THE SPORT OF ROWING “And it worked. I think we took the best from Mike Teti, James Tomkins, Kris Korzeniowski and Ted Nash, and supple- mented all that with our own things, with lifeguard rowing and what we discovered on our own in our pair. “The whole spring of 2001 we had three, maybe four talks with Coach Teti. All of them can be summed up with this statement: ‘I’m acutely aware that my whole career is in the hands of two col- lege idiots . . . because you guys are going to lead the team this year.’ “You know how laid-back Bryan is. Well, I was foaming at the mouth at the pro- spect of leading the National Team. This was my big opportunity. I’d been the small- est guy on every team, the junior team in ‘95, the under-23 team ‘97, ‘98, ‘99, and then being a training dummy in the summer of 2000, but then doing really well in seat racing. “Sweating profusely, Bryan and I would pass the phone back and forth to each other as Mike stated how fast everyone was mov- ing back on Lake Carnegie. ‘If you guys aren’t really training, you guys are going to get absolutely killed when you get back to Princeton . . . and guess what? There’s go- ing to be no one here to help you. “‘Then I’m going to get fired, and then I’m going to come after you, and my cousins are going to come after you.’ “Our heart rates were in AT-mode after those phone calls. “We came back to Princeton at the end of May for the speed order trials. Bryan and I won by more than fourteen seconds, and all those other guys had been getting coach- ing every day. “We beat all the doubles, too. “Bryan and I became the stern-pair of the eight that summer. We came in a close fourth, 3.28 seconds behind Romania, with Croatia and Germany in between.”8166 Mike Teti: “In 2001, I never called Bryan and J.R. once while they were in Co- lumbus. I trusted Brian, as I always have. When J.R. refers to all the guys they beat at the 2001 speed orders, I only had four guys training in Princeton that spring, and only one of them had ever been in a pair.”8167 Jeff Klepacki: “J.R. could sell ice to Eskimos.”8168 J.R.: “At Teti’s wedding that fall, John Pescatore, another South Jersey Lifeguard Champion, a Penn guy, now the Yale coach,8169 said to me, ‘J.R., stay in the pair with Bryan. Row in the Olympics in the pair.’ “Of course, this was less than a year af- ter John coming off a Silver Medal coaching performance with his guys, Sebastian Bea and Ted Murphy,8170 but it’s always good to get encouragement like that when things weren’t going all that well in the big boats.”8171 9-1-1 The Ballad of Bryan and J.R. by Jason Read did not take place in a vacuum. Bryan has a degree in philosophy from Ohio State, and in 1999, at the age of 21, J.R, had be- come the youngest ever elected chief of an EMS and Rescue Squad in the State of New Jersey. ESPN: “There was perhaps no time in Read’s life that called for his serious side more than on Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, along with hundreds of New Jersey-based 8166 Read, op. cit. 8167 Teti, op. cit., 2006 8168 Klepacki, personal conversation, 2008 8169 Pescatore resigned in 2010. 8170 See Chapter 137. 8171 Read, op. cit. 2290