THE ERA OF POLARIZATION Should an athlete, right or wrong, have the authority . . . or the responsibility . . . or the moral right to tell the coach (or President) how, where, when, with whom and/or whether he or she will row? Are these extremes absolute and/or mutually exclusive? Should they be? In a perfect world, is there a middle ground, a common ground? How about in the real world? Dan Lyons Speaks Topolski: “Daniel Kevin Lyons came from Wayne in Pennsylvania and had grown up with rowing on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, coxed boats at ten, rowed in them at twelve. His father sang in the opera, while Dan himself was a very useful tenor and planned to sing in an Oxford choir. He had attended the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and was now a Navy lieutenant.”7586 Kiesling: “He is a self-described ‘hopeless romantic,’ and his heroes are ‘nineteenth-century men living in the twentieth-century – like Churchill, Patton and MacArthur.’”7587 A very passionate Dan Lyons, presenting his side: “We did not start this thing. The guy who really started it was Donald, trying always to get into the boat. That was it! He was just trying to get into the boat, and he had some good reasons for that. If he was president of the winning boat, his life would be made! 7586 Topolski, p. 64 7587 Kiesling, op. cit, p. 88 Author Dan Lyons in 2009 stating his case. “Then when in trying to get into the boat, he kicks out one of his own countrymen, Tony Ward, who then comes to us and says, ‘You have to do something about this because you are the senior guy (me), and the Americans are the senior people.’ “‘Well, what do you want us to do about it?’ “‘Talk to Donald!’ “So I [with Richard Hull] go and talk to Donald [to tell him that the team had decided for the present to continue practicing without him in the boat]. Donald says, and I’ll never forget it, I’m sitting opposite him, his eyes glaze over, and he says, ‘This is a mutiny.’ 2103
