The Boys in the Boat Page 6
George was just going into training for his own shot at the Doggett’s Coat and Badge when, late in 1910, his father abruptly lost his job at Eton, discharged because he had developed a reputation for being too easy on the men who worked for him. Suddenly without means, his father began casting around for boatbuilding work on the London waterfront. George and Dick, not wanting to be a burden on their father, abruptly decided to emigrate to western Canada, where they had heard it was possible to make as much as ten pounds a week working in the woods. They packed their clothes and a few boatbuilding tools, used their winnings from their races to book passage in steerage to Halifax, aboard the steamship Tunisian, and set sail from Liverpool.
Two weeks later, on March 11, 1911, after crossing Canada by rail, the Pococks arrived in Vancouver, with forty Canadian dollars between them. Filthy, dazed, and hungry, they wandered on foot from the train station to Vancouver’s brick downtown in a cold, dismal rain. It was George’s twentieth birthday. Dick was a year older. Set suddenly and unexpectedly adrift in the world, uncertain of what they would do next, both were ill at ease in what seemed to them a primitive frontier town utterly unlike the staid but comfortable environs of Eton. Though still in the King’s dominions, they felt as if they had landed on another planet. They finally found a dingy room in a building downtown, rented it for eighteen dollars a week, and immediately went out looking for work. With only two weeks’ rent money in their pockets, they tried their hands at whatever they could find. Dick worked as a carpenter at the local “bughouse,” a mental hospital in nearby Coquitlam. George went to work in a logging camp on the Adams River outside Vancouver, where he soon found himself scrambling madly up and down a mountain, trying to satisfy a steam donkey’s mechanically relentless appetite for firewood and water. After a month of frantically sawing wood and lugging tin pails of water up from the river two at a time, he quit and returned to Vancouver, where he got a relatively cushy job working in the shipyards—one in which he did not have to work quite at the pace of a steam engine. But it was grim, dangerous work that soon cost him two of his fingers.
In 1912 things started looking up for the Pocock boys. The Vancouver Rowing Club, hearing of their reputation in England, commissioned them to build two single sculls for one hundred dollars apiece. The Pococks set up shop in an old, derelict shed floating on timbers fifty yards offshore in Coal Harbour and then finally resumed what would be their life’s work—crafting fine racing shells. They set to work tirelessly in their shop downstairs, stopping only at night, to sleep in an unheated room above the shop.
Conditions were not ideal. Daylight showed through the roof, and wind and rain shuddered through wide gaps between the wallboards. To bathe, they had to dive out their bedroom window and into the cold salt chuck of the harbor. For drinking water, they had to row over to a public fountain in Stanley Park. From time to time, the shed slipped its anchor and drifted aimlessly among inbound and outbound ocean liners while the Pococks slept. At low tide the shed sat on a sloping mud bank, listing twenty-five degrees from bow to stern. When the tide surged back in, the waterlogged timbers on which the structure was built weighed it down and held it fast to the mud. George later described the daily routine: “The water would rise in the shop while we took refuge in the room above and tried to estimate when the next act of the drama would occur. Eventually, with a swish and a roar, the logs would break the mud’s hold, and up would come the building, like a surfacing submarine, with the water rushing out the doors at each end. Then we could start working again, until the next change of tide.” The brothers completed the work nonetheless, and as word of their craftsmanship spread across Canada they began to get new commissions. By mid-1912 the two of them—just twenty and twenty-one—were beginning to feel that they had their feet under them.
One blustery gray day, George Pocock looked out the window of the floating workshop and saw a gangly and awkward man with a shock of reddish but graying hair flying in the wind, rowing as if he were all elbows and knees. He flailed at his oars, George noted, “like a bewildered crab.” The fellow was apparently trying to reach them, though he seemed to be making little progress in that direction. The rowing was so awkward and ineffective, in fact, that the Pococks concluded the man must be drunk. Eventually they found a boathook, snagged the man’s boat, and dragged it alongside the workshop. When they warily helped him aboard, he grinned, stuck out a large hand, and boomed out, “My name is Hiram Conibear. I am the rowing coach at the University of Washington.”
Conibear—who would come to be called the father of Washington rowing—had become Washington’s coach because nobody else was available to take the job, not because he knew the first thing about rowing. He had been a professional bicycle rider at a time when as many as eight men might mount a single multiseated bicycle and careen around rough dirt racetracks in wild melees that often ended in spectacular and bloody collisions. He had moved on to become an athletic trainer for collegiate football and track-and-field teams and, most recently, the athletic trainer for the world champion Chicago White Sox in 1906. When he arrived at Washington in 1907, as coach of the track team and athletic trainer for the football team, his only rowing experience was four weeks in the summer of 1905 when he had trained on a four-oared barge on Lake Chautauqua in New York. Nevertheless, in 1908 he stepped into the position of crew coach more or less by default, replacing a pair of part-time volunteers.
