THE SPORT OF ROWING A Bronze Medal to add to his 1956 Gold, but Conn Findlay was not finished by a long shot. Edward Payson Ferry Mitchell: “Conn Findlay rowed two- man shells for five years before he found a partner who could stand him for more than one season. “By 1961, Conn had exhausted four partners. In the process, he’d garnered a Gold Medal in the ‘56 and a Bronze in the ‘60 Olympics. After Rome’s third place, Conn was thirty years old, noticeably graying, and desperately needed a fresh, young oarsman to pull him through another four years. Ed Ferry, then a naïve 19-year- old 6’4” [196cm 196lb. 89kg] sophomore at Stanford University, fit the need perfectly.”3435 Ferry: “As a college sophomore in 1961 with only one year of rowing experience, Conn Findlay asked me to row a pair with him, which we did for the next four years. I could not believe it. “The chance of a lifetime! “In our first month of rowing the pair together, he turned to me once and said, ‘You’ll have to row harder than that.’ “I knew that was the last time I would get to hear that sentence, as the next time I would be gone.”3436 Dick Lyon: “Ed Ferry was a fantastic athlete. He actually got into Stanford on a football scholarship and then decided to row instead of playing football. “Conn was not a great one for running and wouldn’t run the stadium stairs with anyone looking, but he was one of the first coaches to require stadiums. Our legs would be so sore after the first few days of our 3435 Kent Mitchell, A Blueprint for Gold, unpublished manuscript, 1965 3436 Ferry, op. cit. 3437 Lyon, op. cit. week-long spring training (while the other students were on vacation) that we couldn’t walk downstairs in the morning without holding onto the banister. “Ed Ferry was a champion stair-runner. He had been a fast quarter-mile runner in high school. We were supposed to break ten minutes for ten sets, one seat at a time. (I think there were about eighty-four stadium rows at Stanford back then.) “Ed ran 7:50. “Conn and Ed practiced mostly without a coxswain (except for time-trials), using instead a couple of tire tube sections with 110 pounds of sand inside, tied off at the ends and laid down in the coxswain’s seat.”3437 Ferry: “Early on I had made a personal promise to myself to do ANY workout this guy proposed. One of Conn’s goals was to row from Redwood City to the Golden Gate Bridge [nearly 30 miles, 45 kilometers through San Francisco Bay]. Waiting for tides and wind, one day it was right. “Well, here we go, sand bags and all. (Lucky you missed this one, Kent!) “There were some swells starting at the San Mateo Bridge, but a not unpleasant three-plus hours later at about 25 strokes a minute we were under the Golden Gate Bridge at full ebb tide in a boat with about three inches of freeboard. “To ‘way enough’ after all that rowing was a refreshing change, and one gets to look up at the underside of the Bridge in a moment of wonder, and. . . . then we quickly realized that the boat was being pulled out to sea at about the same speed as we had been rowing. “So we turned the boat back toward San Francisco and rowed harder than we had for a very long time until we reached a dock 948
