Charlie’s Big Crab
BY ANDY ANDERSON | PHOTO BY PETER SPURRIER
Charlie was a perfect oarsman, an ideal stroke. He had a beautiful rhythm that made him easy to follow and he was quietly intense—although he did count out loud under his breath, which took a lot of heat off me. As we lined up for the semifinal of the Dad Vail—in those days the small-college championships—we were all up for it, no one more so than Charlie. I could feel an electric charge jumping from seat to seat.
“Are you ready? Row!”
We shot off the line. The boat felt great. On the 12th stroke of the start, disaster! In front of me, Charlie was sucked over to port, his hair was in the water. A boat-stopping crab. If we had been rowing in the days of rowing clogs and before shoes were mounted on the footboards, he would have been ejected. Although shocked—this was a guy so steady and smooth that never before had he caught even a mini-crab; how could he be the guy to crab?—I reached forward and grabbed his shirt. The seven-man helped, and together we pulled him back into the boat.
He was not hurt, at least that I could tell, and I called another start. Once again, we went through our shortened slide sequence and a high 20. Only when we settled did I survey the field. We were open water behind all five other crews. My brain was saying, “We’re screwed, we’ll never qualify for the finals,” but emotion and adrenaline helped me stay in the moment. Little by little, we were coming back on the field.
As we came into the last 500, the boat felt great, better than I’d ever felt it before. We could do it, we could qualify, we could win. When the flag went down, we were less than a second behind the winners. But we were in the final. The way we had moved, there was no doubt we could win the next day.
Recently, I was at a ceremony where Trinity College inducted our bowman and captain Ric Ricci into the college’s athletic hall of fame for his two IRA victories in the pair without. Someone asked if we had won the Dad Vail that year, Ric’s senior year. I told that story and said, “Unfortunately, no, we didn’t.”
My take was that the guys had pulled so hard that they were still sore the next day; our finals race was nowhere near the same level of intensity. Ric said that this has bothered him ever since.
“I had never felt a boat go so fast. It felt like a jet taking off. Why couldn’t we repeat that level of intensity the next day?”
Why indeed? Chances are most readers have experienced something similar—one terrific race and then a disappointing one. In most cases, it’s probably fatigue; true max efforts are very hard to replicate. I’ve talked about this with Curtis Jordan, an old friend and boatmate who was a National Team coach and director of high performance.
“I’ve seen lots of examples of boats that go past a point where they’ve never been before. It can be emotionally scary to go into a pain zone for the first time,” he told me.
He recalled the Goodwill Games of 1986 in Moscow when the USA men’s eight had a match race with the USSR.
“Before the race, I saw one of my guys who looked very nervous. I told him, ‘Don’t worry. Yes, the Russians are good, but so are we.’
“‘I’m not worried about them,’ he replied. ‘I’m scared about how much Sudduth [stroke Andy Sudduth, a legend at Harvard and for the USA] is going to make us hurt in order to win.’”
The USA did win.
“I was at a junior team camp one year riding with Tony Johnson, Yale’s coach, and they were doing a competitive workout,” Jordan continued. “The stroke of one boat caught a big crab and dropped way back but then brought them back to even at the end. Tony said, ‘That’s the guy you want in your boat. He’s got no fear.’”
You want to know about people with absolutely no fear, people who are on another level? The late Carie Graves of Wisconsin and the National Team pulled harder than anyone. In an extraordinary 1979 interview published in the old Oarsman magazine, Graves said, “When I go into a big race, I don’t know why it’s that particular word, but it’s ‘Kill.’ I’m not killing anybody, I’m killing myself. You’re peaking, when the blood is pounding and you’re getting ready: Kill, kill, kill! It’s something that surprises the hell out of me, but I use it. It’s frightening.”
Surprisingly, I’d never talked with Charlie about that crab 50 years ago, although I’ve thought about the race frequently. But now, after calling Charlie, I have a new perspective.
“I agree with Ric; I had never felt a boat go so fast,” Charlie said. “I thought, ‘There’s no such thing as pain, and then it happened. You remember more about it than I do; it’s almost like I was losing consciousness.’”
Curtis and I agreed that Charlie was so up for the race, so intense, that the rest of the guys weren’t keeping up with his speed through the water, and that was what caused his crab. He had them racing outside of what they were used to. He was definitely the guy we wanted in the boat. If only we could have matched that intensity, would we have won? If only, if only, that awful if only.
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