THE SPORT OF ROWING up to me and said, ‘You know, Tom, rowing has trained us for these times. We’re able to take the pain where most people couldn’t. If you were in a flash sport where you didn’t experience the pain, you wouldn’t be prepared for this. “‘I don’t know if I’m fully prepared, but it’s a lot better than if I hadn’t rowed.’ “I wasn’t really that much younger than Sy, but because I had started late, my career came after his, and I really looked up to him. I remember in 1966, John and I were doing time trials in our double at home to see if we were good enough to go back East and try out for the National Team. Cromwell and Storm had done their time trials in Philadelphia with the current helping, but we didn’t know that. We were going, I’m thinking 1:29, 1:30, something like that, here in Long Beach, but we decided not to go because we had seen their faster times. “Later I talked to Sy, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. The times in Philadelphia are always misleading.’”3910 John Nunn Up to 1966, all the major players at Long Beach Rowing Association had been local products of the junior or the state college programs. Then two-time Cornell IRA Champion John Nunn 6’6” 210 lb. moved into the area with a single and a dream to make the 1968 Olympic Team. Nunn: “After I got out of Cornell, I went to grad school at the University of Michigan Business School. I ended up paddling with Marcia Jones, who had won a Bronze Medal in the K-1 at the Tokyo Olympics, her sister, Sperry, and Andy Toro, who was a Hungarian C-1 guy who had defected. “I got to be pretty decent in a kayak, but then I got my single, and I thought that all 3910 McKibbon, op. cit. my training and my body type and everything was better for rowing. “After I got out of grad school, I got some job offers around different places. I got one in Los Angeles and another back in Minneapolis that really was a better offer, but I wanted to try for the Olympics, and I figured that place was frozen six months out of the year. “I grew up in like seventeen different places, and they were all cold, so I decided to come to California, and when I arrived in ‘66, I started rowing out of the old ‘32 Olympic Boathouse. John was here. I think Tom might still have been in Detroit. I rowed, but I didn’t race in ‘66. “In ‘67, John and I were training to make the Pan Am team and the Worlds team. We had a number of races out here, and I think he beat me every race. Then we went back east, and I think I beat John by a few inches, so I became the single sculler for the Pan Am Games. Bill Maher won the Singles Trials for the European Championships in Vichy, France, but John and I won the Doubles Trials.”3911 At the Pan Ams in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Nunn won the Silver Medal in the singles behind future World Champion Alberto Demiddi from Argentina. Nunn: “When we got to Vichy, the double felt okay to me, but it turned out to be loaded a little bit too heavy for John. I was bigger and stronger, and he was still just nineteen. “If we’d known anything about rigging, we probably could have lightened his load a little bit, and he would have been fine. We led the final for 1,500 meters, and then Studach and Bürgin3912 came through to win. We ended up sixth, went from first to last.”3913 3911 Nunn, personal conversation, 2008 3912 See Chapter 87. 3913 Nunn, personal conversation, 2008 1078
