Well, this book
„No didactic teaching will place these
values in a young man’s soul. He has to get them by his own observations and
lessons.” (Brown quoting Pocock, 2013, p.7).
“The university, and rowing, had made him
(Al Ulbrickson, the coach) who he was. Now they were almost a religion to him.
His job was to win converts.” (Brown, 2013, p.16).
“The common denominator in all these
conditions – whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones – is overwhelming
pain. (…) pain is part and parcel of the deal. It’s not a question of whether
you will be hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you
will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.”
(Brown, 2013, p.40).
“to make sure the boys weren’t
overtraining and dropping below their optimal weight.” (Brown, 2013, p.41).
“Look, Son, if there’s one thing I’ve
figured out about life, it’s that if you want to be happy, you have to learn to
be happy on your own.” (Brown, 2013, p.58).
“And they pulled with all their hearts.
When horses pulled like that, Charlie told Joe, they could pull far more than
twice what each could pull alone. They’d pull, he said, till the log moved, the
harness borke, or their hearts gave out.” (Brown, 2013, p.63).
“Anxiety, self-doubt, and bickering replaced
that night’s buoyant optimism as Bolles (coach) scrutinized each of them anew
trying to figure out who to keep in the boat and who to demote.” (Brown, 2013,
p.84).
mind in boat: “from the time an oarsman
steps into a racing shell until the moment that the boat crosses the finish
line, he must keep his eyes focused on what is happening inside the boat. His
whole world must shrink down to the small space within the gunwales. He must
maintain a singular focus in the rower just ahead of him and the voice of the
coxswain calling out commands.” (Brown, 2013, p.90).
“As the California boat fell into the
field of view of the Washington boys, their confidence surged. The pain that
had been building in their arms and legs and chests did not abate, but it fled
to the backs of their minds, chased there by a sense, almost, of
invulnerability.” (Brown, 2013, p.98).
About being left by his father: “”I just
don’t understand why you don’t get angry.” Joe continued to stare ahead through
the windshield. “It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t
waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took
everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused.” (Brown,
2013, p.134).
“The brutal afternoon workouts left him
exhausted and sore but feeling cleansed, as if someone had scrubbed out his
osul with a stiff wire brush.” (Brown, 2013, p.135).
On the racing shell: “Looked at another
way, it is a work of art, an expression of the human spirit, with its unbounded
hunger for the ideal, for beauty, for purity, for grace.” (Brown, 2013, p.136).
“After all he had been through, it was
obvious that he still remained utterly disposable, even at the crew house, the
one place he had started to feel more or less at home.” (Brown, 2013, p.155).
“There were too many days when they rowed
not as crews but as boatfuls of individuals. The more he scolded them for
personal technical issues, even as he preached teamsmanship, the more the boys
seemed to sink into their own separate and sometimes defiant little worlds.”
(Brown, 2013, p.158).
“Many crews, even winning crews, never
really find it. Others find it but can’t sustain it, It’s called “swing”. It
only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing in such perfect unison that no
single action by any one is out of synch with those of all the others. (…) Only
then will the boat continue to run, unchecked, fluidlyand gracefully between
the pull of the oars. Only then will it feel as if the boat is a part of each
of them, moving as if on its own.” (Brown, 2013, p.161). And if you try to pull
harder, you will destroy it. Everyone should only pull at 90%. The boat will
life 1-2 cm out of the water.
“Occasionally the sophomores won, but
usually they lost. They rowed well when left on their own, but the moment they
got a glimpse of the older boys they fell apart completely. Months of taunting
had gotten under their skins.” (Brown, 2013, p.177).
“At the same time, the exertion required
to maintain a high rate makes the physical pain all the more devastating and
therefore the likelihood of a miscue greater. In this sense, speed is both the
rower’s ultimate goal and also his greatest foe. (…) “Rowing is like a
beautiful duck. On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s
paddling like mad.”” (Brown, 2013, p.178).
“Even as rowers must subsume their often
fierce sense of independence and self-reliance, at the same time they must hold
true to their individuality, their unique capabilities as oarsmen and oarswomen
or, for that matter, as human beings.” (Brown, 2013, p.178).“Each must be
prepared to compromise something in the way of optimizing his stroke for the
overall benefit of the boat – the shorter-armed man reaching a little farther,
the longer-armed man foreshortening his reach just a bit.” (Brown, 2013,
p.179).
“And capitalizing on diversity is perhaps
even more important when it comes to the characters of the oarsmen. A crew
composed entirely of eight amped-up, overtly aggressive oarsmen will often
degenerate into a dysfunctional brawl in a boat or exhaust itself in the first
leg of a long race. (…) Good crews are good belnds 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.” (Brown, 2013, p.179).
“It is an exquisite thing when it all
comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of
exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than
for trophies or accolades.” (Brown, 2013, p.180).
“Demoted and promoted and demoted again,
he’d start to think of himself as a kind of yo-yo in the hand of the coaches,
or the Fates, he wasn’t sure which – up one minute, down the next. The sense of
purpose crew gave him brought with it the constant danger of failing and
thereby losing the precious but fragile pride that his early successes had
brought him.” (Brown, 2013, p.196).
“He said for him the craft of building a
boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it.
You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely
to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat you had to feel that
you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He
turned to Joe. “Rowing,” he said, “is like that. And a lot of life is like that
too, the parts that really matter anyway.” (Brown, 2013, p.215).
“One afternoon he asked Joe how he came
to be there, at the shell house. It was a big question asked in a small way,
Joe realized. (…) “Why do you row?” “What do you hope to get out of it, Joe?””
