Halberstam - Amateurs

For Mary Ann Madden

IT WAS NOT A CELEBRATED event. It was an Olympic trial, to be sure, and the trial of a sport of unusually passionate participants. But no tickets were sold, and the community in which it was held, Princeton, New Jersey, largely ignored it. The local innkeepers and restaurateurs did not report to the Chamber of Commerce, as seems mandatory these days, that holding the sculling finals in their city had brought $5 million worth of extra business to the town. A handful of hastily put up cardboard signs told the curious few how to find their way through Princetons streets to the shores of Lake Carnegie. In a world of media events, journalists were notably absent. There were no press credentials; there were no television cameras; there was only one still photographer on duty. One young woman from the U.S. Rowing Association was in charge of the press, and her typewriter, old and battered, immediately broke down. A reporter from the Boston Globe showed, and so did one from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Those papers probably represented the two most serious rowing cities in America; Harvard-Penn rivalries in crew were special. The New York Times sent a stringer; crew was a shakier sport at Columbia. The regional Associated Press bureaus seemed to be competing for the right not to cover it. The scullers of America existed, it was clear, in a world of their own.

No chartered planes or buses ferried the athletes into Princeton. No team managers hustled their baggage from the bus to the hotel desk and made arrangements so that at mealtime they need only show up and sign the tab. This was a world of hitched rides and borrowed beds, and meals, if not scrounged, were desperately budgeted by appallingly hungry young men. The rowers were always hungry. Food was fuel, and they burned immense amounts of fuel, judging restaurants not by quality but by quantity.

Christopher Wood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the favorite to win the right to represent the United States in the single sculls, was particularly experienced in scrounging lodging and food, and he knew the Princeton area well. At the Princeton Motor Lodge, for example, while rowing in a four-man boat, he and his teammates had rented a double room for $30, taken the mattresses off the box springs, laid them side by side and four people had stayed in one room for $7.50 each. On this weekend Tiff Wood (from a boyhood inability to say his own name, which had come out not Christopher, but Tiffer) drove down from Cambridge with a friend and competitor named Charley Altekruse, both of their sculls strapped on Woods car. That allowed them both to cut costs on travel. Gas, oil, meals had come to $150 for Wood, or about twice what he had gotten in expense money from the Olympic committee.

Wood liked Charley Altekruse, they were Harvard oarsmen from different crews, and Wood thought that among his colleagues Altekruse had the greatest natural athletic talent, that unlike most rowers, he would be good at almost any sport. Most scullers loved to train but hated to race because the pain and the tension of a race were so great. Wood was amused that the gifted Altekruse loved to race and hated to train. Besides, there was an additional financial benefit in traveling with Altekruse. Since he had only recently graduated from college, he had a better network of friends and graduate students planted around the eastern colleges where regattas took place. In Princeton they would stay at the home of friends of his, further saving on costs.

Tiff Wood was a champion single-scull rower, perhaps, some thought, the best American hope for a sculling Olympic medal in the 1984 games. At thirty-one he was, as a man who had devoted his entire grown life to rowing, the personification of the amateur. He had put aside career, marriage, pleasure in his single-minded pursuit of excellence in a sport that few of his fellow countrymen cared about and that was, therefore, absolutely without commercial rewards. Not only was he probably the official favorite for the race, he was, in the world of oarsmen, the sentimental favorite as well. As a much younger, less experienced oarsman he had been a spare on the 1976 Olympic team. But no one had become sick, and he had not rowed a stroke. A more senior figure in the world of rowing, he had been the captain of the men on the 1980 team, but Jimmy Carter had canceled U.S. participation in the summer Olympics that year, and again Wood had not rowed a stroke. Because the Olympics were the one occasion when the oarsmen had a chance at national exposure, the boycott had been a particularly bitter blow. Wood had been their spokesman that year and had been extremely critical of Carters decision; other athletes were privately as critical but, fearing commercial reprisals, remained publicly supportive. The oarsmen feared no reprisals to careers that had no commercial potential to begin with. So wearing their dissent as publicly as possible, they had formed a rowdy and raucous bunch during the ceremonies held in their honor in Washington by Carter. Many, like Wood, had refused to shake Carters hand on the evening of the gala. There had even been a certain ritual for snubbing the President of the United States; those who had decided not to shake Carters hand simply did not go onstage with him. That part at least was relatively genteel. When the ceremonies were over, most of Woods contemporaries on the 1980 rowing team had swallowed their disappointment, vowed never to vote for Carter if he ran for reelection, and withdrawn from competitive rowing. But Wood was different. The Olympic goal had continued to tantalize him. Because, without a chance to compete in the Olympics, his rowing career seemed incomplete, he had decided to stay with the sport for one more shot, the 1984 Olympics. He loved rowingit, more than his professional life, was his real world; and he had given a great deal personally to it, serving on various official rowing committees. Within the world of former oarsmen, there was a subtle sense that, all things being equal, it would be a nice thing if Tiff Wood won.

On this weekend, two of Woods principal opponents, John Biglow and Joe Bouscaren, both former Yale oarsmen, had driven down together. They had rowed in an informal race the previous Sunday on the Charles against Tiff, and both had beaten him. For Bouscaren, who had come in second, the victory over Wood was a special boost. Bouscaren was a talented and graceful oar who was somewhat smaller than both Biglow and Wood; more often than not, Bouscaren led for the first half of a race, and then Wood or Biglow passed him near the end.

For Biglow, a former two-time national champion who had been bothered by a bad back and who had not rowed well in the past year, it had been a day of genuine celebration. For the first time in a year he sensed that he might be able to try the Olympic single-scull trials after all. Unlike Bouscaren and Wood, who had spent the winter rowing on the Charles and working out in Harvards Newell Boathouse, Biglow had returned to his native Seattle and had tried to find out what was wrong with his back. He had spent most of the winter rowing in a double with his friend Paul Enquist. That put less strain on Biglows back, for a double was not as heavy on the individual sculler as the single, and he had gradually been able to compete again. His rowing, which had been quite rough in 1983, had begun to improve. He and Enquist had formed a very good double, and there was a chance that they might become the U.S. double scull in the Olympics.