THE LONG ECLIPSE OF AMERICAN ROWING “‘Union, you go out and do your own thing because we’re going to have a 2,000 meter race on Saturday, and here’s the deal: If you guys win, you go intact, no changes, but if you lose the race, I want you to agree to abide by anything I say as to who goes in the boat and leave it up to me what I do in the following forty-eight hours. “‘That’s the deal. If you all commit to that, I want it right now up front so everybody knows what’s going to happen.’ “So they all said, ‘Sure. Fine. Let’s go.’ “In the race, the guys that I was working with fell behind a length in the first 500, caught up at the 1,000, and won by two lengths. So then we had a little meeting, some downcast, some grins. I said, ‘You remember the deal, and here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going seat racing.’ “And they all said, ‘What’s that?’ “I explained: ‘During a series of three workouts, morning, evening and morning, we’re going to change the boats around, exchanging two guys at a time, and then based on the results, I’m going to pick a boat. ‘I’m going with the boat of the people who win the seat races. Period.’ “I laid out a course, putting in two parallel pairs of stakes half a mile apart up by the Northeastern boathouse, and then we did it. I controlled the stroke rate, and I got a time for each one. “One day into it, I was doing my math, and Harry came over to me and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I explained it to him, how one guy had beaten another guy, and you know how Harry is . . . pretty taciturn. “He walked away and didn’t say anything. “So I kept doing it, and eventually I announced the boat. “Coincidentally, the four guys, Larry Hough [Stanford], Frank Watson [Yale], Bill Maher [Detroit BC] and Robert Sandel [MIT] [with Harvard Coxswain Dick Grossman] had never sat in a boat together in any of the switches that I did. So their first workout wasn’t until Bled. “Now the U.S. had not made the fours- with final in any European, World or Olympic event since the Washington guys in 1948,4693 and eighteen years later in 1966 there were twenty-five fours-with in Bled, including East Germany, which was far and away the favorite. “Our boat got beaten up in their heat, but they made it through the repêchages into the semi-final. East Germany was in one semi-final, we were in the other, and our boat won, only maybe a half-second off East Germany’s time. This was a group that didn’t even know each other and had only been rowing together three or four days tops! “So they got into the final, but they got in trouble with a bad stroke in the first 500. They didn’t know each other that well. They hadn’t taken enough strokes with each other over a period of years, and they couldn’t pull it back together and placed sixth. “They didn’t have another race like their semi-final. The consistency was not there, but in the regatta we wiped out Australia and New Zealand. They were horizon shots. It was not even close. “We came back, and all these articles got written saying, ‘Look what you can do with an all-star team. In just a couple of days, you can go from nowhere.’ The bottom line was that everybody got jumping on this concept. “I wrote an article in 1966 and said, ‘Don’t believe it. This was largely dumb luck. Seat races do identify things, but you’ve got to have time. You can’t just throw people together and expect it to happen, and you’ve got to have years together to really compete at this level.’ 4693 Actually it was the next set of Washington guys, Olympic Bronze in 1952. See Chapter 89. 1303
