Dead Last
This is a summary of The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. It spoils the story, but the result is also on the first page. The prologue says that nine young men from Washington state shocked the rowing world, and Adolf Hitler, by winning gold in eight oared rowing at the nineteen thirty six Olympics.
So the question is not who wins. It is how, and what it cost. Here are the people, the seasons, and the race.
The Book
I read the full ebook. By my count, the text from the prologue to the epilogue is about one hundred forty six thousand words. It has a prologue, nineteen chapters, and an epilogue, in four parts. They run from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen thirty three, then nineteen thirty four, nineteen thirty five, and nineteen thirty six.
Here is a detail I counted. Every one of those twenty one openings carries a quote from the boat builder George Yeoman Pocock. It is a book about nine boys, and a boat builder is its teacher.
The prologue is Brown’s own story. He visits Joe Rantz, who is dying, and Joe has one request. Write about the boat, he says, and not just about him.
Seattle, October 1933
Chapter one opens on Monday, October ninth, nineteen thirty three, a gray day in Seattle. Men sell apples on street corners. Families sleep in a shantytown on Elliott Bay. This is the Depression, and it is the world the boys come from.
At the University of Washington, a coach named Al Ulbrickson looks over the freshmen on the dock. The book says he needs one rare quality above the others. A rower must be willing to throw his ego over the side and pull for the other boys in the boat.
Then the cuts begin. One hundred seventy five boys turn out. By October thirtieth, it is down to eighty. The first to quit are the boys with polished shoes, and Joe Rantz notices that hurting is nothing new to him.
Joe Rantz
Chapters two and four go back to Joe’s childhood. His father Harry is a tinkerer and a dreamer. In the cramped family homes, Joe is always underfoot, and again and again he is sent to live with other people. At about fifteen, Joe is left alone in a half finished house in Sequim, Washington, with no money and little food.
The next morning he makes a decision. He will never again depend on anyone for his sense of who he is. He will survive on his own.
Joe works, and he finds free food, even mushrooms on stumps, and he finishes school. He also finds Joyce, who loves his habit of hunting four leaf clovers. His line is, you only miss one when you stop looking. In late April, he leads her to a meadow, and he holds out a closed hand. It holds a ring.
The Boat Builder
Now the book brings in George Pocock, who builds the cedar racing shells in a workshop at the back of the Washington shell house. Rowing, the book says, is brutal punishment before it is beauty. A two thousand meter race takes the toll of two basketball games back to back, in about six minutes.
Pocock’s idea is that the crew has to row as one. The freshmen learn it in a beaten up practice boat called Old Nero, then in shell barges, then in real shells. In nineteen thirty four, they beat the California freshmen on Lake Washington. Two years running, the varsity beats California, and then loses at Poughkeepsie, in New York.
Alongside, Brown cuts away to Germany. Leni Riefenstahl, who would film the games, dines at the Goebbels home.
The Olympic Year
On January fourteenth, nineteen thirty five, Ulbrickson tells the boys his target. Washington crews have won the highest honors in America, but have never been to the Olympics. That is the objective.
That summer, Joe, Johnny White and Chuck Day take jobs at the Grand Coulee dam, doing hard labor, and the boys stay in shape. The book also shows how Germany builds the Berlin stadium, while American officials argue about a boycott, and decide to go.
In nineteen thirty six, the boat that matters is found by trial and error. In late March, Ulbrickson swaps Joe into a seat, and writes in the logbook that it helped a lot. After that, the boat flies. Pocock christens it the Husky Clipper.
The Husky Clipper wins at Poughkeepsie. A New York columnist complains that coarse outlanders from the Far West have taken over the Hudson.
Princeton and the Bill
Next come the Olympic trials at Princeton. The coxswain, Bobby Moch, plays the race exactly his way, and Washington wins the trials.
That night comes a shock. The head of the Olympic rowing committee says the boys must pay their own way to Berlin, or the second place crew will go instead. The sum is five thousand dollars by the end of the week.
Seattle reacts. Newspapers print appeals, and civic leaders open headquarters at the Washington Athletic Club. The boys are told as little as possible.
Then the boys sail on the Manhattan. Two rowers, Don Hume and Roger Morris, spend the first morning sick in their berths. In Berlin, the book shows a city staged for visitors, with anti Jewish signs taken down, and Roma families marched to a detention camp.
Berlin
The boys settle in Köpenick and row at Grünau on the Langer See. The weather turns wintry, the boat checks and bounces, and Don Hume, the stroke, is sick with a cough that will not leave. By July twenty ninth, he is too ill to get out of bed.
Ulbrickson also loses an argument about the course. Lanes five and six are exposed to the wind, and the officials will use all six anyway. Washington draws an outside lane.
The British, with a short coxswain called Noel Duckworth and a stroke named Ran Laurie, row exactly the way Washington does. The book calls it two crews playing the same game.
The Final
In the final, the wind is howling. The starter shouts in French, and Bobby Moch never hears him. The American boat and the British sit motionless, and when they get going, they are already behind.
By the thousand meter mark, Washington is nearly five seconds behind. At three hundred meters, Don Hume goes white and half closes his eyes. Moch screams at him to go higher, and nothing happens.
Moch is about to hand the stroke to Joe, when Hume snaps awake. The stroke rate climbs to thirty seven, and they move from fifth to third. In the last stretch, with seventy five thousand people chanting for Germany, Moch starts counting down twenty strokes, and keeps resetting the count at fifteen. The boys row on.
The official time, as the book tells it, is six minutes, twenty five point four seconds. Italy is six tenths of a second behind. Germany is a second behind. Hitler turns and walks back into the building.
After the Gun
Joe does not go out that night. He lies awake, looking at the medal. Over the last few hundred meters, he had realized there was nothing more he could do except trust the boys around him, and throw himself into each stroke.
The epilogue follows them. In nineteen thirty seven, they sweep Poughkeepsie again. Royal Brougham, a Seattle sportswriter, figures that Joe, Roger and Shorty Hunt had each rowed about four thousand three hundred forty four miles in college.
Joe died on September tenth, two thousand seven. In two thousand eight, a new oak tree was planted by the shell house, with nine shovelfuls of soil, one for each of the boys. The Husky Clipper hangs today in Conibear Shellhouse.
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