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

by Daniel James Brown

  their game.

  Bobby Moch began to fudge his shell over toward the Syracuse lane. He was thinking ahead. Far down the course, his assigned lane was going to carry the Husky Clipper under the railroad bridge right at the point where water swirled around behind an abutment and flowed back upriver. If they ran into the swirl, the boat would all but stop momentarily. The only way he was going to avoid it was by running right down the line between his lane and Syracuse’s. The Clipper slid over to the line until the Orange’s blades were all but clicking up against the Huskies’. Furious, the Syracuse coxswain began bellowing, cussing at Moch. As Washington pulled even, Moch leaned over toward the Syracuse boat, smiled, and said, rather softly but in his deep baritone voice, “Go to hell, Syracuse.” As the Syracuse coxswain resumed cussing, his boys’ timing began to falter and his boat began to fall back.

  A mile into the race, to the astonishment of the crowd on the observation train, Columbia had crept up to third place, passing California and settling in behind Navy and Penn. As the boys from New York City stroked past the boys from Berkeley, New Yorkers on the train began to cheer. But by the mile-and-a-half mark, California had answered the move and powered back past Columbia and Penn into second again. Navy, California, and Penn now formed a cluster, far out in front, exchanging leads, cutting each other up. Washington remained four full lengths behind the leaders. Cornell seemed unable to get anything going and lingered back near Washington. Syracuse had fallen well to the rear.

  In the press car, a hush had gradually fallen over the Washington contingent of writers and coaches as they had taken in just how far behind the Husky Clipper was. People began to murmur, “Come on, Bobby, take it up, take it up.” Al Ulbrickson was silent, calm, sphinxlike, slowly working the gum in his mouth. Any moment now, he figured, Bobby Moch would make his move, just as they’d planned. He stared ever more intently across the river as the growing darkness began to envelop the shell. All one could really see of Washington were the white tips of their blades appearing and disappearing rhythmically in the water, still at a nice, steady, leisurely twenty-eight.

  At two miles Penn had begun to fade, falling behind Columbia. Cal and Navy were duking it out for the lead. Cornell had fallen behind Washington, which had moved into fifth place. But Bobby Moch still hadn’t altered the beat at all. He was still four lengths back. In the press car, Al Ulbrickson began to grow uneasy. Moch had been told not to let the leaders get more than two lengths ahead. He was twice that far behind. And he was supposed to have started moving by now. This was most definitely not the race plan Moch had been given. Tom Bolles and George Pocock sat down, looking morose. It was starting to look like a case of suicide. But out on the water, Bobby Moch told Don Hume, “Take your time. We can catch those boys anytime we want.”

  As they passed the two-and-a-half-mile mark it was essentially the same story. California and Navy were far out in front, with Columbia trailing them; Washington had eased past a weakening Penn crew but remained a devastating four lengths back. Ulbrickson still didn’t flinch; he just continued to stare out the window at the flickering white blades on the water, chewing his gum. But he had begun to slump in his seat. He couldn’t believe what was happening. What on earth was Moch doing? Why in God’s name didn’t he turn them loose?

  In the boat Bobby Moch took a look at the four lengths between his bow and California’s stern, and hollered to his crew, “OK, you lugs! We’re one length behind.”

  Downriver, the thousands of fans packing the shoreline and yachts and other vessels in Poughkeepsie could not yet see the oncoming shells, but they could hear the coxswains barking like so many seals out in the river’s darkness. Slowly the barking grew closer. Then the bows of three boats began to materialize out of the gloaming, just beyond the railroad bridge. A roar went up as the crowd began to discern the state of play. Navy was neck and neck with Cal, and the two of them seemed to be running away with it, though Columbia, astonishingly, appeared to be in third place. Cornell, also astonishingly, was nowhere to be seen, but at least the East had one boat in the race after all, maybe two. Almost nobody even noticed the Washington shell apparently limping along out in the middle of the river, so far back one could barely see it in the gathering darkness.

