THE SUNSET OF CONIBEAR knew that they would not be our compe- tition. It was Harvard, and that was all we could think about. ”4425 1968 Olympic Eights Trials Cadwalader: “The tempo increased as the Trials grew nearer. I recall that we thought that we were the favorites and Harvard was now the challenger since the Penn Eight was so much stronger after the lineup changes, though we were still rough and unblended as a boat. “We knew we had a real challenge ahead and respected Harvard and Harry and all the other eights.”4426 Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist Frank Dolson: “It was a strange situation before the Olympic Trials. Joe calmed them down before the big race. Ted stirred them up. He walked through the halls of the dormitory wearing his Olympic jacket with the U.S.A. on the front and made it a point to let each member of the crew see how nice it looked. “‘Here, hold this,’ he’d say, handing the jacket to the oarsman and running off. “‘I’m as subtle as a brick,’ Nash grinned. “His tactics were remarkably successful on the freshman level. As a recruiter, he was second to none. “‘He’s like Tom Sawyer at the fence,’ Burk once said. ‘If Ted Nash were selling insurance, he’d be a millionaire.’”4427 Penn Varsity bow-seat Nat Reece ‘69: “Two years before the Trials, I had been part of Ted Nash’s first recruiting class at Penn, and with our freshman crew he had focused on conditioning and character. We called our rowing style ‘frantic,’ but he taught us 4425 Jones, op. cit. 4426 Cadwalader, op. cit. 4427 Dolson, p. 5 ‘heart’ and used to say, ‘The body can take ten percent more than the mind thinks it can!’ “Our first big test my freshman year was the ‘66 Adams Cup in Philadelphia against Harvard and Navy. We took the lead early and kept it. We were told it was the first time any Harvard heavyweight crew had lost in three years. “A couple of weeks later at the Eastern Sprints, Harvard went out like a jack-rabbit, and we trailed them by around three-quarters of a length all the way down the course. At about 400 meters to go, our stroke, Dexter Bell [‘73], put the word out that it was time to move. People say we went by in nine strokes. “We won by open water. “Over the next two years, Harvard worked hard on their finishing sprint, and as my classmates and I moved up to the Penn Varsity, Joe Burk focused on style, smoothness, and grinding crews down during the body of the race. “But Ted was ever present. During the ‘68 Trials, Gardner and I were roommates in the Long Beach State dorms. Ted put a red, white and blue sign in our room: ‘For Pain, Take Gold.’ “Much of the smoothness of our 1968 crew was a function of mileage. We rowed our 4,000th mile on the way down to the start at the Trials. “At the Long Beach Marine Stadium,4428 site of the 1932 Olympics, supposedly nine of every ten days were headwinds, but the morning of the final, there was a quartering tailwind of six miles per hour over the port side. Vesper jumped off at some phenom- enal rate and took the lead in the initial few strokes. Harvard and Penn were next to each other, and we went off at a 48 to a tree root we had chosen on the bank marking twenty-seven strokes, at which point we had 4428 See Chapter 88. 1219
