It’s a great art, is rowing. It’s the finest art there is. It’s a symphony of motion. And when you’re rowing well, why it’s nearing perfection. And when you near perfection, you’re touching the Divine. It touches the you of yous. Which is your soul.
On November 25, 2006, thirty-five-year-old James Kim and his wife, Kati, and their two daughters found themselves snowbound in their Saab station wagon after making a wrong turn onto a logging road in Oregon’s Coast Range.
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 up 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.
It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead.
One of the first admonitions of a good rowing coach, after the fundamentals are over, is “pull your own weight,” and the young oarsman does just that when he finds out that the boat goes better when he does. There is certainly a social implication here. – George Yeoman Pocock.
Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History.
It isn’t enough for the muscles of a crew to work in unison; their hearts and minds must also be as one. – George Yeoman Pocock.
They are almost all gone now – the legions of young men who saved the world in the years just before I was born. But that afternoon, standing on the balcony of Haus West, I was swept with 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.
Men as fit as you, when your everyday strength is gone, can draw on a mysterious reservoir of power far greater. Then it is that you can reach for the stars. That is the way champions are made. – George Yeoman Pocock O.
Others dangled cigarettes from their lips, and as they paged through the day’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer they could take satisfaction in a half-page ad that trumpeted the latest proof of the health benefits of smoking: “21 of 23 Giants World’s Champions Smoke Camels. It Takes Healthy Nerves to Win the World Series.
In the end, though, Joe Louis would have the last laugh. He would indeed fight Max Schmeling again, two years later, and Schmeling would last all of two minutes and four seconds before his corner threw in the towel. Joe Louis would reign as heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1949, long after Joseph Goebbels’s charred body had been pulled out of the smoldering rubble of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and laid next to those of Magda and their children.
And when you near perfection, you’re touching the Divine. It touches the you of yous.
Before all was said and done, she would, in fact, become the woman in Germany who more than any other would materially shape the destiny of the Nazi movement. Leni Riefenstahl was beautiful and brilliant. She knew what she wanted and how to get it. And what she wanted above all was to be at the center of things, in the spotlight, basking in applause.
Eight bare backs swung forward and backward in perfect unison. Eight white blades dipped in and out of the mirrorlike water at precisely the same instant. Each time the blades entered the lake, they disappeared almost without a splash or ripple. Each time the blades rose from it, the boat ghosted forward without check of hesitation.
They were having a hard time walking normally now, staggering as if drunk at times and needing to stop to rest every quarter of a mile or so.
Rowing is like a beautiful duck. On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s paddling like mad!
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.
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.
In the fireplace, nestled among the ashes, a large cast-iron Dutch oven stood always at the ready. It was a vessel from which Sarah had likely served and eaten a thousand meals. For as long as she could remember, it had served for uses as varied as stewing venison, baking salt-rising bread, and soaking her father’s frostbitten feet on winter nights.
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.
George Orwell wrote, “Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.