The Amateurs (6 page)

He had always been an achiever, even as a little boy. "What can you tell me about John?" a fourth-grade teacher had once asked his mother at the start of a school year; and Nancy Biglow, after thinking very long arid hard, had answered, "He wants to excel."

But if he wanted to excel, he also did not want to fail, and he carefully chose the battlefields upon which he allowed himself to compete. During their Yale years, Kiesling had taken a biology course. Midway through the year, he had a vague sense that Biglow was in the same course. Kiesling regularly sat in front in the class, and from time to time he thought he saw Biglow far in the back. But when he mentioned the course to Biglow, the latter said he wasn't taking the course, he was merely auditing it. That was hard to believe. People did not audit courses in biology. They audited courses in the history of art or modern American history, but not in something so technical as biology. Later, Kiesling became certain that Biglow was taking the course but was waiting to find out how well he would do before admitting it. His friends thought the period after Yale in which he was trying to get into medical school was the one in which he was most easy to like. His marks were not very good and, great sculler or no, most medical schools were subdued about his applications. For the first time since they had known him, the mighty Biglow was having trouble with something. With his human frailty showing, he allowed himself genuine intimacy with his friends. Previously, the responsibility of being the best, of not showing weakness, made him admirable if not always likable.

More than most of his contemporaries, John Biglow bore the burden of family and of tradition. The Biglows were a
family.
They gathered annually, they kept in touch and they were as much aware of their obligations as of their freedoms. Biglows always did well. John Biglow might be from Seattle, but the Biglows by tradition were old-school Easterners. It was the kind of family in which the past was inextricably linked to the present. If Grandfather Biglow's son, Lucius Biglow, had moved to Washington after World War II, it was because both he and his young wife, Nancy, wanted to be spared some of the burden of that past.

John's grandfather, Lucius Horatio Biglow, had both rowed and played football at Yale until his mother, John's great-grandmother, had watched a Harvard-Yale race and had seen an oarsman pass out over his oar. Absolutely appalled, she had urged him to give up one of the sports, and he, to her vast relief, chose football, becoming captain of the '07 Yale team. He had long ago passed away, but his wife, Grandmother Biglow, was, in her own way, a keeper of the family flame. Biglows, she was quick to tell friends of John, were a special breed, and it was clear that she meant it. Biglow men did certain things, and they most assuredly did not do other things. They did well at school, they were Christian in their attitude, they went to church regularly, they attended Yale, they behaved like gentlemen and they took proper jobs. The list of things they did not do was equally stringent. They did not drink, they did not cry, they did not show their anger and they did not swear. Her house was filled with a vast variety of Biglow athletic memorabilia, some of it dating back to the beginning of the century. When Yale came perilously close to rejecting Luke Biglow, John's older brother, she vowed to take down Grandfather Biglow's Yale banner. Fortunately Luke got a delayed acceptance, and the banner was allowed to hang. Her son, Lucius Biglow, had not shared in nearly so much athletic glory as his father; he played football, but his only award had been for the best attitude on the team. Still, he had continued the family tradition. Like his father, he had been a member of Skull and Bones; and as achievement was constantly held out to him, he now held it out to his children. As his parents had sent him out the door with a little verse about school, he had sent his own children out with the same words. "Happy day," he said every morning, "all A's."

John Biglow had grown up in an uncommonly privileged Seattle household that blended some of the freedom of the West with the traditions and obligations of the East. Nancy Biglow might be able to keep a vast menagerie of animals at her house, chickens, ducks, even a turkey, but the East was there in terms of life-style, obligations and education. The children would go to Lakeside, the best country day school in the area, and they would take up, and predictably excel at, sports such as tennis, soccer and rowing. John Biglow rowed in his first single scull when he was about ten; and, through the tennis club they belong to, he had good coaching from the start. It was an interesting home, loving and sensitive, with immense amounts of care and energy allocated to the children. If anything, thought one friend, the Biglows were too perfectly tuned to their children, unwilling or unable to allow them to make their own mistakes, giving them more protection than they needed. They had imparted to John Biglow a belief that his needs would be always understood, a belief that turned out to be not always true.