  As the Washington boat swept under the black skeleton of the railroad bridge at the three-mile mark, it was still nearly three lengths back with a mile to go. The leaders had slowed just a bit, and that had narrowed the gap, but if Moch had raised the rate at all, it was imperceptible.

  The Washington boys were rowing as if in a kind of trance now, somehow detached from themselves yet keenly aware of one another’s every minute motion. There was little sound out in the middle of the river, except for Moch’s chanting, the rattle of oars in oarlocks, their own deep rhythmic breathing, and their pulses pounding in their ears. There was almost no pain. In the number five seat, Stub McMillin realized with astonishment that he was still breathing through his nose after three full miles of rowing.

  On the train Al Ulbrickson had all but given up. “They’re too far behind,” he muttered. “They’re overplaying their hand. We’ll be lucky to finish third.” Ulbrickson’s face was ashen. It seemed to have turned entirely to stone. He’d even stopped chewing his gum. In the lane nearest to him, California had powered back out in front, rowing beautifully. With a tiring field behind them and less than a mile to go Cal was in a commanding position to win. Ky Ebright, it seemed, had somehow outwitted him again.

  But if anybody had outwitted Al Ulbrickson, it was his own coxswain—the short kid with his own Phi Beta Kappa key. And now he would show his hand. Suddenly he leaned into Don Hume’s face and bellowed, “Give me ten hard ones for Ulbrickson!” Eight long spruce oars bowed in the water ten times. Then Moch bellowed again, “Give me ten more for Pocock!” Another ten enormous strokes. Then another lie: “Here’s California! We’re on them! Ten more big ones for Mom and Dad!” Very slowly the Husky Clipper slipped past Columbia and began to creep up on Navy in second.

  Someone on the train idly remarked, “Well, Washington is picking up.” A minute later someone else called out, much more urgently, “Look at Washington! Look at Washington! Here comes Washington!” On the train and onshore, all eyes shifted from the leaders to the eight white blades barely visible out in the middle of the river. Another deep guttural roar began to rise from the crowd. It seemed impossible for Washington to close the gap. They were a half mile from the finish now, still in third place, still two lengths back. But they were moving, and the way they were moving compelled immediate and absolute attention.

  In the boat Moch was incandescent. “OK! Now! Now! Now!” he barked. Don Hume took the stroke up to thirty-five, then to thirty-six, then to thirty-seven. On the starboard side, Joe Rantz fell in behind him, just as smooth as silk. The boat began to swing. The bow began to rise out of the water. Washington slid past the middies as if the Navy boat were pinned to the water.

  Cal’s coxswain, Grover Clark, glanced across the river and, for the first time since he’d left it behind at the starting line, he saw the Washington boat, sweeping up on his stern. Stunned, he bellowed at his crew to pick it up, and Cal’s rate climbed quickly to thirty-eight. Moch hollered at Hume to take it up another notch, and Washington went to forty. The rhythm of the California boat seemed to waver, then grow erratic.

  California and Washington careened into the last five hundred yards, storming down the corridor of open water between the spectators’ boats. People in rowboats were standing up now, risking a dunking to see what was happening. Some of the large excursion steamers began to list toward the center of the river as people crowded their rails. The roar of the crowd began to engulf the oarsmen. Boat whistles shrieked. On the float in front of Washington’s shell house, Evanda May Calimar, the crew’s cook, waved a frying pan over her head, whooping and urging the boys on. In Washington’s press car, pandemonium broke out. George Varnell of the Seattle Times shoved his press credentials into his mouth an
d began to devour them. Tom Bolles commenced beating a stranger on the back with his lucky old fedora. Royal Brougham was shouting, “Come on, Washington! Come on!” Only Al Ulbrickson remained motionless and silent, still riveted to his seat, his eyes cold gray stones locked on the white blades out in the river. Joe Williams of the World-Telegram stole a glance at him and thought, “This guy has ice water in his veins.”

