The Amateurs (23 page)

Dietz, in turn, thought that unlike most of the other Harvard people, Tiff Wood measured him only on what he was as a man and an oarsman, not on who his parents were and where he had gone to school. He was glad to have one last row with him. They had two days to practice. He knew that Tiff had not been rowing well, and he knew exactly what he had to do. He had to stop Tiff from rowing with his heart all the time, doing everything with pure courage and strength. Having rowed well in their first practice, they had both immediately sensed their possibilities. But Dietz, bothered by Wood's roughness, had taken him aside afterward. "Tiff," he said, "if you want to know why you didn't make a boat—I'll tell you. You're just out there hammering the water. You're killing fish, not rowing. Row like you do in practice. Let me set the stroke. The power will always be there." If they could harness their talents, they had a real chance. Dietz might be past his prime, but he was still able to drive a boat very hard.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

By the time the camp boats arrived at Princeton, Harry Parker was pessimistic about the chances for the Bouscaren-Altekruse double. As far back as the Lucerne regatta, he had been uneasy about Joe Bouscaren's state of mind. In the beginning of the Hanover camp, Bouscaren, possibly because his skills were so readily adaptable to team boats, had been perhaps the most confident oarsman in the camp. But at Lucerne he had started showing signs of anxiety. The day before the first race there, Parker had grabbed him by the shoulders, shaken him gently and told him, "Joe, you're going to wake up tomorrow and feel good and rested and strong. You're going to forget about everything else and you're going to race fast.
Fast,
Joe!" The double, in fact, had done reasonably well; but when the team had returned to Hanover, some of the anxiety also returned. Part of the reason Parker attributed to the furor over the Wood-Biglow double, but even more he sensed that Bouscaren was genuinely concerned about the Lewis-Enquist boat. Already word was filtering back through the rowing channels that Brad and Paul were rowing well. Bouscaren and Altekruse's boat just wasn't moving quickly. They began arguing between themselves, and Bouscaren clearly felt he was being picked on, that Altekruse was blaming him for the boat's problems. He also resented what he thought were Parker's doubts about him: "Are you really ready to race?" Parker kept asking. Finally Bouscaren turned to Parker and Altekruse and told them, "I
do
know how to scull. I am
not
an idiot. You guys have got to stop dumping on me." Going into the race, all the signs of a Bouscaren-Altekruse victory were bad.

The first race, again at Princeton, was to be on Saturday. Although most of the other oarsmen started showing up on Wednesday to work out, Lewis and Enquist appeared on Friday. They were warriors now, confident, almost arrogant. They stayed at a more expensive motel to be away from everyone else. They won their heat on Saturday by six lengths. On Sunday, Tony Johnson, who had helped coach them at Cornell and who was looking out for their interests during this miniature regatta, had gone to see them as they left the boathouse for the race. He wished them good luck. "We're going to kick the shit out of them today," Lewis had said. Johnson was bothered not so much by the obscenity but by the fury with which it had been said. That kind of fury was not necessarily an asset in a race, for it could burn out too quickly, and in a 6-minute race the pair might easily come apart at the end. Oarsmen did not normally talk like that, but Johnson finally decided that both men knew what they were doing, and he did not doubt the outcome.

Lewis and Enquist rowed down to the start and settled into the stake boats that held the sculls at the start of a race. Altekruse and Bouscaren were in the next lane. Lewis heard one of their voices—Altekruse's, he was sure—wishing them good luck. Neither he nor Enquist spoke, nor did they turn their heads. He thought he heard Altekruse say something else. Again they did not acknowledge him. This race was not about friendship. Brad Lewis had found the perfect role for himself, the outsider spurned by authorities, the challenger versus the favorite who had been given all the advantages. He was absolutely comfortable, absolutely ready.

When they had rowed to the stake boat, Joe Bouscaren had heard Charley Altekruse say hello to Lewis and Enquist. When the greeting was unreciprocated, Bouscaren had turned to look at them and seen their faces staring straight ahead, eyes averted. They're really ready, he thought. He wondered if he and Altekruse had the same concentration. He heard Altekruse, annoyed by Lewis and Enquist, telling them, "Hey, come on, you don't have to be like that." He told Altekruse, "Let it go, Charley, it isn't worth it."

