What was eating at him now wasn’t so much a fear of failing as a creeping sense of loss. He missed the low-key camaraderie that had grown among his sophomore classmates after two years of rowing—and winning—together. He missed Shorty Hunt sitting behind him, whispering, “Don’t worry, Joe. I’ve got your back,” whenever Ulbrickson barked at him. He missed the easy if largely wordless comradeship he’d had with gruff, sardonic old Roger Morris right from the first day of freshman turnout. He hadn’t really thought before about the fact that it mattered to him that those two fellows were in the boat with him, but it turned out that it did matter, a lot. It came now as a startling and painful realization that he’d had something and lost it without fully understanding that he’d had it in the first place. He had the same feeling every time he watched his new Grand Coulee buddy Johnny White and Shorty sweep by him in another boat, part of something else now, a crew of boys dead set on beating the boat in which Joe sat. When he was abandoned in Sequim, he promised himself he’d never depend on anyone else, not even on Joyce, for his happiness or his sense of who he was. He began to see that he’d allowed himself to do exactly that, with the usual painful results. He hadn’t expected it, hadn’t prepared for it, and now the ground seemed to be shifting under him in an unpredictable way.
Then, just a few days into the season, the ground under Joe positively lurched. On October 25, when he arrived back at the shell house after a long, cold, wet workout, his brother Fred was waiting for him, standing in the rain on the floating dock, peering grimly out from under the brim of his fedora, white faced. He’d gotten a call from Harry at the hospital, then gone by the house on Bagley to tell the kids. Thula was dead. Septicemia caused by an obstructed bowel.
• • •
Joe was numb. He didn’t know what to think or to feel about Thula. Pathetic as it was, she had been the closest thing to a mother that he had known since he was three. There had been some good times back in Spokane when they had sat together on the swing out in the backyard in the sweet night air, when they had all gathered around the piano in the parlor to sing. Over the years he had pondered what he might have done to make things better between them later, when the trouble had started. How he might have tried harder to get along with her, to sympathize with her own cramped circumstances, maybe even to see at least some of what his father had seen in her. Now he would never have a chance to show her what he could become. But he also found that there were limits to his regret, and beyond a certain point he simply couldn’t feel much of anything for her. Mostly he worried about his father, and even more about his half siblings. If there was one thing Joe knew, it was what it was like for a child to be motherless.
The next morning Joe went by the house on Bagley. He rapped lightly on the front door. When no one answered his knock, Joe followed a brick path through some hydrangeas and around behind the house to try the back door. He found his father and the kids sitting at a picnic table on a soggy lawn. Harry was mixing up a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid, the kids’ favorite. Without saying anything, Joe sat down at the table with them and scanned their faces. Rose and Polly were red about their eyes. So was Mike. Harry Junior had a distracted, weary look, as if he had not had much sleep. Joe’s father looked deeply hurt, and suddenly a good deal older.
Joe told his father how sorry he was. Harry thanked him, poured the Kool-Aid into Dixie cups, and sat down wearily.
They talked for a while about Thula’s life. Joe, conscious of the kids watching him over the rims of their Dixie cups, found himself elaborating on the things he remembered fondly. Harry began to talk about a trip they had recently taken to Medical Lake, but then choked up and had to stop. All in all, though, he seemed to Joe to be relatively composed for a man who had now twice lost a young wife. He showed no inclination to run away to Canada or anyplace else this time. Instead he seemed to be working on some kind of inner resolve.
Finally he turned to Joe and said, “Son, I’ve got a plan. I’m going to build a house where we can all live together. As soon as it’s done, I want you to come home.”
At this last pronouncement, Joe sat at the table staring at his father as if struck dumb. He did not know what to make of it, did not know if he could trust the man. He stammered out a noncommittal answer. He and his father talked some more about Thula. Joe told the kids that he would be coming by to keep them company from now on. But he drove back to the YMCA that night not sure what to do, confusion morphing into resentment, resentment merging into silent anger, and anger giving way again to confusion, all of it washing over him in waves.
• • •
If Joe was emotionally numb on the inside, he was physically numb on the outside. For a third consecutive year, unusually cold and stormy weather descended on Seattle shortly after crew practice got under way. On October 29 fifty-mile-per-hour gale winds raked the outer coast of Washington; thirty-mile-per-hour winds tossed boats about on Lake Washington. That night the mercury plummeted into the twenties and a heavy snow began to fall. Nine houses in Seattle burned down as a result of chimneys clogged by snow. For the next seven days, each day was colder than the one before.
