"...and we had fun filling out the forms
and playing with the pencils on the bench there"
-- Arlo Guthrie

There comes a moment -- fraught with peril -- in every season. The manila envelope arrives on your desk from the local, and/or college newspaper. If your rowing program is particularly fortunate in its publicity, such an envelope may even arrive from the local television news station. It's media information kit time. Those questionnaires which journalists send to coaches, and which are crucial to reporters facing tight deadlines (and trying to get names spelled right). Names, heights, weights, place of birth, positions rowed, experience etc.

Harmless information, no? Peril lurks beneath the surface of those blank sheets. There's no such thing as an innocent question. That now-famous misquote -- given in an unguarded moment in Worcester to a nationally-syndicated sportswriter -- that "the reason we're panting [is we've been carrying outboard motors]" still comes back to haunt a certain lightweight eight.

The 'inspirational' quotes on one's spring training t-shirts? Best left unexplained.

Remember the year your rowers simply passed the sheets around, and everyone filled in a blank at random with whatever phrase came into their heads? Then each picked one from the stack and signed it?

Perhaps you -- as coach -- attempt to ward off trouble by reviewing your crew's answers before the infokits get back to the fourth estate, so as to nip the more outrageous exaggerations in the bud. (Bet'cha didn't know that your six seat recently discovered a new permutation of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm?) Problem is, once you've touched them, you become responsible for the howlers that slip by. Far better to send them back unread. That way you can claim honest ignorance when you find that story on page 2 of the Style section about how your three seat balances the time demands of her rowing career with: 1) chairing the United Nations Commission on Disarmament, 2) a work-study job as a test pilot, AND 3) touring Europe as an internationally-famous violinist. (Don'tcha hate being the last person to find out these things?)

Or when the NCAA recruiting watchdogs phone you with some very penetrating questions after one of your freshman 'phenoms' (who, by the way hasn't broken 6:50 on the erg all year) tells a reporter -- off the record -- that "you'd never know it to look at me, but actually I've been rowing for the Estonian national team since the age of seven. " While you're talking your way out of a one-year suspension, your assistant slips you a note that the Undersecretary of State for Eastern Europe is holding on the other line...

Still, it might not be a bad idea to leave the erg room door ajar -- just to be forewarned -- while your budding starboard novelists create legends that would have done Cyrano de Bergerac proud. We won't worry about the minor fabrications here -- the extra inch or two in height, the imaginary seconds shaved off a wholly fictitious erg score. So what if one of your coxswains grew up in a hut in Borneo? (Imagine her parents' surprise.) Such embroidery adds spice to life.

Other interests: This is where the real trouble starts. The blank that launches a thousand retractions. For example (apologies in advance to the sports editor of the Seaford Tribune), Dave does NOT own a 1936 Rolls-Royce. He has a mountain bike, and three of the gears don't work. To clarify: Karen does not particularly like sunsets. (Somebody else added that to be funny; if you look closely, you can see the handwriting is different.) Sunsets leave her unmoved, but she's into high-energy particle accelerators in a big way. Oh yeah, that story going around the boathouse -- the one about Joe, the oars, and the airport monorail? That one is true. Stories about Joe often are, unfortunately.

Mattsen was never a Scottish paratrooper (red hair notwithstanding), despite his repeated protestations that he actually got one of the women sitting next to him on a flight back from Istanbul to believe him. He does do the accent rather well. Finally -- and I am only going to say this once -- Carl did not spend last summer backpacking through the Himalayas to raise money for left-handed rural solar panel installers in remote villages.

(Disclaimer: This implies no disrespect to left-handed solar panel installers, either in the Himalayas or anywhere else. The guild of North American Screenwriters and Columnists of Rowing (NASCOR) further certifies that no left-handed solar panel installers (or backpackers) were injured during the writing of this column, not even in the avalanche scene -- which had to be deleted later in order to maintain artistic integrity.)

Matisse observed that "Accuracy is not always Truth." Well, thank goodness for that. Our crew's got Truth to spare. Want some?