  With the finish line looming ahead of him in the gathering dark, Bobby Moch screamed something inarticulate. Johnny White, in the number three seat, suddenly had the sensation that they were flying now, not rowing. Stub McMillin desperately wanted to peek, to glance over toward lane one where he knew California would be, but he didn’t dare. In number six, over the crowd noise, Shorty Hunt could hear someone on a radio, yelling frantically. He tried to make out the words, but all he could tell was that something terribly exciting was happening. He had no idea how things stood except that he still hadn’t seen the California boat fall into his field of view. He kept his eyes locked on the back of Joe Rantz’s neck and pulled with his whole heart. Joe had boiled everything down to one action, one continuous movement, one thought: the crew’s old mantra running on through his mind like a river, hearing it over and over, not in his own voice but in George Pocock’s crisp Oxford accent, “M-I-B, M-I-B, M-I-B.”

  Then, in the last two hundred yards, thinking itself fell away, and pain suddenly came shrieking back into the boat, descending on all of them at once, searing their legs, their arms, their shoulders, clawing at their backs, tearing at their hearts and lungs as they desperately gulped at the air. And in those last two hundred yards, in an extraordinary burst of speed, rowing at forty strokes per minute, pounding the water into a froth, Washington passed California. With each stroke the boys took their rivals down by the length of another seat. By the time the two boats crossed the line, in the last vestiges of twilight, a glimmer of open water showed between the stern of the Husky Clipper and the bow of the California Clipper.

  In the press car, the corners of Al Ulbrickson’s mouth twitched reluctantly into something vaguely resembling a smile. He resumed chewing his gum, slowly and methodically. Standing next to him, George Pocock threw back his head and howled like a banshee. Tom Bolles continued to flog the back of the fellow in front of him with his old fedora. George Varnell removed the well-masticated remains of his press credentials from his mouth. In Seattle, Hazel Ulbrickson and her son Al pounded the glass top of their coffee table until it shattered into dozens of pieces. Up on the automobile bridge, Mike Bogo had the distinct pleasure of setting off seven bombs in rapid succession. In the boat the boys pumped their fists in the dark night air.

  For a long while, Ulbrickson just sat there staring into the darkness as fans came rushing through the car congratulating him and slapping him on the back. When he finally stood up, reporters crowded around him and he said, simply, “Well, they made it close. But they won.” Then he elaborated. “I guess that little runt knew what he was doing.”

  • • •

  Washington had become the national champions and swept the Hudson. The varsity’s astounding come-from-behind victory that day was historic in its scope and drama. In the press center at the Poughkeepsie railroad station, the nation’s sportswriters sat down to typewriters and began to pound out superlatives. Robert Kelley of the New York Times called it “a high mark in the history of Poughkeepsie.” Herbert Allan of the New York Post called it “spectacular and unprecedented.” George Timpson of the Christian Science Monitor called it “brilliant.” James Burchard of the World-Telegram found more original phrasing: “It was a story of psychology, pure nerve, and rowing intelligence. Moch’s noodle was the best oar in the Washington boat.” Royal Brougham thought long and hard about how to characterize what Bobby Moch had pulled off. Finally he settled on: “It was positively cold blooded.”

  Al Ulbrickson went down to the water and followed the boys back upriver to the shell house in his launch. As they rowed upstream in the warm summer dark, Ulbrickson saw that they were pulling flawlessly, with the exceptional grace and precision that was quickly becoming their norm. He grabbed a megaphone and bellowed over the wet growling of the boat’s engine, “Now that’s it! Why didn’t you row like that in the race?” The boys glanced at one another, grinning nervously. Nobody quite knew whether he was kidding or not.

  He was, but the comment had purpose. To reach his goal, Ulbrickson was going to have to beat Ebright one more time. In a little less than two weeks, they were going to have to race again, twice, in a pair of two-thousand-meter sprints, to earn the right to represent the United States in Berlin. In one of those races, California would be sitting in an adjoining lane, with one last chance to finally get even and send themselves to Germany. Ulbrickson didn’t want his boys getting all swell-headed again. And, thrilled as he was with the result, he wasn’t entirely pleased with Moch’s insubordination. At any rate, he needed to remind them who was in charge.

