by Ginny Gilder
I could feel my perspective already shifting to accept his version of reality, to concede the inevitable outcome of my falling short. He says I’m not good enough. I cut off the conversation and made my escape. I was embarrassed and crushed. My own coach thought so little of me. How foolish I had just looked, confessing to wanting something that was permanently out of reach. My dreams were too big for me.
I headed home in the late winter twilight, a hint of spring nudging the chill. My trudge turned into a stomp as I gained distance from Nat. What the hell does he know? He was another naysayer asserting his judgment and experience over my desire, confusing his opinion for fact, and invoking his view of the present to justify his version of the future. To Nat, I was an average rower on a terrific college crew. Certainly I was an above-average rower compared to the national pool of women rowers in the late 1970s, but Nat was spoiled by the talent that flooded his varsity. He could nod his head from the stern to the bow of his top eight at rowers who could reasonably contend for a National Team berth.
All things considered, he had responded predictably. He worried more about the size of his rowers’ heads than the size of their hearts. He believed in tearing down to inspire and motivate. The concept of building confidence to bolster physical capacity never occurred to him.
One could think I would have understood that his world outlook mirrored my own. Minimize the positive. Overstress the negative, focus on the risks, and work like hell to keep them from manifesting. Focus on the downside; ignore the upside. Prepare for the unlikely disaster. A glass half empty didn’t adequately capture his bleak outlook; it was more like glass badly cracked and leaking steadily.
Inside, I did understand, all too well. Nat’s skepticism found a ready internal proponent. He could be right. He is the coach after all.
Here I was again, me against myself.
Not good enough: I’d heard it so many times before from Nat. From my father. Rowing for Nat and hoping for encouragement was like searching for an oasis in the desert, and it was just the same with my dad. Of course he meant to show his support; he attended his share of races, in fair weather and worse. But his incessant needling, intended as humor, landed flat and hurt. Every time he proclaimed, “Rowing isn’t really a sport,” I bristled, stung by the vote of no-confidence I heard in his tone.
I shook my head to shake out my coach’s bullshit. I was going to have to do this myself.
But it’s awfully lonely to nudge a dream forward by yourself. If only someone would bet on me instead of against me, I was sure it would all be different.
9
The winter ice finally cracked and flowed over the dam in Derby, and spring ushered in the best time of year: racing. The Yale Women’s Crew had a great season, and ostensibly I did, too. Unaccompanied by any announcement or discussion, Nat seated me as the varsity’s stroke. He had to re-rig the boat to do it, as port rowers more commonly stroke and I rowed starboard. Stroking was a huge honor, a sizable responsibility, and an acknowledgment of my progress. I had reached the pinnacle of the varsity, but Nat’s expressed doubt about my Olympic dreams confused me and made me question the honor. What was he thinking? I’m not stroke material.
The stroke is the leader of the crew, on the water and off. Everyone follows her. She sets the cadence in the boat and the mood on shore. The coxswain strategizes with her, absorbs her staccato comments huffed out during pieces, and translates them into technical directions and tactical adjustments for the rest of the crew.
A good stroke hauls self-confidence to the brink of arrogance. She believes in herself. She drips assuredness like an oar sheds water. She speaks authoritatively and commands her crew’s respect. Her assumption of leadership is critical if a crew is to excel. She needs to view herself as deserving of this distinguished role, as special, and maybe a tiny bit superior. Along with controlling her crew’s cadence, she establishes the odds for success. A good stroke needs to exude strength. Her teammates count on her toughness if the chips are down, adopting her mental stance as they follow her stroke. They rely on her to do whatever it takes to win and will do their best to back her up.
A poor crew will outperform if they have a good stroke; an excellent crew will underperform without one. With a good stroke, a crew can move mountains; without her, they’re dead in the water.
