The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
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have to pass every boat on the river on their way to the finish line, but at the very least they’d still be rowing hard at the end. When they were all in agreement, Al Ulbrickson went to tell Bobby Moch the plan.
• • •
The Washington boys arrived in Poughkeepsie early in the morning on June 14, in the midst of a summer thunderstorm. Drenched to the skin by torrential rain, they unloaded the shells from a baggage car, lifted them over their heads, and hustled down to the river to stow the boats and inspect their new quarters. They were not using the rickety old shack on the Highland side of the river this year. Al Ulbrickson had arranged for them to move into Cornell’s former house, a much more substantial structure on the east side of the river, right next door to the California house. As they shed their wet coats and tromped through the building, they marveled at the luxuries the new quarters afforded. There were hot showers, exercise facilities, electric lights, and a spacious dormitory, complete with extra-long beds. There was even a radio on which the boys would be able to listen to everything from baseball games to Fibber McGee and Molly to live broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic direct from Carnegie Hall or, if Joe got his hands on the dial, to The National Barn Dance from Chicago. There was a wide screened-in porch where they could sleep if the weather turned hot. And as the rain thundered down outside, it was no small thing that the roof didn’t leak.
By the time they had finished settling in, they could smell food cooking. Led by their noses, and by Joe Rantz’s nose in particular, they quickly discovered the best feature of the new place—a cookhouse on the beach, just twenty-five feet from their front door. In command of the cookhouse was the imposing figure of Evanda May Calimar, a lady of color and, as it would turn out, an awe-inspiring cook. Working for her were her son Oliver, her mother, and her brother-in-law, all busily preparing fried chicken for the Washington boys’ lunch. The boys quickly found that they had just landed smack-dab in the heart of hog heaven. Royal Brougham, amused, watched them go at their first meal and then wired home a story about it. The Post-Intelligencer ran it under a picture of Joe captioned “Joe Rantz, The Eating Champion.”
Over the next few days, George Pocock went from boathouse to boathouse, tending to the shells of Washington’s competitors. Seventeen of the eighteen boats on the river this year had again come out of his shop. Pocock enjoyed working on them, adjusting the riggers, revarnishing hulls, making minor repairs. He didn’t want to see shabby or derelict boats with his name on them out on the river. And this kind of service made for excellent customer relations. The first place he went was right next door to the California boathouse to tend to Ky Ebright’s boats.
The Washington boys, though, declined to speak to the California boys, and vice versa. On the float they shared, the two crews passed each other silently, with eyes averted, only taking the occasional sidelong glance, like dogs circling before a fight. And a fight was a real possibility. Not long after they arrived, a reporter sauntered up to Shorty Hunt and mentioned that the impression in the California shell house was that the Washington boys seemed to think they were awfully tough, that they seemed always to be spoiling for a fight, that if they couldn’t pick a fight with someone else they’d pick a fight with themselves, but that California would be happy to save them the trouble. Shorty replied, “If those lobs want a fight we’ll fight, but we aren’t looking for any.”
Meanwhile Ulbrickson and Bolles began to work their boys hard, rowing at a low rate but for long distances, trying to take right back off the three or four pounds they had deliberately encouraged them to put on during the train trip. The theory was that they would thus arrive at a perfect racing weight and in perfect condition by race day, on June 22, neither too light nor too heavy. Mrs. Calimar’s cooking, however, was soon countering the coaches’ best efforts.
Then news leaked out that the California varsity had turned in a blazing 19:31 over four miles. It was by far the year’s fastest time on the river. The Cornell boys had also begun to turn in impressive times. On the evening of June 17, Al Ulbrickson kicked things up a notch and staged a time trial of his own. Rowing at nine in the evening, under the cover of darkness and in rough water, Joe and his crewmates streaked down the four-mile course in what Al Ulbrickson told writers was a time just a fraction of a second over 19:39, significantly off Cal’s impressive 19:31. Johnny White recorded the true time in his journal that night: 19:25.
