The Amateurs (5 page)

As he had got older, he had worked harder than most young men at trying to come to some level of self-knowledge, carefully examining his behavior and his eruptions of temper. When he was at Yale and in the years since, he liked to get others to talk openly about why they rowed and what they really thought. Such soul searching did not endear him to many of his peers. Some were made uneasy by his attempt to understand their behavior (Biglow's encounter sessions, they called them); and others worried that if the answers were known, they might lose some of the athletic drive that had propelled them thus far. All of this added to his reputation of being different. What had happened, of course, was that he had taken his social awkwardness and turned it around for protection.

Though John Biglow was unusually candid with his peers in talking about himself, he kept his learning disability a secret while at college. Thus his friends could never entirely understand him, for a piece was always missing. The debate about him that had raged during his entire four years at Yale still continued: Was he a hick pretending to be a sophisticate, or was he a sophisticate pretending to be a hick? Was he an idiot or a genius? Some of his friends and coaches thought of him as a man-child, others as a kind of child-man. He seemed sometimes completely without guile, and in the next moment, all guile. Tiff Wood once defined his manner as "artificial innocence." Part of him was as sweet and innocent as Holden Caulfield, but the part of him that was an athlete was a pure killer.

He was a Yale graduate on his way to Dartmouth Medical School, yet he did not seem like a young Ivy League prince. If at times he appeared inarticulate and ill-informed, at certain moments he could become exceptionally articulate, making it abundantly clear that he paid attention to
everything
with an almost cold-blooded eye. Yet a moment later he would revert to being the innocent hick again, wanting to know everything, wanting to be helped.

Between his innocence—whether feigned or real—and his willingness to ask astonishingly personal questions of virtual strangers, he often came up with a great deal of information. By putting the burden of the conversation on the other person, Biglow often found out far more about others than he revealed about himself. He had a special talent for keeping others off balance, of asking embarrassing questions to which he already knew the answer, in order to watch the response.

His manner made the older Yale oarsmen wary of him. The superlative athlete was supposed to be the athlete-cool or the athlete-passionate. But who ever heard of athlete-hick or athlete-innocent? What frustrated some of his Yale teammates was their knowledge that with his ability, his looks and his background he could so easily be like the rest of them but for some odd reason he willed himself to be different.

Because he had been socially awkward as a boy, he had sought friendship through rowing; and when he defined what he loved most about rowing, his was an unusual description. When most oarsmen talked about their perfect moments in a boat, they referred not so much to winning a race but to the feel of the boat, all eight oars in the water together, the synchronization almost perfect. In moments like that, the boat seemed to lift right out of the water. Oarsmen called that the moment of
swing.
John Biglow loved that moment, too, but he spoke of it in an interesting manner. What he liked most about it, he said, was that it allowed you to
trust
the other men in the boat. A boat did not have swing unless everyone was putting out in exact measure, and because of that, and only because of that, there was the possibility of true trust among the oarsmen. That meant that as a young Yale oarsman he might well be seeking different rewards than most of his teammates were.

Even his style of rowing, influenced by the University of Washington crews, was different. To eastern eyes it appeared much rougher and included a small backsplash at the catch when he drove his oar. As a freshman, Biglow had had an argument with Ed Chandler about it. Chandler, who had rowed at Exeter, insisted that the backsplash was a sign the boat was being checked, its progress impeded. They took the argument to Congram. Chandler had rarely been so sure of anything. "Well, actually," said Congram, "John is right." Chandler was stunned. He walked down to the boathouse and saw some of his friends. "You won't believe this," he said, "but I've just lost an argument on technique to
Biglow."

Soon the eastern oarsmen decided that he might have a good technique but that he wasn't really pulling hard. The tipoff on this, they decided, was that the puddles left by his oars were not particularly large. Mike Ives, another of the prep-school oarsmen, had looked at Biglow's smooth stroke and small puddles and had said,
"He's not pulling.''''
That meant his stroke was all finesse and no muscle. No wonder, then, his technique seemed so good. That contention had ended one day during the winter when the oarsmen measured their scores on the ergometer, a particularly cruel machine that simulated a race on the water; it tested strength and endurance, and it left even the biggest and strongest men gasping for breath when they got off it.

Because everyone knew everyone else's erg scores and measured a fellow rower by them, erg day was a day of judgment. Most of the oarsmen signed up as late as they could, so that the other scores would be posted by the time they took their turn. For men like Steve Kiesling and Eric Stevens, big and strong, who had never rowed before Yale, this was a wonderful day, for the erg allowed them to go out and bust a machine without worrying about technique. Each oarsman was to row for 10 minutes. Dan Goldberg, the freshman coxswain, was monitoring the machine, checking the scores so that Congram would have not just the final score but also the splits, what an oarsman did at each increment of time. Some of the other oarsmen asked him to goad them, to push them a little harder. Biglow wanted none of that. "I don't want you to say anything to me," he said, "except to give me my stroke rating every minute. Do not say anything else." All the other oarsmen had gone out as hard and as high as they could, and then predictably they had tailed off in the final minutes. Biglow did not go out hard, but he went out very smoothly. His splits were consistent, and with about half of the test done he was only a little behind the best scores. It was, thought Goldberg, the most methodical performance he had seen so far. Then Biglow's splits began to go up, higher and higher. This was his sprint, he was finishing strongly, and he had timed his energy to the scale of the test almost perfectly. His score was 10 percent higher than that of anyone else. It was an astonishing performance. While all the other top oarsmen had more or less collapsed over their machine at the end, Biglow had gotten up as quietly and calmly as he could and then casually walked away from the machine as if he had been doing nothing more strenuous than reading a newspaper. His scores had been so high, his lack of physical grief so remarkable that Goldberg and some of the other oarsmen immediately checked to see if the machine had been broken. Could this freshman of only modest rowing size (Biglow was six-three and weighed perhaps 185 pounds; a truly big oarsmen was closer to six-five and 215 pounds) have pulled these scores, which were not only higher than all the other freshman scores but also higher than the scores posted by the strongest men on the varsity?

