by Ginny Gilder
The Housatonic offered vastly improved rowing conditions compared to the lagoon. The water was clean, the surroundings safe. A dam directly downstream from the Yale boathouse limited the crews in that direction, but four miles of wide, meandering river stretched upstream for their uninterrupted use. Recreational boat traffic was scant and no other rowing programs used the waters, which kept them calm and peaceful. The gentle hills that rose and fell along the river’s shores provided a visual respite from the rigors of practices.
Derby’s scenery and the facilities were oceans away from the urban jungle surrounding the lagoon. When the women’s program earned varsity status, the women finally gained access to Derby and the men had to make room.
To the women, Derby was heaven, but the heavyweight men protested that we made their lives hell. With limited equipment of our own, we begged boats from the men’s program, diminishing the guys’ inventory and storage space. We occasionally damaged boats—hitting the dock on landing, running over submerged debris during practice—just like the guys; fixing our mistakes ate into Jerry Romano’s availability to repair and rig their boats. We shared dock space, imposing on their launch and return times. We rode on the bus with them to and from practice every afternoon, enduring their sly comments and obvious glares.
But we couldn’t share lockers, toilets, and showers. The boathouse had one tiny bathroom on the first floor that the women could use to relieve themselves before and after practice, but there was no place to shower or change. All that had to wait, and often that wait approached two hours.
Rowing is not a dry sport. Besides the obvious source of moisture, sweat produced by aggressive exertion, the backsplash of oars entering the catch guarantees that everyone who doesn’t sit in the stroke seat gets drenched at some point or another. Add to that the late winter, early spring air temperature in Derby, which averages in the mid-thirties in February and creeps up to the mid-forties in March—don’t even consider the possibility of precipitation—and you have prime breeding conditions for sickness.
Fifteen to twenty minutes after the women got on the bus, sweaty, soaked, and, by now, often shivery, the men would straggle on, clean, hair freshly combed, wrapped in warm jackets, and eager to hit the dining hall for dinner. Reaching campus before the last dining hall stopped serving always proved a scramble, as the drive back took nearly half an hour, which meant that our showers had to wait even longer. No matter the weather, we waited for the men in wet clothes, we endured the bus ride back to campus in wet clothes, we ate our meals in wet clothes, and we walked back to our dorm rooms in wet clothes.
“What about taking a shower in Joni Barnett’s office?” Anne joked to Chris one afternoon in late February. (Barnett was the director of women’s intercollegiate sports and reported to the athletic director.) “We could bring in a bucket, sponge, soap, and a towel.” Chris sneezed and wiped her nose. Only a week into rowing outside at Derby following the breakup of the winter’s ice that had sheathed the river, she’d already caught a cold and Anne was struggling with pneumonia. They weren’t alone; several more women rowers quickly came down with respiratory ailments after we began practice at Derby.
The university had unwittingly laid the groundwork for rebellion. Realizing the boathouse needed an upgrade, no doubt helped to this conclusion by Chris’s steady complaining, the powers that be decided to transform the building’s unused third floor into space for the women and shared the blueprints with Chris. However, because the expansion would require modernizing the existing structure to meet new building codes, the university deemed the project too costly and nixed it. Instead, it resorted to the solution devised the previous season: importing a temporary trailer that squeezed a triad of showers and a parking strip’s worth of locker room space into the boathouse’s parking lot. This year, however, the occupancy permit approval was delayed, leaving the women with nothing.
That snag, combined with her sense that the university had pulled a bait and switch regarding a more permanent solution, ignited Chris’s disappointment. With the vision of a permanent locker room dancing in her head, Chris was no longer willing to settle for what had morphed into too little, too late, especially because she captained a team that relied on her and whose power to do great she not only championed, but believed in and relied on herself.
Chris followed Anne’s lead. “We could go into her office and strip down. That would get her attention.”
“Imagine you standing buck naked in front of Joni Barnett!” Anne started laughing. “I dare you!”
“You’re on!” When this pair of Olympics-bound competitors egged each other on, there was no backing down. Chris rubbed her hands together gleefully and launched into planning our foray into Barnett’s office.
