The Boys in the Boat

On New Year’s Day I threw a turkey in the oven and took my son to see The Boys in the Boat; George Clooney’s movie adapted from Daniel James Brown’s bestseller. The theater was packed. This surprised me, probably because it was only the second time since Covid that I’ve been inside a movie theater. Yes I loved the book and long before it was published knew (and missed) the story of the University of Washington junior varsity’s victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics from the research I did on The Book of Rowing in the mid-1980s. Both my step-brother and my daughter’s godfather rowed for UW, and I’ve visited the Conibear Shellhouse several times, as well as the old Pocock boat shop. 

So I had a reason for being there in theater number three, wedged into a seat beside my son sharing a tub of popcorn and some peanut M&Ms. But what had inspired a couple hundred other people to be there? The holiday? The popularity of Brown’s book? The fact that another best seller, Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, also featured a protagonist — the runner Louis Zamperini — who competed in the so-called “Hitler Olympics” on the same American Olympic team as Jesse Owens? Were they all rowers or the parents of rowers, or former rowers like myself?

I can confidently say there has never been a good movie made about rowing, nor a single rowing scene in any movie or television show that manages to depict actual actors rowing a boat without the use of experienced doubles and trick shots. Rowing has to beone of the most tedious spectator sports. There’s an absence of action, just the monotonous metronomic heaving and ho-ing of some strong young men who know no “moves” other than the four-part sequence of catch-drive-finish-recovery.

There are no bicycle kicks, penalty shots, or Hail Mary passes in rowing. The only thing that changes over the six minutes of a 2,000 meter race is changing distance between the boats and the facial expressions of their crews, most of whom finish the race in an exceptionally exhausted state characterized by anoxia, lactic acid poisoning of the quadriceps, and occasional vomitus. The most exciting and insightful line in The Boys in the Boat, is when U Washington crew coach Al Ulbrichtson tells the squad “Eight-man crew is the most difficult team sport in the world. The average human body is just not meant for such things. It’s just not capable of such things.“

Most popular sports celebrate the unpredictable surprises of exceptionally talented individuals as much as the team they play for. Rowers pull an oar 200 times during a typical race. Each and every one of those 200 strokes is the same as the stroke before and the stroke that follows., except done at different rates per minute, with a racing pace around 36 strokes per minute and sprints going into the mid-40s . The rowers sit facing astern and never dare look out of the boat, eyes locked on the back of the rower in front of them.

The boat starts with all eight blades submerged and locked into the catch position. It weighs 200 pounds, is 60-foot long, one foot wide, and has a round bottom. The eight rowers and coxswain weigh 1,700 pounds. The rowers sit on seats with wheels set in metal tracks. Their feet are strapped into special shoes that can be torn open with a single tug should the shell ever capsize and. They hold a 12-foot carbon fiber oar locked into a swiveling oar lock hung a few feet out over the water. When the oars are out of the water, the blades dripping and swinging forward in perfect unison, the rowers roll astern on their wheeled seats calmly and composed, “recovering” before the snap and explosive drive of the catch when their legs are compressed in a tight sitting squat and their bodies lock into a chain of back, shoulders and straight arms, their hold on the oars through the fingertips in a claw-li

Simply sitting in a long, needle-shaped boat without capsizing is enough to make a novice clench the oar handle with white knuckles, but to row decently with seven other rowers generally takes at least three or four months of daily practice. To row perfectly, on camera, with zero prior experience is nothing short of a miracle, yet the actors who portray the 1936 UW crew did just that in a feat no other rowing film has ever managed to accomplish. One has to give credit to Clooney and the screenwriters who adapted the book for resisting the Hollywood urge to embellish the facts with some faux rowing drama and investing in the time it took to teach the cast how to actually row. No one catches a crab and dives overboard. Boats don’t collide or smash into docks.

Yes there is the obligatory love interest, and the film doesn’t begin to capture the true essence of Brown’s story of Joe Rantz, the impoverished young man who toils in the timberlands of the Pacific Northwest and struggles to make it through college on his own. As a piece of nostalgia the movie made me choke up due to the boat — the Husky Clipper — the same type of Pocock shell I learned how to row in fifty years ago on the choppy waters of North Andover’s Lake Cochichewick. Only a few years later I’d be rowing in a fiberglass shell, and few years later in college in the first carbon fiber shell. Those long varnished needles of wood flexed and creaked and cracked and flew through the water on occasion when me and three other wet, miserable teenagers managed to pull together and make it move well enough to make us want to make it do it again.