THE ERA OF POLARIZATION “That was Andy.”7415 Ruth: “Andy commented to me once as we prepared for a workout and I asked him how hard we were going to go. ‘Why, you just go as hard as you can for the time allotted.’ “When he was well into chemotherapy, gaunt and pale, my mother saw him on his road bike on rollers with a lake of sweat growing under his bike. She said she’d never seen anyone work out so hard. It was just another day on the bike for him. “He was amazing. If not impervious to pain, then with an incredible threshold. It took a serious change of approach as he was dying to treat pain differently. He had always used pain as information on how his body was performing. It became time to manage the pain and to keep it under control so he could function and be present for the people he loved.”7416 Rest in peace, Andy Sudduth. Perspective The international success of Jimmy Dietz and Bill Belden in the 1970s, Scott Roop in 1981, John Biglow in 1981 and 1982, Tiff Wood in 1983, the double in 1984 and Andy Sudduth in 1985 represented flickers of light in the midst of the Dark Age of American sculling . . . and rowing, too. The technique of Sudduth and the healthy Biglow was the reincarnation of Ned Hanlan and John B. Kelly, Sr. Unfortunately, rowers have short memories, and nobody in the ensuing years remembered. Placed in proper historical perspective, Andy Sudduth, Lewis and Enquist, John Biglow, Belden and Roop, Jimmy Dietz, Hough and Johnson, Van Blom and McKibbon, the 1974 U.S. Eight and the 7415 Ibbetson, personal correspondence, 2009 7416 Ruth Sudduth, op. cit. 1964 Vesper Eight were the last echoes of the American bell first rung by Ellis Ward at Penn and Charles Courtney at Cornell three- quarters of a century earlier. Cornell-grad Bill Stowe was the last of the great American international strokes produced by the Courtney/Conibear tradition. In the forty years since, there certainly have been other strokes as gifted. Al Shealy,7417 Cal Coffey7418 and Andy Sudduth immediately spring to mind, but not until the basic truths about boat moving which Stowe embodied in 1964 could reemerge in U.S. rowing would an American eight win another Olympic Gold. Ironically, during the American Dark Age, the rest of the world was experiencing an Age of Enlightenment. There was a free exchange of ideas unlike any seen before in the history of the sport. Other countries took turns sharing the forefront of world rowing: the German Federal and Democratic Republics, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Canada, Spain, Italy, Norway, Danish lightweights, Romanian women. Not the United States. Afterward The year 1984 was an epic tragedy, the reason why at least two books7419 and one commercial film7420 have been made about the American men scullers of that fateful year. Brad Lewis and John Biglow tried a double in 1985. It did not go well. 7417 See Chapter 104 ff. 7418 See Chapters 116 and 129. 7419 the Halberstam and Lewis books. See Bibliography. 7420 Rowing Through, 1996, loosely based on the Halberstam book. 2071