The next day rumors began to circulate that California had held yet another time trial. Ebright wouldn’t reveal the time, but observers reported that his varsity had come in with the phenomenal time of 18:46. The Poughkeepsie Eagle-News had it at 18:37. Royal Brougham wired a grim report back to the Post-Intelligencer: “The sun-browned oarsmen of California will again rule as the favorites. . . . That’s not rowing, it’s flying.”
But Ulbrickson remained unruffled. He wanted well-rested boys in the race, and he’d seen enough. He told his boys to relax. From now until race day on the twenty-second there would be only light workouts, to keep in shape. That was fine with the boys. They already knew something that nobody else knew, not even Ulbrickson.
Late on the night of the final time trial, after the wind had died down and the waters had calmed, they had begun to row back up the river, in the dark, side by side with the freshman and JV boats. Soon the red and green running lights of the coaches’ launch disappeared upriver. The shells passed under the two bridges draped with shimmering necklaces of amber lights. Along the shore and up on the palisades, warm yellow light poured from the windows of homes and shell houses. It was a moonless night. The water was ink black.
Bobby Moch set the varsity boys to rowing at a leisurely twenty-two or twenty-three. Joe and his crewmates chatted softly with the boys in the other two boats. But they soon found that they had pulled out ahead without meaning to, just pulling soft and steady. Soon, in fact, they had pulled so far ahead that they could not even hear the boys in the other boats. And then, one by one, they realized that they couldn’t hear anything at all except for the gentle murmur of their blades dipping into and out of the water. They were rowing in utter darkness now. They were alone together in a realm of silence and darkness. Years later, as old men, they all remembered the moment. Bobby Moch recalled, “You couldn’t hear anything except for the oars going in the water . . . it’d be a ‘zep’ and that’s all you could hear . . . the oarlocks didn’t even rattle on the release.” They were rowing perfectly, fluidly, mindlessly. They were rowing as if on another plane, as if in a black void among the stars, just as Pocock had said they might. And it was beautiful.
• • •
In the final days before the Poughkeepsie Regatta, another big sports story dominated the headlines on sports pages and sometimes on front pages around the country—the story of a heavyweight boxing match. Max Schmeling of Germany had been the heavyweight champion of the world from 1930 to 1932, and he was set on reclaiming the title from James Braddock. But a twenty-two-year-old African American boxer from Detroit, named Joe Louis, stood in Schmeling’s way. Louis had battled his way through twenty-seven professional matches with twenty-three knockouts and no defeats to reach his current status as the number one challenger in the world. In doing so he had gradually begun to erode the racial attitudes of many—though far from all—white Americans. He was on his way, in fact, to becoming one of the first African Americans to be widely viewed as a hero by ordinary white Americans. Louis’s rise to prominence had been so spectacular that few American sportswriters or bookies gave Schmeling much of a chance.
In Germany, though, the view was very different. Although Schmeling was not a Nazi Party member, Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi elite had enthusiastically latched onto him and promoted him as a symbol of German and Aryan supremacy. The German press, under the careful direction of the minister of propaganda, had made much of the upcoming fight.
Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic had an opinion about what would happen. Even the crew coaches in Poughkeepsie t
ook time out to comment on the fight. “Schmeling might go four rounds,” opined Al Ulbrickson. Ky Ebright was blunter: “Louis will murder him.”
When the fight began, in a sold-out Yankee Stadium on the evening of June 19, Louis was, at eight to one, the overwhelming favorite in New York. In Germany, though interest in the fight was at a fever pitch, there was almost no betting on the fight. The odds were so low on Schmeling that few wanted to risk their cash, and no one wanted to be caught betting on a black American.