Al Ulbrickson sent his four potential varsity boats out onto Lake Washington nonetheless. This was serious cold-weather rowing. The boys rowed with white knuckles and chattering teeth, their hands so cold they could hardly feel the oars, their feet throbbing with pain. Icicles dangled from the bow, the stern, and the riggers that held the oarlocks. Layer upon layer of clear, hard ice grew on the shafts of the oars themselves as they dipped in and out of the water, weighing them down. Lumps of ice formed wherever water splashed on the boys’ sweatshirts and the stocking hats they wore pulled down over their ears.
They practiced rowing from half-slide and quarter-slide positions. They sprinted one day and rowed long, punishing ten- or twelve-mile marathons the next. Ulbrickson seemed oblivious to the cold. He followed them up and down the lake in his launch, wrapped in an overcoat and muffler, bellowing at them through his megaphone. When they finally stopped rowing in the iron-cold dark of late afternoon and returned to the dock, they had to chip ice off the oarlocks to get the oars out. Then, with their shells inverted over their heads, the icicles on the riggers standing oddly upright, their leg and arm muscles cramping in the cold air, they slid and slipped along the ice-slick dock and hobbled up the ramp to the shell house. Inside, they stretched out on benches and yelped in pain as they tried to regain the use of their limbs in the steam room.
By mid-November the weather had moderated, which is to say that it had become cold and rainy as it always is in Seattle in November. To the boys, it felt almost tropical compared with what they had just been through. Ulbrickson announced that he would wrap up fall training on November 25 with a two-thousand-meter competition under full racing conditions. The results would let everyone know where they stood going into the longer, harder push after the Christmas break.
On the twenty-fifth, another cold snap arrived. Ulbrickson told the coxswains of all four boats to go no higher than a beat of twenty-six. He wanted to see where the power lay, and a lower stroke was likely to reveal that. The results pleased Ulbrickson a good deal. He was, by his standards, buoyant when he met with reporters after the event. “We have,” he said, “a stronger lineup than in the spring of 1935, and we figure to have three good fast boats in contention in January.” The same boat that had been dominant all fall—the boat built around four of last year’s freshmen—had won by an impressive three lengths in a time of 6:43. That was well off what he would consider a fast two thousand meters, but for low-stroke work the time was good. In second place was the boat that had been second best all fall—the boat with big Stub McMillin in the middle and Roger Morris in the bow. Joe’s boat came in third.
Joe had been struggling with his rowing for weeks, especially since Thula had died. Then he got a letter from Sequim. Charlie McDonald was dead too, killed in an automobile crash on Highway 101. It was a stunning blow. Charlie had been an adviser and
a teacher, the one adult who had stood by him and given him a chance when no one else had. Now he was gone, and Joe found himself unable to focus on anything other than the losses back home.
As the fall season wound down, his mind was almost never in the boat, and it showed in his rowing. He took some consolation from the fact that Ulbrickson had told the press that the third boat was still in contention. But he could not help but wonder whether Ulbrickson really meant it. As far as Joe could tell, nobody in the coaching launch was even watching him anymore.
But, in fact, someone was watching him very closely. Joe had noticed that George Pocock had been riding along in the coaching launch frequently that fall, but he hadn’t noticed where Pocock had been training his binoculars.
• • •
On December 2, a little more than a month after Thula died, Harry Rantz put some money down on a two-thousand-dollar piece of lakefront property right next door to the house in which Fred and Thelma lived, near the north end of Lake Washington. Then he got out a pencil and paper and set about designing a new house—a house he would again build with his own hands, and in which he would finally reunite Joe with his family.
A few days later, on December 8, at the Commodore Hotel in New York, the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States voted on a resolution to send a three-man committee to Germany to investigate claims of Nazi maltreatment of Jews there. When all the votes—including fractional votes—had been tallied, the resolution had failed, 58.25 to 55.75. And with that—after several years of struggle—the last serious American effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics was effectively dead. In many ways it was a victory for the thousands of young Americans who were then competing for a chance to participate in the Olympics. It was also a victory for Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, and his allies who had fought tooth and nail to ensure that there was no boycott. Most of all it was a victory for Adolf Hitler, who was rapidly learning just how ready the world was to be deceived.
As recently as late November, the boycott movement had been very much alive. On November 21 ten thousand anti-Nazi demonstrators under police escort had marched peacefully through New York rush-hour traffic. Carrying placards and following a banner reading “The Anti-Nazi Federation Calls on All Americans to Boycott the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany,” the marchers had moved somberly down Eighth Avenue and then east on Twenty-Third Street to mass in Madison Square Park. There the crowd—mostly concerned Jews, labor leaders, university professors, and Catholics—had listened to more than twenty speakers detailing what was happening in Germany, how the Nazis were concealing it, and why it would be unconscionable for the United States to participate in the games.
