INTERNATIONAL ROWING TURNS PROFESSIONAL “It was remarkable. Here we were, the same two people who had failed in Helsinki, but now so focused on the Gold Medal in Melbourne that we would do anything we could to win it. No effort was too great. “And our speed and endurance kept increasing.”3242 The 1956 Season The first opportunity for Fifer and Hecht to test themselves in competition came a month after arriving in Philadelphia . . . and they missed it. The New York Times: [NYRA Regatta, Hunter Island Lagoon, May 12, 1956] “The Olympic Champions, Charles Logg and Tom Price of Rutgers Rowing Club, rowed to a four-length victory over the National Champions today. “The New Jersey scullers defeated the New York Athletic Club in the senior pair- oared event without coxswain over a 2,000 meter course. Logg and Price jumped to an immediate lead and gradually drew away from the field to finish strong. “Stanford University was late to the starting line. The race was started without its pair.”3243 Logg and Price While the story of Beggs, Fifer and Hecht is one of imagination and dogged determination, the parallel saga of the great 1952 Olympic Champion Rutgers Coxless- Pair of Chuck Logg, Jr. and Tom Price is one of the more improbable in rowing history. Logg’s father, Chuck Logg, Sr., was the head coach at Rutgers University after the Second World War. He had been captain and rowed 7 on Coach Ed Leader’s 3242 Hecht, personal correspondence, 2009 3243 Logg-Price First in Sculling, The New York Times, May 13, 1956 1921 Washington Varsity which lost to Cal in their dual meet by five feet.3244 As the Princeton Coach in 1927, Logg père broke Leader’s six-year unbeaten streak at Yale.3245 Chuck Logg, Jr.: “At the ‘28 Trials, Princeton lost out to Yale by ten feet in the semi-finals. Yale then lost to California by 1.2 seconds in the final. Cal became Olympic Champions.”3246 As with Jimmy Beggs, the story of the Rutgers Olympic Pair also goes back to the 1948 Olympic Trials. Logg: “In 1948, we lived on a farm in Penn’s Neck, New Jersey, and I had just finished my junior year in high school. The Olympic Trials were in Princeton, which was only about five miles away. My dad took me over to watch, and after the Yale Pair-Without won in about 7:20, he declared, ‘Well, I can get two guys to do that!’ “He kept that idea alive for four years, and in the winter of ‘51-’52 when I was a junior at Rutgers and all the Pocock shells for the East Coast arrived by train at Princeton Junction, there waiting for us was a brand new pair that Dad had ordered. We got it, and it sat in the boathouse all spring. “The plan was for me to row it with John Brenner. He was the Varsity stroke, and I was 7. We didn’t start rowing together until the season was over, about the middle of May. I rowed with him a few times, but it didn’t work very well. I kind of pulled him around a little bit. “Then we went into exams, and between exams and his father’s health, John missed a couple of practices. “I asked my dad, ‘Well, who else can I row with?’ and he said there was only one 3244 www.huskycrew.org 3245 See Chapter 52. 3246 Logg, personal correspondence, 2009 905
