THE SUNSET OF CONIBEAR “What Ted Nash was doing was cutting edge, years before its time, simply applying to rowing the recruiting practices that were routine in other sports. What really irked people was that he was so damned good at it. “His passionate intensity, his charismatic charm, his fearless commitment to hard work, and his unqualified personal loyalty to those he assembled made him a recruiter par excellence. He was gifted – and he was all alone ahead of the field. “What Ted Nash introduced to rowing was pre-application/pre-admission recruit- ing, which was the norm in most other sports, even in the Ivy League, and he was doing it well within the guidelines of the league and of his university. I could not do that, because I was bound by a Harvard rule that specifically prevented coaches from initiating contact with prospects before they had applied and were admitted. That’s a fact, not an excuse. “So what was I doing at Harvard? I was recruiting my butt off, but on campus in the fall.”4321 Ted Nash recruited tremendous athletes to Penn and put them through a year-long freshman rowing “boot camp,” making them do endless miles, endless squat leaps and endless pull-ups, and in the end he produced spectacular freshman crews. They won their first IRA in 1966, the first year for which Ted had been able to recruit. Luther Jones ‘71, 7-seat on the 1968 Quaker Freshman Crew, was recruited by Ted even though he had never seen a shell before he came to Penn. He captures the atmosphere of his first race in an excerpt from his extraordinary memoir: Jones: “That weekend, we all decided to shave our heads, so we lined up laughing and sheared our hair to the scalp. We decided that we would wear our Penn ‘71 4321 Washburn, personal correspondence, 2007 hats to the start, and as the crews were lining up, we would take our hats off, providing a psychological advantage . . . “As we got to the start line, we were in the center between Princeton and Columbia. We counted down from the bow and took off our hats. The Princeton Tigers and Columbia Lions looked over with what I could only call disbelief. “At that moment we became ‘Nash’s Animals,’ a name that would last the entire year.”4322 The stroke of Luther’s 1968 Freshman Boat was Rick Crooker: “Some of that crew are still in touch regularly, and we never tire of the stories that defined that year. Two more to add to LuJo’s head- shaving story: “Ted was convinced the stern-four was faster than the bow-four, so he raced us in fours one day. We raced down the river – we raced up the river – we even raced across the river, but the bow-four won every piece . . . until they figured out we’d be out there all night if they didn’t eventually lose. “So they threw the next piece, and we got to go home. “Another day, Ted wanted us to row 500 meters as high and fast as possible – ‘Just 500 meters, boys. That’s all.’ “After a series of ‘false starts’ that had us extremely wound up, we drifted to the 1,000 meter mark and he yelled “ROW!!” We took off at 52spm, and I swear you could have seen daylight beneath us. Two- fifty into the piece, his voice floats across the water: ‘Don’t stop at the 500 meter mark – Take it to the finish line . . . ” “Of course, we did, and I discovered a new level of pain, but we learned that our limit was far beyond where we thought it was. “A few weeks later, we faced Harvard for the first time at the Adams Cup. As they started to move back on our half-length lead 4322 Jones, unpublished memoir, 2006 1187
