Read Online The Amateurs by David Halberstam - Free Book Online

Yale, he was about six-two and quite slim, the perfect build for a tennis player. But the illusion of tennis died quickly. He was at best a limited country-club player, and the people who would play for Yale had already been on the junior circuits. So finally he turned to crew. Early in the fall of his freshman year, his tennis career abruptly terminated, he had wandered over to the Yale boathouse and asked for help in learning how to row. Even then the intensity was exceptional. Tony Johnson, the Yale varsity coach, had a sense that this young man wanted to learn everything there was about rowing in the next ten or fifteen minutes so he could stop wasting time and get out on the water and do it.
    Like Biglow, who arrived a year later, Bouscaren became a critical part of the group that helped regenerate Yale rowing. Old-time Yalies were inclined to blame the decline on the radicalization of the campus during the Vietnam War; but Harry Parker's Harvard crews had been magnificent in those same years, they had worn their hair long, identified themselves with antiwar protest groups, written their senior theses on black power and gone to the Olympics. Indeed, Parker had taken a special pride in the intensity of the political commitment of his athletes. Joe Bouscaren, so competitive himself, thought Yale rowing remarkably uncompetitive. The strength of Harvard's crews came from the constant challenge from the third- and second-boat heavies, which were almost as good as the varsity. At Yale the oarsmen appeared content to wait their turn. A sophomore was not supposed to drive a senior out of the varsity boat. We'll row, the varsity oarsmen seemed to be saying, we'll be genteel with each other and will not be abrasive. Bouscaren by those standards was abrasive. Years later, Tony Johnson remembered that in Bouscaren's sophomore year he had taken two crews out on the river. Since it was early in the season, he had asked the new sophomores to introduce themselves. Each had done so, the most modest kind of roll call, until it had been Bouscaren's turn and he had said, "I'm Joe Bouscaren, and I'm going to kick your ass."
    What he loved about rowing was the knowledge that what he put into training he would always get back on the water. He did well from the start, he was a good student of the style and he quickly became a mechanically gifted oarsman. He had to be good mechanically, for unlike the others, he had nothing left over to waste. He became the stroke of the freshman heavyweight crew, a considerable achievement for someone who had never rowed before. He also began to build himself up. For the first time he had a sense he could become a varsity athlete at Yale, and that mattered. He loved rowing but hated the fact that as the smallest man on the 1978 and 1979 varsity his place was never as secure as it should have been. Though he had stroked the varsity as a sophomore, by his junior year, his size threatened to make him expendable. A lot of talented sophomores, Biglow and his classmates, were obviously going to row for the varsity, and Tony Johnson privately felt that someone a little bigger and stronger might replace Bouscaren in the first boat. That winter Johnson had driven his oarsmen with a series of unusually grueling indoor exercises; Bouscaren had done them along with all the others, but at the end, when the other oarsmen were barely able to stand up, he had done an additional twenty minutes of jumping rope to add to his conditioning. He would not be displaced. He saved his seat. A year later, the Yale boat was bigger and stronger than ever, and Bouscaren and Biglow were the two smallest men in it. Johnson, like most crew coaches, preferred his weight in the middle and his lighter men at the ends, one stroking, one at bow. For a time Bouscaren stroked. Then Johnson tried Biglow at stroke. Bouscaren took it very hard, and there was some dissident muttering from him. Finally one of the other oarsmen went to Johnson and said that