Technically, I was a passable stroke, but beyond that I believed I was abysmal. I lacked confidence. I was afraid of losing and of disappointing everyone. I was afraid of our coxswain, Joyce Frocks, whose great sense of humor was biting and precise. Instead of relaxing into her style and joining the fun, I bristled when she focused her pointed, disparaging humor at me. Her comments pierced my brusque exterior and wounded me, but I couldn’t admit that and didn’t know how to parry with humor of my own. I didn’t know how to give and take, to allow people room to disagree without trying to win them over. I knew how to be tough, to work extremely hard, but I didn’t know how to ignore or downplay my internal doubts; they had me by the throat. In short, I lacked the mental tenacity required of a good stroke.
Despite my private concerns, our crew went undefeated the entire regular season. I attributed our success to the freight train behind me, whose powerful engine compensated for my lack of leadership in dual races against poor competition. Meanwhile, my confidence ebbed to the point that I longed for relief from stroking.
We came into the Eastern Sprints seeded first and the clear favorites. We had raced and defeated every varsity crew entrant, except one: Wisconsin. We were poised to reclaim our varsity eight title.
Unfortunately, the weather intervened. The wide open waters of Lake Onondaga northeast of Syracuse, New York, the site of the Sprints regatta, turned into a churning sea late in the morning on race day, thanks to gale force winds. Rain drenched and froze competitors. Waves washed over riggers. Boats flooded and sank. The howling storm forced everyone ashore, leaving no option but to cancel the regatta.
Eager to dredge some victory from the cancellation, Nat and Jay Mimier agreed that Yale and the University of Wisconsin would meet early the next morning and race for the unofficial title of Eastern Sprints Champion. We spent an extra night in Syracuse in our dumpy motel and sullenly sat through our banquet—during which I received the first-ever Anne Warner award for leadership.
Early the next morning, under the cover of low gray clouds and greeted by perfectly flat water, we squared off against the Wisco women. I stroked my crew to its last victory of the season. No crowds cheered us on; no victory platform awaited us; no medals were draped around our necks; no trophies were awarded to our coach.
More disappointment followed. Our varsity eight headed west to compete in the NWRA Nationals, sited in Seattle. We stopped in Wisconsin to race the Wisco women one more time—and lost, breaking our two-year string of victories. It was only the varsity’s second dual race loss in three seasons, and the proof I had long expected of my unsuitability as stroke. We continued to Seattle with our confidence shaken. We raced in the Championship Eight event on rotund Green Lake and made the finals, but struggled from there. In our last race, we finished an undistinguished fifth, hardly the glorious season-ending performance we had envisioned.
We had lost our Olympian stroke when Anne Warner graduated and I was her replacement. That was the only substantive change in the lineup from the previous year, when we had won everything. I knew the truth about the woman in Yale’s stroke seat, even if no one else did. She may have been good enough to lead her crew to an undefeated regular season, but she was unreliable in the big moment. She wasn’t up to the job of leading anyone to a national championship.
The internal battle raged on.
By the end of my junior year, I had learned to trust Molly Meyer with my health. I had taken a leap of faith and capitulated completely, no halfway compliance. For nearly two years, I’d stuck to her prescribed regimen of twice-daily pills and bronchodilators before exercise, ignoring the putdowns and warnings I heard screeching within every time
I swallowed or puffed. My asthma had become manageable. I had completed winter training without succumbing to illness. I hadn’t missed a race all season.
A month later in Seattle, I discovered exactly how little I could trust Nat Case with my dream. I had followed his instructions for nearly three years. I learned to push myself beyond reasonable. I didn’t merely suffer through his punishing workouts, but attacked them. I was a fighter. I had become one of his top rowers, despite my internal doubts. And none of it mattered. Directly following the end of the Nationals, Nat convened the camp to select the European Tour squad. He ran the process as advertised, short and subjective. On the afternoon he posted the names of athletes who would represent the United States during the European Tour, I gathered around the list with the other hopefuls and waited for a clear view. My name was absent.
I went in search of Nat, forcing down my tears as my protest worked its way up. I found him fiddling with a rigger in the boathouse, hiding from the rowers.