In a small square of white light in the vast, dark void of the stadium, Louis stalked Schmeling around the ring like a predator for three rounds, lacing him with hard left jabs to the face. It looked as if it would be a short evening. But in the fourth round, out of nowhere, Schmeling landed a hard right to the temple that knocked Louis to a sitting position on the floor. Louis took a count of two and then rose to his feet, covering his face and retreating until the bell sounded. Through the fifth round, Louis seemed dazed and ineffective. And then, at the end of the fifth, following the bell—which neither fighter heard over the crowd noise—Schmeling landed a particularly devastating right to the left side of Louis’s head. For the next six rounds, Louis staggered about the ring, punished by a relentless barrage of rights to the jaw, somehow staying on his feet but scoring few if any points and inflicting little damage on the German boxer. Many in the overwhelmingly white crowd had by now turned suddenly and savagely against Louis. “Delirious with joy,” by the New York Times account, they screamed for Schmeling to end it. Finally, in the twelfth, Schmeling went in for the kill. With Louis now careening almost aimlessly around the ring, the German leaned into Louis’s body and launched a rapid-fire flurry of hard rights to his head and face, followed by one final crushing blow to the jaw. Louis sank to his knees, then toppled forward on his face. Referee Arthur Donovan counted him out. In the dressing room afterward, Louis said he couldn’t remember anything about the fight beyond the fifth round.
That night in Harlem, grown men wept openly in the streets. Younger men threw rocks at cars full of white fans returning from the match. In German American sections of New York, people danced in the streets. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler wired his congratulations to Schmeling and sent his wife flowers. But no one in Germany was happier with the evening’s developments than Joseph Goebbels. He had spent the night at his posh summerhouse at Schwanenwerder, sitting with Magda and Schmeling’s wife, Anny, listening to the fight on the radio into the wee hours. He sent Schmeling a congratulatory telegram of his own: “We are proud of you. With best wishes and Heil Hitler.” Then he ordered the state-controlled Reuters News Agency to issue a statement: “Inexorably and not without justification we demand Braddock shall defend the title on German soil.” The next day, still excited, Goebbels sat down and made an entry in his journal: “We were on tenterhooks the whole evening with Schmeling’s wife. We told each other stories, laughed, and cheered. In round twelve, Schmeling knocked out the Negro. Fantastic. A dramatic, thrilling fight. Schmeling fought for Germany and won. The white man prevailed over the black, and the white man was German. I didn’t go to bed until five.”
In the end, though, Joe Louis would have the last laugh. He would indeed fight Max Schmeling again, two years later, and Schmeling would last all of two minutes and four seconds before his corner threw in the towel. Joe Louis would reign as heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1949, long after Joseph Goebbels’s charred body had been pulled out of the smoldering rubble of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and laid next to those of Magda and their children.
• • •
On Saturday evening Ulbrickson told the varsity they could take the coaching launch out for a spin if they wanted. They were bored with the amusement park just up the hill, and Ulbrickson didn’t want them lounging around the house all evening getting restless and nervous about the race on Monday.
The boys recruited one of the crew’s student managers as pilot and navigator, and piled into the boat. Not sure where to go, they decided they’d pay a visit to the president of the United States, whom they understood to live somewhere upriver. They goosed the throttle, and the boat swung out into the river, heading north past the Navy and Columbia shell houses. They roared northwest through the bend at Krum Elbow and continued another two miles alongside forest and cliff until they came to a dock marked “Hyde Park Station.” There they asked someone how to get to the president’s house and were directed to a cove a mile back down the river.
When they found the cove, they left the manager in charge of the boat, crossed some railroad tracks, walked gingerly across a narrow trestle, and headed uphill through the woods. For the next half hour, they wandered up bridle paths and overgrown roads, hurrying across broad lawns, and trooping past an abandoned gristmill and a stable the size of a cathedral, until they finally came across some greenhouses and a gardener’s cottage that appeared to be occupied. They knocked on the door and an elderly couple appeared. When the boys asked whether they were anywhere near the president’s estate, the couple nodded enthusiastically and announced that they were standing on it, then pointed out the way to the main house. Walking through the adjoining nursery and up another path, they finally arrived on a wide gravel drive leading up to a large expanse of lawn on which stood Springwood, the Roosevelts’ stately three-story brick-and-masonry mansion, complete with a semicircular portico supported by white Grecian columns. It was by far the most magnificent house any of them had ever seen.
