Review: The improbable rowers who challenged Hitler

Review of: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Author: Daniel James Brown

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: A

Here’s a dare for sports enthusiasts -- name a superstar, a single person – in the sport of competitive rowing. The answer is: there aren’t any. Rowing, or crew, as it’s better known in the United States, is all about the team, not the individuals. That camaraderie is the secret behind the sport’s growing popularity, and the reason you’ll probably never see crew members, even those of Olympic caliber – taking home multi-million dollar endorsement contracts. In a way, the sport is the antithesis of our culture’s lone individual mythos.

Not that young Joe Rantz thought about endorsement contracts when he showed up in the fall of 1933 at a refurbished airplane hangar that housed the University of Washington’s racing shells. All he hoped for was the guarantee of a part-time job on campus that would enable him to stay at the university in the darkest days of the Great Depression. 

Without that slender means of support, Daniel James Brown writes in The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, “(Joe Rantz) would never be a chemical engineer, and he would not be able to marry high school sweetheart. . . To fail at this rowing business would mean, at best, returning to a small, bleak town. . . At worst, it would meaning joining a long line of broken men standing outside a soup kitchen. . . ”

Brown chose to make Rantz’s story the throughline of his book in part because crew would teach Rantz lessons about trust, about subsuming his individuality in a group, lessons that went against the grain of a youngster who had found himself forced to depend only on himself multiple times in his young life, from being farmed out to relatives following the death of his mother, to his abandonment by his father and stepmother while still in his teens.

In early 2007, when Brown first spoke to Rantz – by then near death, almost the last survivor of the team that challenged Germany’s team of crack rowers for Olympic gold -- he found him talking repeatedly about “the boat.” Brown was well into the discussion before he realized the term signified more than the shell or even its crew. “It was “a shared experience – a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone.”

In response to Brown’s promise to write a book about Rantz’s rowing days, “he admonished me gently, ‘But not just about me. It has to be about the boat.’”

Olympic gold wasn’t even on the mind of Rantz or the rest of his team of freshman hopefuls in 1933. First, they had to learn to row. Not just as individuals, but as members of a team in which a mistake by one could mean the defeat of all. Along the way to Berlin, they would need to best the crack crews of the United States. These would range from Washington’s traditional West Coast rival, the University of California, which had already won Olympic gold in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, to East Coast colleges whose rowing traditions dated back nearly a century.

True to Rantz’s plea not to make the book only about himself, Brown interweaves stories of other crew members of the boat they named “Husky Clipper;” of their coach, Alvin Ulbrickson Sr., whose terseness earned him the title of “the dour Dane” from sportswriters of the period; of the history of the sport (with nods to its growing popularity among women); and even of the boat builder himself, the working class, English-born George Yeoman Pocock.

Brown also provides a chilling overview of the rise of Hitler and his Nazi party, and the 1936 Olympic games that would become Hitler’s most successful – and infamous – propaganda coup. 

When I started reading this book, my knowledge of rowing was limited to a few stints in a gym and passing views of a local university’s crew team on Dallas’ White Rock Lake. But The Boys in the Boat is a book in the tradition of Unbroken and Seabiscuit, tales of athletes and sports that transcend their genre. Even the most sedentary readers will find themselves cheering for the crew that moved beyond its origins as a Washington team to become the team for an entire nation.