“Why didn’t you choose me? I was the best rower on our squad this year!”
His eyes were hooded under his baseball hat. “Ginny, you did a fine job for Yale. But that’s not what this trip is about. It’s my job to identify rowers who have Olympic potential.”
“You starboard-stroked the boat so I could lead the crew, and now you’re telling me I’m not good enough to become an Olympian?”
Nat shook his head. “Ginny, you’re just too small. You’ll never make an Olympic team.”
“So you’re taking Cathy Pew because she’s bigger than I am?”
“I’m taking Cathy Pew because she has more potential.” He paused. I wanted to kill him.
“Yeah, well, what’s potential if it never delivers? How long are you gonna wait for that potential to become potent? You know I’m better than Cathy.”
Nat said nothing, shaking his head.
He was the coach. The decision was his. He’d made it in character, betting on brawn, hedging against heart.
And he was right about Cathy’s size. At six feet, she towered over me by five inches. Those extra inches translated into a longer stroke through the water, which meant more time to apply power to the oar and move the boat. With longer arms and legs came more opportunity to build muscle mass. She would be able to pack more muscle onto her body. She did have more physical potential.
For Nat, that potential would always be worth more than my actual performance.
“Wow,” I said. “Some coach. Thanks a lot. I’m never rowing for you again. You can go to hell!” I turned around and walked out. No crying in front of him.
My own coach had thrown me aside. I got the message, loud and clear: give up your dream now, ’cause it’s too big for you.
I left Seattle dejected and flew back across the country. I had sworn off ever rowing for Nat again, but I couldn’t leave my sport. I ended up spending the summer in New Haven, driving to Derby early most mornings, taking out a single, and learning how to scull by myself. It was my first taste of rowing as a solitary endeavor.
I started running seriously too, working up to half-marathon distances. Visiting my mother in East Hampton, Long Island, I often woke early and launched my runs before sunrise to beat the heat. Loyal Max often accompanied me, but he also regularly cut his run short as the sun rose and the pavement heated up, and found his way along alien back roads to my mother’s rental. Mom would grumble when I returned home later, sweat-soaked, red-faced, and exhausted. “That dog is smarter than you. At least he knows when to stop.”
The European Tour ended in late summer and Nat returned to coach at Yale. And, of course, I rowed for him again. While the World Rowing Championships unfolded down under in New Zealand on Lake Karapiro, the Yale Women’s Crew headed into its last full year with the class of ’79 dominating the varsity boat. Six of us were seniors now, five rowers and the coxswain. We were collectively determined now. We had agreed among ourselves: no one—not another crew or our negative coach—would deter us from an undefeated season, first place at the Eastern Sprints, the Collegiate National Championship, and the Elite Eight National Championship trophy.
And I was going to earn a spot on the National Team, once and for all, this year before the Olympics. The third time had to be the charm. The 1979 Worlds would be held in Bled, Yugoslavia, again in August; team tryouts would therefore take place in the summer, requiring no juggling of academic schedules. This time, a new coach was in charge: Kris Korzeniowski, a Polish émigré with a long résumé detailing international successes, who had just landed the head women’s coaching position at Princeton University. The US Olympic Rowing Committee named him to serve as the US women’s Olympic rowing coach. He would be in charge of the women’s National Team in 1979 and 1980.
I knew nothing more about him, nor did I care to. It didn’t matter who the coach was. I just had to be strong enough, tough enough, fit enough, dedicated, and persistent enough to make the team, pure and simple. There was nothing complicated about the challenge. It was not easy, but straightforward.
Nat relegated me to the three seat, a major step down from my stroke role of the previous year. Mary O’Connor, who’d been my seven seat the previous year, took over as stroke. She dove with authority into her leadership duties. Brimming with confidence, Mary was a great choice. She was easy to follow. She was unafraid to stand up to a confrontation if one arose. She knew how to assert herself without worrying about whether she came across as arrogant.