Avery Brundage and his allies on the AOC had fought back vehemently. Brundage believed strongly in the Olympic spirit, and particularly in the principle that politics should play no role in sports. He argued, reasonably, that it would be unfair to American athletes to let German politics deprive them of their chance to compete on a world stage. But as the situation in Germany darkened and the fight over a possible boycott intensified, many of his arguments began to take a different turn. In September of 1934, Brundage had toured Germany. He had been given a quick and closely supervised tour of German athletic facilities and been assured by his Nazi handlers that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. He had returned to the United States reporting confidently and loudly that the Jewish outcry was much ado about nothing.
The Nazis had not had to work very hard at deceiving Brundage, though. The fact was that Brundage’s views—like those of many Americans of his class—appear to have been tainted by his own anti-Semitic prejudices. He had written, in chilling terms in 1929, about the probable coming of a master race, “a race physically strong, mentally alert and morally sound; a race not to be imposed upon.” Now, in fighting the boycott movement, he advanced a number of disturbing arguments. He pointed out that Jews were not admitted to the clubs he belonged to either, as if one wrong justified another. Like the Nazis, he consistently lumped Jews and communists together, and frequently threw all supporters of the boycott movement into the same general category. He and his allies, even speaking publicly, regularly drew a distinction between “Americans” and Jews, as if the two could not be one and the same. Perhaps the most important of those allies, Charles H. Sherrill, formerly U.S. ambassador to Turkey, had often proclaimed himself a friend to American Jews. But like Brundage he had recently toured Germany. He had, in fact, attended the Nuremberg Rally of 1935 as Hitler’s personal guest. There, and in a private meeting with Hitler, he had been mesmerized, as many visiting Americans were, by Hitler’s force of personality and by his undeniable accomplishments in resurrecting Germany’s economy. Returning home with the same empty assurances as Brundage, Sherrill began to systematically deny the increasingly obvious evidence of what was happening to Jews in Germany. He also took to mixing threats into his “pro-Jewish” remarks: “I shall go right on being pro-Jewish, and for that reason I have a warning for American Jewry. There is a great danger in this Olympic agitation. . . . We are almost certain to have a wave of anti-Semitism among those who never before gave it a thought and who may consider that 5,000,000 Jews in this country are using 120,000,000 Americans to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” It was Brundage himself, however, who came up with perhaps the most twisted bit of logic to advance the antiboycott cause: “The sportsmen of this country will not tolerate the use of clean American sport as a vehicle to transplant Old World hatreds to the United States.” The trouble—the “Old World hatreds”—in other words, came not from the Nazis but from the Jews and their allies who dared to speak out against what was happening in Germany. By late 1935, deliberately or not, Brundage had crossed the line between deceived and deceiver.
Nevertheless, the issue was settled. America was going to the Berlin Olympics. What remained was to select the athletes worthy of carrying the American flag into the heart of the Nazi state.
PART FOUR
1936
Touching the Divine
The 1936 varsity crew
Left to right: Don Hume, Joe Rantz, Shorty Hunt, Stub McMillin, Johnny White, Gordy Adam, Chuck Day, Roger Morris. Kneeling: Bobby Moch
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When you get the rhythm in an eight, it’s pure pleasure to be in it. It’s not hard work when the rhythm comes—that “swing” as they call it. I’ve heard men shriek out with delight when that swing came in an eight; it’s a thing they’ll never forget as long as they live.
—George Yeoman Pocock
On the evening of January 9, Al Ulbrickson gathered the boys at the shell house and issued a stark warning: anyone who showed up for varsity turnout the following Monday, he said, “must be ready to take part in Washington’s greatest and most grueling crew season.” After months of talking about the Olympic year, it was finally here. Ulbrickson didn’t want anyone to underestimate the stakes or the brutal price of participation.
When Joe reported to the shell house that Monday and glanced at the chalkboard, he was surprised to find that his name was listed among those in the number one varsity boat, as were Shorty Hunt’s and Roger Morris’s. After rowing in the number three and four shells all fall, Joe couldn’t fathom why he had suddenly been promoted. As it turned out, it wasn’t really much of a promotion. Ulbrickson had partially reconstituted some of the old boat assignments from 1935, purely on a temporary basis. He wanted to spend the first few weeks working on fundamentals. “As a general rule,” he said, “men are in a more receptive mood for pointers when working with familiar teammates.” As soon as they started rowing at a racing beat, though, he would bust the boatings up, and it would once again be every man for himself. The boat assignments really didn’t amount to a hill of beans for now.
