The Amateurs (18 page)

He had returned to Harvard after the war and instead of rowing lights, he had, at only five-ten and 165 pounds, stroked the Harvard heavies to a very good record, including a victory in Seattle in what stood for more than three decades as a record time for a twelve-boat regatta. A year later, still unsure of what he wanted to do and feeling that he was not measuring up to Cunningham standards, he bummed across the country with a friend and ended up in Seattle where, among the relatively small group of Harvard alumni, his rowing exploits still loomed large. In Seattle, unlike the East, there seemed to be much less in the way of expectations. A few weeks after he arrived, he had been at dinner with some Harvard alumni when someone asked him if he had found a job yet. "No," he had answered, "not yet," but he was about to start looking. "There's no rush, Frank," the man had answered, "take your time. Plenty of time." With that Cunningham knew he had finally found a home and a place where he could breathe.

He started out by coaching the junior rowing program for the city of Seattle; then he coached and taught in the public-school system before moving to Lakeside, a model country day school for the children of the upper middle class, as an English teacher and rowing coach. He was an unusual coach. He promised Lakeside a good and disciplined program and that the kids would be off the water at 5:30 P.M. He did not promise victories. He had no intention of being a coach whose ego was mixed up in whether a group of seventeen-year-olds won or lost. As far as victories went, he had had enough victories at Harvard to last a lifetime. He would teach his athletes to row. The rest was up to them. He did not promise them that rowing would be fun. If it was, so much the better. If parents complained about the lack of intensity (and by and large they did not, for Frank Cunningham was a tough man, one whom parents did not lightly criticize, or at least criticize to his face), he would say that the intensity went into keeping the boathouse clean and repairing the boats. But he had been coached by masters, Tom Bolles and Bert Haines at Harvard (Bert Haines was the lightweight coach, and when the young Cunningham had approached him and asked how to row an important race, Haines had answered, "Frank, get ahead at the start and stay ahead."), and he was ready to pass on his knowledge. Whenever someone would ask him how his boats had done in competition, his standard answer—"We lose more than we win"—was almost gleeful. He did not push his people, but the oarsmen who came out of his program were as good as any in the country.

The relationship between Frank Cunningham and John Biglow was complicated. It was filled with admiration, ambiguity, reservations and dramatically different objectives. Cunningham thought Biglow a remarkable oar but wanted him to be more independent and more complete as a person. Biglow, in turn, talked of Cunningham as a coach who was more concerned with technique and taking care of the boathouse than he was about winning. Lakeside was a school where soccer was as important as football and where rowing was a prestige sport. Not the least of the reasons for its prestige was the fact that many parents wanted their children to go to Ivy League schools, and there was no better Ivy League ticket than rowing

In the fall of his first year at Lakeside, John Biglow had played soccer, and during the winter he had played some squash and in the spring he had thought of rowing, mainly because the people who rowed had standing in the school and were socially pleasant. He did not like it his first year; it was serious, hard work, and Cunningham had seemed to him to be too critical. Besides, there was not enough emphasis on winning, which would at least give some sense of reward for all the work invested. He decided not to row in his sophomore year, and Frank Cunningham did not try to change his mind. As far as Cunningham was concerned, each boy knew what was best for himself. In his sophomore year Biglow played lacrosse, which had been his father's sport at Yale. But lacrosse had seemed too rough to him. If it had been more like women's lacrosse, with additional padding and protection, he might have enjoyed it. That spring, while driving home from school, he had stopped for a moment on a floating bridge. The water was calm, and he was delighted by the serenity of the scene beneath him. Just then a crew had rowed by, and Biglow had experienced such a powerful desire to row that he could feel the rowing motion in his body. The sport had given him far more pleasure than he had ever realized.

So in his junior year he once again went out for crew. Biglow had been an exceptional rower as a freshman, and Cunningham was pleased to have him back, keener than ever. The problem was that the Biglow who returned was, as far as Cunningham was concerned, more of a nuisance than a pleasure. In Cunningham's view, Biglow wanted to intellectualize the sport. He asked endless questions and wanted details and reasons for everything. Some of his curiosity, Cunningham thought, stemmed from deep interest in rowing, and some of it was to set himself apart from the other rowers and gain special attention. There was Biglow constantly asking for explanations, and there was Cunningham telling him, "John, when you do it right, you'll
feel
it." Biglow would again demand an explanation, and Cunningham would say, "Goddamn it, John, just
do
it." Cunningham's irritation came to a head one day in the boathouse when Biglow asked a question about technique.

