Nah. The Boys in the Boat isn’t a book about Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey. It’s about rowing and the eight-man crew from the University of Washington that won gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, right under Hitler’s nose. Deutschland uber alles?? Ah. Not this time.
But first. Some rowing vocabulary. When a team of rowers thinks, moves, and pulls as one, and powers its scull with grace and synchronized beauty, they’ve got swing. It’s the ultimate experience for a crewman, to row in a scull that’s swinging. It’s what each athlete seeks, and this boat had it.
But not always. And it took a while to find the right combination of mind and muscle to mount a challenge to not only its West Coast rival California, but to the eastern elites like Harvard, Penn, Cornell, Navy and Syracuse.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Author Daniel James Brown tells the story, set in the soggy northwest, through the life and times of Joe Rantz. If all the other student athletes came from solid families rooted in lumber towns or farms, Joe was the outsider looking in. His circumstances were so much less. He was abandoned by his father and stepmother, but somehow found a way to prosper, even in the midst of the Depression. He scraped by and as he grew continued to find jobs that funded his tuition. Rantz’s life alone could fill a book, but his trials to support himself, keep up his grades and compete at an elite level made me look upon him with the utmost respect. It was an honor to read about him and his crew mates. In fact, it was humbling. Brown shares nuggets about each of the young men. No one had it easy, and so many of them were multifaceted personalities. In addition to their athletic skills, many were top engineering students and musicians and, in the case of coxswain Bobby Moch, a master racing strategist.
From the get-go you know we win the gold, but Brown turned me into a shaky mess while recreating the time trials and training and Rantz’s near-miss getting into the championship boat. And then the race for the gold, with one of the crew battling a fever??? Well. Writing and sports stories don’t get much better.
Don’t miss this story. Even if sports isn’t your bag, give it a try. In a way it’s almost like a fairy tale, except there are nine princes and one big bully of a nation in Europe that was already hard at work with its propaganda and war machine. No one there knew what was to follow, but as a reader you do. And it’s a pleasure to read about the good guys pulling off the upset.
Reading, Reviewing and Ranting 