I didn’t hesitate to follow Chris’s lead and join the protest. By March 3, I’d been rowing six months. I’d survived my first winter training. I’d accomplished previously unimaginable challenges with women I’d grown to like and respect. I was one of nineteen young women who gathered in the humid basement locker room at Payne Whitney before practice. Not everyone on the team showed up. Some had late afternoon classes, and at least one, Bakehead, citing apprehension over losing her campus job (she worked in the athletic department) and, worse, her financial aid, demurred. She could easily imagine a worst-case scenario in which the university would lash out at the participants, and she couldn’t afford it: “I wish I could go, but I can’t risk it,” she said.
Our joking and joshing diminished as we printed “Title IX” on each other’s backs in Yale-blue marker. We grew quieter as we dressed in our team-issue sweatpants and sweatshirts. We paired up and proceeded to Barnett’s office in the Ray Tompkins House, home of the athletic administration, trailed by a duo of Yale Daily News staffers—a writer, David Zweig, who doubled as a stringer for the New York Times, and a photographer, Nina Haight. Barnett’s secretary was surprised that Chris Ernst was accompanied by eighteen others to her appointment with the director, but she ushered us in.
We stood silently, somberly, facing Barnett, who retreated behind her broad desk. Instead of sitting down, however, she remained standing, one hand on her desk as if to steady herself. Chris turned sideways and nodded slightly. Perfectly synchronized, we turned our backs to the administrator, pulled off our sweatshirts, dropped our pants, and stood stark naked, absolutely silent. David Zweig turned his back and kept scribbling notes.
Barnett said, “Do you want this man in here?”
Chris waved her hand as if to shush a child. “Yes, it’s fine. Just listen please.” She unfolded a sheet of paper. “These are the bodies Yale is exploiting,” she began, reading from her prepared statement. I stood there, feeling a wintry draft through the aging windows of the Ray Tompkins House. “We are using you and your office because you are the symbol of women’s athletics at Yale; we’re using this method to express our urgency …”
I felt the magnificence of the moment: standing up for myself, for all of us, surrounded and strengthened by my compatriots. Forget those rower boys who thought our beloved sport belonged only to them, who thought their disgusting nicknames for us could intimidate and dissuade us. The power of “crack,” “sweat hog,” and “inhuman scum” drained away, along with my sense of loneliness. I had found my place, where I didn’t have to diminish my dreams or sacrifice myself to gain acceptance or affection. I could stand tall and strong without stooping to accommodate the prejudice or preferences of others, buoyed and bolstered by my teammates.
“There has been a lack of concern and competence on your part,” said Chris, winding down. I felt energy coursing through me. Her words buoyed me with a new resolve. They couldn’t stop me.
When Chris and Anne told Nat about the protest immediately afterward on the dock at the boathouse, he yelped, “You did what?” But he seemed proud. By the next day, however, he’d come to his senses, undoubtedly aided by the university’s athletic director, who must have urged him to rein in his unruly team. Hung over and sull
en, head sagging, he gathered the team together for a meeting in Jennie Kiesling’s room, where he admonished us in mumbles for going around his back and making him look ineffectual. “Why didn’t you let me handle this?” he said. Perhaps he’d been working behind the scenes to broker some kind of change, but that no longer mattered. This was the first time I heard my coach express his disappointment in us, which should have alerted me to his questionable judgment.
Nat’s displeasure could not dent the crew’s belief in either the justice of our position or the rightness of our action. As far as we were concerned, we had struck a blow for freedom, one backed up by the law of the land, and we were tired of waiting for the bureaucracy to grind out its version of progress at its leisure. The event deepened our sense of unity as a team and our willingness to rely on each other, essential qualities of fast boats.
No one on the women’s crew anticipated that news of the protest would end up on the front page of the second section of the New York Times, picked up by the Associated Press and wired around the world, even showing up in the International Herald Tribune. While not all my team members’ parents were happy with their daughters’ uppity, ungrateful behavior, several sent clippings and congratulations, my father included. He was proud of my defiance; at least this time, I wasn’t defying him. Letters poured in from alumni, some beseeching the administration to rectify the problem, others blaming the administration for creating it by admitting women in the first place. No one predicted that the publicity would shame the university into a commitment to expand the Robert Cooke Boathouse to accommodate women the following year.
