Daniel James Brown - The Boys in the Boat: The True Story of an American Teams Epic Journey to Win Gold at the 1936 Olympics

For
Gordon Adam
Chuck Day
Don Hume
George Shorty Hunt
Jim Stub McMillin
Bob Moch
Roger Morris
Joe Rantz
John White Jr.
and all those other bright, shining boys of the 1930s
our fathers, our grandfathers, our uncles, our old friends

Prologue

This book is a true story. It was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day, several years ago, when I climbed over a split-rail cedar fence and made my way to the modest house where Joe Rantz lay dying.

Joe was my neighbor Judys father, and she had asked me to come down and meet him. I knew only two things about him when I knocked on her door that day. I knew that in his midseventies he had single-handedly hauled a number of cedar logs down a mountain, cut and split them by hand, then built the nearly half-mile-long pasture fence I had just climbed over. And I knew that he had been one of nine young men from the state of Washington who shocked both the sports world and Adolf Hitler by winning a gold medal in rowing at the 1936 Olympics.

When Judy opened the door and ushered me into her cozy living room, Joe was stretched out in a recliner with his feet up, all six foot three of him. He had a thin white beard, and his eyes were puffy. An oxygen tank stood nearby. Rain flecked a window that looked out into the wet woods. A fire was popping and hissing in the woodstove. Jazz tunes from the 1930s and 1940s were playing quietly on the stereo.

Judy introduced me, and Joe offered me an extraordinarily long, thin hand. We talked for a while. Joes voice was thin and reedy, not much more than a whisper. When the conversation began to turn to his own life, I leaned closer and took out my notepad. I was surprised at first, then astonished, at what this man had endured and overcome in his life. But it wasnt until he began to talk about his rowing career that he started, from time to time, to cry. He talked about learning the art of rowing, about the sleek and delicate wooden boats known as shells, about tactics and techniques. He told stories about long, cold hours on the water under steel-gray skies, about smashing victories, and about marching under Adolf Hitlers eyes into the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. But it was when he tried to talk about the boat that the tears really welled up in his bright eyes.

At first I didnt know what he meant by the boat. I thought he meant the Husky Clipper, the racing shell in which he had rowed his way to glory. Then I thought he meant his crewmates. Eventually I realized that the boat was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it was something bigger than that, something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience, a golden moment long ago, when he had been part of something much larger than himself. Joe was crying partly for the loss of that moment, but much more for the sheer beauty of it.

A Washington crew working out, circa 1929.

As I was preparing to leave that afternoon, Judy removed Joes gold medal from the glass case against the wall and handed it to me. The medal had vanished once, years before. The family had searched high and low, then given it up for lost before they finally found it, buried in some insulating material in the attic. A squirrel had apparently taken a liking to the glimmer of the gold and hidden the medal away in its nest. As Judy was telling me this, it occurred to me that Joes story, like the medal, had been squirreled away out of sight for too long.

I shook Joes hand and told him I would like to come back and talk to him some more. I said that Id like to write a book about his rowing days. Joe grasped my hand again and said hed like that, but then his voice broke once more. But not just about me, he whispered. It has to be about the boat.

The Washington shell house, 1930s.

1

Only Nine Seats

On a sunny October afternoon in 1933, two young men, taller than most, hurried across the University of Washingtons campus. The school was perched on a bluff overlooking the still waters of Seattles Lake Washington. A gray, overcast morning had given way to a radiant day, and students were lounging on the grass in front of the massive new stone library, eating, chatting, and studying. But the two boys, both freshmen in their first weeks of college, did not stop. They were on a mission.

One of them, six-foot-three Roger Morris, had a loose, gangly build, dark hair, and heavy black eyebrows. The other, Joe Rantz, was a pencil tip shorter, but more solidly built, with broad shoulders, powerful legs, and a strong jaw. He wore his blond hair in a crew cut and watched the scene through gray eyes verging into blue.