THE SPORT OF ROWING contrast, Allen at 33 and Harry at 29 were young! representing a new generation, brilliant youthful harbingers of a bright, new and exciting future. Tim Mickelson, Wisconsin ‘70, who rowed for Washington-grad Norm Sonju, another member of the old guard, and later for both Parker and Rosenberg: “American rowing was somewhat inbred. Only Al and Harry seemed interested in the international scene and making their crews go faster. There was a whole generation of Conibear coaches who lived and breathed the two- and three-mile races, and then every four years, we’d switch from a three-mile IRA to a 2,000-meter IRA. “A lot of the old-time coaches took what they knew but didn’t look much beyond that. I can remember my sophomore year, 1968, at Wisconsin when Norm prepared us for the Olympics by saying, ‘We’ve got to row these 2,000 meter races a little differently!’”4508 The most astonishing unintended consequence of the rise of the two dynamic young coaches in the years that followed 1964 was that their influence on American rowing became so pervasive and so persuasive that the country as a whole let go of its remembrance of all those in rowing history who had preceded Allen Rosenberg and Harry Parker. Today, we might call it hitting the reset button. Author and philosopher Eric Sigward was a member of Parker’s Harvard crews in the years immediately after Tokyo. “It was once held that technique, above all, was the key to successful rowing. I had heard old- timers talk about rowing as a poetic experience of one’s youth. When I entered Harvard, weight lifting had just begun to be a large part of our training program, but we were more concerned with the inexpressible beauties of the sport: a catch neither too fast nor too slow, a finish without splash. “At Harvard, however, rowing in our era developed from the hazy realms of poetry and gentlemanly aesthetic to a science of technique, conditioning, motivation and boat and oar construction. “All along I had seen romantic notions about rowing replaced by technology.”4509 Ask coaches today, and you will find very few who have any detailed or accurate conception of what happened technique- wise in American or in world rowing before Tokyo. The sad fact is that most of the lessons of the first half of the 20th Century, the greatest era in American rowing history, have completely disappeared from the collective American memory. 4508 T. Mickelson, personal conversation, 2005 4509 Sigward, pp. 49-50 1246
