The romance of the river is eternal. Those of us who’ve pulled an oar at any level, from maneuvering a bulky wherry around a honking gaggle of geese to racing in the Olympics, never quite leave the dock behind. “There is nothing—absolutely nothing—like messing about in boats,” Rat declares in ‘The Wind in the Willows.’
Andy Larkin’s fascination with rowing began at age 10, when he came to Cambridge with his father, spotted a sculler paddling on the Charles and was ‘transfixed’. He might have found his way to the water eventually—his ancestors built ships in Maine. But Andy got there the way that most of his college teammates did, by serendipity or suasion.
Andy was a polio survivor who evolved into a gangly prep- school cross-country runner whose coach, who’d dubbed him ‘Giraffe’, concluded that he was too big and slow for the sport and nudged him toward crew. Only one of his seatmates on the 1968 Olympic eight had rowed before he arrived at Harvard. The rest were an assemblage of football and basketball players who’d been tracked down in their dorms by freshman coach Ted Washburn or plucked out of the line at registration. “They were dragged, prodded, shamed, provoked and repeatedly pestered into attending the Crew Meeting,” Washburn recalled.
When the candidates walked across the Lars Anderson Bridge and through the crimson doors of Newell Boathouse, the drafty Victorian-era torture chamber, they arrived at the dawn of what would become the sport’s most enduring dynasty. In the autumn of
1964 a number of upperclassmen just had returned from the Tokyo Olympics. “They were tall, fit, accomplished,” Andy recalls. “They were the river gods.”
Harry Parker, their master and commander, was only 28 but already something of a deity. The varsity that he was piecing together that season went on to make the cover of Sports Illustrated as the ‘world’s best crew’. Andy and his classmates were the neo- phytes, learning their craft in the ‘Leviathan’, the double-wide gray barge that resembled a flattened Roman galley whose conscripts were struggling to grasp the concept of catch, drive and recovery.
What they learned went well beyond the intricacies of feathering a blade. Rowing represented ‘a surrender of the self to the whole’ and the necessity of pushing past pain to achieve success as it was measured on Saturday afternoons. What their varsity coach, himself an Olympic sculler, convinced his charges was that the body could endure more than the mind imagined. “What could be tolerated?,” Andy mused. “What were the limits of effort?”
Andy regarded Parker as an Eastern mystic who embodied the traditional tenets of yoga—austerity, intensity, concentration, physical strength, superior intellect and mental will. “Harry’s path to enlightenment was to row fast,” Andy observes.
Although he rowed in the second freshman boat in 1965 Andy was invited as a spare to Red Top, the Harvard headquarters where the oarsmen prepared for the annual four-mile pull against archrival Yale on the Thames River in New London. The following year he found himself rowing at No. 6 for the rebuilt varsity that Parker later hinted was one of his favorite boats.
They might have been an odd amalgam of New York ethnics, New England Brahmins and Utah Mormons but they still went undefeated. “They were boisterous and argumentative,” observed Parker. “And they had a lot of fun.”
No previous Harvard varsity had taken on the rest of the planet as Andy and his confreres did during their tenure. In 1967 the Crimson won the Pan American Games as the US entry then went
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to the European championships and finished second to the West Germans.
The following summer Harvard earned its Olympic ticket by the narrowest margin conceivable—five-hundreths of a second over Pennsylvania in a race where the Crimson never were ahead until the final stroke. On that day, Parker reckoned, the two crews were the fastest on the planet.
Harvard’s primacy literally vanished into thin air as soon as the oarsmen went to Colorado for three weeks to prepare for Mexico City and struggled with altitude sickness that left them listless. “What this crew needs is a doctor, not a coach,” Parker concluded.
At the Games, the most politically turbulent ever, Andy and his seatmates found themselves criticized as radicals because of their support for equal rights for their black teammates and at odds with the US Olympic Committee, which derided them as unpatriotic longhairs and considered sending them home.
Yet Harvard, the last collegiate crew ever to represent the US, still made the final with a rejiggered boating against five national composite crews. Three of those oarsmen continued on to 1972 where they won the silver medal in Munich. Andy put away his oar, went to Harvard Medical School, worked in the North Philadelphia ghetto as a conscientious objector and became a doctor specializing in internal and pulmonary medicine.
A decade later the river drew him back. He’d watched a crew rowing and ‘something stirred within me’. Andy’s father had died and he was going through a divorce. “There was something missing in my life as an adult,” he says. “I recalled my adventures of youth rowing in a boat.”
So he bought an Alden, a sturdy and forgiving recreational sculling boat, and went out on the Connecticut River near where he grew up. Instead of surrendering himself to the whole as one of eight, he could indulge himself, paddling as he pleased. “It is a great pleasure to move at my own slow pace,” he writes, “without concern that I will be beaten.”
The long views available over water calmed his mind, Andy says, and the exercise warmed his body and provided a sense of well-being. The tradeoff was that as a sole practitioner Andy was on his own. He was responsible for his own gear, his own food and water and, if anything went awry, his own life.
On one of his voyages down the Connecticut River he capsized on Long Island Sound at New London when his boat was smacked by a ferryboat wake and he had to arm-paddle ashore after his belongings had floated away. “It was not so much the situation that you got into but rather how you handled the situation,” Andy writes. “It was OK if you got to tell the tale.”
He is no longer a ‘hammer’, he says. He has lost his power. But still he settles in and pushes off as he did half a century ago. “I continue to row for the joy of messing around in boats,” says Andy, who makes prudent concessions to age and moderate obstructive lung disease. “There remains nothing more pleasurable for me than to go out and row steadily for an hour.”
The romance of the river is eternal. “What is there in the universe more fascinating than running water and the possibility of moving over it?,” muses Santayana’s quote posted on the Newell bulletin board. “What better image of resistance and possible triumph?”
May 7, 2018 Brewster, MA
AndrewLarkin 