Nervous, but too far along to back down now, they shuffled deferentially up onto the portico and peered inside. It was coming up on nine o’clock, and growing dark. Inside they could see a young man about their age, leaning against the end of a long table and reading a book. They knocked on the door. The young man appeared to call for a servant, but then put the book down and came to the door himself. When he opened the door, the boys announced who they were, mentioned that they had met John Roosevelt the previous year, and asked if the president was in. He was not, the young man said, but he invited them in eagerly. He was, he said, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., but they should call him Frank. He grinned slightly and announced that he rowed in the number six seat in the Harvard JV boat and had just returned from New London, Connecticut, where, though the Crimson’s varsity had won their annual race against Yale, the JV had not. Just before the race, he said, Harvard’s coach, Charlie Whiteside, had been fired, and there was a great deal of talk now that the next head coach at Harvard would be a fellow named Tom Bolles, particularly if Bolles pulled off another freshman victory at Poughkeepsie. Roosevelt couldn’t wait to talk to the boys from Washington.
He ushered them into the president’s library and sat them down and began talking rapidly about rowing and about coaches. As he talked, the boys gaped at the room. Most of the walls were lined from the floor to the high ceiling with shelves of books. Any spots on the walls not taken up by books were covered with pictures of American presidents and various Roosevelts. An ornate fireplace dominated the end of the room where they were seated. In front of the fireplace was a fifteen-foot-long library table stacked with new editions of books on every conceivable topic. Nearly every other table in the room had a vase of fresh flowers or a porcelain figurine on it. Shorty Hunt, starting to relax, settled into a comfortable upholstered chair near the fireplace, and then nearly jumped out of it when Frank told him it was the president’s favorite, and that he occasionally delivered his famous fireside chats on the radio from that very chair.
They talked for an hour. Later that night, back at the shell house, Johnny White got out his diary and wrote, as if he had just stopped in at a neighbor’s house back in Seattle, “Visited the President’s home at Hyde Park tonight. They sure have a fine place.”
• • •
By the morning of the regatta, the consensus in the eastern press, at least, was that California and Cornell were the boats to beat in the varsity race, with Washington expected to come in perhaps just a beat or two behind the leaders. Cornell, after
all, had come within four-tenths of a second of beating California the year before. The Seattle papers gave the odds, narrowly, to Washington. Royal Brougham, despite his earlier gloomy assessment, had already announced his personal prognostication: Washington to win, Cornell in second, California third. Writing for the Post-Intelligencer that morning, though, he said he thought Cal would probably go off as the slight favorite among the bookmakers. Actually, the bookies in the cigar shops in Poughkeepsie had Cal and Washington at even money, with Cornell lagging just behind at eight to five. The bottom line seemed to be that any one of the three schools might win the varsity honors.
Now Brougham was poking around town. He wanted to gather as much color as he could before it was time to sit down and pound out his story after the final race. Because of tidal conditions, the race would not go off until after 8:00 p.m., just after sundown. So Brougham took his time, looking for tidbits. It was, he noted, a fine, clear day in Poughkeepsie. A few cottony white clouds drifted across a pale blue sky, moved along by just enough of a breeze to keep things pleasantly cool.
At midafternoon he hiked down the steep descent to the waterfront, where a U.S. Navy destroyer and two coast guard cutters had taken up positions among the usual flotilla of yachts, sailboats, launches, dinghies, and canoes assembling near the finish line. At the California shell house, Ky Ebright sat on the upstairs porch, wearing dark glasses, nodding and smiling at people as they streamed by below, saying nothing. Next door Al Ulbrickson, wearing an unusually colorful outfit—a white cloth cap, a yellow-striped sweater, and the lucky purple tie given to him by Loyal Shoudy back in 1926—sat on the dock in front of the Washington shell house. When pressed for a comment by a gaggle of reporters, Ulbrickson spat into the water, chewed a piece of grass, and looked at the wind-ruffled river for a long while before finally saying, “Going to be fast if she flattens out a little.” Royal Brougham moved on. He knew that was about all the press boys were going to get out of Ulbrickson.