But even the ergometer scores heightened the sense that something about him was not quite right. Anyone intelligent would in some manner or another manage to give more signs of distress. No brain, no pain, his detractors said of him with a certain cruelty, and he was very much aware of what they said. Soon stories spread that his board scores on the SAT admission tests had been unusually low. He became known as a machine. Joe Bouscaren, his friend and competitor, also called him a machine, but in a different sense. "He's an aerobic machine," Bouscaren had said. Biglow knew they were saying this about him, and in a way he resented it. He felt the pain; it was, however, something he had come to terms with, a requisite part of his attaining his goal in rowing.

In truth Biglow was a perfectionist about both himself and everyone around him. In his freshman year he could not stand to be near the six-four Kiesling. The aversion was not personal. It was simply that Kiesling had never rowed before and therefore, however powerful he might be, he was also crude and lacked finesse. In a sport so demanding of technique, this lack of skill enraged Biglow. If the people in the boat behind him were talking or not paying attention, he would turn and scream at them. Goldberg, the cox, would try to mediate between Biglow and the others. On the day of their freshman race against Harvard, there was an unusually strong wind. Just before the race was to begin, Biglow started whispering instructions to the others on how to deal with the rough water, seemingly unaware that everyone was already wound tight. Goldberg could sense the storm coming, and it came, "John," said Kiesling, "why don't you mind your own damned business and row your own damned race."

If many of the other oarsmen were governed by the culture of class, albeit a class that rowed, Biglow was governed by a profound sense of the ethics of crew. It was as if frustrated by the real world he sought in the world of crew a purer, more ethical universe. He and Goldberg had a tempestuous relationship; they irritated each other at first, and it took them a long time to become friends. Goldberg had been a boxer in high school in Iowa, and he was as new to the ethics of rowing as he was to the culture of class. He had heard that part of the job of a coxswain was to provoke and push the rowers. He had done that in the beginning, trying to push them at the end of the race by screaming at them,
"How much do you want it? How much do you want it?"
The former football players who were rowing for the first time liked these exhortations, which fitted the way their high-school coaches had pushed them. But Biglow hated them. "Don't ever say that to me again," he had told Goldberg. "It is never a question of that. Never." For Goldberg it was his first lesson in the code of oarsmen: Whatever else, if they were not doing well, it was not because they did not want something badly enough. The pain was such a given that all oarsmen who competed deserved never to be questioned.

There were many different parts of the code: Every race was as much a race against yourself as it was against opponents. Crew was always imperfect; no matter how good your crew, you were bound to lose, if not a race, then the ephemeral feeling of swing, when a boat was moving perfectly. Because currents, tides and winds made times largely meaningless, it was a sport in which records had no value. A runner might know that he had bettered the time of those who went before him. The oarsman in a boat that had won every race would always wonder if his boat was better than one that was comparably victorious six years earlier. The only clue that his boat was probably faster came from other sports, for swimmers and runners were systematically improving on the records set by their predecessors. But there was no empirical evidence. Therefore, humility became part of the code: You did not boast of what you would do or had done, nor did you embarrass a loser. Because your adversaries had subjected themselves to virtually the same regimen that you did, you respected them as much as you respected yourself. Biglow hated the moment in his sophomore year when Yale won the Eastern Sprints and some of the Yale rowers held up their fingers as if they were number one; he hated it even more a year later when some of the Yale sophomores had taunted the Harvard boat. "The sophomores are good," he said later of that race, "but they haven't learned the humility of crew yet."

Tony Johnson, the varsity coach, was, like Goldberg, struck by the intensity of Biglow's belief in the code. Winning was important, but competing at a high level was equally important. John's favorite race, Johnson sometimes thought, was not a race he had won but the Eastern Sprints in his freshman year. Yale had come in third in a race won by Penn and in which a half second separated the first three boats. In conversations with Johnson, Biglow was always coming back to what a great race it had been. Johnson was also struck by the fact that Biglow was exceptionally sensitive to any possible denigration of another crew. He hated to see people judged negatively because they had not rowed well. Once Biglow and Johnson had stood watching a regatta, and Johnson had made some idle comment about how badly one of the crews had rowed. Biglow had been offended and had challenged him immediately. "John," said Johnson, "I didn't say they were bad people. I simply said they rowed very poorly."

His daily manner belied the intensity of his drive to win. Most highly competitive athletes give off a tangible scent of their ego and drive; it is impossible to be around them without feeling their ambition or watching them stake out territory. By contrast, Biglow seemed more like a child of the counterculture seeking a little more nurturing than like a rival who would pay almost any price to win in a particularly demanding sport. His competitiveness, thought Kiesling, showed much more in defeat than in victory. In victory he was able to retain the mask of innocence; in defeat the passion was manifest. Once, during a particularly informal Yale practice, Kiesling and Biglow had been told to stroke competing boats. Kiesling, knowing his boat was not nearly as good as Biglow's, had cheated and sneaked off to a quick two-length head start. Biglow, to his surprise, had been enraged and had screamed a wild rush of obscenities at him and everyone in the boat. When, in 1983, Biglow had had trouble with his back, and Tiff Wood had captured the bronze in the world championships, someone had asked Biglow if he had been pleased that Tiff had done so well. After all, they were good friends, and Tiff had been a remarkably supportive rival. Biglow had answered with stunning candor: "No, I was jealous, jealous as hell."