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something had to be done about Joe, that his unhappiness was poisoning the atmosphere. Johnson called him aside and, with an implied threat in his words, told him that his complaining had to end. The muttering stopped. He didn't like it, but he had still made the first boat.
    He had graduated from Yale in 1979. While many of his teammates had tried out for and made the national team that year, he had pulled back from rowing. His new world was medical school. He still cared about keeping in shape, and he bought a machine that simulated cross-country skiing. But after a year away from rowing he was surprised how much he missed it. He had thought of sculling. Mike Vespoli, who had replaced Buzz Congram as the freshman coach at Yale and who knew how to motivate Bouscaren, had stood with him once at the Eastern Sprints. When the subject of sculling came up, Vespoli, who wanted Bouscaren to try it, said, as casually as he could, "I don't think you can do that, Joe. It's too hard, and you have to find too much within yourself. I don't think you can push yourself hard enough." It was, he knew, the perfect way of lighting a fire in Bouscaren. (Four years later, right after Biglow had beaten both Bouscaren and Wood on the Easter Sunday race in Cambridge, Vespoli, still wanting to motivate Bouscaren, had said to Biglow, in Bouscaren's presence, "John, how did it feel to row right through Joe? It must have felt really good.")
    In the summer of 1980, Bouscaren, home from Cornell Medical School, had started working out in Syracuse with Scott Roop, a champion lightweight sculler. He and Roop went out together almost every day, and Roop would give Bouscaren quite generous leads and then row right through him. But Roop, who was training hard, pulled Bouscaren up to his level; the latter became more serious about the sport and about working on the Nautilus machines. His brother Mike thought that for Joe there was the appeal of a sport in which the athlete worked things out for himself and practiced by himself. To Mike, it fit the way his younger brother had grown up. Their mother had died of cancer at the age of forty-six when both older brothers were already out of the house, and Joe had become a single child living with a single parent. He had been forced to develop a sense of self-dependence that most people learn only much later in their lives. He was, Mike Bouscaren believed, accustomed to finding his sources of strength from within. Nothing could be better preparation for a sculler. When he returned to Cornell Medical School after that summer, he decided to keep up his sculling. He would drive to New Haven on the weekends, sleep in the deserted Yale boathouse and take out a scull for as many hours as he could, balancing the intense mental and psychological exertion of medical school with the physical exertion of rowing.
    He came gradually to love sculling. He had always wanted to stroke because the stroke stood apart in a boat. In sculling every quality oarsman stood apart. He was no longer the slim little bow oar who was carried by the heavier guys in the crew. By 1981, he was spending more and more time in Cambridge so he could work out with the other top scullers under the eye of Harry Parker. Bouscaren was intrigued by the contrast between his Yale coach, Tony Johnson, and Parker. Johnson, a gentler and more reachable man, pushed his oarsmen as hard as Parker did physically but not as hard mentally. With Tony, he thought, if you were putting out a genuine effort, there was almost always some kind of verbal reward. But with Harry, whatever you did was never enough. The question that seemed to hang in the atmosphere of the Harvard boathouse, unstated but always there, Bouscaren thought, was: Are you really tough enough for this? The Harvard environment, he decided, was a colder one. If he never became entirely accustomed to it, it did push him to reach for still higher levels of excellence. His brother Mike, whom he had once admired so