THE SPORT OF ROWING Pocock had predicted,5299 all traces of the wisdom of Courtney and Conibear and Ebright and Ulbrickson and so many others, all the experience that had made up the Golden Age of American Rowing were erased from the collective memory. Imagine that! Giants like Ten Eyck and Callow faded to mere names on a plaque, pictures on a boathouse wall. By the mid-1970s, when the Ratzeburg virus had run its course and America was waking up with a hangover and lowered resistance, this was when American rowing suffered its mortal wound. Into the void left at the end of the Ratzeburg era rushed the misinterpreted, misunderstood mutant strain of the Rosenberg approach, Modern Orthodoxy, and suddenly it was as if the Conibear Stroke had never existed. American rowing was plunged into a Dark Age. In the forty years between 1964 and 2004, as we shall discuss, there have been great individual stories, Joan Lind, Bill Belden, the 1972 and ‘74 Men’s Heavyweight Eights, the ‘74 Lightweight Eight, the 1975 Red Rose Crew, Scott Roop, the 1984 Olympic Champion Men’s Double and Women’s Eight, Andy Sudduth, a decade of Penn A.C. Men’s Coxless-Fours, Jamie Koven, several men’s and women’s eights during the 1980s and ‘90s and a gaggle of lightweight women, rowers and scullers. These lights burned much the brighter, having been surrounded by darkness and disappointment. They had become the exceptions, not the rule. Rosenberg the Man To this day, Allen Rosenberg remains a man with an immense following in the American rowing community. He is generous with his time and maintains an enthusiasm for rowing and the rowers who strive every day to move boats faster. Allen Rosenberg is a gentleman. He is a man readying himself to look upon his complicated rowing past with the perspective of time. He tells me he is considering writing a book. I say bravo! This short anecdote captures some of the charm of Allen Rosenberg: Steve Johnson, stroke of the 1964 University of California Varsity Crew: “Our coach was Jim Lemmon, and he had just missed the Olympics in 1960. We were undefeated, a fabulous crew, and had won the IRA by a couple of lengths of open water. We thought we had a lock on the Olympics in 1964 (which was a mistake!). “Cornell had been completely beaten in Syracuse, but Stork Sanford was fabulous. He gave up [his Olympic ambitions] and gave us his whole pre-Olympic training program at Ithaca, so we went up there to train before the Trials, and sailed through the Trials until the final. “We were in the outside lane, and the story is that a press boat picked up and waked us. We had three guys with full crabs at the start. The coxswain had his hand up the entire first 500 meters, but they never called it back. Vesper ended up beating us and went on to win the Gold Medal. More power to them. “When the Vesper crew came back to the dock, everybody else was gone. We were waiting for them, greeted them, helped them out of their boat, gave them our shirts. “Later we got this lovely letter from 5299 See Chapter 98. 1460