Cunningham brushed him aside, but Biglow persisted. "Mr. Cunningham, I need to know in order to improve."

It was one time too many. "John," Cunningham had answered, "I just don't care."

"But Mr. Cunningham," Biglow began, "don't you want me to improve ..."

"John," said Cunningham, "your mother wants to see you improve. Your father wants to see you improve. But me, I just don't give a good goddamn . . ."

But Cunningham was also aware that John Biglow might become an outstanding oarsman. He was eminently teachable, and he had the one critical quality required of any serious oarsman. He was, in Cunningham's phrase, "an obsessive-compulsive," and all good oarsmen had to commit more to this sport than it was actually worth. In addition, John Biglow had high athletic intelligence, a sense of the sport and a certain daring. In a race during his junior year, the crew had gone out very high and after several hundred yards were down a length. At that point Biglow had brought the stroke down four notches. It was an unusual move, something that almost no other seventeen-year-old would have been willing to risk. The response of almost every other stroke would have been to send the stroke higher, or go for power tens. Instead, Biglow had steadied his boat, allowed it to find its tempo, and the Lakeside boat had come together, catching even and then surging ahead. He had been ecstatic after the race. "Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Cunningham," he had shouted, "it worked! It worked!"

Cunningham had no idea how far Biglow would go, but there were signs the next year, when Biglow stroked the varsity. He was more serious about rowing than some of the others and determined that high standards of seriousness should prevail. He was angry when the others did not concentrate or care as much as he did. One day when there was too much talking behind him, he told one of the oarsmen that if he talked about anything other than rowing, he, John Biglow, was going to throw the offender in the water. When the warning was not heeded and the boat came back to the boathouse, Biglow did indeed throw the oarsman in the water and then, just for good measure, jumped in himself, perhaps to show that going in the water was not so bad a fate and perhaps to prevent anyone else from throwing him in.

His relationship with Cunningham remained one of mutual admiration mixed with mutual grievance. Part of the reason may have been that John, because of the tensions with his father, always wanted his coaches to play a larger role in his life than they really could. In subtle ways he expressed his belief that Cunningham both demanded too much and did not push the crew enough or place enough emphasis on winning. On Cunningham's side, there was a belief, also expressed in subtle ways, that John had not yet grown up and used his unusual sensitivity to manipulate people to get what he wanted. It appeared that he would go to Yale, which had shown interest in him. Compared to recruiting for sports such as football and basketball, Yale's courtship was mild, a few phone calls from a freshman coach and a few letters. But it was recruiting nonetheless.

That summer he worked out in a pair with a Lakeside friend named Paul Most. Biglow's mother later referred to it as the summer he rowed, ate, slept and went out rowing again. Their training was serious. After shopping around for advice, they gradually put together a schedule. For the first time Biglow pushed himself to reach for extra power, to punish himself at a level far greater than in the past. He and Most decided they wanted to enter some kind of regatta, but all the regattas were back East. Finally they selected the national championships, which were in Philadelphia that summer. Their headmaster knew the Penn crew coach, Ted Nash, and he arranged for them to use a boat. They entered the intermediate category, which, Biglow later learned, was a mistake. They were good enough to enter the elite. They rowed very well and came in second. Biglow was surprised at how easy it had been, and he was annoyed after the race that Most, his bowman, had not told him there was one boat still ahead of them. They might have won the whole thing. For the first time, Biglow sensed what he might be able to do in rowing.

Yale was supposed to be inevitable for a Biglow. His brother Lucius had applied and received an unlikely, which meant that there was only a 1 percent chance that he would be admitted. But his father had pulled strings, and Lucius had been let in. Yale had not been a pleasant experience for him. The bright people seemed too bright, and the athletes were better than he was; later he transferred to Boston University. John, therefore, had been wary of following the family footsteps to Yale. He applied there dutifully, but he intended to go to Williams. But he failed to get into Williams, and the only two schools that accepted him were the University of Washington and Yale. He did not want to stay at home; Yale, therefore, it would be.