5
When the Title IX protest occurred, not even Nat knew the Yale Women’s varsity eight would end its season with a pair of Olympians occupying its stern pair and freshmen filling its five bow seats. He certainly didn’t know an unathletic city girl with no business going near a rowing shell would worm her way into one of those seats, earning her spot the old-fashioned, sweaty, and hard-working way. I didn’t either.
At the first practice after spring break, the entire squad stood in the boat bay out of the wind, surrounding Nat, waiting for his usual pre-practice announcements. Without any fanfare, he began. “I’m boating varsity and JV lineups for this coming weekend’s races today.” I took a deep breath. My foot started tapping and my fingers twitching.
“Anne, Chris, Bakehead, Ginny …” Nat’s voice didn’t trail off, but my ears got stuck on my name. A whoosh of energy surged through me and I felt myself swooning, walloped by glee. I only realized I hadn’t fallen when no one rushed to help me. I glanced around to check the faces of my new varsity teammates. No one cracked a smile. I knew to follow their lead, but I was a crappy liar. I sang inside while my mouth struggled not to smile.
“Ok, now the JV lineup,” Nat continued. I tried to keep listening to be respectful. I knew it was important to acknowledge everyone’s achievement, but my happiness wanted out. I looked down at the ground, pretending to concentrate on what Nat was saying, hoping my smile wasn’t too obvious.
“Here’s the plan for today’s workout. Let’s paddle up to the quarter-mile mark and start our warm-up from there. Thousand-meter pieces today.” Nat dismissed us to get ready to launch without offering congratulations or encouragement to anyone. Everyone still acted as if nothing special had happened and busied themselves with stretching and taking a last drink of water. I wanted to grab my new boat mates and hug them, swear my undying determination to die for them in the heat of battle, but no go. I tried to act nonchalant as I took my oar down to the dock, but my shoulders squared with newborn confidence and my steps hinted at a swagger. Bakehead was ahead of me, plunking a pair of blades on the dock. She turned toward me as I reached her. “We’re gonna be fast,” she declared as she gave me a fierce hug.
We raced every weekend from March through mid-May, beating everyone on our way to the Eastern Sprints Championships: Barnard, Boston University, Wichita State University, University of Nebraska, Connecticut College, Williams, Princeton, MIT, Cornell, Ithaca College, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers. We raced on the Harlem River off Manhattan, on the Schuylkill in Philadelphia, on Lake Onondaga in upstate New York and the Charles in Boston.
Thanks to the Kansas branch of the Yale Alumni Association, which invited the top freshmen to visit and paid for the trip, Nat broke the varsity up for a weekend to seat a freshmen-only eight. He sent us to Wichita where we raced through the middle of the city on the narrow, winding Arkansas River and won handily, almost guiltily accepting the mustard-yellow shirts proffered by our hosts. We left the next morning and drove six hours north across the dead-flat Midwest to Carter Lake in Omaha, Nebraska, and kicked butt there, too. I rowed in the seven seat for that pair of races, behind Chris Stowe, steady and resolute, a no-bullshit athlete from tight-lipped Maine. A former cross-country running star, Chris was no stranger to pain or the demands of an endurance sport, the perfect role model for the newbie athletes following her.
Within the first two hundred meters of the Omaha race, the gate of my oarlock jiggled loose and flipped open. Our coxswain noticed the problem immediately and alerted me. Six people sat behind me, including the other three starboards, whose oars needed to stay in sync with mine.
I looked out at my rigger and saw the gate standing upright like a tiny flagpole. I couldn’t help but also notice the Nebraska crew in the adjacent lane, about half a boat length behind. Damn! If the gate remained open throughout the race, my oar would likely pop out of the oarlock completely and cause total havoc—at least a bad crab, at worst a complete loss of oar control.