The house was not without its tensions, which surfaced more often than not between John and his father. The differences were classically generational. John always believed that his father, burdened as he was by the demands of his own parents, pushed his children too hard in terms of success and achievement, that his love for them was connected to their ability to achieve. John exempted his mother from that judgment; but to him his father was a man consumed by the idea that Biglows be successful. A Biglow should go to the best schools, should succeed in athletics and then should join a company and become president of it. The Holden Caulfield part of John rebelled. (At Yale he had loved rowing but had hated the Harvard-Yale race because it meant old Blues coming up and telling him how much a victory would mean in terms of Yale's fund raising that year. He did not like the alumni talking about winning instead of about rowing. Sometimes he wanted to tell them that if that was what the race meant to them, they could row it themselves. To him the race should be for those who rowed it, not for those who would then give more money to Yale.) As a little boy in school he had had constant disciplinary problems, challenging the authority of his teachers again and again. His mother believed his attitude was a result of the unrelenting pressure on him, that it was his form of rebelling against a world where a B was not good enough because Biglows always got A's.

Lucius Biglow would always deny that his love was attached to achievement, but then he would say something that would convince John that it was. When, for example, John had applied to medical school, he was aware of the limits of his grades. But his father had spoken immediately of Harvard and Yale medical schools, the best. To John Biglow that was just what he was trying to escape from, the idea that Biglows had to go to the best schools and advance to the highest levels. He did not think he could get in, he had told his father; and Lucius Biglow had responded that if John wanted anything badly enough, he could have it. That seemed a perfect reflection of an endless loving struggle, of generations and attitudes never entirely harmonized. In the end John Biglow thought that his father did love him, but he believed as well that his father's esteem rose and fell with his athletic performances. It was ironic, he thought, that his parents had moved to Seattle to escape the kind of pressure that was in the end more a part of his father than his father knew. That left John Biglow a conflicted young man, for that desire for achievement was something that he at once responded to powerfully—and resisted with equal power.

CHAPTER

FIVE

No one knew John's feelings better than Joe Bouscaren, who had been John's friend, teammate and competitor for six years. Bouscaren had spent considerable time with the Biglow family in Seattle. In the fall of 1982, when Bouscaren was in his last year of medical school at Cornell, he had been required to spend two or three months at a series of other medical schools. Since he was completely committed to the idea of Olympic rowing and since he planned to follow some form of sports medicine, he had made sure his stops were all at places with good rowing facilities. One of these places was the University of Washington in Seattle, where he had stayed with the Biglow family, enjoying that family's exceptional hospitality as so many other young oarsmen had before him. The senior Biglows had liked him, even though the sense of his rivalry with John made the friendship a little delicate.

He was, they decided, very competitive but absolutely charming. One morning Nancy Biglow was having breakfast with him and she asked Joe about his plans for rowing.

"I'd like very much to make the Olympic team," he said.

"In which boat, Joe?" she asked. There was a moment of silence. "The quad?" she continued.

"That would be fine," he said. Nancy Biglow felt that something was being left unsaid. It couldn't be that he wanted the single scull. The single belonged to her John.

"The single?" she said, almost not believing her own voice.

He looked at her. His eyes were lovely and perfectly innocent. He was smiling in the nicest way, sitting in her house at her breakfast table eating the breakfast she cooked. "The single would be very nice," he said. He wanted her son's place at the Olympics. A world of beautiful young killers, she thought. It was the end of her innocence about rowers.

The generational war between John Biglow and his father had amused Bouscaren. When Lucius pushed his son toward the most prestigious medical schools, John took his revenge by constantly challenging his father on the latter's diet, urging him to use less salt and sugar. The irony for Bouscaren was that, Grandfather Biglow's achievements as a Yale football player notwithstanding, John was athletically the most successful Biglow in history. Either this had not dawned on him and the rest of his family, or it had dawned on but not yet liberated him.