Conibear was, according to those who knew him well, “simple, direct, and fearless.” He attacked his new job with characteristic gusto—what George Pocock later called “inflammable enthusiasm.” Lacking a coach’s launch, he ran up and down the shores of Lake Washington, yelling at his boys through his megaphone, freely mixing baseball slang with rowing terminology and a wide variety of exuberant profanity. He cussed so loudly, so frequently, and so colorfully that offended lakeside residents soon began complaining to the university. Convinced that rowing instruction needed to be more scientific, he pored over anatomy books and physics texts. Then he appropriated a human skeleton from the biology lab, strapped it in a rowing seat, wired its hands to a broom handle, and carefully observed its movements as his student-assistants manipulated it to simulate various rowing strokes. Once he was convinced that he was on the right track with the mechanics of the sport, he turned his focus to the boats themselves. Washington had relied on home-built shells, many of which were notably tubby and slow, some of which had a tendency to fall apart when rowed hard, and one of which was so round bottomed and prone to tip over that Homer Kirby, stroke oar of the 1908 crew, said if you wanted to keep her on an even keel, you had to part your hair in the middle and divide your chewing tobacco evenly between your cheeks.
What Conibear wanted now was the kind of shells they made in England: long, sleek, elegant shells. Fast shells. When he learned that a pair of English boatbuilders had taken up residence just to the north, in Vancouver, he set out in search of them.
When he found their floating shop in Coal Harbour, he told the Pococks that he planned to establish a veritable rowing navy. He needed to purchase a fleet, perhaps as many as fifty, but certainly no fewer than twelve, eight-oared shells. He wanted the Pococks to move down to Seattle forthwith, where he would provide them with a shop on campus—a dry shop on terra firma—in which to build the fleet.
Stunned, but delighted at the size of the potential order, the Pococks visited Seattle, and then wired their father in England, telling him to make haste to Washington, as they had found work enough for the three of them. Only after Aaron was on his way across the Atlantic did George and Dick receive a sobering letter from Conibear. He had spoken a bit prematurely, it seemed. He had only enough funds, it turned out, to buy one shell, not twelve. When told of the setback, Aaron responded to his sons dryly, “You must remember that Mr. Conibear is an American.”
Despite the radically lowered expectations, the Pococks were soon ensconced on the Washington campus, and Hiram Conibear began t
o realize that he had hired much more than a skilled boatbuilder in George Pocock. When George began to watch the Washington oarsmen on the water, he quickly spotted inefficiencies and deficiencies in the mechanics of their stroke that no amount of fiddling with a skeleton could fix. At first he held his peace, not inclined by nature to offer unsolicited advice. But when Conibear began to ask the Pococks for their opinion about his boys’ rowing, George gradually spoke up. He began to teach Conibear elements of the stroke that he had learned from Thames watermen in his boyhood and taught to the boys at Eton. Conibear listened eagerly, learned quickly, and what came to be called the “Conibear stroke” soon evolved from those discussions. It featured a shorter layback, a quicker catch, and a shorter but more powerful pull in the water. It left the oarsmen sitting more upright at the end of the stroke, ready to slide forward and begin the next stroke more quickly and with less fuss and bother. It differed conspicuously from the rowing stroke long used by the eastern schools (and Eton), with its exaggerated layback and long recovery, and it began almost immediately to result in Washington’s first significant victories. Before long, even the eastern schools were taking note of the Conibear stroke, trying to figure out how something so unorthodox could be so successful.
Conibear died just a few years later, in 1917, when he climbed too far out on a limb, while reaching for a plum in a tree in his backyard, and plunged headfirst to the ground. By then, however, Washington had become a serious contender in crew on the West Coast, a worthy opponent for Stanford and California and British Columbia, if not yet quite what Conibear had dreamed of making the program: “the Cornell of the Pacific.”
After the Great War, Dick Pocock moved east to build shells for Yale University, while George remained in Seattle and orders for his exquisitely crafted shells began to pour in from around the country. Over the next several decades, a succession of Washington coaches and crews came to learn that the Englishman quietly at work up in the loft of their shell house had much to teach them about rowing. They came to see him as something new under the sun, what in modern parlance might be termed a rowing “geek.” His understanding of the details of the sport—the physics of water, wood, and wind; the biomechanics of muscle and bone—was unmatched.
But Pocock’s influence didn’t end with his command of the technical side of the sport. It really only began there. Over the years, as he saw successive classes of oarsmen come and go, as he watched immensely powerful and proud boys strive to master the vexing subtleties of their sport, as he studied them and worked with them and counseled them and heard them declare their dreams and confess their shortcomings, George Pocock learned much about the hearts and souls of young men. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope, to see skill where skill was obscured by ego or by anxiety. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust. He detected the strength of the gossamer threads of affection that sometimes grew between a pair of young men or among a boatload of them striving honestly to do their best. And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for. And in the years since coming to Washington, George Pocock had quietly become its high priest.
Years later a Washington coxswain would sum up the sentiment of hundreds of boys who felt his influence: “In his presence Washington crewmen always stood, for he symbolized that for which God’s children always stand.”