(Brown, 2013, p.219).
“When you get the rhythm in an eight,
it’s pure pleasure to be in it. It’s not hard work when the rhythm comes – that
“swing” as they call it. I’ve heard men shriek with delight when that swing
came in an eight; it’s a thing they’ll never forget as long as they live.”
(Brown, 2013, p.229).
“He wanted to spend the first few weeks
working on the fundamentals. “As a general rule,” he said, “men are in a more
receptive mood for pointers when working with familiar teammates.” (Brown,
2013, p.229).
“He told Joe that there were times when
he seemed to think he was the only fellow in the boat, as if it was up to him
to row the boat across the finish line all by himself. When a man rowed like
that, he said, he was bound to attack the water rather than work with it, and
worse, he was bound not to let his crew help him row.
He suggested that Joe think of a
well-rowed race as a symphony, and himself as just one player in the orchestra.
If one fellow in an orchestra was playing out of tune, or playing at a
different tempo, the whole piece would naturally be ruined. That’s the way it
was with rowing. (…) And a man couldn’t harmonize with his crewmates unless he
opened his heart to them. He had to care about his crew. It wasn’t just the
rowing but his crewmates that he had to give himself up to, even if it meant
getting his feelings hurt.
Pocock paused and looked at Joe. “If you
don’t like some fellow in the boat, Joe, you have to learn to like him. It has
to matter to you whether he wins the race, not just whether you do.” (Brown,
2013, p.235).
“”Joe, when you really start trusting
those boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond
anything you’ve ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed
right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.” (Brown, 2013, p.235).
“He
liked these boys. He didn’t know Gordy Adam and Don Hume well, but both made a
point in welcoming him aboard.” (Brown, 2013, p.239).
“giving himself up to the crew’s effort
entirely, rowing as if he were an extension of the man in front of him and the
man behind him.” (Brown, 2013, p.240).“the transformation wasn’t so much that
he was trying to do what Pocock had said as that this was a bunch of boys with
whom he could do it.” (Brown, 2013, p.240).
“All were merged into one smoothly
working machine; they were, in fact, a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging
blades.” (Brown, 2013, p.249).
“To be of championship calibre, a crew
must have total confidence in each other, able to drive with abandon, confident
that no man will get the full weight of the pull.” (Brown quoting Pokock, 2013,
p.251).
“The boat began to swing. The bow began
to rise out of the water.” (Brown, 2013, p.270).
“”I
never expect to see a better rowed race.” Then he stepped down. Nobody cheered.
Nobody stood up and applauded. Everyone just sat, silently soaking in the
moment.” (Brown, 2013, p.273).
“All of Seattle – and much of the rest of
the country – would be listening. There would be no place to hide if the boys
didn’t come through for him.” (Brown, 2013, p.280).
“All
along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been
added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of
the sport, and he still tended to row erratically. But what Joe didn’t yet know
– what he wouldn’t, in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the
other boys were becoming old men – was that every boy in the boat felt exactly
the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be
rowing in the boat, that he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of
them was fiercely determined not to let that happen.” (Brown, 2013, p.326).
“Al Ubrickson did what he always did
before big races: he backed off the training.” (Brown, 2013, p.327).
“rowing slow and low, limbering up,
enjoying the in and out of their breathing, the synchronized flexing and
relaxing of their muscles. The boat felt easy under them, sleek and lithe.
Anxiety had bubbled up in Joe’s belly all
morning, but it started now to give way to a tenuous sense of calm, more
determined than nervous.” (Brown, 2013, p.340).
“boat and men forged together, bounding
fiercely forward like a living thing.
Then they rowed into a world of
confusion. They were in full sprint mode, ratheting the stroke rate up toward
forty, when they hit a wall of sound.” (Brown, 2013, p.348).
“and knew that somehow the boys had to go
even higher, give even more than they were giving, even as he knew they were
already giving everything they had.” (Brown, 2013, p.349).
“Someone
whispered, “Who won?” Roger Morris croaked, “Well … we did … I think.” (Brown,
2013, p.350).
“Where is the spiritual value of rowing?
… The losing of self entirely to the cooperative effort of the crew as a
whole.” (Brown quoting Pocock, 2013, p.353).
“He had spent much of the night simply
staring at his gold medal, contemplating it as it hung on the end of his bunk.
As much as he had wanted it, and as much as he understood what it would mean to
everyone back home and to the rest of the world, during the night he had come
to realize that the medal wasn’t the most important thing he would take home
from Germany.” (Brown, 2013, p.355).
“there
was nothing more he could do to win the race, beyond what he was already doing.
Except for one thing. He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely
without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him
would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they
needed to do it. He had known in that instant that there could be no
hesitation, no shred of indecision. He had no choice but to throw himself into
each stroke as if he were throwing himself off of a cliff into a void, with
unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him from catching the
whole weight of the shell on his blade. And he had done it. Over and over,
forty-four times per minute, he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not
just believing but knowing that the other boys would be there for him, all of
them, moment by precious moment.
In
the white-hot emotional furnace of those final meters at Grünau, Joe and the
boys had finally forged the prize they had sought all season, the prize Joe had
sought nearly all his life.
Now
he felt whole. He was ready to go home.” (Brown, 2013, p.355).
“Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re
the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization
is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can
fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.” (Brown, 2013,
p.357).
“in four years of college rowing, each of
them had rowed approximately 4,344 miles, far enough to take him from Seattly
to Japan. Along the way, each had taken roughly 469,000 strokes with his oar,
all in preparation for only 28 miles of actual collegiate racing.” (Brown,
2013, p.359).