Parker, worried about Bouscaren's tendency to burn out at the end, had told them not to go out too high at the start. Bouscaren wanted to go out a little faster; he did not want to spend a championship race behind some very good boats. But at five hundred meters Lewis and Enquist were already ahead by a length, and in the second five hundred they increased the margin. At the thousand-meter mark Bouscaren heard Brad Lewis give a yell of jubilation. To Bouscaren it sounded like an Indian war cry (in reality it was a Japanese judo cry) of absolute triumph. Oh, shit, he thought. He never expected to be down that far that early. The gap widened. Other boats went past them.

Jim Dietz was pleased with the race he and Tiff Wood were rowing. The other boats had been practicing together for weeks and even months, and they had had only two days. Dietz took them out low because he wanted Wood to pick up a rhythm and feel comfortable. The power would come later. The boat moved nicely. The early leaders were Casey Baker and Dan Brisson. Midway in the race, the Enquist-Lewis double made its move. Dietz and Wood gave everything they had, but the other double was too strong. Wood's double had come in second in the time of 6:41.13, some 5 seconds behind the Enquist-Lewis time of 6:35.50. The camp boat came in fourth, at 6:43.10.

The quad race was still ahead. A sculler named Dan Louis had already entered a boat in the hope that some of the defeated double oarsmen might want one more chance. He asked Altekruse and Bouscaren to join him, and they in turn asked Tiff Wood to become part of the instant quad. Wood, his own race finished, was drinking beer when they came by. Recent antagonisms were forgotten, and the sanctity of the camp system was further diminished. "You ask Harry if it's okay," said Altekruse to Wood. Wood went by to see Parker. He would neither, he said, encourage nor discourage the instant quad. Mostly he seemed to shrug his shoulders at the idea. They led for the first twenty strokes. A miracle did not take place, but they had fun. They came in 27 seconds behind the winners. The camp quad also did poorly. "Bloody Sunday," Brad Lewis called it.

Later Tiff Wood went over to thank Dietz. They were oddly pleased with themselves. They were not going to the Olympics—not as boated oarsmen, anyway—but the bitterness of the camp was gone. Dietz had wanted to give it one last try, and he had done that. Wood had wanted to dispel the camp doubt that he was strong but could not row in a team boat, and he had done that. His team boat, with very little notice, had beaten the camp boat. His hopes had not died in Hanover without one last chance on the water.

Dick Cashin, Wood's old Harvard teammate, went over to talk with Bouscaren. He thought that Bouscaren might be disconsolate, but in fact he found him in a very good mood. "So what do you do now?" he asked Bouscaren.

"I'll get on with my life and become a doctor," Bouscaren answered. "It's probably about time, anyway."

"Just getting here is ninety percent of it," said Cashin, who had been eliminated in the pair sweeps the day before. "That's what it's really about."

Harry Parker was in a rage after the trials. He was a man who, in the best of circumstances, took defeat of any kind hard; and a day like this, when both his camp boats had been upset by challengers, was almost a personal humiliation to him.

The entire camp, he thought, had been a disaster. The main problem had been the decision to open the trials to challenges. He had always opposed the idea of trials, but the rowing people from Philadelphia wanted the trials; and rather than a prolonged court fight, he had agreed to the idea the previous fall. Then he had made a critical mistake. He should immediately have canceled participation in the Lucerne races. The trials, once mandated, put too much of a burden on the camp boats and made Lucerne unnecessary. By going to Lucerne, he had lost two or three weeks of critical time and had handed a major psychological advantage to the challengers. If he had stayed in Hanover, his boats would have had more confidence, and the psychology might have been reversed, with the word coming out of Hanover of how well various boats were doing.

He also felt he should have chosen a different method of selection. He should have picked the best quad and then let the oarsmen fight it out among themselves for the two best doubles. Both of those doubles could enter the trials. The best oarsmen would find each other, and the doubles would be good. The oarsmen were shrewd about that. "You're not a sculler if you're not cunning," Brad Lewis liked to say.

