Over the summer of 2022, I got an email from Göran Buckhorn, a Swede living in Connecticut. He was working on an anthology of rowing stories and asked me if I would contribute a piece from my 30 years of the Ask Doctor Rowing column. Of course, I said yes. A colleague of mine tells his students that seeing your name in print is the second most exciting thing that can happen to you. The most exciting? Falling in love. I’m lucky. I get to see my name every month right here. Falling in love? It happened a long time ago but still burns bright.
Göran has supplied the rowing world with Hear The Boat Sing, a website that produces something rowing-related, amazingly, nearly every single day. “It would be an honor to be represented,” I told him. I sent him a favorite column and promptly forgot about his project. One day in October, two copies of The Greatest Rowing Stories Ever Told, published by Lyons Press, arrived.
What an eclectic mix of writings are contained within its soft covers. There’s fiction—an excerpt from Captain of the Crew (1901) in which the boys of Hillton School, desperate to fill their eight for a race against their archrival, ignore the fact that the boy who rows in the four seat is sick. How does he fare? No spoilers here.
In a short story from Mark Helprin that’s one of my favorites, “Palais de Justice,” a Boston judge slams down his gavel, and the courtroom empties out. The defense attorney heads to the Charles River on the hottest day of the year to take out his single. “There won’t be a single soul on the river,” he thinks. “I’ll have it all to myself, and it’ll be as smooth as glass.” How many of us have experienced the same escape?
His solitary workout is spoiled when a much younger man appears around the Eliot Bridge turn and begins to catch him. “I’m a fool for racing in this heat. I have nothing to prove. I’ll let him pass, and I’ll let him sneer. I don’t care,” he says to himself. But once a competitor always a competitor, and he can’t find it in him to let the younger man pass him. Who will win? The veteran of the Charles or the younger, fitter sculler? I’m reminded of a friend who says, “It doesn’t matter whether you’ve agreed beforehand to compete or not. You are always racing.”
There’s a science-fiction piece about The Boat Race in the year 2107. And “The Boat Race Murder.” With not a butler in sight, whodunit?
The fiction is fun, but it’s difficult to develop characters and plot in just under 10 pages. It’s the nonfiction pieces that stand out. In “The Pineapple Cup,” Aquil Abdullah reflects on the heartbreak of losing the 2000 Olympic trials by 0.33 of a second. “I will never ‘get over’ losing the Olympic Trials, but I will move past it. By not making the 2000 U.S. Olympic rowing team, I gained a better understanding of who I am.…It occurred to me, given some time to reflect, that growing as a person is the most important victory we can ever achieve in our lives.”
Stephen Kiesling’s “The Shell Game” has an excerpt about seat racing to make the 1979 world championships. Kiesling is a Yale oarsman; his opponent, a Harvard man. Brad Lewis, whose “Olympian” is the gold standard for “How I won an Olympic gold medal” stories, has a selection about the first time he went sculling. After his first time on the water, Lewis writes, “I’d found my escape vehicle of choice, the perfect solution for a young man, not yet old enough to drive, but already searching for his freedom.”
Although the book is not intended to be a rowing history, there are numerous contributions by rowing historians. Many of the authors choose to write about specific races. Thomas Mendenhall writes of Yale’s 1956 Olympic gold-medal race in Australia. Bill Miller dives into John B. Kelly’s 1920 Olympic victory in the single. In a chapter from his book The Red Rose Crew, Dan Boyne captures the excitement of the trailblazing U.S. women’s eight finishing second at the 1975 world championships, the first women’s National Team boat to medal at Worlds. William Lanouette writes about the great professional sculling races between Courtney and Hanlan. Thomas Weil is in the launch for the finals of a school-eights championship at the Henley Women’s Regatta. Rick Rinehart, a Henley victor with Kent School in 1972, adds a brief history of this most famous regatta.
There are some biographical pieces, among them one by Lucy Pocock Stillwell, a sister of George and a contributor to rowing in Washington state in her own right. There are also poems and a few songs.
It’s quite a comprehensive gathering of rowing stories, but inevitably one asks “What is missing?” Many readers will probably say, “Why no Boys in the Boat?” Buckhorn reached out to other sources, but publishers wanted outrageous sums apparently to reprint certain popular works.
This isn’t a complete collection of the greatest rowing stories. There are certainly others waiting to be told (I wish there were more contributions from women). But it’s a fine beginning, and I hope it will spark more in this genre. Dip in to it and you will be rewarded.
