Book Review: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

 

The Unity of the 1936 Rowing Team from Washington

When I first picked up the book I knew as much about rowing as I did logging in the Northwest. I suspect it’s this way for most people. There was a time, however, when rowing was the biggest collegiate sport in America, at least it was in certain parts of the country. In The Boys in the Boat: Nine American and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Daniel James Brown tells a Depression era story of working class kids overcoming great odds and winning it all. It takes a great writer to resurrect the past just enough, and make Americans wonder why we hadn’t heard this gem of a story before now.

Brown tells the story of the rowing crew through the person of Joe Rantz, a Washington native. It’s both heartbreaking and encouraging to understand how someone can struggle just to feed themselves, while working their way through college. Joe’s father, Harry, left Joe to care for himself, abandoning him at the behest of his second wife. She didn’t like Joe. He was from Harry’s previous marriage and therefore not welcome. Joe was still in high school. The grueling days living in cabin and scrounging up meals built a toughness in him that made rowing a perfect fit.

The ‘Boys in the Boat’ teaches us how rowing crews come together and why unity is essential for victory. The University of Washington’s coach, Al Ulbrickson, relied heavily on George Pocock for some of the technical aspects of rowing. Pocock, a Brit, set up a business building and selling racing shells out of the University years before. He understood rowing, its spiritual and physical characteristics. He wasn’t a coach but could diagnose a problem with a team from afar. As a result of his eye, Ulbrickson relied on him at times to work on the phycology of his athletes. Joe Rantz was the recipient of this expertise for a time.

 Rantz’s freshmen squad showed talent almost immediately. They Beat the University of California, a perennial rival, at the yearly regatta in Poughkeepsie in 1934.

Ulbrickson made wholesale changes from the time the freshman won their first major race to the Olympic victory in Berlin. By the time they became the varsity crew, they’d been changed out so many times that they never felt secure. Their inconsistency almost doomed them. Eventually though Ulbrickson settled on a team with a smart coxswain and a strong lead. The coxswain, Bobby Moch, figured the most efficient way to win was to get into rhythm as quick as possible and ramp it up near the end. The boys wasted less energy this way because they were able to move as quickly as crews with a faster tempo.

Their secret was unity. The more in tune rowers are with one another, the less wasted motion there is. It’s why a lot of signature wins from the Washington boys were come from behind attacks. Moch keep them at a slower rhythm relative to other teams. The Olympic victory played out a little differently. I won’t spoil it, but Brown doesn’t disappoint in his tense, excited description. The boys from Washington, now representing the United States, had a few staggering impediments on the final race. One was a sick rower and the other, an unfair lane assignment. Al Ulbrickson complained mercilessly to the committee about the lanes 6 and 7 with their heavy crosswinds.

While the story is the Boys, there is a fair bit of history about the Depression and the Nazi’s grand display in Berlin. It’s impossible to talk about 1936 without detailing Leni Riefenstahl’s big vision for the Olympics. Her ongoing fight with Joseph Goebbels plays out against the camaraderie of the US rowing team. More than anything, the story is best when talking about the hardships the team experienced, rowing in the cold and getting comfortable with pain. It’s why Brown focuses so heavily on Joe and his hard scrabble existence that followed him like a shadow. Money is nearly impossible to come by. He even gets beat up by a game warden who catches him fishing illegally and selling the bounty for cash.

What comes together at the end is a true American story of triumph and overcoming odds. One of my favorite passages is near the end. It perfectly sums up the feelings of the boys and how the team had replaced the individual.

 “All along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport, and he still tended to row erratically. Bu what Joe didn’t yet know—what he wouldn’t, in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men—was that every boy in the boat felt exactly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in the boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and that he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen.” (page 326)

I’m impressed with author Daniel James Brown’s exhaustive research. Much of the story relies on historical records from over a hundred years ago. He must have poured over countless newspaper headlines from the Washington papers to recount the races, times and weather details. The personal stories are always the best though, and readers will get a hefty dose of human struggle and triumph. Highly recommend.