  But, Dour Dane or not, Ulbrickson also felt the need to say something commensurate with the occasion. When they got to the shell house, they found hundreds of exuberant fans jockeying for space on the wobbly float and milling around in front of the building, hooting and hollering. The boys climbed out of the boat and threw Bobby Moch into the Hudson to the delight of the spectators. Then, after retrieving him from the water, they formed a phalanx, forced their way into the building, and slid the doors closed behind themselves, letting in only a few Seattle pressmen. Ulbrickson climbed up onto a bench and the boys, clutching jerseys they’d collected from the losing crews, sat on the floor around him. “You made history today, you freshmen, junior varsity, and varsity oarsmen and coxswains. I am proud of you. Every son and daughter of Washington is proud of you. . . . Never in history has a crew given a more gallant, game fight to win the most coveted rowing honor at stake in this country than the varsity did today. And I can only say to you that I am proud and very happy.” He paused and looked around the room and then concluded, “I never expect to see a better rowed race.” Then he stepped down. Nobody cheered. Nobody stood up and applauded. Everyone just sat, silently soaking in the moment. On the stormy night in January 1935, when Ulbrickson had first started talking openly about going to the Olympics, everyone had stood and cheered. But then it had seemed like a dream. Now they were on the verge of actually making it happen. Cheering somehow seemed dangerous.

  Bobby Moch

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Therein lies the secret of successful crews: Their “swing,” that fourth dimension of rowing, which can only be appreciated by an oarsman who has rowed in a swinging crew, where the run is uncanny and the work of propelling the shell a delight.

  —George Yeoman Pocock

  “For four straight years now, coarse outlanders from the Far West have dominated the Hudson,” Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram spat out the day following the Poughkeepsie races. “The regatta has lost all its original form and pattern. It is no longer an eastern show. . . . When one western team doesn’t win, the other does. . . . Washington took everything there was to be taken on the river yesterday. The townspeople were relieved that the visitors had the decency to leave the bridges and the fat-bodied ferries.” Williams then went on, presumably in jest, to call upon President Roosevelt to do something about the “very disturbing situation.”

  The tone may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the substance of Williams’s piece was no joke for thousands of eastern crew fans—their schools seemed to be falling out of contention in a regatta they had designed to test and demonstrate their own rowing prowess.

  And it wasn’t just eastern sports scribes and fans who found themselves facing a new reality after the 1936 regatta. Ky Ebright knew exactly what he had seen in the varsity race, and he was smart enough and diplomatic enough to acknowledge it straight out. Packing up his own boys for their trip to Princeton and the Olympic trials, where he would take one more stab at defeating Washington, he pointed to Joe and his crewmates and said,
“There’s the best crew in America. That’s the boat that should go to Berlin, and the rest of the world will have to produce something pretty hot to beat them in the Olympics.” This wasn’t the usual prerace “downplay your chances” banter that both he and Al Ulbrickson regularly engaged in. Ebright was dead serious, and he needed to tamp down expectations in Berkeley. He’d go to Princeton and compete and try to win the Olympic berth, but when Bobby Moch engineered that cold, calculating, come-out-of-nowhere victory, Ebright quickly saw the demoralizing effect it had on his own crew. The deliberate way Washington rowed that race had seemed partly a challenge, partly a dare, but mostly it had seemed a warning. As he made his way down the course, Moch might as well have raised over his stern a flag emblazoned with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” and the figure of a coiled rattlesnake.

  • • •

  On July 1, after a week of working out and relaxing in Poughkeepsie, the boys packed up their possessions, loaded the Husky Clipper onto a baggage car, and headed for the 1936 U.S. Olympic trials. By six that evening, they had arrived at Princeton and entered the world of the Ivy League, a world of status and tradition, of refined tastes and unstated assumptions about social class, a world inhabited by the sons of bankers and lawyers and senators. For boys who were the sons of working-class parents, this was uncertain but intriguing terrain.