By late afternoon the Main Street wharf was crowded with people waiting for ferries to get them across the river to the observation train. Brougham sat watching as dozens of lesser boats—everything from outboard speedboats to rowboats—also ferried more people of all sorts across: tipsy women in fashionable Fifth Avenue hats, fat men with cigar stubs in their mouths, old men wearing raccoon coats and clutching college pennants.
One by one the freshman crews boarded their shells and began to paddle upriver to the starting line near the Columbia shell house—an elegant structure that looked as if it could double as the clubhouse at any of the East’s fine country clubs. A little before 6:00 p.m., Royal Brougham climbed aboard the observation train on the west side of the river just as it was about to start backing up toward the two-mile freshman starting line, pulling a press car and twenty-three flatcars with bleachers full of fans sitting under white canvas canopies. As many as ninety thousand people now lined both sides of the Hudson—the largest crowd in years. The earlier breeze had died down, and the water was placid, smooth and glassy, tinged with bronze in the slanting late afternoon light. Ulbrickson was right. It was going to be fast.
• • •
As the train began to back up, Tom Bolles, wearing his battered lucky fedora, had much to ponder. He had heard what had happened to Charlie Whiteside. Harvard had made clear to the world that they were prepared to pay handsomely to get what they wanted in the way of a new head coach. And Bolles knew he was again at the top of their list. If his boys came through for him yet again this year, he’d be getting an offer, and he figured this time he’d probably take it.
His boys did come through for him. And they made short, sweet work of it. When the race went off, exactly at 6:00 p.m., Navy and California moved out to early leads. Washington settled in at a relatively low beat of thirty-two but stayed close. Pulling gracefully and efficiently, they gradually overpowered Navy and settled in behind Cal. At the one-mile mark, going under the railroad bridge, they crept ahead of Cal. California challenged several times but Washington repeatedly moved back in front, still holding at thirty-two. Finally, a quarter of a mile from the finish, California began its sprint, charging up from behind, one more time, to nose out ahead of Bolles’s boys. Washington’s coxswain, Fred Colbert, turned his crew loose. Washington exploded forward, rowing at thirty-nine and pulling away from Cal by a full length at the line. And with that, Washington won the race but lost Tom Bolles.
An hour later the JV race began, and once again Washington made short work of their opponents, rowing a remarkably similar race. Early on, Navy and Cornell pulled out ahead of Washington by a quarter of a length, but, finding that he could hold his bow in that position with his crew rowing at a relaxed thirty or thirty-one, Washington’s cox, Winslow Brooks, was content to sit back and watch the two leaders burn themselves out. He sat there, in fact, for a mile and a half, then found that he was slowly pulling even with the boys from Annapolis and Berkeley without having asked his men to raise the beat. A mile above the finish line, he finally called on them to take up the stroke rate. The beat went to thirty-seven, and Washington simply got up and walked away from the field. The boys in the Navy and Cornell boats suddenly looked as if they were rowing in glue. Every stroke Washington took in the last mile widened the distance. They crossed the line three lengths ahead of Navy, still pulling away at the head of a long, strung-out parade of boats far to their rear.
Even as the last boats crossed the line and the cheering began to die down, an audible murmur began to ripple through the crowd along the shore as a number of realizations clicked into place. Washington, for the second time in two years, now stood again on the brink of sweeping the regatta. California, on the other hand, could become only the second school ever to win the varsity race four years in a row, as well as the first to ever go on to win three consecutive Olympic berths. But there was still hope for eastern fans. Cornell looked as if they could finally redeem their cause this year. Or maybe Navy.
As the observation train drew back upriver again for the start of the varsity race, the atmosphere grew electric, the dusky sky crackling with static. The crowd began to buzz. Boat whistles shrilled. Alumni draped arms over one another’s shoulders and sang fight songs. Somebody was about to win big; somebody was about to lose big.