But Parker was also aware that he had not coached well. Wounded by the loss of the sweeps to Korzeniowski, by the
way
the committee had done it, he had been so disappointed and distracted that he had never given the sculls his best. Some of the criticism of him by the scullers was legitimate. Although he supported the idea of a national coach who would work with the Olympic rowers free from college responsibilities, he thought that the timing had been a personal betrayal. His oarsmen, the young men he had worked with for the past two years and done all the spadework with, had been given to another coach on the eve of the great events. In the face of this adverse decision, the proper thing to have done was to resign. But he had let his ego get in the way and had allowed a normally positive experience to become a negative one. He had let the scullers down, and that was unthinkable. Understanding his errors and admitting them publicly were among the hardest things he had ever done.

John Biglow had not gone to Princeton for the double trials. He stayed in Hanover rooting for Lewis and Enquist. Paul was his friend, a consistently fair and kind man with whom he had worked out all winter in Seattle. He could not root for Joe and Charley because of all the bitter things that had been said in the camp. He heard the race results by phone. The next day, when Bouscaren came back to Hanover, Biglow wondered if they were still friends. Bouscaren, who had moved out during the height of the tension, had not moved back in. Biglow was in his room when he heard Bouscaren's voice in the hall. Biglow went down the hall; and when Bouscaren offered his hand, Biglow felt an immense sense of relief. "It was tough," Bouscaren said, talking of the trials, "but I have to get on with it. I can't dwell on it." He hung around for a few days, visiting friends. But the day before the new quad and double were supposed to arrive in Hanover, Joe Bouscaren, as quietly as he could, departed.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

Tiff Wood was chosen as the spare by the Olympic rowing committee. Being the spare in 1976, when he was the backup for the sweeps, had been an exceptionally difficult experience for him. He had never felt so useless in his life. What had made it worse was that everyone around him had been filled with such high purpose. An Olympic camp pulsed with the special intensity of all of those young men and women who had worked so hard and had finally arrived. This time Wood was determined that he would create some kind of role for himself. One of the hardest things for him to come to terms with was the fact that he was rowing exceptionally well. At Hanover, during the practices after the double trials in Princeton, he and Biglow raced regularly against each other, and Wood beat Biglow more often than not. By the time the team went West, first to Berkeley and then to Casitas, he decided that it was not a good idea for him to practice against Biglow, that it might be fun for him but it was not doing John any good.

On his own at Casitas, he shadowed as often as he could the British women's four, which was a very good match for him. The rest of the day was harder. When strangers met him and were excited to discover that he was an Olympic oarsman, he had to explain that he was the
spare
for the scullers. Their disappointment in hearing this was matched by his own in telling it. He had ordered several sets of tickets for his parents, and on the mornings that the scullers were to race he sometimes stood in front of the grandstand, a lonely figure selling tickets that were no longer needed. That was not exactly a memorable Olympic experience. Getting rides back and forth between Casitas and the dorms at Cal Santa Barbara was also difficult. The Americans had a van to transport their oarsmen; and while the van might wait for oarsmen and coaches and coxes, it did not wait for the spare. If he was not exactly on time, the van left without him.

He felt as if everyone knew that he belonged but did not belong. His only hope was to capitalize on someone else's misfortune, but no one showed the slightest sign of becoming sick. He neither avoided nor sought out Harry Parker. The rupture between them was real, at least on Wood's part. It might be that Parker was willing to patch up their split, but Tiff Wood was still wounded. When he thought back to the summer he decided the critical moment—when he did not make the double—had come and passed without his even realizing it. Given the immediacy of the pressures to get ready for Lucerne and the difficulty of adjusting to the quad, he had had virtually no chance of making the quad. He faulted Harry for not making sure that more combinations were tried for the double, even at the expense of not doing well at Lucerne. The entire process had been too casual and disorganized. The other possibility that ran through his mind was that Harry had never thought that highly of his talents in the first place.