  They moved into the stately Princeton Inn, perched majestically on the edge of the Springdale Golf Club’s manicured fairways, a building that made even the president’s home at Hyde Park look a bit cramped and shabby. From their rooms, the boys watched Princeton alumni stroll around the golf course wearing their knickerbockers, high argyle socks, and tweed caps. The boys explored Lake Carnegie and stopped by the Princeton Boathouse to check the facilities. It was a large stone structure, complete with Gothic arches over the entrances to the boat bays—a structure far more elegant than the clapboard homes most of them had come from. It was a far cry from their old airplane hangar; it looked more like the new Suzzallo Library back in Seattle. Even Lake Carnegie itself was an emblem of wealth and privilege. Until early in the twentieth century, Princeton crews had rowed in the Delaware and Raritan Canal, which ran directly along the south side of the campus. The Princeton boys, though, found it inconvenient to row among the coal barges and recreational vessels that also made use of the canal, so they got Andrew Carnegie to build them a private lake. For roughly one hundred thousand dollars, about two and a half million in today’s dollars, Carnegie quietly bought up all the properties along a three-mile stretch of the Millstone River, dammed it, and produced a first-class rowing course—shallow, straight, protected, lovely to look at, and quite free of coal barges.

  For the first few days at Princeton, the boys kicked back and luxuriated in the posh surroundings of the hotel and country club. Don Hume tried to throw off the effects of a nasty cold. Twice a day they took light workouts in the shell. Mostly, they practiced rowing high-stroke-rate sprints and racing starts. Starts were among the most critical component of a two-thousand-meter race, and something they were having trouble with lately.

  Six crews were competing for the right to go to Berlin: Washington, California, Penn, Navy, Princeton, and the New York Athletic Club. The field would be divided into two groups of three for a preliminary elimination heat on July 4. The top two boats in each heat would advance to a final contest of four boats the next day.

  As the elimination heats approached, the weather grew oppressively warm—the first intimations of what was about to become a lethal heat wave all across the East. By the night of July 3, the boys had grown nervous and unsettled, the magnitude of what was at stake starting to sink in. They had trouble sleeping in the damp heat. Al Ulbrickson went from room to room telling them to settle down, but there was an edge to his voice that betrayed his own anxiety. That night, long after lights-out, Joe and Roger sat up in the dark, joking, telling stories, trying to talk themselves down from an emotional cliff. Now and then the darkness was punctuated by an orange glow as Chuck Day took another drag on a forbidden cigarette.

  It wasn’t that they were seriously concerned about their preliminary heat. They would race against Princeton and the Winged Footers of the New York Athletic Club. Neither was a real contender. California, on the other hand, would have to face Penn and Navy, both excellent sprinting crews. The worry came from what would happen after the preliminaries. Penn had swapped out three of its eight Poughkeepsie oarsmen, replacing them with recent graduates not eligible to race in the intercollegiate regatta but perfectly legal in Olympic trials. Navy had inserted Lieutenant Vic Krulak of the marine corps as its coxswain. California had also moved recent alumni into its boat. Washington, in fact, was the only crew that would be made up entirely of undergraduates. Assuming the boys qualified in their own preliminary, whichever crews they met in the final would, to some extent, be made up of unknowns—unknowns who were presumably superior to the boys they had just defeated in Poughkeepsie.

  On Saturday, the Fourth of July, the boys left the Princeton shell house for their race a little before six thirty. It was a buggy, sultry evening. Several thousand people had gathered along the shores of the lake for the qualifying heats, most of them climbing into the newly constructed grandstands at the finish line. The boys backed the Husky Clipper into their starting stall, on a floating platform that had been specially built for the Olympic trials, and waited.

