THE LONG ECLIPSE OF AMERICAN ROWING Taylor: “Apparently, no head coach decision had been made. Future Badger assistant Randy Jablonic remembers Sonju telling the story several times that, following their arrival in Ithaca, Sanford and Sonju flipped a coin to determine who would coach the varsity and who would guide the freshmen. Sanford ended up with the varsity. As a result, many would say the two acted as ‘co-coaches’ of the Cornell crew.”4871 Jablonic: “Norm liked long practices. He also would not frequently change the varsity boating arrangement. Sometimes he would watch the same guy for two or three days, counting how many bad strokes out of several hundred a rower would make. Five out of six hundred was good. Norm liked consistency.”4872 According to Allison Danzig of The New York Times, in 1951 Sonju was coaching “the powerful, short-swinging Badgers,”4873 suggesting that Wisconsin was rowing a version of the limited-layback 2nd Generation Conibear Stroke originated by Al Ulbrickson and Tom Bolles.4874 Eric Aserlind ‘75: “I got the feeling that for Norm Sonju in Wisconsin’s relative isolation, the emphasis was on beefy oarsmen and mile upon mile of sustained rowing.”4875 Sonju coached at Wisconsin for twenty- two seasons from the fall of 1946 until 1968, winning three IRA varsity titles, the first in the 1951 flood in Marietta,4876 and later in 1959 and in 1966 on Onondaga Lake. Sonju’s teams tended to be manned by tall Wisconsin natives of Scandinavian descent recruited on campus. His crews had 4871 Taylor, pp. 90-1 4872 Qtd. by Ibid, p. 92 4873 Allison Danzig, Race Cut to Two Miles, The New York Times, June 17, 1951 4874 See Chapter 59. 4875 Aserlind, personal correspondence, 2010 4876 See Chapter 64. some of the same characteristics that Penn Coach Ellis Ward had seen in the Berry Crate Crew in1899. In the words of The New York Times quoted earlier: “Their form had been so ragged . . . This is one of the cases, however, where splendidly conditioned men, fitted physically for their boat, can often beat crews whose rhythm and form are absolutely perfect.”4877 Randy Jablonic Three-seat on the 1959 IRA Champion Wisconsin Varsity was Randall T. Jablonic. After he graduated in 1960, he became Sonju’s Freshman Coach. Aserlind: “Jabo comes across as exactly what he is – a jovial Northern Wisconsin farm boy with beefy hands, bulbous calves and an earthy charm. This decidedly un-Ivy persona was precisely what appealed to his targets in the registration lines at the University of Wisconsin, the rangy, homegrown boys from the farms and towns of the state. Very few of his recruits had ever even heard of rowing, let alone set foot in a shell. In fact, in the five years I spent rowing in Madison, I think I only rowed with one guy who had any pre-college crew experience.”4878 When Sonju retired at the end of the 1968 season, Jablonic moved up to Head Coach. This represented a confluence of evolutionary forces: an isolated population seeking guidance from within, increasing the isolation. Result? Inbreeding? It didn’t happen. The 1960s were a fertile period of new ideas in rowing. If Sonju remained a traditionalist to the end, his freshman coach did not. When Jabo took over the reins, it was at the height of Harry Parker’s explosion onto 4877 Pennsylvania Wins in Poughkeepsie, The New York Times, June 28, 1899 4878 Aserlind, personal correspondence, 2010 1359
