row2k Features
Book Excerpt: Chapter 11, Bob Olson—from Four Years at Four, by John Escher
February 25, 2022
John Escher and Philip Makanna

Bob Olson was a novice in our regular season undefeated 1959-60 varsity crew. And there was another novice in the boat, engineer Roger Clarke, a six foot five one hundred- ninety pounder who shrewdly figured out the intricacies of the rowing stroke and replaced at bow the one hundred forty-seven pounder Jim Moody who had graduated, with both of them being very good.

At Potomac Boat Club, where we went for a third time for our Spring break, we caught Roger, curious, rifling through a desk. He was henceforth known as Burgle-Burgle or Burgle the Bowman, and our name for Olson was Nussbaum.

Burgle-Burgle the Bowman
Burgle-Burgle the Bowman

It is unusual, I think, to have two complete novices in an undefeated national championship eight-oared crew. Burgle was smart and Nussbaum at six foot five two hundred and five pounds was so strong that a lot of the technical requirements took care of themselves.

Anybody who rows will tell you that how you get in the water and how you get out are two separate questions that are absolutely crucial.

When I coached at the very populous West Virginia University enough huge guys tried out for crew that if we had stuck together we could have conquered the world.

Sadly, though, I seldom saw the same group of giants twice, and the upperclassmen, interesting as individuals, understood very little about teamwork. Maybe I couldn't engage them since I was a thin man from Hegamumpus in Haddam, Connecticut. Or maybe they knew mountains but not boats.

Nussbaum meanwhile was as smart as he was strong and almost immediately realized that if he used his strong arms to pull his oar all the way into his bod a vacuum would form behind his blade so it could pop out clean.

As to how we got into the water I go with Charlie Butt's son Charley, who established himself as a top American authority on the rowing catch with an article published in The New York Times. And with his predecessor as head coach at Harvard, Harry Parker, who postulated a man standing on a tree floating in a pond.

The man steps in one direction. The tree glides six inches in the opposite direction then returns to where it was. The same thing tries to happen in a single, a pair, a four, a quad, an eight, or an octuple. The trick is to use a relaxed drop of one's blade faster than the eye can see to propel the boat forward before the tree re-settles.

Reader, imagine you are a crew coach supervising people of limited strength but you have manufactured six inches of free travel through Newton's third law.

Envision now a two thousand meter five-and-a-half minute race rowed by your crew at a fixed rate of 39 strokes per minute and do the math.

39 times 5.5 is 215 strokes multiplied by six inches to get 1,290 inches which divided by 12 gets 108 feet - or almost two boat lengths since eights are shorter than they used to be.

That's a two-length victory over a crew that was identical in strength and skill but never really learned that for every action there is an equal and opposite action.

Burgle-Burgle post Dad Vail – 1960 – Photo by Whitey
Burgle-Burgle post Dad Vail – 1960 – Photo by Whitey

Our coach Whitey was very good too on the subject of catch. We had fast hands and a slow slide, a worldwide model that had changed to steady hands by the time I became a crew coach twenty years later. "Hit the catch," he would say, and we did.

Whitey didn't over-intellectualize. And neither did Steve Gladstone, the winningest college crew coach in American rowing history and Harry Parker, second winningest. At least Parker (Harvard heavyweights) and Gladstone (Princeton freshmen, Harvard lightweights, Cal heavies, Brown heavies, Cal heavies, Yale heaviest) did not intellectualize when they were out on the water. I say this from having sat in both of their motorboats. I got to ride with Charlie Butt too. He mostly talked about how beautiful his high school crews looked just then rowing in the glancing sunlight between us and the D.C. esplanade.

In my four years on the Brown crew we raced twice in spring flood-- that was exciting. The first time was on the Potomac with all kinds of flotsam and jetsam speeding down from Great Falls. Mouse had to avoid chicken coops and telephone poles.

Even an orange crate could put a hole in our borrowed boat worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Because a shell is a shell, i.e., it is so thin you can put your thumb through the bottom. There are strict places where you can step or grab ahold. The polished cedar of The Stein was five sixteenths of an inch thick. Modern materials, usually white or glossy black, are a bit tougher, but ever more lightness is the goal there too.

The apocryphal story about the famously foul-mouthed Princeton coach Dutch Schoch is that one time he chewed out a novice crew whose members were so surprised by the plenitude of his obscenities that they all stood up at once with the result that sixteen legs went through the hull's bottom.

The assumption here is that the coxswain stayed in his seat and kept steering.

Well, Mouse avoided all floating objects and set a course record. That was the race in the dark where immediately after crossing the finish line we had to backwater to a full stop just inches from crashing into Key Bridge.

Given the speed of the torrent totaled with the porcupine-headed momentum of our final sprint all nine would have been demolished. Believe me when I say this was a crucial moment in the hundred-plus-year history of Brown crew.

Balance (photo by Whitey Helander)
Balance (photo by Whitey Helander)

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