  At the gun, Washington charged out of the stall at a high beat of thirty-eight. The Husky Clipper began to move out in front almost immediately. After about a minute, Moch told Don Hume to drop the rate. Hume went down to thirty-four. In the third minute, Hume dropped it to thirty-two, and even as the boys dropped the rate, the boat stayed out in front and began to widen its lead. The New York Athletic Club’s Winged Footers and the Princeton boys were both rowing at thirty-five. By the halfway mark, Washington had open water on both boats. As they began to approach the finish line, the Winged Footers made a move, sprinting past Princeton and challenging Washington. Moch told Hume to ease the stroke rate back up to thirty-eight. The Husky Clipper pulled briskly ahead and sliced across the line two and a half lengths ahead of the Winged Footers.

  Confident as they had been, the Washington boys were nevertheless surprised at just how easily they had won. Even in the muggy evening air, they’d hardly broken a sweat. They paddled out of the racing lanes and took up a position along the bank at about the fifteen-hundred-meter mark. The real question of the day was how California would do in their qualifying heat, and the boys wanted to see the answer for themselves.

  At 7:00 p.m. Navy, Penn, and California left the mark, all rowing hard and high. For the first thousand meters, the three boats settled in and contended more or less evenly for the lead. At that point, Penn picked up its pace and began to move slowly out in front. As they entered the final five hundred meters, though, it was Cal that brought the fans in the grandstands to their feet. The boys from Berkeley executed a tremendous surge, suddenly blowing past both Navy and Penn, seizing the lead and winning by a quarter of a boat length. It was an impressive show, and it reinforced the long-standing belief—shared by many of the coaches and writers present that day—that despite Washington’s wins in the long races at Poughkeepsie and in Seattle, California remained the superior sprinting crew. It was hard to argue otherwise. California had won its heat in 6:07.8; Washington had taken 10 full seconds longer, 6:17.8, to cover the same distance. “An almost insurmountable handicap for the Huskies,” declared the New York Sun’s Malcolm Roy.

  As the Washington boys retreated to the Princeton Inn that night, anxiety cascaded down on them again. Al Ulbrickson once more spent much of the evening going from room to room, sitting on the ends of bunks, reassuring his boys, reminding them that they had in effect won a sprint in the last two thousand meters at Poughkeepsie, telling them what they already knew in their hearts but needed to hear one more time—that they could beat any crew in America, at any distance, including California. All they
had to do, he told them, was to continue to believe in one another.

  They nodded and agreed with him. The spring campaign—the instant fellowship they had all felt when they took to the water together for the first time, their commanding victory over Cal on Lake Washington, their stunning come-from-behind triumph at Poughkeepsie, and their almost effortless qualifying race earlier that day—had more than convinced them that together they were capable of greatness. None of them doubted anyone else in the boat. But believing in one another was not really at issue anymore. What was more difficult was being sure about one’s self. The caustic chemicals of fear continued to surge in their brains and in their guts.

  Late that night, after Ulbrickson had finally retired to his quarters, the boys stole out of the hotel singly or in pairs and walked along the shore of Lake Carnegie. The moon was full, the lake silver and glimmering. Crickets sang in the grass at their feet; cicadas buzzed in the trees overhead. They gazed into the moon-washed stars above, talking quietly, reminding themselves of who they were and what they had done. For some of them, that was enough. Joe remembered years later that a sense of calm had come over him that evening. Resolve had begun to flow into him, at first like a freshet, then like a river. Eventually, in the wee hours, they returned to their rooms and slept—some peacefully, some fitfully.

  • • •

  In the morning Chuck Day got up and wrote in his journal, “Final Olympic trials, very nervous but confident.” Johnny White wrote, “We woke up all scared and having frequent visits with Alvin.”

  Alvin Ulbrickson couldn’t have been exactly relaxed himself. This was his day of judgment. Many of his peers would be on hand to watch the race that evening—not just Ebright, but old Jim Ten Eyck from Syracuse, Ed Leader from Yale, Jim Wray from Cornell, and Constance Titus, an Olympic champion sculler from 1904. More than that, though, Royal Brougham was there, getting set to broadcast the race live to fifty stations around the country on the CBS network. All of Seattle—and much of the rest of the country—would be listening. There