And so they all took to the water again. Through the rest of January and into February, rowing six days a week now, rowing from quarter slides and half slides, taking shorter strokes to focus on technique. They practiced raci
ng starts. They worked on individual weaknesses. Every few days snow flurries descended on Lake Washington. When it wasn’t snowing, it was clear, bitter cold, and windy. They rowed anyway, some of them attired in ragged sweat suits, some, incongruously, in shorts and stocking caps. Universal Pictures came and shot newsreel footage of them, just in case it was needed for the Olympics. Occasionally they staged short races against one another. The nominal first boat, Joe’s, kept coming in third. The third boat kept coming in first. Ulbrickson noted that the boys in Joe’s boat would get going, then lose their swing, then regain it, then lose it again, as many as three times in a single race. Their catching was the worst of the top three boats.
One gray day in February, Ulbrickson was out in the launch, struggling to correct the problems in boat number one and growing frustrated with the effort, when he noticed George Pocock sculling by himself in the distance. He hollered, “Way enough!” at the boys and slipped the launch into idle, still watching Pocock.
The boys noticed Ulbrickson’s faraway stare and turned in their seats to see what he was looking at. Pocock was ghosting over the water as if effortlessly, his boat ethereal looking in a light mist that had settled on the water. His lean, upright body slid forward and backward in the boat fluidly, without hesitation or check. His oars entered and left the water noiselessly, broad, smooth puddles blooming in the dark water alongside his boat.
Ulbrickson grabbed his megaphone, motioned the boatbuilder over to the shell, and said, “George, tell them what I’m trying to teach them. Tell them what we try to accomplish around here.” Pocock circled the shell slowly in his own boat, talking softly to each boy in turn, leaning ever so slightly toward the long cedar shell. Then he waved at Ulbrickson and rowed away. No more than three minutes had passed.
When Ulbrickson barked, “Row!” the boys pulled their shell smartly ahead, their catching and their rowing suddenly crisp and clean. From that point on, George Pocock rode along in the coaching launch most days, bundled up in an overcoat and neck scarf, a fedora pulled down over his ears, taking notes, pointing things out to Ulbrickson.
In general Ulbrickson was pleased. Despite the difficult weather and the erratic performance of boat number one, things were progressing very well; the time trials were promising for so early in the season. With the infusion of new blood from the previous year’s exceptional freshman boat, he was again faced with the dilemma of having almost too much talent out on the water. It made it hard sometimes to separate good from great, great from greater. Nevertheless by late February he was starting to form solid ideas about what a first varsity boat—a boat for Berlin—would look like, though he wasn’t ready to talk to the press or to the boys themselves about it. As long as they were competing with one another on even terms, they were likely to keep improving. At least one thing was obvious, though. If a Washington boat did go on to ply the waters of the Langer See in Berlin later that year, Bobby Moch was going to be sitting in the stern with a megaphone strapped to his face.
• • •
At five foot seven and 119 pounds, Moch was almost the perfect size for a coxswain. George Pocock, in fact, designed his shells to perform optimally with a 120-pound coxswain. Even less weight was generally desirable, but only provided that the man had the strength to steer the boat. Like jockeys, coxswains often went to extraordinary lengths to keep their weight down—they starved themselves, they purged, they exercised compulsively, they spent long hours in the steam room trying to sweat off an extra pound or two. Sometimes oarsmen who thought their cox was weighing them down took matters into their own hands and locked their diminutive captains in the steam room for a few hours. “Typical coxswain abuse,” one Washington cox later said, laughing. In Bobby Moch’s case, staying small had never been much of a problem. And at any rate, even if he had carried an extra pound here or there, the roughly three pounds devoted to his brain would have more than made up for it.
The first task of a coxswain is to steer the shell on a straight course for the duration of a race. In a Pocock shell in the 1930s, the cox controlled the rudder by pulling a pair of ropes in the stern, at the end of which were a pair of wooden dowels, called “knockers” because they were sometimes used to raise the stroke rate by beating them on an ironbark “knocker-board” fastened to the side of the boat. When eight very large men are in constant motion in a twenty-four-inch-wide vessel and the wind is blowing and the tide or current is relentlessly trying to push them off course, steering is no small challenge. But it’s the least of what a coxswain must worry about.
