Michael's Reviews > The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Quite an uplifting story of the young men from the University of Washington who took the gold medal for nine-men shell rowing at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Like Hillenbrand’s wonderful book “Seabiscuit” this is a tale of underdogs overcoming personal adversities and capturing the attention of a nation laid low by the Great Depression. Starting in 1933, we get the story of a young man, Joe Rantz, arriving at the college and merging the dreams from his hardscrabble life with that of other sons of miners, farmers, and lumbermen of the northwest. The other story is that of the coaches who mold and inspire this raw human material into a team which hopefully can beat their traditional rivals, University of California at Berkley, and challenge in the annual regatta in Poughkeepsie the historical masters of the sport, the elite private colleges of the East. These include the crafty and laconic head coach, Al Ubrickson, and legendary boat builder George Pocock, the guru of a Zen-like philosophy of rowing and master of techniques adapted from Thames working boatmen that he picked up from his days at Eton.

Joe’s family was hurt bad by the depression. He lost his mother at a young age, and his father married a much younger woman who favored her own children over her stepson. At one point she forces Joe’s father to make a move, leaving Joe behind to fend for himself at age 14. A heartbreaking story to read about. But he became strong from plenty of outdoor work, self-reliant to the extreme, and ripe for a sense of belonging that a team sport can engender. Going out at dawn in the bay in all kinds of weather and pushing himself beyond exhaustion and pain was something he could handle well. His new girlfriend is a big support, though she finds it hard to understand how Joe can forgive his father for the abandonment. It took a lot for the coaches to help Joe surmount a wavering confidence and performance so bound up in a fundamental mistrust of people. Pocock eventually found an angle to instill a way for Joe to submit himself to a trust in his teammates.

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 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.



I especially appreciated the segments about Pocock’s story. How he designed and constructed by hand the elegant 60-foot racing shells. The special qualities of wood for each component of the boat, buoyant and flexible Western red cedar for the panels, long straight sugar pine for keels, and resilient and strong ash for the frames. Joe grooves on this artistry, based on his experience working on hauling cedar out of woods with horses and hand cutting of shingles. Pocock’s marvels were so outstanding that soon all colleges in the U.S. were using his boats.

Team rowing is such an unusual sport in how so much effort goes into preparation for so few and so brief competitions, events that provide no spotlight for individual performance success. My recent personal experiences with a rowing shell given to me by a neighbor contributes to an appreciation of some of the physical details. Like the trade-off between fast strokes and deep hard strokes. The precision of wrist action required to control the angle of the oar at entry and exit from the water. How the faster you row, the harder it is to do it well and avoid a “crab”, when the wrong angle or too deep a stroke leads a diving of the oar, impossible to lift. These factors are amplified in importance when it comes to achieving the synchrony required in team rowing. I never imagined the hidden sociology that lies behind a good team:

…the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.
…
Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge; someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight; someone to make peace; someone to think things through; someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That’s the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are.

Brown brings out the truth of these conclusions among the cast of characters Joe rows with over the years preceding the Olympic meet. Ubrickson found that a boat without Joe in it just didn’t do as well in the various collegial meets. A particular coxswain, Bobby Mock, also proved essential to the final team. Whatever the coaches’ plans ahead of time, the motivational tricks and last minute choices of strategy by the coxswain in the middle of the competition is critical to success:

In short, a good coxswain is a quarterback, a cheerleader, and a coach all in one. He or she is a deep thinker, canny like a fox, inspirational, and in many cases the toughest person in the boat.

Throughout the book we get interludes on the preparation of the Germans for using the Olympics as a great propaganda showcase of Nazi greatness, proof that they were the pinnacle of Western civilization and not monsters. The mastery of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and Minister of Propaganda Goebbels in pulling off this largely successful triumph is highlighted well and placed in contrast with the perspective of the rowing crew of ordinary Americans from average walks of life. They made sure no anti-Jewish signs were visible and underclasses like Gypsies were hustled out of town. Germany won most of the rowing races, but the win by the boys from Washington put a nice dent in their armor. The exciting details of adversities the American rowers had to overcome on the day of the competition awaits your reading pleasure. The black track star Jesse Owens did even more damage to Aryan pride by winning four gold medals (the main character of Hillenbrand’s biography of Louis Zamperini, “Unbroken”, also competed in longer distance races but did not win).

Ultimately, I wanted more about all the book’s main characters and more beyond on the pervasive theme about teamwork and subjection of the self to the sport. But some of that hunger comes from the successful illusion that this is a novel. The writing depended on limited resources, including interviews with Joe at age about 90, the daily logs of Ubrickson, and a biography of Pocock. There is magic in Brown getting me all caught up in the athletic success of long dead young men in a sport I don’t follow. I couldn’t help get a tear in my eye over saying goodbye with the author to the boys from Washington:
I was swept by gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night.

There is footage from the rowing races at the Berlin Olympics on YouTube. This short promotional clip for “The Boys in the Boat” has some closeups of the 9-man rowing team and video spots from their race:
Book trailer.