When he entered Yale, he was torn between going out for soccer and rowing. He was unsure of himself academically and socially, and he knew that he wanted to be part of something that gave him a sense of self and a sense of belonging. When he turned to his brother for advice, Luke Biglow asked him what he wanted out of athletics. John Biglow's answer was odd for someone contemplating rowing: He wanted fun. "In that case," said Luke, "you probably ought to try rowing—they seem to have a lot of camaraderie."

John rowed on the first Yale freshman crew to beat Harvard in thirteen years, but even then he was not sure he was ready to make a full commitment. He was also in a singing group, and he liked singing and had a good voice. In the end he decided his rowing friendships were more important than his singing friendships. Because the oarsmen all had to sacrifice so much for the sport, their relationships with each other were far more intense.

The commitment to rowing, once made, was complete. He held back nothing. The Yale program had been in disarray since the early 1960s. When John Biglow entered Yale in the fall of 1976, Harvard had won the annual four-mile race every year since 1963 and had dominated almost all of eastern rowing as well. Yale rowing had become a backwater, and an aura of defeat hung about the boathouse. In the early 1970s, the Yale coaches had a hard time even putting together a second heavyweight freshman crew. In rowing, it was traditional for the losers to give their rowing shirts to the winners. The customary Yale rowing shirt was fancy and by no means inexpensive, blue with white trim and a satin sash. So many of these shirts had been given away that by the 1970s the school had started sending its young men out in simple blue T-shirts. But in 1975, the nucleus of some very good Yale crews began to assemble.

The next year Steve Kiesling, Dave Potter and Eric Stephens, as well as Biglow, were added. From the start there was no doubt that Biglow's was an exceptional presence. But he was often difficult, even for those who liked him. He insisted on calling Tony Johnson "Mister Tony," as if he were a little boy at summer camp talking to the head counselor. ("What are we going to do today, Mr. Tony?" he would ask, and Johnson would that they were going to do 3-minute pieces. "Will it be hard on us, Mr. Tony?" he would ask. Johnson would answer that yes, indeed, it might very well be hard. "Will it be hard on you, Mr. Tony?" he would ask. Johnson said that no, he was going to coach so it would not be very hard on him.)

Johnson handled Biglow with great skill. He did not challenge Biglow, and he did not make his games seem more serious than they were. Johnson realized he had a superb and dedicated athlete who was reflecting ambivalence about who and where he was by playing games. But on important things—training, discipline, concentration—no corners were cut. Biglow never cheated. If anything, he was an enforcer who helped the coach. Biglow himself was not only a great oar but he also pushed others, by his skills and by the fact that such extraordinary ergometer scores came from so modest a body, to be better. Mildly irritating and abrasive he might be, but no one doubted his seriousness as an athlete or his desire to compete. Whether he chose to grow up in other areas was his own business.

Johnson did not force confrontation, and he accepted Biglow at face value. If Biglow came down to the boathouse before breakfast and asked too many questions, Johnson usually did not cut him off. But one day Biglow asked too many questions, and Johnson turned to him and said, "John, we have thirty people on this squad. If I answer a lot of questions from all of them, I won't have time for anything else. So you can ask only one question." Biglow asked his question, looking very much like a little boy. Afterward, there was a long silence. Then Biglow, his face a little sheepish, asked, "Mister Tony, do you think it's all right if I ask one for Dave Potter, too?" On another occasion, during a long and exhausting early-spring workout in Florida, John Biglow looked up from his oar, pointed to a bird and asked, "What kind of bird is that, Mr. Tony?" The next day Tony Johnson had a bird watcher's guide with him in the launch and dutifully tried to figure out which bird was which. Later, as they all walked past the University of Tampa library, Johnson noticed a large number of unusual birds. "Do you know what those are, John?" he asked. "No," Biglow said. "John," said Johnson, who had been studying the guidebook the night before, "those are yellow-crowned night herons." He took the guidebook and handed it to Biglow. He was terribly pleased with himself.