There was one straight-pair unbespoke in the East. It was at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where Rusty Callow held sway. Rusty had coached the 1952 Navy Great Eight to an Olympic Gold Medal,3230 and he had been kind to Fifer and me in Helsinki. When we asked him if we could borrow his pair, he gave our project his blessing. “We drove the pair down to Florida strapped on a rack Fifer had made for his Pontiac convertible. We were headed for Rollins College, where U.T. Bradley agreed to let us find shelter in his boathouse. “While picking up the pair in Annapolis, we saw Rusty’s 1952 Olympic Eight back in training – they, too, had dreams of a second Olympic experience3231 – slugging up and down the Severn in December sleet, gray sweat suits heavy with rain, wet towels around steaming necks, a terrible way to get back in shape. 3228 “ground control approach.” 3229 Hecht, op. cit. 3230 See Chapter 64. 3231 See Chapter 68. 901
