John Walters gets it wrong. (When is a Sport not a Sport -- SI On Campus 11/11/03). In spite of his own rowing history at Notre Dame, Walters argues rowing is not a sport. A sport, he opines, must be "an athletic competition in which defense is directly deployed." The first part of his definition is correct. A sport must be an athletic competition. But the second part, insisting on defense and interaction between two opponents doesn't define a "sport" so much as it defines a game..
Football, basketball, hockey, and soccer? All games (and sports). Monopoly, Scrabble and Tiddlywinks? Games, (but not sports). Rowing, track and field, swimming, weight lifting, diving, and gymnastics? Sports all, but certainly NOT games. There is no sport where defensive moves are more directly deployed than wrestling, but it certainly seems more like a sport than a game. And while baseball is certainly a game that requires a great deal of skill, the condition of some of its major stars leaves me wondering just how physical a sport it is.
Walters' article is interesting because he reinforces of the perception out there that rowing must not be all that difficult. (To re-quote the article that raised the issue in the first place, from an NFL and former Harvard football player: "On a scale, if football is a 10, then rowing would be a two. One would be Quiz Bowl.") Sure, the thinking goes, rowers work hard and get up at crazy hours, but if all those women who never rowed before college are getting scholarships, rowing must, fundamentally, be some sort of joke.
For the most part, people pick up rowing in college because there wasn't an option for them to row earlier in life. And, certainly the fundamental motion, like a golf swing, can be learned in about 15 minutes. But perfecting that motion, and then training yourself and your crew to execute it in perfect synchronicity with up to seven other athletes 220 twenty times over six minutes while your heart is racing at upwards of 200 beats per minute and your lungs are aching to grab all the oxygen they can get is not so easy to do, and is certainly an athletic challenge of the highest caliber.
To take the golfing analogy further, imagine the athleticism it would take to line up eight golfers, have them all take 220 perfectly synchronized swings in six minutes and have all eight knock each ball 250 yards or further straight down the fairway without missing a single connection. No resetting the grip, no replanting the feet, no rewiggling the butt, just swing-connect, swing-connect, swing-connect. Now think of six teams of eight lined up next to each other doing the same thing simultaneously, with the winner being the team with the best cumulative distance off all the drives, so each shot by each golfer counts. Breathing hard? Keep swinging. Legs tired? Swing away! There are no timeouts in this sport.
What irks me most about Walters'column, and what clearly gives him away as being "someone who rowed at Notre Dame" rather than a "Notre Dame rower" is his ridiculous assertion that the only difference between training and competition in rowing is the venue. Our sport, Mr. Walters, is not about indoor ergometer competitions, which are a nice, but essentially meaningless diversion to winter training. Lining up for the championship final at the IRA (Men's National Collegiate Championships), Women's NCAA Championships or Olympic Games? Like kicking a clutch field goal in a football game, this is more sport than most people can handle.
Perhaps the most interesting anecdote about the difficulty of rowing comes directly from college football itself. Several years ago, the Colorado football athletic medicine staff thought there were too many players using the trainers to take breaks on the sideline in practice. Their solution? They put the sidelined players on rowing ergometers instead of stationary bikes, and players got themselves back in the mix quite quickly. Rowing, apparently, was too hard.
So, while some might argue that the equation really should be "Rowing 10, Football 2 and Quiz Bowl 1," I prefer the way it's said on an old (and grantedly rowing-centric) t-shirt: "Athletes row. Everyone else plays games."
Charley Sullivan
Associate Head Coach, Men's Rowing
The University of Michigan