• • •
Four miles up the river, just below Krum Elbow, Joe Rantz, sitting in the Husky Clipper near the eastern shore, heard five bombs go off downstream and knew that the Washington JV, in the number five lane, had won their race. He lifted his fist silently in the air. So did Shorty Hunt and Roger Morris. Half the boys in the JV boat had been members of their all-sophomore crew in 1935. Every one of them had been disappointed not to be sitting where Joe and Shorty and Roger were sitting, waiting for the varsity race to begin at 8:00 p.m.
The sun had already slipped behind the palisades, on the west side of the river. The tips of church spires up in Poughkeepsie, on the east side, were just catching the last rays of sunlight. Down on the river, twilight was settling over the water like gray gauze. The river itself had turned a rich and lustrous shade of violet, reflecting the sky overhead. A line of gray stake boats stretched across the river, marking the starting line. Far downstream, twinkling lights began to appear at the portholes of some of the larger yachts anchored near the finish line. On the east side of the river, a passenger train flashed by, trailing clouds of swirling smoke. On the west side, the observation train jolted to a stop adjacent to the line of stake boats. Just above the line, a telegraph operator sat perilously on the steep river bank, his keypad in hand and a strand of copper wire running up the hill behind him to a pole where he had made a connection with the main line, ready to tell the world when the race began. Joe and his crewmates began to paddle out to the line of stake boats to take their position. In the stern, Bobby Moch began quietly talking them through the race plan one more time. Out in Seattle, Hazel Ulbrickson locked the front door to her home so as not to be disturbed during the race. Joyce got p
ermission from Mrs. Tellwright to switch on the large cabinet radio in her parlor.
On the observation train, in a press car full of Washington coaches, alumni, and sportswriters, George Pocock and Tom Bolles paced up and down the aisle. Al Ulbrickson sat alone in silence, methodically chewing a piece of gum, looking out intently from under the brim of his white cloth cap toward the spot where Joe sat. Washington had drawn the worst lane, number seven, far out in the middle of the river, where any hint of wind or current would be strongest and where, in the failing light, it would be hard even to see the boat. As in 1935, California had drawn lane number one, the most protected lane, snug up against the railroad embankment, sitting right under Ulbrickson’s nose.
Ten years ago Ulbrickson himself had stroked Washington’s varsity to a national championship here. No Washington varsity crew had won one since. Ulbrickson remembered his oath to his wife, and his failed promise to Seattle the year before. The Olympics loomed. Nearly everything Al Ulbrickson wanted out of life was going to be determined in the next twenty minutes.
• • •
At 8:00 p.m. the starter called out, “Are you ready?” Two coxswains raised their hands. The starter waited a minute or two, then called out again, “Are you all ready?” This time three coxswains raised their hands. Exasperated, the starter waited again while the different crews made a few final adjustments. He called out a third time, “Are you all ready?” This time all seven hands went up.
The starting gun popped, the boats lurched away from the line, and the telegrapher clinging to the riverbank tapped at his key to let the world know that the thirty-eighth annual varsity crew race at Poughkeepsie was finally under way.
For five full strokes, all seven boats stayed absolutely abreast of one another, their crews digging hard. Then Washington suddenly eased up. The entire field surged out in front of them. That was OK with Bobby Moch. That was just what he wanted. He settled his crew in, rowing at a steady twenty-eight and began to watch the backs of his rival coxswains disappear down the river into the dusk. To steady the boys, Moch began to chant their newest rowing mantra in time with the stroke—“Save, Save, Save”—reminding them that this was all about conserving power.
Pennsylvania, Navy, and California quickly moved out in front of the pack, rowing high at first, then gradually dropping their stroke rates into the low thirties. After half a mile, Washington was seventh in a field of seven—almost five lengths behind the leaders. Syracuse and, surprisingly, mighty Cornell—the Big Red hope of the East—continued to hang back with Washington, perhaps playing