The intense focus of a racing start was still with me. I didn’t hesitate. I snaked my arm out to the end of my rigger, snapped the gate back into place, and tightened the nut that locked it down without missing a stroke or losing track of Chris’s rhythm. Steady as she goes, taking care of business. We then proceeded to walk through the Nebraska crew and win by open water.
We jubilantly called Nat, who had stayed back east to accompany the freshmen-free varsity to its weekend races, to report our successes and the oarlock incident. After asking for the crew’s race times and not offering any congratulations, he observed that we should have performed a more complete equipment check before launching. Fine: I already knew that nothing we did could get a rise out of the guy. No accomplishment would merit his acknowledgment.
I didn’t care. Racing swept me away. I loved the fierceness of it, the chance to test myself while hidden snugly within a crew. It wasn’t all about me. Except, of course, secretly I knew it was. But I never had to admit it, because I had seven racing companions. I’m sure that every one of us contended with inner demons, but we did it together, in sync, and never discussed our private battles. Fear was nothing to flaunt, but was something shameful that had to be endured in the pre-race jitters and the first strokes of a race. It was part of the price to pay to reach the joy of rowing hard and well, to claim victory. I sure wasn’t going to cop to my internal doubts; they were short-lived worries that I wasn’t up to the task, showing up on race day and dissipating as soon as the starter’s flag came down, but I didn’t want to risk diminishing my teammates’ confidence in me.
Winning felt pure and good, like an Ivory Soap commercial. I could point to our victories as proof that I didn’t wimp out. I delivered.
Our season’s perfect record earned us first seed for the Eastern Sprints, held on Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Massachusetts. The championship regatta featured heats and finals over a two-thousand–meter course. Crews raced in groups of six, with the top three proceeding to the Grand Final later in the day. We won our morning heat without expending extraneous effort, rowing most of the course at a sedate twenty-nine strokes per minute and beating second-place Cornell easily.
Then came the final.
The sun beat down with its characteristic late-afternoon, late-spring intensity as we laced our foot-stretchers and shoved away from the dock. My heart beat loudly in my throat. We were
racing for the championship. The Yale women had never beaten Radcliffe or won the Sprints, but today we were the favorites. We had a chance to claim the title. All that lay between us and the trophy were five other crews who might share our dream, but not our strength or our bond.
We ended our warm-up by the starting line. The six crews in the race before ours were lined up at the starting platform, their sterns held by volunteers lying on their stomachs, arms stretched out. The rowers stared straight ahead impassively, bodies angled forward, knees tight to their chests, arms extended, oars buried in the water, ready to explode into focused aggression at the starter’s command. We sat still, relaxing but not relaxed, waiting for the race to go off and the official summons to the starting dock. I tried not to think about all the things I could do wrong to blow the race. Now was not the time for fear, but I struggled to combat my inner voice of doom.
I concentrated on the real enemies, the Cliffies in their black shirts with white piping, imposing white Rs emblazoned on their backs. They looked big and mean, but we could beat them. Why not? We’d beaten everyone else all season, whether we’d been the favorite or the underdog. We would win this race.
Before I knew it, we were in the race’s last five hundred meters. “All right, we’re even with Radcliffe. Let’s move on them,” our coxswain, Lynne Alvarez, called. Now or never. Let’s go! Eyes glued on Elaine Mathies, my quads pounding down through the drive in time with hers, our hands flowed out of the bow to start the recovery and reach for the next catch and kick some more ass. The boat was a little rocky, the setup disturbed by the water’s slight chop, but we would not be distracted or deterred. Lynne’s voice boomed through her megaphone: “Ok, you gave me two seats. I want more.” Accelerated breathing, no time to gasp for air, muscles shrieking with the burn of overexertion. “Okay, just twenty more strokes. Give me all you got. We’ve got those Cliffies. Let’s take it home!” Lynne commanded and I obeyed, back arching with effort. “Paddle,” she called. I looked up and saw Radcliffe behind us. Alright. “Way enough.” We stopped rowing. Bent over my oar, now I could gasp for air. I looked across the course.
