Through the first four fifths of this book I was convinced I would not write about it or, if I did, I would do so from the perspective of the limitations of writing a historical novelization of someone else's life in terms of portraying the internal workings of the mind. But something happened near the end of the book - a subtle shift that revolved around two short sentences. While I will still intend to write about the limitations that this perspective introduces, I think I may have a better sense of why this particular book has turned into a best seller. Something universal seems to have been described about Joe Rantz, the central protagonist, in the sentences, "Now he felt whole. He was ready to go home."
Joe had a lot of hard knocks as a kid and then joined the eight man crew (nine if you count the coxswain) for the University of Washington who, in 1936, not only beat Cal Berkeley, the reigning West Coast crew power, but every elite crew in the East and went on to win the Olympic Gold medal in the Berlin Games. So a lot of the book can be seen as setting the historical scene for this powerful victory - one that is, in some ways, as stirring and as filled with intrigue as Jesse Owens' victories in the same Olympics. And the author does a very nice job of setting the stage for the propaganda fest that the 1936 Olympics was, and the ways in which the world was duped by Hitler's literal and figurative whitewashing of what was going on in Germany. He even clarifies how the U.S.'s own Avery Brundage (the head of the American Olympic committee for a very long time) witlessly colluded in Hitler's double speak based on Avery and his class's own ingrained double speak to manage their disavowed but very real anti- Semitism.
This parallel, by the way, is, I think, a missed opportunity for the author. He chose to emphasize, in what I thought were pretty anemic ways, the differences between our system and the Nazis and made an attempt to portray this as a victory for democracy or the American way over totalitarianism. But to get there, he had to overlook a great deal of classism that the group overcame and, interestingly, a great deal of privilege that came their way as well. Even Joe, with all the hard luck that he had, had opportunities that a person of color, for instance, could not have had. More subtly, the author notes in passing but neither explains nor emphasizes that the definition of amateur, which we came to think of as a noble distinction from the professional athlete, was intended to protect the gentleman athlete from having to compete with the working class person who, for instance, rowed for a living - it would be unfair for someone like that to compete with a gentleman of leisure! Our educational system did allow people like Joe and Jesse to compete with aristocrats, but our educational system was and is aristocratic in addition to being meritocratic, and our system protected every one of the boys in the boat from becoming cannon fodder in the Second World War - their skills, learned at the University - were needed behind the lines. I don't want to belabor this further, but the author was portraying a more complicated world than his summary would indicate and evil was not confined to Nazi Germany; it was and is among and within us every day.
The book, though, takes a very long time to build to its Olympic crescendo as it paints the picture of Joe- a cast off kid, the second son of his father's first marriage who is sent to live with relatives when his father remarries Joe's older brother's wife's twin sister (you might want to read that again) - a prima donna who cares only marginally more for her own children than for her stepson. Joe moves back with his Dad and stepmother and his half siblings after being shuffled around, only to be left totally on his own at the age of 14 when his Dad and Stepmother drive off with her children and he is left on the porch of their farmhouse to fend for himself. So Joe becomes, effectively, an orphan. He lives on his own on the farm the family abandoned, raising food, foraging for timber and generally fending for himself through High School, and then being admitted to the University of Washington, where he did janitorial work during the school year and outdoors work during the summer to support going to school and sleeping in a cubicle at the YMCA during the winter.
At Washington, which he saved for by working for a year after High School, Joe tried out for crew. His motivation for doing this is unclear. The author initially states that he believes that he will get cushy or higher paying summer jobs as a result of this. There is no evidence that this happens. I think that the competition, if it was not what drew him in the first place, is what kept him. He liked hard work. I think he also liked the structure and the pecking order - he found out where he stood on a regular basis and, by working hard, he could improve on his lot. But he was a funky crew member. His stroke was never quite right - he was dropped from the boat a number of times, but each time he was replaced by someone who the coach thought would do better, the boat's times went down. He wasn't the right guy, at least not yet, but he had something - in spite of his technique - that was of value.
The crew coach was a dour, driven former champion. Terse and reserved, he used a stopwatch and a keen eye to build a team. The wild card, though, is that the UW boats - indeed essentially all of the boats competing in the US - were being built upstairs in the UW boathouse. And they were built by a zen like figure who observed and commented on the team, and who was assigned to figure out Joe. This somewhat enigmatic figure, a poetic writer whose epigrams grace most every chapter heading, George Pocock, was a displaced Brit who blended the shorter stroke of those working class taxi rowers who were disallowed from the Olympics with a love for the centuries old cedars that he discovered in the Northwest. Pocock built the boats using this wood that had a certain tension in it that allowed the boats to come alive, but also watched the boys and, as he worked with Joe, was able to find a particular kind of life within him as well.
This book is written as if the author hopes it will be turned into a movie. Despite having access to Joe, near the end of his life as he lay dying in hospice, and lots of access to Joe's daughter, who had heard Joe's stories across the years, there is remarkably little about the inner life of Joe or the other characters. The author is relying on historical sources - rowing was the first collegiate sport and was - in the thirties - as big a deal as college football would become - there were 100,000 spectators for some of the regattas and coast to coast broadcasting. The newspapers reported on the progress of the crew in morning and evening editions, despite the fact that there were really only two competitions during the year - there was a lot of speculation, with not just coaches but newspapermen holding stopwatches in their hands as the teams prepared and regular interviews of the coaches - who didn't want to give anything away to the other teams. So the book holds the attention of the readers through a description of the boats, of the crews, of the coaches, of the weather, and of the techniques of racing and it is this last little bit that opens the door to the psychological.
Pocock described to the crew, and the author describes to us what it means when a crew is functioning together - when something called "swing" occurs. In this moment, the crew is acting as one, and the experience is uncanny - beyond rowing - it is divine. Pocock uses this goal, something that the phenomenological psychologists like Abraham Maslow characterized as a peak experience, as a carrot to help Joe move away from a position of being defended to the point of isolation. Pocock told this boy who had by necessity come to be incredibly self reliant, "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." He then went on to say, "When you really start trusting those other 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."
The transcendent experience that Pocock describes is one that Joe is able to work towards and experience, in spite of his history. In ways that are merely described, he is able to carry this far beyond his experience in the boat, as he becomes a generative son - reconnecting with his father after his stepmother dies - husband, and father of five children. As I was preparing to write this section, I received a piece of writing from a friend that described the complexities of psychotherapy - especially the kind of psychotherapy that a therapist should endure. Joe's therapeutic interaction with Pocock is much simpler - almost cinematically so - but it does capture the essence of what a good psychotherapy should do - it should allow, through the means of a personal interaction, a person who has become separated from him or her self and others, to reconnect and to move forward with the complicated business of living. Ideally this should be able to take place with at least a little bit of joy.
I think the interaction between Pocock and Joe illustrates another important element of treatment - many of the best treatments take place outside of the psychoanalyst's consulting room - they take place between a parent and a child or a teacher and a student or between a coach and a player. And I am concerned, then, that my State - and others I assume - is moving away from teaching team sports in Gym - in favor of teaching students how to get fit - to use rowing machines (something the dour coach deplored) and treadmills as opposed to teaching rowing and running (and I won't even rail against texting instead of writing and conversing). I withdrew from sports in High School - I was engaged in other things, but also afraid that I did not have the "right stuff". While my stuff might not have propelled me or my team to the Olympics, it might have given me moments of swing, and an interaction or two with a coach might have saved a year on the couch! It might, as it did for Joe, have helped me feel whole.
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