From the moment the shell is launched, the coxswain is the captain of the boat. He or she must exert control, both physical and psychological, over everything that goes on in the shell. Good coxes know their oarsmen inside and out—their individual strengths and vulnerabilities—and they know how to get the most out of each man at any given moment. They have the force of character to inspire exhausted rowers to dig deeper and try harder, even when all seems lost. They have an encyclopedic understanding of their opponents: how they like to race, when they are likely to start sprinting, when they like to lie in wait. Before a regatta, the cox receives a race plan from the coach, and he or she is responsible for carrying it out faithfully. But in a situation as fluid and dynamic as a crew race, circumstances often change abruptly and race plans must be thrown overboard. The cox is the only person in the shell who is facing forward and can see how the field is shaping up throughout a race, and he or she must be prepared to react quickly to unforeseen developments. When a race plan is failing to yield results, it is up to the cox to come up with a new one, often in a split second, and to communicate it quickly and forcefully to the crew. Often this involves a lot of shouting and a lot of emotion. In Cal’s Olympic gold medal race in Amsterdam in 1928, Don Blessing put on what the New York Times called “one of the greatest performances of demonical howling ever heard on a terrestrial planet. . . . But such language and what a vocabulary! One closed one’s eyes and waited for the crack of a final cruel whip across the backs of the galley slaves.” In short, a good coxswain is a quarterback, a cheerleader, and a coach all in one. He or she is a deep thinker, canny like a fox, inspirational, and in many cases the toughest person in the boat.
Little Bobby Moch was all of that and more. He had grown up in Montesano, a foggy little logging town on the Chehalis River in southwestern Washington. It was a wet, dusky world; a world dominated by big trees, big trucks, and big men. Massive Douglas firs and cedars grew in the misty hills outside town. Ponderous logging trucks rumbled through town on Highway 41 night and day on their way to the mills in Aberdeen. Beefy lumberjacks in thick flannel shirts and hobnailed boots strutted up and down the main street, shot pool at the Star Pool Hall on Saturday nights, and sat in the Montesano Cafe drinking coffee by the gallon on Sunday mornings.
Bobby’s father, Gaston—a Swiss watchmaker and jeweler—was not a large man. But he was a prominent member of the citizenry, a proud member of the all-volunteer fire department, and was celebrated for having driven the first automobile twelve miles from Aberdeen to Montesano, a journey that he had accomplished in a jaw-dropping hour and a half. When Bobby was five, a botched operation on his appendix nearly killed him. The recovery left him short, skinny, and sickly—afflicted with severe asthma—throughout his grade-school years and beyond. Determined not to let his frailty and his stature stand in his way, in high school he went out for every sport he could think of, mastering none but playing all of them tenaciously. When he couldn’t make it onto the school football team, he and other boys who weren’t large enough to make the cut gathered on a vacant lot just down Broad Street from his home, playing rough-and-tumble scrub football without benefit of helmets or pads. The smallest of the small boys on the lot, Bobby was always chosen last, and though he spent much of each game with his face planted in the dirt, he later credited the experience for much of his subsequent success in life. “It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down,” he told his daughter, Mar
ilynn. “What matters is how many times you get up.” In his senior year in high school, by sheer force of will, he lettered in—of all things—basketball. And the three pounds of gray matter he carried around in his skull served him well in the classroom. He wound up at the top of his class, honored as Montesano High’s class valedictorian in 1932.
When he enrolled at the University of Washington, he set his sights on coxing. As with everything else he attempted, he had to fight tooth and nail to win a seat in the stern of one of Al Ulbrickson’s boats. But once he was in that seat, his tenacity quickly made a believer out of Al Ulbrickson. Like everyone else in the shell house, Ulbrickson soon discovered that the only time Moch didn’t seem entirely happy and comfortable in the coxswain’s seat was when he was in the lead. As long as he could see another boat out ahead of him, as long as he had something to overcome, someone to beat, the boy was on fire. By 1935 Moch wielded the megaphone in the JV boat that contended with Joe and the other sophomores for varsity status that season. He wasn’t a popular choice. He had displaced a well-regarded boy his new crewmates had been rowing with for two years, and they initially refused to give Moch the respect a coxswain absolutely depends on. That just made Moch push them harder. “That was a tough year. I wasn’t liked at all,” he later said. “I demanded they do better, so I made a lot of enemies.” Moch drove those boys like Simon Legree with a whip. He had a deep baritone voice that was surprising in a man so small, and he used it to good
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Page 19
