THE SPORT OF ROWING plan. The norm was just his expectation that we would win if we put our all into every stroke. “This time the race plan was simple, and in its execution, devastating. Sprint the first 500; then through the middle 1,000 meters, take three one-minute pieces; in the final 500, do what you have to do to win. This sermon was given quietly but with a determination that was infectious. “At 500 gone, we were down a half- length. After the first one-minute piece we had drawn even; after the second, we had a half length; after the third, we had open water. We broke ‘em! “Never was a victory so sweet or the smile so wide as we saw when Harry greeted us at the victory dock.”4756 Harry in 1972 “Partly because of the Harvard Crew’s failure to medal in the [Mexico City] Games – which was attributed, variously, to the altitude, to the sickness of the stroke, as well as the political activities of several of the crew members during the Games which, it was alleged, distracted them from the task at hand – the USOC put together a National Camp system. Parker was named head coach [for 1972].”4757 In Munich, Harry Parker’s American composite Eight squared off against Ratzeburg, New Zealand and GDR for the Olympic championship. Harry’s Eight had come out of a selection camp truly national in scope, but it still ended up with six Harvard grads, two sets of brothers, Mike and Cleve Livingston, Bill and Fritz Hobbs, coxswain Paul Hoffman, and former Harvard Lightweight Monk Terry at stroke. In fact, both Livingstons, Fritz Hobbs and Hoffman had all been on the 1968 Harvard Olympic squad. Only Gene Clapp from Penn, Tim Mickelson from Wisconsin and Pete Raymond from Princeton broke into the otherwise all-Crimson lineup. Dietrich Rose:4758 “You only had a couple of months, such a short time to prepare a boat to go against the Europeans. We would try to have them relearn what we wanted them to do. That was one of the big, huge challenges. There were a lot of talented people who came along, but they could not adapt. “That was the most difficult part. That’s why Harry always selected his own people that already knew what he wanted when he was the coach of the eight.”4759 Clapp: “I’d been on the National Team the year before in the four-with. It was a throw-together boat at Vesper. Three weeks together to go up against the World, and you know how that works . . . or doesn’t, so 1972 was a second chance for me, and I took it seriously. “At the beginning of the camp it was really a huge cross-section of rowers from all over the country. It didn’t feel like a Harvard thing. It was at Dartmouth, a beautiful place to row and train, and I thought it was run pretty fairly. “Clearly, this wasn’t a coaching session. It was a survival session. There was a fairly brutal process where you’d go through a week of seat racing, and then on Friday they posted a list on the wall of those who were to be there on Monday morning for the following week “So you were either on the list or you weren’t. It was like going to work. Every day you had to go out there and win your seat races. We were all a bunch of 4756 Hamlin, personal correspondence, 2005 4757 www,wikipedia.org 4758 See Chapters 107 and 122. 4759 Rose, personal conversation, 2010 1320