The Yale women’s varsity achieved nearly all its aspirations over the course of our last season together. Undefeated season, check. Eastern Sprints champions, check. Collegiate National Champions, check. Elite Eight National Champions … not quite check: the Canadian National Team beat us, and so did a club crew, Vesper Boat Club, comprising several Olympic aspirants. Nearly thirty years would elapse before Yale would win another National Championship in the women’s varsity eight event.
At graduation, Cathy Pew, the Yale Women’s Crew captain for two years and my fellow varsity rower for our four years together, was recognized as the university’s female athlete of the year, which every graduating member of the women’s varsity crew reveled in and claimed partly for herself. But I didn’t spend much time savoring my role in my class’s terrific success on the water. I could boast four varsity letters, only two dual-race losses, and a Collegiate National Championship, but I had more important things to do and no time to waste enjoying my accomplishments or reflecting on the past. After all, there was no better way to cap a tremendous senior year of rowing victories than with the fulfillment of my dream to make the National Team. I was ready to exchange my wannabe status for the real deal, but I had no inkling of how well south of success I remained, and the twisted path ahead.
I started out pretty well. I garnered an invitation to attend camp. So did Mary and Bouche. I’d been there before and felt ready. I was two years older, two years tougher, fitter, more determined, and emotionally prepared.
However, so was everyone else. The pool of candidates had grown, the rowers all seemed taller and tougher, and everyone was generally fitter and stronger than the cast of characters from the 1977 team. The first day I surveyed the competition for starboard seats and wondered how I stacked up; I didn’t notice that my precious confidence had already begun to dwindle.
To a northerner, Princeton is practically the south, especially in the summer. Weather conditions often paralleled Madison’s 1977 summer—oppressive humidity broken by explosive storms that whipped the water into a fury. We rowed in steam-room conditions, minus the fog.
Beyond the weather, however, nothing resembled Madison. The dainty and confined Lake Carnegie, a mere three miles from end to end, acted more like a river. Barely two hundred meters of water separated its opposing banks. Princeton University’s boathouse occupied one end, and the race course took up the other, separated by some gentlemanlike bends and one ornately decorated footbridge.
The Princeton atmosphere seemed too refined and straight
-laced to permit anything as chaotic as a raging thunderstorm to chase its rowers off the water. Stately homes lined the lakeshore. The setting seemed a fancy location for a National Team selection process, but its elegance disappeared soon enough in the camp’s intensity.
I kept my hopes up through the entire camp. I rowed hard, maintained my focus, and tried to behave. I attempted to contain my emotions, not to show anger, seem desperate, or exude cockiness. I tried to keep my cool, retain an air of detached interest, suppress my eagerness, downplay my excitement; and treat people with friendly, if distant, respect. This was a tall order under the best of circumstances, but I was on my best behavior.
I don’t recall how many athletes attended the selection camp, when it started, how long it lasted, or when cuts were made. In the waning days of camp, Kris Korzeniowski seat-raced me against a newcomer to the National Team selection process, a newly minted UCLA graduate named Carol Bower. Seat racing involves racing two crews, side by side, usually in four oared shells, then pulling the boats together on the water and switching one person from one boat with one from the other, and racing again. The difference in winning margins between the two races determines which person, of the two who were switched, is the more effective boat-mover.
Carol was a National Team wannabe novice; I was an expert. Surely I should’ve walloped her. We raced in fours. I lost, perhaps narrowly, perhaps by open water; all I remember is that I lost. He didn’t race me against anybody else, so I kept my hopes up. After all, one lousy loss was merely a single, isolated instance, not a pattern or proof of anything.
A couple of days later, Kris announced the cuts. I hadn’t made the team.
Walking down the path away from the boathouse, steaming in the hot sun, I heaved my empty water bottle into the bushes. Goddammit! How could he cut me on the basis of one simple race?
I sought Kris out and forced a conversation with him. He spoke with a thick Polish accent but had no trouble making himself crystal clear. “Carol Bower beat you,” he said.