If his staying with the Biglows strengthened Bouscaren's relationship with John, it also on occasion stretched it, for John, like his father, was so meticulous about everything that being his house guest was not easy. In addition, Bouscaren sometimes sensed a deft element of gamesmanship in John's actions, as if John were subtly suggesting by his behavior his implied superiority as a sculler. That began to gnaw on Bouscaren. From the way Biglow talked (or at least in the way in which Bouscaren
heard
Biglow talk), there was a considerable difference in their abilities. It was not that Biglow failed to praise Bouscaren's improvement but that he did it in a way almost calculated to annoy. "You're really doing well now, Joe," he would say, "you're really improving—you're the third-best sculler in the United States." With John there was no telling how deliberate this was, for he was capable of being a gentle and good man and a brilliant gamesman all at the same time. When, at a later date, Biglow saw his friend Kiesling, who was trying for the Olympics in the pair sweeps, he was very pleasant, but at the end he said casually, "Just remember, Steve, you'll do as well as you've prepared for it." Since Kiesling, with a full-time job in New York as a magazine editor, had been able to prepare for the race only haphazardly, it was not the most gracious of sentiments.

By most standards, Bouscaren had an absolutely admirable body. He was six-three, lean and well-muscled. But he was not big-boned, not broad in the shoulders, where oarsmen get their power. Walking around the boathouse, he looked like an athlete from another sport, perhaps an exceptionally well-muscled tennis player who had walked over to meet a friend. As a sculler rowing against Biglow and Wood in the past two years, coming in more often than not third, he had assumed that his problem was his size. So in the year leading up to the Olympics he had worked hard to build up his body, to break through previous limits of strength and, above all, to prove that the mind, not the body, was the final arbiter of performance. Only that belief enabled him to work positively with the body he had been given. In the past it had posed something of a mental block; this year he had convinced himself that it did not matter, that he was as competitive an oarsman as if he were six-four and weighed 210 pounds.

Harry Parker thought Bouscaren was probably the most competitive of all the top scullers. Bouscaren competed at everything. If long-distance running was a critical part of the Yale rowing program, Joe Bouscaren, initially an ordinary runner, fashioned himself into a quality distance runner. When, after the 1981 sculling season, he and Biglow had decided to build themselves up in the weight room, he had wanted exact measurements of their improvement and had regularly measured both his and Biglow's muscles to see which sculler's was improving more. During the winter months, he and Tiff Wood had gone cross-country skiing several times together. Cross-country skiing was a sport Harry Parker encouraged, for it built up athletic endurance. Because he was lighter than Wood, Bouscaren usually beat Wood. As far as Bouscaren was concerned, a victory over Tiff in cross-country skiing was a mental victory that carried over to rowing. He suspected that Wood felt the same way, too, and that there had been diminishing interest on his part in more skiing.

The name Bouscaren was French. Anthony Bouscaren, his father, was sixty-one years old and looked twenty years younger. He had gone to Yale, where his athletic career had been interrupted by World War II. He had been a Marine transport flier during the war, and he later taught political science at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. He was a strong figure in the eyes of his three sons, a serious Catholic, a deeply conservative man politically and an intensely competitive weekend athlete. He was by no means a Little League father, yet his drive and competitive zeal—he won his club's tennis championship in men's singles at the age of sixty-one—was directly transmitted to his sons. He faithfully, perhaps more faithfully than any other of the fathers, attended his sons' games and regattas, and his support for them was absolute. But he brought with him at all times the completeness of his standards. In 1981, when Joe Bouscaren had rowed in the single final for the first time and had done exceptionally well, coming in third, just nipped at the end by Tiff Wood, his father had greeted him after the race by saying, "Damn shame, Joe, damn shame." John Biglow, standing next to Bouscaren, had had an instant sense that the standards, however unconsciously, had been applied again and that it was important for Joe to do even better the next time.