• • •
Each day, after Tom Bolles finished talking and George Pocock made his way back up into his shop, the boys wrestled the long, white-bladed oars from their racks, carried them down to the water, and prepared to row. They were not remotely ready to step into the delicate confines of a racing shell, so they waited turns to board the school’s venerable training barge, Old Nero. The vessel—a wide, flat-bottomed scow with a long walkway running down the middle and seats for sixteen novice oarsmen—had served as an initial proving ground for freshmen since 1907, virtually the whole of the thirty years that Washington had maintained a crew program.
As the freshmen of 1933 flailed at their oars in the first few days, Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson strode up and down Old Nero’s walkway in gray flannel suits and fedoras. Ulbrickson mostly just watched the boys quietly, still sizing them up. Bolles, however, barked at them continuously—to grip the oar this way and not that, to square their blades to the water, to straighten their backs, to bend their knees, to straighten their knees, to pull harder one moment, to ease up another. It was bewildering and backbreaking. Old Nero was designed, in part, to drive boys who, by temperament, weren’t cut out for crew—“mollycoddles,” Ulbrickson called them—to an early realization of that fact, before they could break expensive oars and racing shells. The boys strained and heaved and gasped for breath, but for all their efforts they moved Old Nero only slowly and erratically out of the Cut and onto the ruffled expanse of Lake Washington. As they tried to absorb their lessons and experience, and to synchronize their efforts, they lived in constant fear of making any of the many egregious errors Bolles kept pointing out to them.
One error in particular required no scolding. They soon learned that if the blades of their oars entered the water too deeply, at the wrong angle, or out of time with the others, or if they remained in the water a fraction of a second too long at the end of a stroke, they were apt to “catch a crab”: the oar would suddenly and irretrievably become stuck in the water, immobilized as surely as if some sort of gargantuan crustacean had reached up from the depths and seized the blade, holding it fast. Old Nero would keep going but the oar would not. The boy holding the oar would either be smacked hard in the chest and knocked out of his seat or, if he held on to the oar too long, be catapulted unceremoniously into the water. Every stroke he took thus offered each boy the possibility of a wet, cold, and spectacularly public form of humiliation.
Of the whole freshman lot, the only one who had ever rowed a lick in his life was Roger Morris. Before the Depression, the Morris family had maintained a small, rustic cabin on the western side of Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound. As a boy Roger had idled away his summers rowing lazily about in Manzanita Bay, a lovely blue cove lying in the lee of the Olympic Mountains. But he was tall and strong and, when he wished to, Roger could go pretty much as far as he wanted to in that rowboat, a fact he had demonstrated one day when he was twelve. Suffering from a toothache and wanting to return to the comforts of his family home in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, he rowed some fifteen miles—north through Agate Passage, six miles southeast across the relatively open water of Puget Sound, among freighters and ferries, then east through the Ballard Locks, where he wedged his small rowboat in among salmon trawlers and tugboats and rafts of logs, and finally through Salmon Bay—before walking into the house to the utter astonishment of his mother. But aboard Old Nero, Roger quickly found that his freewheeling rowing style was more hindrance than help when it came to mastering the racing stroke that Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson taught in the 1930s.
None of the freshmen, in fact, found it easy to master it. To achieve even a reasonably smooth and powerful stroke, they had to learn to execute a series of precisely timed and carefully coordinated moves. Facing the stern of the boat, each boy began with his chest bent over his knees, his arms stretched out in front of him, and both hands gripping the handle of his one long oar. At the beginning of the stroke, the “catch,” he dropped the blade of his oar into the water and leaned his torso back hard, toward the bow, keeping his back ramrod straight. As his shoulders came vertical over the center of his body, he began the “leg drive” by propelling his legs forward, his seat sliding toward the bow on greased runners bene
ath him. Simultaneously, he pulled the oar toward his chest against the resistance of the water, throwing all the strength of his combined arm, back, and leg muscles into the stroke. As the oar came to his chest, and with his back inclined about fifteen degrees toward the bow, he reached the full extent of his “layback.” Then he began the “release.” He dropped his hands toward his waist and pulled the blade quickly and decisively from the water while at the same time rolling the wrist of the hand nearest the water in order to “feather” the blade parallel to the surface of the water. Next, to begin the “recovery,” he rotated his shoulders forward and pushed his arms sternward against the oar while pulling his knees up toward his chest, thus propelling his body forward on the sliders back into the crouched position in which he had begun. Finally, as the boat moved forward beneath him, he again rotated the oar to bring the blade perpendicular to the surface for the next catch, dropped it cleanly back into the water at precisely the same moment as the other boys, and immediately repeated the entire procedure over and over again at whatever rate the coxswain was calling for through the small megaphone strapped on his head. Done correctly, this process levered the boat forward in the water smoothly and powerfully. But it had to be done in one continuous and unbroken cycle of uncoiling and coiling the body. It had to be done rapidly, and it had to be done in precisely the same manner—at the same rate and with the same amount of applied power—as everyone else in the boat was doing it. It was maddeningly difficult, as if eight men standing on a floating log that threatened to roll over whenever they moved had to hit eight golf balls at exactly the same moment, with exactly the same amount of force, directing the ball to exactly the same point on a green, and doing so over and over, every two or three seconds.